The Broad View

Broken record

In less than three days, Obama will be giving another of his make-or-break speeches. Once again, he'll be trying (and, I expect, failing) to redefine the health reform debate that has careened so far out of reason or control. On the Sunday gasbag shows, White House officials prepared the way -- for another round of insipid boilerplate and equivocation. From the NYTimes:

Three days before President Obama is to address a joint session of Congress about overhauling the health care system, administration officials on Sunday continued to characterize a new government program for the nation’s 50 million uninsured as worthwhile but not essential to legislation.

David Axelrod, a White House senior adviser, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Mr. Obama “believes the public option is a good tool.” But Mr. Axelrod added: “It shouldn’t define the whole health-care debate.”

Oh no, the public option certainly doesn't define the whole debate. The right-wing whackjobs have taken care of that and now it's insane conspiracy theories about commie-fascist death panels and withholding health care from Republicans that drive the "debate".

The White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, who appeared on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” sidestepped questions on whether Mr. Obama still regarded the so-called public option as a necessity for any bill he would back.

“We’re trying to provide choice and competition for individuals and small business owners,” Mr. Gibbs said when asked if the public option was “essential.”

“The president strongly believes we need to provide choice and competition,” he said. Pressed on whether Mr. Obama would demand that a government insurance program be included in legislation, Mr. Gibbs said that it could be a “valuable component” of any health plan. And asked whether the president would reject a plan that did not include government insurance, Mr. Gibbs responded: “We are not going to prejudge where the process will be.”

[...]

And The Associated Press reported that on a call with prominent liberal House members Friday, Mr. Obama refused to be pinned down.

In his talk-show appearance, Mr. Gibbs said, however, that Mr. Obama will clarify his position in his address to Congress and is considering broadly outlining his own legislation instead of letting Congress set the terms.

It's nauseating. Just fucking make up your mind, already. Stand for something, dammit. I have this nightmare vision of getting to 2012 with a president that has spent the last four years refusing to be "pinned down" about anything of importance.

The endless parroting -- "choice and competition," "competition and choice," blah, blah, blah. What does that mean, exactly? That's right: Nothing. There hasn't been one component of actual reform (versus insignificant tinkering at the edges) that Obama hasn't supported, then "indicated" he'd trade away, and back and forth, yes, no or maybe, ad infinitum.

Are we supposed to cheer that Obama might propose an actual plan? It beggars the imagination that this "clarification" will be any less nebulous than his statements thus far when the latest trial balloon is floated using words like "considering" and "broadly outlining." If he truly wants to "clarify" this clusterfuck, he'll ditch everything and start over by first reading the riot act to the Senate Democrats and then taking a tire iron to their future electoral ambitions.

That won't happen, though. We'll probably get another mealy-mouthed paean to bipartisanship, competition and choice along with heart-felt thanks for the cooperation of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries in fashioning this historic legislation. Feh.

An aside: Not only have I called and emailed the White House, I mailed an ink-and-paper letter to the president in which I promised that he will lose my vote if a fully competitive public option is not passed. Late last month, I received a reply. It's a canned response, brimming with bland boilerplate. The letter includes this line:

There are tough choices to be made, and I will bring businesses and workers, health care providers and patients, and Democrats and Republicans together to create a system that delivers better care and puts the Nation on a much sounder long-term fiscal path.

I am then urged to "learn more about [Obama's] agenda" online. The letter ends with this:

I share the sense of urgency that millions of Americans have voiced. I watched as my ailing mother struggled with stacks of insurance forms in the last moments of her life. This is not who we are as a Nation; together, we will fix it.

Sorry, but Obama's language and tone are so dispassionate, so dry, so brittle, that the merest gust of Teabagger bullshit can easily shatter his narrative -- and that's exactly what's been happening.

Americans are dying because they can't get or afford health insurance. Americans in the hundreds of thousands are facing medical bankruptcy even with insurance. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies are posting the biggest profits on record and they're lavishing millions in salaries and bonuses on their executives while children are denied life-saving treatments. How can these fuckers be winning?

I know Obama is a cool customer. However, if he wants to change the scorched landscape of American health care, he had better get angry --  very angry and very soon. This is a life-and-death debate and Obama's got to man up and fight. Get in touch with your lizard-brain, man.

[Cross-posted at The Followspot.]

Afghanistan Outpost

Our endless floundering in the Afghan quagmire is finally commanding some attention. Miraculously, it's taken only eight years for the American public to realize that something is gravely amiss with our Central Asian Adventure. In his latest NYTimes column, Bob Herbert compares Obama's escalation in Afghanistan to Johnson's in Vietnam and concludes that both presidents listened to the wrong advisors:

President Obama is being told (as Lyndon Johnson was told about Vietnam) that more resources will do the trick in Afghanistan — more troops, more materiel, more money.

Supporters of the war offer an array of rationales in a way that reminds me of Bush's constantly mutating excuses for the Iraq invasion: Every explanation carefully avoids the real, bedrock motivation for our occupation of a hostile country.

After all the huffing and puffing about Iraq's imaginary WMD, Saddam's imaginary ties to al Qaeda, Saddam's insanity, the regime's cruelty and oppression, establishing viral democracy in the region and more, the real reason for our invasion of Iraq was as obvious as it was unspoken.

When Dick Cheney pored over maps of the Iraqi oil fields with petroleum company executives during the secret meetings of his Energy Task Force, all was clear. When our military forces in Baghdad guarded the Oil Ministry while ignoring the looting at the National Museum, it was clear that file cabinets were vital security objectives but the priceless heritage of early civilization was expendable. Securing the Iraqi oil fields was our strategic objective in the first resource war of the 21st century and establishing massive permanent bases and a friendly puppet government was how we'd do it.

Afghanistan started differently. We had legitimate objectives at first --  the capture of bin Laden and the destruction of al Qaeda's network of training camps and safe havens in the country. Once we'd botched that, the stage was set for what we have now -- a prolonged and ineffectual occupation in an increasingly hostile environment. Nevertheless, we're establishing massive bases and protecting a puppet government that, more and more, is unfriendly.

So why are we still there? Of course, we're saving face. God forbid that we have to tuck our tails between our legs and accept ignoble retreat, defeated by a bunch of violent country bumpkins in a repeat of the Soviet debacle. But again, mostly bogus excuses abound. We're saving the Afghanis from the oppressive Taliban, whether or not they want to be saved. We're watering the seeds of democracy in Central Asia, despite propping up a rampantly corrupt regime with no support outside Kabul. We're fighting the scourge of opium, even though the poppy fields are once again blooming abundantly after a hiatus under the Taliban. (Interestingly, the Taliban originally banned opium production under Sharia law, but now they embrace the trade as a way to raise both cash and allies in the countryside.)

Afghanistan looks like a dry hole in terms of our strategic interests, yet Obama is doubling down. Perhaps the answer lies next door. Our bases in Afghanistan are the launchpads for invasion should events take a very bad turn in Pakistan. I can't imagine any other reason to put the spurs to this conflict.

Bush made a precedent of "pre-emptive" war in Iraq and now Obama seems to agree that it's a good idea in Afghanistan. Thus we're drawn deeper and deeper into both real and potential conflicts in countries and cultures where our understanding is shallow at best. And nobody talks about it.

We persist in believing that we must police the entire globe through the vast network of military outposts we've established and pay for with money that might otherwise be used for universal health care, investment in modern infrastructure, R&D in energy, medicine, climate control and more. Will we ever, as a nation, grow up?

[Cross-posted at The Followspot.]

The Reaper Chronicles

Every aspect of the health insurance "debate" makes me purple with rage. This morning's AP story quotes Sibelius' claim that the wretched Obama is willing to drop the public option in favor of the useless co-op nonsense.

There are no words to describe my complete disgust with Obama and the rest of the Washington Democrats. Their gutless incompetence has in all likelihood doomed real health insurance reform for another generation. Actually, a humane, civilized health care system is probably impossible in the U.S., given our hostility to doing anything to help our fellow citizens -- especially those who aren't white -- and the opposition of a loud, easily manipulated plurality of stupid Americans. Yes, there is a significant percentage of American citizens who are proudly ignorant, gullible dolts. These are the kind of people who give Democracy a bad name.

The Rabid Right's latest cri de coeur -- "Obama Death Panels" -- has been scooped up and amplified by an equally stupid and irresponsible media class. So far, Obama has been singularly ineffective in countering the hysteria. As Maureen Dowd writes in today's NYTimes:

Sarahcuda [Sarah Palin] knows, from her brush with Barry on the campaign trail, that he is vulnerable on matters that demand a visceral and muscular response rather than a logical and book-learned one.

Okay, here's a visceral response to the idiotic notion that Obama will pull the plug on Grandma. Here's the story of a real Grandma, my husband's Grandma.(All names have been changed.)

Louise had metastatic cancer. She had survived breast cancer many years earlier but now, in her eighties, the cancer had returned. One bout of chemotherapy was enough to convince her that she didn't want to spend what was left of her life enduring painful torture. I think it was the right decision. She lasted another two years and was relatively healthy until the last three or four months. The "cure" would probably have killed her far more quickly by weakening her with poison and pain. And it is those last three or four months that concern us now.

Harry, my husband's grandfather and Louise's husband, was in his mid-eighties. He was amazingly vigorous and sharp as a tack, but old age had amplified his peculiarities. He was a miser and a hoarder. And he was totally paranoid about having strangers come into his home. That, in itself, wasn't unreasonable. The elderly have good reason to feel vulnerable to strangers. As his wife's health deteriorated, however, he insisted on coping with caring for her by himself and then, when he could no longer lift her to change her soiled bedding, he enlisted his daughter Joanne's help. My husband's mother was well into her sixties and not in great shape herself.

The combination of ignorance and despair was determinative. Joanne called me one day to ask, amazingly, for my advice. She didn't know what to do, how to proceed, how to handle an increasingly untenable situation. Her stubborn, paranoid father refused to allow anyone into the house -- no nurses, no home health workers, not even Meals on Wheels.

I advised that she convince Harry that he must allow her to have professional help. At no point, I said, should she allow her father to hospitalize Louise. I told her that once her mother was in the hospital, her agony would be prolonged. She would have the tubes inserted, the machines hooked up, and she'd be kept alive as long as possible, in misery. I advised her to contact someone about home hospice care.

All Louise needed at that point was to be kept clean and comfortable. At home, she could spend her last days with family in familiar surroundings with a view of her lovely garden outside.

Harry was an autocrat and would have nothing of it. Joanne, even in her sixties, was still a cowed and impotent child when facing her father. So Louise was taken to the large hospital nearby. She was hooked up to a feeding tube, IVs and monitors. Her view out the window was of a brick wall.

Louise spent the last forty-two days of her life on her back in that hospital. No one asked about alternatives. Standard operating procedure was to prolong her life through any and all means.

There's also a dirty little secret that nobody in this health care "debate" talks about: Doctors are paid by the procedure and there's nothing like a helpless, elderly patient for the opportunity to pile on the tests and procedures. During a patient's last days in the hospital, doctors come out of the woodwork to peek in the door, glance at a chart, order an expensive test, and walk out to bill Medicare accordingly.

When Louise wasn't staring out the window in pain, she was being hauled all over the hospital for tests and x-rays for -- what, exactly? There was no question that she had terminal disease and that the end was very near. Did they think this blood test or that x-ray would tell them something they didn't already know? Did they expect to predict the exact day and hour of her death?

So for forty-two days, Louise was mindlessly kept alive while her body was being eaten to death by the cancer. Her bones had become so fragile that some time in the last week her hip broke merely from lying in the bed. Her guts had turned to putrid goo. Finally, she died.

The hospital bill was, of course, stratospheric. Miserly Harry didn't care, though. Medicare picked up most of it and what they didn't cover, supplemental insurance did. And it was all totally, utterly unnecessary. Harry was rich enough that he could have paid for round-the-clock nursing at home. There would have been no feeding tube, no monitors, no IVs. Louise would have died weeks sooner, in her own bedroom, and been spared what passes for "care" in America's modern hospital system.

But no one in a position of authority spoke up. Louise wasn't given the chance to choose her own fate. Every day in the hospital, she begged to go home. Instead, she had a husband more concerned with money and his own paranoia, a willfully ignorant man happy to have someone take the problem off of his hands for free. She was left to a system that has perverted its mandate for mercy into a soulless, hypocritical exercise in milking the helpless for every penny that can be squeezed from Medicare.

So don't talk to me about "Obama's Death Panels." Don't talk to me about "pulling the plug on Grandma." Don't pretend to care about people when all you care about is demagoguing and demonizing humane health care reform to score political points.

I'm in despair that any real reform will ever be enacted. I'm sick of a country informed by brutality and stupidity. I wonder what all those imbecilic "Town Hell" screamers would be screaming if they found themselves in Louise's hospital bed.

(Cross-posted at The Followspot.)

Uh-oh!

Well, the only poll that matters has been taken, the only vote that counts has been cast.

The Alien has endorsed McCain. Obama should just concede the election right now and save us all time and money.

WASHINGTON, DC - In a shocking reversal, the Alien has switched his endorsement from Barack Obama to John McCain.

With major implications for the U.S. presidential election, political kingmaker the Alien has changed his endorsement amid furor. Both political camps are buzzing about the implications, as the Alien has correctly predicted the winning president in every election for the past 28 years.

Ongoing investigation points to Cindy McCain as being the cause for this historic shift in allegiances.

Yes, it's true. The Alien has been mesmerized by Cindy McCain's eerily transparent eyeballs and was last seen cavorting with Mrs. McCain in a hot-tub.

Also abuzz are the Village Elders who have been rendered incoherent by the revelations. While they are properly scandalized by Cindy's dalliance with the Alien -- Sally Quinn has vowed to strike the hussy from her guest list -- they are simultaneously overjoyed that Favorite Son and former Maverick John McCain will be their next club president. The Washington Post reports that David Broder, Dean of the Undead, will postpone his embalming to attend the Inaugural Balls.

Weekly World News editors remain cautious in their predictions:

What impact this news will have on the election has yet to be determined. Swing state voters, who will decide this election, have the highest rate of alien abductions and UFO sightings and are known to vote in accordance with supernatural forces.

Do we have a "Plan B"?

Chart: NYTimes

I'm starting to hum "Remember My Forgotten Man" and "Blue Skies" and screen all those Depression-era films in my head.

I guess the big bailout package wasn't the be-all and end-all, after all. But wait! There may be some hope...

Here's Krugman and he's pretty shrill:

The response to this downward spiral on the part of the world’s two great monetary powers — the United States, on one side, and the 15 nations that use the euro, on the other — has been woefully inadequate. [...]

The United States should have been in a much stronger position. And when Mr. Paulson announced his plan for a huge bailout, there was a temporary surge of optimism. But it soon became clear that the plan suffered from a fatal lack of intellectual clarity. Mr. Paulson proposed buying $700 billion worth of “troubled assets” — toxic mortgage-related securities — from banks, but he was never able to explain why this would resolve the crisis.

What he should have proposed instead, many economists agree, was direct injection of capital into financial firms: The U.S. government would provide financial institutions with the capital they need to do business, thereby halting the downward spiral, in return for partial ownership. When Congress modified the Paulson plan, it introduced provisions that made such a capital injection possible, but not mandatory. And until two days ago, Mr. Paulson remained resolutely opposed to doing the right thing.

The British, Krugman explains, are taking the lead and doing just that: injecting ₤50 billion with interbank transaction guarantees. Hopefully, Europe and the U.S. will get on board with similar and coordinated plans.

They will have the opportunity this weekend with two important meetings scheduled of top international financial officials on Friday and the annual IMF/World Bank meeting the following two days. Krugman warns that they must seize this chance to forge a global rescue plan that they agree upon in principle, at least.

What should be done? The United States and Europe should just say “Yes, prime minister.” The British plan isn’t perfect, but there’s widespread agreement among economists that it offers by far the best available template for a broader rescue effort.

And the time to act is now. You may think that things can’t get any worse — but they can, and if nothing is done in the next few days, they will.

It really is the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

No one can remain immersed 24/7 in politics and economic Armageddon. I want to think about something happy today and one of the happiest thoughts in October is of Pumpkins.

The very word "pumpkin" is delightful. "Pump-" is so close to "plump" and "dumpling." The "-kin" is a cosy, endearing suffix, like Squirrel Nutkin. Pumpkin is from the Greek, "pepon", for large melon.

In my neighborhood, pumpkins lined up on porch steps are the first harbinger of Halloween. I love the ritual of carving the jack-o'-lanterns on Halloween morning and being impatient for dark and finally lighting them. These days I use battery-powered lights for safety, but I miss the smell of scorched pumpkin with real candles.

Baking a pumpkin pie can be easy as pie if you use canned puree or labor intensive if you start with a whole cheese pumpkin, one of the recommended varieties for pie-making. Google "pumpkin pie recipe" and choose from thousands. Every pumpkin recipe I've tried has been good, with the exception of a dreadful pumpkin cheesecake one Thanksgiving.

Pumpkins naturally signify the harvest's bounty. The large, heavy fruit are so richly colored, so substantial that they inspire Giant Pumpkin Contests at country fairs everywhere. Imagine spending an entire growing season coddling one mutant plant that grows more gargantuan by the hour until you need a forklift and a semi to transport the monster. A gallery of giant pumpkins is what inspired this post. Here is the contender for this year's record-breaker. At the time it was photographed, it weighed 1,878 lbs. with a circumference of 198 inches. It's growing at the rate of 11 lbs. per day. Now that's a Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

The Blame Game

The Blame Game. Sarah Palin dragged out that motheaten phrase again tonight, when rebutting Biden on a question of Middle East policy:

No, in fact, when we talk about the Bush administration, there's a time, too, when Americans are going to say, "Enough is enough with your ticket," on constantly looking backwards, and pointing fingers, and doing the blame game.

We first started hearing that phrase from Republicans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They were frantic to rush past any scrutiny of the administration's complete failure to act while an American city was drowning. It's a cynical attempt to evoke indulgence for heroic bureaucrats struggling with a difficult situation. Once the magnitude of the administration's criminal negligence became apparent, the choruses of "We don't want to play the blame game," were yodeled at every press conference by everyone from Bush down to the lowliest party hack.

Yeah, I'll bet they didn't want to play the blame game. Why? Because they were to blame! Bush and his incompetent flunkies deserved to be blamed. And if they managed to avoid blame, nothing would be learned. Nothing would be done. When bodies are floating in the brackish water of a flooded American city for days -- in a horror show that was totally avoidable -- you bet someone should be blamed and someone should pay a price.

The point is, when Palin tried to accuse Biden of "pointing fingers and doing the Blame Game," his -- and every Democrat's -- response to the accusation should be unequivocal: This isn't a game. It's deadly serious and when a disaster occurs because of an administration's negligence or incompetence, someone must take responsibility and the blame.

The Blame Game is trying to stage a comeback these past few weeks, while the Republicans and the administration are again refusing to play. After all, we have to save the global economy and we can't afford to stop and play blame games, now can we?

If we don't have the courage to affix blame for these monumental disasters where it belongs, and make those responsible pay a price, we shouldn't be surprised if we're bailing out another city and another economy before too long.

So next time a self-serving Repug tries to make a Democrat sound like a cavilling kill-joy for "playing the Blame Game," you know who to blame.

Palin-drone

I can't pin down all my reactions to Palin, though I know for sure that I find her repellent.

She's a phony baloney populist who starts to droppin' the g's and floggin' the folksiness in order to drop a scrim of wholesome American archetypes over her flashes of High School Mean Girl.

Then there are the times she resembles nothing so much as a Disney animatronic candidate, grinning through a mechanical recitation of stock phrases, talking points, jibes and suckups.

There are occasional glitches in her programming that pop up when the questions do not compute. Then she whirs and spins and garbles her Magic 8-Ball answers into a completely incoherent vomitus of gosh-darn-it's, mavericks, you-betcha's, rears-its-head's, greed-and-corruption-on-Wall-Street's, taxes-taxes-taxes, and Main-Streeters-like-me's.

Finally there are the glimpses of a shrewd, calculating and nasty woman who has no doubts about herself, her ambitions or her rightful place at the pinnacle of American political power.

It wasn't all that surprising that she would exceed the lowest debate performance expectations in recent memory. Her slightly bobble-headed grin of faux cheer wooed  the Repug base anew and might have won her a few new fans among the easily impressed. For those who are looking for something more than a drinking buddy in their candidates for high office, her hockey-mom/joe-six-pack persona is an embarrassment.

Her gaffes were the kind that would rally the Repug base and the hell with logic or truth. One was Palin's novel reading of the Constitution to include a vague expansiveness of vice presidential power over the Senate. That might thrill Cheney fans watching from their coffins of native soil, but several cable-news commentators, particularly Chris Matthews, were agape. He was also horror-struck at her suggestion to move the capital of Israel to Jerusalem.

More serious were, I think, her snide jibes. I watched the debate on CNN and the focus group meters were consistent in recording audience disapproval of negativity or attacks. I think I also detected deflating scores every time she wandered in the thickets of repetitive Repug bromides rather than answer a simple question.

The best reaction of the night came from Howard Fineman, on with Olbermann after the debate:

"My dominent impression stylistically was of a wolverine attacking the pant-leg of a passerby. I mean, she got ahold of Joe Biden and hung on for dear life, using every attack line she conceivably could ... It was attack, attack, attack, resort to Alaska when necessary, not listen to the questions or answer them when necessary, all to get through the ninety minutes by attacking...."

Hee! Fineman starts at about 5:15 into the video: 

"Because he's black"

H/T to Andrew Sullivan for this extraordinary video of the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka speaking on racism and Obama. As Sully says, "Something truly profound could happen in this election, if we want it to."

EPIC FAIL!

So the Bailout Bill has failed to pass the House. I can't actually say I'm sorry. What happens from here on will tell everyone whether or not to be sad or glad. What happened first, unhappily, was a drop in the Dow of 700 points until it rose to a mere 540 point loss as of 3:00 pm Eastern. Whee-e-e-e-e!

IMO, the administration and Congressional leaders badly miscalculated the public's mood. Despite Bush and Paulson doing their best to scare the crap out of everyone with doomsday scenarios, voters would rather take their risks and see the fat cats in Hell than bail them out. The weak punitive measures written into the bill sounded like slaps on the wrist when people want bankers' blood to run down the center of Wall Street.

With the unprecedented and ferocious response from constituents, Republican (and many Democratic) House members decided that Wall Street and financial industry lobbyists may have the money, but the people have the votes. It's not surprising.

Another problem with the bill is that professional and academic economists didn't like it. Nouriel Roubini hates it:

Thus, the Treasury plan is a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer. And the plan does nothing to resolve the severe stress in money markets and interbank markets that are now close to a systemic meltdown. It is pathetic that Congress did not consult any of the many professional economists that have presented - many on the RGE Monitor Finance blog forum - alternative plans that were more fair and efficient and less costly ways to resolve this crisis. This is again a case of privatizing the gains and socializing the losses; a bailout and socialism for the rich, the well-connected and Wall Street. And it is a scandal that even Congressional Democrats have fallen for this Treasury scam that does little to resolve the debt burden of millions of distressed home owners.

I don't doubt we're in for a world of economic hurt, no matter what's ultimately done about the crisis. Yet still, I can't say I'm sorry if the Masters-of-the-Universe get their teeth kicked in.

Update: Bravo, Stirling! I'm convinced. No runes here, he's on fire with righteous wrath.

Update 2: Dow down 777. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 1960...

As I listened to McCain and Obama duke it out last night over what to do about Georgia, I had a queasy sense of déja vu. Is it already 48 years ago that one of the rallying cries in the second debate between Nixon and Kennedy was "Quemoy and Matsu"? I was still a kid at the time, but somehow I remember thinking that Quemoy and Matsu must have been terribly important if the Vice President and this new guy got so excited over it.

The issue of the PRC's perennial mischief in the Strait of Taiwan, where the ROC-claimed islands of Matsu and the Quemoy group are located, lives on today but is hardly the Rubicon of Asia-Pacific geopolitics. In the 1960 presidential debate, Nixon pressed Kennedy to commit to using nuclear weapons to defend Quemoy and Matsu against the PRC. Get that? Nuclear war over a couple of islands that most Americans probably couldn't locate on a map.

Russell Baker, the incomparable Times columnist, recalled the demagoguery over Quemoy and Matsu in discussing its similarities to the issue of Nicaragua in 1985:

There hasn't been so much posturing and braying about so little since 1960. That was the year John F. Kennedy and Vice President Nixon managed to spend a big part of an entire Presidential campaign flailing at each other about Quemoy and Matsu.

Everybody remembers Quemoy and Matsu, I hope, because there isn't enough space in this column - or in this entire newspaper, for that matter - to explain why the future of humanity hung on the outcome of the Quemoy-and-Matsu situation. You had to be there.

And if you were there, of course, you probably can't believe - now that you think about it - that grown Presidential candidates really thought Quemoy and Matsu were important.

More... "Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 1960..."

Paul Newman, 1925-2008

Paul Newman died yesterday, at his home in Connecticut, kept company by family and close friends. He was 83.

I can't think about the Paul Newman of recent years, except for his magnificent commitment to charity and good works financed through his "Newman's Own" product sales. One hundred percent of Newman's Own profits went to charity, over $175 million.

When I think of Newman, I see the vibrant, wry, wickedly handsome guy born to set female hearts aflutter. And as he got older, he only got sexier. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Update: MsLibrarian's diary at DKos has a sampling of reaction to the sad news, including this statement from Newman's Own:

"Paul took advantage of what life offered him, and while personally reluctant to acknowledge that he was doing anything special, he forever changed the lives of many with his generosity, humor, and humanness. His legacy lives on in the charities he supported and the Hole in the Wall Camps, for which he cared so much.

"We will miss our friend Paul Newman, but are lucky ourselves to have known such a remarkable person."

She also includes this quote from a 2007 DSCC fundraising letter signed by Newman:

More than the films, more than the awards — finding out that I was on Nixon's Enemies List meant that I was doing something right.

Nixon didn't like my campaigning for Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. But then again, he didn't much care for debate, dissent, or the Constitution either.

I was proud to stand with Democrats against an imperial president back then.  And I am proud now to stand with a new generation of Democrats against a president who poses what I believe to be the biggest internal threat  to American democracy in my lifetime.

.