Reconciliation's resurgence

post from Daily Kos on 19 February 2010 10:52:02 AM. © Daily Kos

So the public option is on the comeback trail. Or is it?

With 18 Senators now signed on to the letter urging leadership support of an effort to bring the public option to the floor under reconciliation procedures, things are either looking up for the popular plan's prospects, or else everyone's out looking for a freebie, hoping to snap up some progressive creds by signing on to an effort that's both doomed and the death of which can be blamed on the Senate's nonpartisan parliamentarian.

In the scenario where they're punking us, it's win-win in terms of the politics of it for the Senators. As long as there aren't 51 signatories and nobody thinks there ever will be, anyone who wants to look progressive but doesn't particularly care for the public option can sign on and be in no danger of being called upon to live with the consequences. And if they get 51, well then, what the hell? Go pass it. You've got all the cover in the world.

But even with 51 votes, it'd have to get past the parliamentarian first, and that's not such a sure thing. But even if it doesn't, that's just more win for Senators who need to look pro-public option but don't really want to have to vote for it. "Gosh, we really wanted to do it -- you saw me sign the letter! But that darn parliamentarian!"

That assumes a startling level of cynicism, of course. There's really not all that much reason to believe there are many Democratic Senators who really do secretly dislike the notion of a public option and who fear just coming right out and saying so.

And even if it's all somehow an act, it's still worth it all by itself when you look back at the conventional wisdom from not that long ago, which was that there was simply no way of even contemplating passing a public option in the Senate, and reconciliation was out of the question.

Oh, and one last point, too. The latest signatory to the letter is Chuck Schumer, who also happens to be Chairman of the Senate Rules Committee. Now, the Rules Committee in the Senate doesn't play the same critical role as the Rules Committee in the House. And the endorsement of the idea of passing a public option under reconciliation procedures by the Chairman of the Senate Rules Committee isn't by itself dispositive on the question of whether it passes parliamentary muster. But it doesn't hurt things, that's for sure.

So those of you who might've been stung in the past by being called a DFH for thinking it was worth advocating using reconciliation to pass not only a "fix" for the old Senate version of the health insurance reform bill, but perhaps taking a second crack at the public option as well, take heart. If you're wrong, at least you're in good company.

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Things to Come

post from Talking Points Memo on 19 February 2010 10:48:00 AM. © Talking Points Memo

Is it a sign of things to come? One of the Democratic senate candidates in North Carolina this year is starting to frame his candidacy around reforming or abolishing the filibuster. [...]

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‘Impeach Obama’ Advocate At CPAC
Concedes Movement Is Based Largely On ‘Policy Differences’

post from Think Progress on 19 February 2010 10:45:00 AM. © Think Progress

Yesterday at CPAC, ThinkProgress spoke with the Western Center for Journalism’s Caleb Heimlich, who was advocating on behalf of the “Impeach Obama” campaign being run by the Policy Issues Institute. We asked Heimlich what the campaign is about:

HEIMLICH: Basically the gist of our case is that Gerald Ford said ?an impeachable offense is anything that Congress says it is.? And so our argument is that?Obama is not living up to the Constitution and therefore if you can prove that, he can be impeached.

Heimlich cited the auto bailouts, health care reform, and the stimulus as the specific reasons for impeaching President Obama, arguing that the Constitution does not give that authority. ThinkProgress then pointed out that it would be Congress, not the President, that would pass health care reform (and passed the Recovery Act). “That is a good point,” Heimlich conceded.

He later acknowledged that he and his supporters want to throw Obama out of office based on policy disagreements:

TP: So basically, what you?re saying is your grounds for impeachment is based on your differences in ? the policy differences that you have with the President and the Democrats in Congress.
HEIMLICH: Partially. It?s based on the policy differences with regards to the Constitution. We believe that if something is not constitutional, the Constituion is there for a reason. We believe that if you?re not following the Constitution then you?re not fulling your oath of office and you shouldn?t be there.

Watch the interview:

video details and more

ThinkProgress asked if the “Impeach Obama” movement is garnering any support at CPAC. “It’s a mixed bag,” Heimlich conceded. “There?s not 100 percent acceptance here.”

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Medicaid on the chopping block, even as demand
grows

post from They gave us a republic... - Front Page on 19 February 2010 10:39:38 AM. © They gave us a republic... - Front Page

All across the country the demands on the Medicaid system are growing, yet in spite of this reality, virtually every state is considering significant cuts to their programs budgets. Since the states are temporarily barred from decreasing the roles by making it tougher to qualify for benefits by changing the income levels for eligibility, all the states have left to cut are the reimbursement rates they pay doctors and hospitals, and "optional benefits." You know - the frivolous shit like eyeglasses, dental care, durable medical equipment like batteries for a quadriplegics wheelchair.

Medicaid is in a classic Catch-22 right now. The economy sucks, so more and more people qualify for the program, but the economy sucks so money isn't flowing in to state coffers to pay for it.

A survey released Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation found a record one-year increase in Medicaid enrollment of 3.3 million from June 2008 to June 2009, a period when the unemployment rate rose by 4 percentage points. Total enrollment jumped 7.5 percent, to 46.9 million, and 13 states had double-digit increases.
Because Medicaid enrollment often lags behind unemployment, this year's increase could prove even greater.
The National Association of State Medicaid Directors estimates that state budget shortfalls in the coming fiscal year, which begins in July in most states, will total $140 billion. Because Medicaid is one of the largest expenditures in every state budget, and one of the fastest-growing, it makes an unavoidable target.
"For most states, the fiscal situation is still dire, and the Medicaid cuts are significant," said Scott D. Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers.
Governors and legislators have managed to defer the deepest cuts because the federal stimulus package provided $87 billion to states in Medicaid relief. The cost of Medicaid is shared by the federal and state governments, with states setting eligibility, benefit and reimbursement levels within broad federal guidelines, and Washington covering the majority of the expense.
But the stimulus assistance is due to expire at the end of December, in the middle of many states' fiscal years, leaving budget officials to peer over a precipice. Congress and the White House are considering extending the enhanced payments for six more months, at a cost of about $25 billion.

The House of Representatives has passed a bill to ameliorate this problem, and President Obama has included it in the budget he released this month. And you damn well know what comes next...The legislation is stalled in the Senate as 41 petulant sore losers lay down on the floor and kick and scream and say "No!"

And that Catch-22 I mentioned? Yeah, it's two-fold. When states start cutting to save money, they end up in a death spiral, because the rules say that for every dollar a state cuts, they lose at least a dollar in federal assistance to pay for the program.

Missouri has already been down this path. Hell, we blazed this trail in 2005 - and it goes nowhere good.

However, this reality does highlight what is at stake when the President and the Congress get together for their Health Care Summit next week. And it also highlights who wasn't invited to the table who ought to be: Governors.

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More Texas Suicide Attack Humor

post from Talking Points Memo on 19 February 2010 10:37:00 AM. © Talking Points Memo

Last night Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) suggested the Texas suicide bomb attack was part of the same public frustration that sent him to Washington. Just now Human Events editor Jed Babbin joked about the attack in his introduction of Grover Norquist. Video[...]

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Fear Of Inflation, But Not Recession

post from TalkLeft on 19 February 2010 10:35:00 AM. © TalkLeft

Yesterday, the Fed raised the interest rate banks pay on emergency Fed loans:

Financial markets were sent into a late-day spin after being caught off-guard by the Federal Reserve decision to raise the rate it charges banks for emergency loans. [. . .] The increase in the discount rate is just one of several moves the Fed is taking to reverse its unprecedented easing of monetary policy, but it is perhaps the most visible action taken so far. [. . .] [T]he move was widely seen as a key step in the central bank's move toward raising interest rates more broadly.

Why in heaven's name would the Fed take such an approach? Surely not a rational fear of inflation. Today, new inflation numbers were released - they show DEflation for the first time since 1982:

The price of a variety of goods, everything from rent to cigarettes, rose 0.2 percent in January. Excluding food and fuel costs, which tend to be volatile, prices fell 0.1 percent — the first decrease since 1982.

What could the Fed be thinking? Thursday's jobs report was not good:

Thursday’s report on jobless filings, in fact, rekindled worries that the labor market would be slow to bounce back. First-time unemployment claims last week were much higher than expected — 473,000, up 31,000 from the previous week.

The problem is not inflation, it is unemployment. How the Fed could see it otherwise is not clear to me.

Speaking for me only

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Where the Power Elite Gets Its Power

post from TPMCafe on 19 February 2010 10:32:00 AM. © TPMCafe

I've seen columnists obsessed; I've seen them rage or swoon over the objects of their obsessions. But nothing compares with New York Times columnist David Brooks' love-hate fixation on Washington's Ivy Leaguers.

This morning, he wrings his hands over the "system of promotion" that produces these wunderkinder. But recently he was showering the same people and system with breathless admiration. One day, he snarks; another day, he coos -- at the same people, from the same institutions!

I used to wonder if it all depended on whether or not they were returning his calls. But this compulsive see-sawing reflects a deeper personal envy and insecurity that keeps him -- and those who find his column thought-provoking -- from facing the real problem. It's not elitism (a perennial in human nature) but the encroachment of perverse new configurations of capitalist finance and consumption upon American leadership training.

Critics like Brooks can't analyze the Ivy League's capitulation to riptides of global capital marketing, consumer marketing, predatory marketing, and self-marketing, if he and the other critics are swinging manically from Ivy envy to Ivy ingratiation and back. And forth. And back. Watch Brooks swing, and rue the loss to his readers of a better understanding:

This morning, he recycles a familiar and half-valid charge: Yale and Harvard, once the crucibles of a WASPy, clubby, disciplined, and sometimes admirable elite, have become nervous diversitocracies that cultivate too much elitist talent and narrow technical knowledge but too little civic character, trust and contextual awareness.

Not only have we "opened up opportunities to women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics, and members of many other groups...[note the protective coloration in Brooks' list]; we've changed the criteria for success. It is less necessary to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working.

"Yet here's the funny thing. As we've made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We've increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower."

It's not funny, and Brooks hasn't just noticed it now. This is the argument made years ago in the Wall Street Journal by one of his mentors, Charles Hill, a former executive assistant to Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz: Hill lamented that the foreign service had lost its competence by valuing color and narrow expertise over the seasoned bonding of a leadership class.

Hmm, didn't that class give us the Iran and the Cuba we have today, not to mention Vietnam? Yet Brooks assures us this morning that, once upon a time, the financial world, government, and journalism were run more effectively by these people, because they valued loyalty and trust more than narrow measures of "merit."

If only they really had! Brooks insists that, in finance, "well-connected blue bloods" kept things stable, even honorable. In journalism, hard-drinking working stiffs gave us honest reporting. In government, even party hacks brought more stability than today's elite graduates of public policy schools. That's not exactly how I'd assess the brokers, reporters, and politicians who gave us the War to end all Wars, the Great Depression, and the 1950s' military-industrial complex, consumer-marketing juggernaut and McCarthyism, not to mention the Bay of Pigs and that coup in Iran.

Brooks isn't wrong to recycle my own argument: that the Ivies are becoming career factories and cultural gallerias for an anomic global ruling class accountable to no polity or moral code. I've showed that the American republic sometimes did get better leadership from the networks of civic trust, including even the "old" Yale I describe here, than it gets now.

Yet here's the funny thing: Only a year and a half ago, Brooks was lavishly praising the newer, narrower meritocrats whose rise he's now bemoaning. In November, 2008, the "love" side of his Ivy fixation on them was surging in a column celebrating an influx of Clinton Ivy Leaguers into the new administration.

"[M]uch as I want to resent these over-educated Achievatrons," he wrote, "I find myself tremendously impressed....." They're "twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists." (By 'poor reporters,' does Brooks mean the hard-drinking, honest working stiffs he praised for good journalism, or reporters from the University of Chicago, like himself?)

In 2008, he assured us, the Ivy League meritocrats coming to Washington were "open-minded individuals who are persuadable by evidence..... They are admired professionals,..... hardheaded and pragmatic... They're thinking holistically -- there's a nice balance of policy wonks, governors and legislators." Mirabile dictu, they are "the best of the Washington insiders. Obama seems to have dispensed with the romantic and failed notion that you need inexperienced 'fresh faces' to change things." This time, "Obama is not bringing along an insular coterie of lifelong aides who depend upon him for their well-being."

Tell me if you can reconcile this with Brooks' fine-spun disdain for many of these same people, not only in this morning's column (maybe some of them really aren't returning his calls) but, more tellingly, in a gloating, 2001 Wall Street Journal essay, "Bush In, Ivy Out" There, Brooks ridiculed the Ivy leaguers who were being replaced by Americans "from inland state schools" under two apostate Yalies, Bush and Cheney: "The skills [George Bush] acquired in the Texas oil business [??!!] are suited for a world in which success and failure are measured by tangible accomplishments, like oil production levels and after-tax profits," Brooks wrote.

What a refreshing change that was going to be from elitist Ivy presumptions "suited to a world in which the definition of success is totally unrelated to tangible accomplishment of any kind." Bush was cleansing Washington of the erudite bluffing and arrogant insouciance that arouse "both awe and silent hatred" in regular Americans. He noted happily that Condoleezza Rice had gone to the University of Denver, Colin Powell to the City College of New York, Paul O'Neill to Fresno State, and Dick Cheney to the University of Wyoming -- after dropping out of Yale -- and that "Karl Rove, the brains behind the whole operation, has no college degree at all." Yes, the republic would be in better hands from January, 2001 on.

Somehow, Brooks remained as mesmerized as he was galled by the Ivies. In 2003, he devoted his very first Times column, "Bred for Power," to an elegy for the strong, civic-republican leadership training of the old schools attended by Howard Dean and John Kerry as well as by both George Bushes. (All of these were undergraduates at Yale -- as were L. Paul Bremer III, John Negroponte, and I. Scooter Libby, who was taught there by Paul Wolfowitz.)

By 2005, Brooks got snarky again. The disclosure of the identity of the Watergate source for Bob Woodward, a Yale graduate, prompted a nasty Brooks column about the compulsive networking of young Ivy grads like Woodward, who'd found his way to his Deep Throat source through just such ingratiation as a young reporter.

Then came Obama's election and the return of the liberal, "new school" Ivy meritocrats Bush had swept away. Now they weren't callow and arrogant ,but seasoned and broad-minded. Had they all experienced civic-republican epiphanies? Not particularly, although Larry Summers got something of a political makeover. Had Brooks himself changed? Not really. But the country had repudiated the conservative Republican partisanship he'd championed sinuously for all of his adult life until its fiscal recklessness and corruption, its Katrina paralysis, its Iraq War, and its enabling of the financial meltdown forced him to distance himself from most of what he'd been promoting.

What Brooks had been promoting for all those years was not the nuanced, Burkean conservatism he sometimes invoked but the riptides of corporate consumer marketing, predatory marketing, and self-marketing that were battering the very networks of trust and civic commitment he now wants us to appreciate -- the civic-republican leadership training grounds of the old Ivy League, the working-class solidarities of labor unions and parish sodalities.

He leaves you to assume what he has often claimed before: that diversity-mad liberal relativists have undermined these institutions. But visit any Ivy League Economics 101 course or classes in microeconomics, statistics, computer science, and most social sciences. The homunculae economicae and number-crunching "methodologues" at the podium aren't liberals or leftists, as Brooks used to charge, except in the "color equals culture" sense that big corporations embrace for management and marketing purposes.

"Diversity" itself is an industry, and universities themselves are run like corporations whose students and faculty members are "customers," as one unfortunate Yale memo actually put it. But, then, increasingly, students are customers: Thousands of visits per capita to vapid Internet sites and shopping malls before matriculation have annealed them against whatever the campus Marxists or postmodernists might hope to impart.

Just watch the Yale admissions video produced recently by two undergraduates, a paean to a college with no palpable sense of its history and mission, and you'll understand the resentment Brooks plays to in his column. What he doesn't challenge is the pervasive ideology at Harvard and Yale (of free-marketing, self-marketing, predatory marketing) that normalizes orientations that are narrow and arbitrary, indeed

Conservative critics get vocal only when campus leftists are the pitchmen, like the Harvard Shakespearean scholar Marjorie Garber, who, in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety and Sex and Real Estate, swings like a semioticist with marketing that's reshuffling our libidinal and racial decks. Conservatives also have fun howling about hypocrisy when other leftists administer revival meetings for penitent racists and sexists who want to feel better about making lots of money by backing reforms that divide blacks from blacks as well as blacks from whites, and whites from whites and women from women as well as women from men and men from men. That's progress, perhaps; but "progressive" it's not.

The left-liberal follies on campus that Brooks usually cites to explain the emphasis on color and credentials over trust and contextual awareness are mostly reactions to deeper currents that critics like Brooks never name. He calls occasionally for more conservative scholarship to rein in the facile, meritocratic elitism, which he blames on the left: America warehouses its "radical lunatics ... in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated." But lavishly funded nunneries for conservative lunatics are sprouting at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont McKenna, Chicago, and elsewhere, and a few of them now hire conservative activists and national-security functionaries as teachers who cast Thucydides as a prophet of the war on terror.

That won't rein in the campus capitalist circus. It won't nurture the down-to-earth leadership Brooks wishes we had -- this morning. It's too easy, and a bit cheap, to lampoon and lament the soulless meritocracy that has drained old Ivy wellsprings of civic trust. It's harder to be honest about the causes, when that would require taking a look in the mirror.

Brooks will keep on dancing around the edges of the problem. He'll hold up a mirror up to others and make them feel guilty. He'll dispense barbed apercus while careening from Ivy envy to Ivy ingratiation and plucking those same chords in his fans. "[O]ur system of promotion has grown some pretty serious problems," he'll fret. But he won't look into those problems' causes if he can point fingers at their carriers, at least on the days he's resenting the carriers rather than courting them.

United States - Washington - John Kerry - History - Presidents

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Where The Power Elite Gets Its Power

I've seen columnists obsessed; I've seen them rage or swoon over the objects of their obsessions. But nothing compares with New York Times columnist David Brooks' unending, love-hate fixation on Ivy Leaguers in Washington.

This morning, he affects to wring his hands over the "system of promotion" that produces these narrow wunderkinds. But very recently he was showering the same people and system with breathless admiration. One day, he snarks; another day, he coos -- at the very same people, from the very same institutions!

I used to wonder if it all depended on whether or not they were returning his calls. But this compulsive see-sawing reflects a deeper personal envy and insecurity that keeps him -- and the many who'll find today's column thought-provoking -- from facing up to the real problem. It's not elitism (a perennial in human nature) but the encroachment of capitalist finance and consumption on civic-republican leadership training.

Unfortunately, critics like Brooks can't analyze the Ivy League's capitulation to riptides of global capital marketing, consumer marketing, predatory marketing, and self-marketing when those critics are swinging manically, as Brooks is, from Ivy envy to Ivy ingratiation and back. And forth. And back. Just watch him swing, and rue the loss to Times readers:

It's not funny, and Brooks didn't just notice it. It's the argument made years ago in the Wall Street Journal by one of Brooks' mentors, Charles Hill, a former executive assistant to Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz: Hill lamented that the foreign service had lost its competence by valuing color and narrow expertise over the seasoned bonding of a leadership class.

If only they really had! Brooks insists that, In finance, "well-connected blue bloods" kept things stable, even honorable. In journalism, hard-drinking working stiffs gave us honest reporting. In government, even party hacks brought more stability than today's elite graduates of public policy schools. That's not exactly how I'd assess the brokers, reporters, and politicians who gave us the War to end all Wars, the Great Depression, and the 1950s' military-industrial complex, consumer-marketing juggernaut and McCarthyism, not to mention the Bay of Pigs and that coup in Iran.

"[M]uch as I want to resent these over-educated Achievatrons," he wrote, "I find myself tremendously impressed....." Not only are they "twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists." (By 'poor reporters,' does Brooks mean the hard-drinking, honest working stiffs he praised for good journalism, or reporters from the University of Chicago, like himself?)

Tell me if you can reconcile this with Brooks' fine-spun disdain for many of these same people, not only in this morning's column (maybe some of them really aren't returning his calls) but, more tellingly, in a gloating, 2001 Wall Street Journal essay, "Bush In, Ivy Out"? There, Brooks ridiculed the Ivy leaguers who were being replaced by real Americans "from inland state schools" under two apostate Yalies, Bush and Cheney: "The skills [George Bush] acquired in the Texas oil business [??!!] are suited for a world in which success and failure are measured by tangible accomplishments, like oil production levels and after-tax profits."

What a refreshing change, he told us, from elitist Ivy presumptions, "suited to a world in which the definition of success is totally unrelated to tangible accomplishment of any kind." Bush was cleansing Washington of the erudite Ivy bluffing and arrogant insouciance that arouse "both awe and silent hatred" in regular Americans. He noted happily that Condoleezza Rice had gone to the University of Denver, Colin Powell to the City College of New York, Paul O'Neill to Fresno State, and Dick Cheney to the University of Wyoming -- after dropping out of Yale -- and that "Karl Rove, the brains behind the whole operation, has no college degree at all." Yes, the republic would be in better hands from January, 2001 on.

Somehow, though, Brooks remained as mesmerized as he was galled by the Ivies. In 2003, he devoted his very first Times column, "Bred for Power," to an elegy for the strong, civic-republican leadership training of the old schools attended by Howard Dean and John Kerry as well as by both George Bushes. (All of these were undergraduates at Yale -- as were L. Paul Bremer III, John Negroponte, and I. Scooter Libby.)

By 2005, though, Brooks got snarky again. The disclosure of the identity of the Watergate source for Bob Woodward, a Yale graduate, prompted a nasty Brooks column about the compulsive networking of young Ivy grads like Woodward, who had found his way to his Deep Throat source through just such ingratiation as a young reporter.

Then came Obama's election and the return of the liberal, "new school" Ivy meritocrats whom Bush had swept away. Now they were not callow and arrogant but seasoned and broad-minded.

Had these former know-it-alls experienced civic-republican epiphanies? Not particularly, although Larry Summers had had something of a political makeover. Had Brooks himself changed? Not really. But the country had repudiated the conservative Republican partisanship he'd championed sinuously for all of his adult life until its fiscal recklessness and corruption, its Katrina paralysis, its Iraq War, and its enabling of the financial meltdown forced him to distance himself from most of what he'd been promoting.

What Brooks had been promoting for all those years was not the nuanced, Burkean conservatism he sometimes invoked but riptides of corporate consumer marketing, predatory marketing, and self-marketing that have been battering the very networks of trust and civic commitment he wants us to appreciate, from the civic-republican leadership training grounds of the old Ivy League to the working-class solidarities of labor unions and parish sodalities.

Visit any Ivy League Economics 101 course or classes in microeconomics, statistics, computer science, and most social sciences. The homunculae economicae and number-crunching "methodologues" at the podium aren't liberals or leftists, as Brooks used to charge, except in the "color equals culture" sense that big corporations embrace for management and marketing purposes.

"Diversity" itself is an industry, and universities themselves are run like corporations whose students and faculty members are "customers," as one unfortunate Yale memo actually put it. But, then, increasingly, students are customers: Thousands of visits per capita to vapid Internet sites and shopping malls before matriculation have annealed them against whatever campus Marxists or postmodernists could hope to impart.

Just watch the Yale admissions video produced recently by two undergraduates, displaying a college that has lost its sense of history and mission, and you'll understand the resentment that Brooks plays on in his column. What he doesn't challenge is the the pervasive ideology at Harvard and Yale (of free-marketing, self-marketing, predatory marketing) that normalizes student orientations that are narrow and arbitrary, indeed

Conservative critics become vocal only when campus leftists are the pitchmen, like the Harvard Shakespearean scholar Marjorie Garber, who, in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety and Sex and Real Estate, swings like a semioticist with marketing that's reshuffling our libidinal and racial decks. Conservatives also have fun howling about hypocrisy when some other leftists administer revival meetings for penitent racists and sexists who want to feel better about making lots of money by backing reforms that now divide blacks from blacks as well as blacks from whites and whites from whites and women from women as well as women from men and men from men. That's progress, perhaps; but "progressive" it's not.

But left-liberal follies on campus are reactions to deeper currents that critics like Brooks never names. He calls occasionally for more conservative scholarship to rein in this facile elitism: America warehouses its "radical lunatics ... in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated," he has claimed. But lavishly funded nunneries for conservative lunatics are sprouting at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont McKenna, Chicago, and elsewhere, and a few of them now hire conservative activists and national-security functionaries as teachers who cast Thucydides as a prophet of the war on terror.

That won't rein in the campus capitalist circus. It won't nurture the down-to-earth leadership Brooks urges upon us this morning. It's easy, and a bit cheap, to lampoon and lament the soulless meritocracy that has drained the old Ivy wellsprings of civic trust. It's harder to be honest about the causes when that would require taking a look in the mirror.

Brooks will keep on dancing around the edges of the problem. He'll hold up the mirror up to others to make them feel guilty. He'll dispense barbed apercus as he careens from envy to ingratiation and plucks those same chords in his fans. "[O]ur system of promotion has grown some pretty serious problems," he frets. But he won't look into the problems' causes of as long as he can point fingers at their carriers on those days when he's resenting rather than courting them.

United States - Washington - John Kerry - History - Presidents

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Clive Maund: Unlock Profits with Technical
Analysis

Source: Interviewed by Karen Roche, Publisher, The Gold Report

Which camp are you in, inflation or deflation? While Mr. Market labors under the pressures of both and the burgeoning weight of artificial stimuli, Clive Maund, a 30-year veteran of technical analysis, is positioning himself for gains either way. "Properly used," he says, "technical analysis does not require the use of other inputs to be effective." In this enlightening interview with The Gold Report, Clive extols the virtues of the age-old practice as a reliable predictor of future stock price movement in any economic environment.

The Gold…

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