Celebrating Iraqi elections? No, I just got arrested last night.

As a blog that purports to be about politics and DC, I suppose I ought to cover the State of the Union speech, huh? Fine, fine. Here are my thoughts.

1)We've seen it five times now, but is there any creepier picture in the world than Cheney and Hastert sitting behind Bush at the SOTU, smiling their crooked smiles?

2)Let the Democratic voices be heard! For a moment I thought I was sitting in the Houses of Parliament, when the Dems chanted, "No!," while Bush fibbed about the state of Social Security. This was a good moment for them, far better than the Dem response.

3)The Dem response sucked. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are great people to have working for you in the halls of Congress, but who decided they should be the public face of the Democratic rebuttal? Is there no one with any charisma in the party? Where the hell was Barack Obama? I don't care if he's only been in the Senate for three hours, get his ass in front of the microphone every time we have to say anything. Upside: no one, and I do mean no one, not network anchors, not the cameramen, not Harry Reid's mother, watched the Dem response.

4)Bush brings back the gay marriage amendment. Note one: this is appalling, and the GOP will pay for this one eventually. Note two: he said he supports one, not he will throw his hard-earned, two-percent-of-the-vote-means-a-mandate political capital behind it. A sop to the base, who will hopefully be disappointed when saner heads prevail.

5)So, I guess we're maybe thinking about helping Iran? If I heard correctly, and I think I did, Bush clearly said that we stand with the Iranian opposition. What will we do if the opposition rises up? We don't have such a good track record on this one (see Bush I, Kurds left to be massacred), but I'm guessing, along the lines of Seymour Hersh's stunner of a piece a few weeks ago, if Bush is saying these things in the SOTU, then we probably have some boots over there passing out how-to leaflets on revolution.

6)Lots of other crap that won't ever be heard from again (see, trip to Mars).

7)Social Security. I feel that this need not be seriously discussed, because I'm fairly convinced that Bush's plan doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell, but's let's talk anyway. Almost to a point, Bush's ideas are bad. First, as everyone with a calculator has pointed out, Social Security isn't in that bad a shape. It's certainly not in crisis. A tweak or two could extend its solvency indefinitely. Moreover, as Paul Krugman points out, if the market gains Bush promises for his personal accounts come to pass, then we wouldn't have needed to make any changes in the first place. If the market doesn't grow, and SS is in real trouble, then private accounts won't do any good anyway. Second, saving in general and saving for retirement specifically are good things. We should encourage them. Encouraging them does not require a convoluted, expensive, government-run plan, claiming to save SS. If Bush wants more people to have 401(k)s, then he should design policies to that effect. Increase the tax incentives for IRAs. Make it easier, or possible, for wage labor to develop their IRAs. Encourage saving. That has nothing to do with SS, and should be kept separate. Third, it should be kept separate, because SS is supposed to exist to save people from market swings that would leave them destitute in old age. Of course, Bush guaranteed that people wouldn't be able to choose overly risky investments, withdraw their money all at once, and would be protected from crashes and the like, but then that makes the plan sound like there's not a lot of choice or market-orientation to these things. Fourth, if you think Wall Street isn't licking its chops over this, you're very much mistaken, all Bush protestations notwithstanding. Fifth, so, uh, 4% of payroll taxes are going into these accounts while there is no change in benefits for people 55 and older, and we're making the tax cuts permanent and all that other stuff, and you know he never really introduces anything that's going to raise some new revenue. This plan is costly on a scale the likes of which you cannot believe. It would make the Reagan deficits look like the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny jar. If Bush's plan where somehow to pass, we'd need record levels of saving, because no foreign investor in their right mind would get anywhere near American debt. This is really a horrible idea. Verdict: enough self-interested Congress persons fear gutting SS and heaping debt on their constituents; the bill dies.

8)One last thing: why are the President's environmental proposals always so godawful? Why hydrogen, clean coal, and ethanol (which is renewable in that you can always grow more corn, and a terrible idea in the sense that it takes a lot of polluting energy to process that corn into ethanol)? Why is Bush constitutionally (small c) incapable of proposing something that might actually be a good idea? For instance, significantly increasing MPG standards would slash our oil dependence, reduce highway fatalities (by getting rid of the super-giant SUVs), and hasten the arrival of fully electric cars (which would be way cheaper than H-cars, because there's already electricity everywhere, while the nearest hydrogen station is, uh, not close by). Best of all, it wouldn't cost the government a red cent. But, you know, it's not a handout to some industry or another, so I guess that ruled it out.

That's pretty much it. There was a lot of other frustrating stuff, but I'm sure we've all seen a Bush speech before.

Today is the first day of the rest of February.

It was 30 degrees Fahrenheit for my morning stroll out the back door into the alley, down to the coffeeshop, and on the few blocks to the Columbia Heights metro station. Thirty degrees, under many circumstances, is unpleasantly cold, but mornings of late have been affairs in the teens, where brisk winds draw tears from one's eyes that freeze before they hit the ground. You can understand, then, when I say that a sunny 30 degrees felt like spring.

Premature as it might be, a winter morning that feels like spring is a great thing. People are out. It's warm enough for construction to resume on the lofts going up at the end of my street. It's warm enough that birds can sing without pausing to swear at the cold. It's warm enough that you can smell the city. When it's cold, all you can smell is cold. All it takes for life to resume in February is a 30 degree day.

Basking in the almost-above-freezing warmth of the morning, I find myself thinking spring thoughts. I find myself noting that nothing in the world is as great as being up early on a spring morning when you don't have to go to work. I am, in fact, going to work, but this dampens my spirits only a little. I think of recent spring trips to Italy, sitting under cedars drinking coffee on cool mornings that lead to warm, sun-drenched afternoons, sea air carrying salt spray and the heavy smells of newly opened flora into the shade where I sit with a crossword and a glass of wine. I'm drunk on these thoughts, this 30 degree morning, and I slip on ice into traffic. Honked at, I near the metro, toss my empty coffee cup into a nearby bin, and descend to the platform, where none of us can decide whether to leave our coats on or take them off.

Back at street level, the trickle of water in the gutter makes people grin, even these hardened K Street office grunts. The 30 degree warmth thickens the air the slightest bit, giving the smallest shimmer to the tail lights backed up on Connecticut, and carrying the smells and sounds of Dupont to Farragut Square, and vice versa. Warm air holds more life, I discover, and we all feel a little more alive stumbling and slushing our way to the office this morning. We push and swear a little more, we linger smoking outside the revolving doors of one firm or another, we talk, where before we ran bent over, eyes streaming, for the nearest HVAC unit.

Inside there's no difference this morning. The constant glacial pressure of work drains moods all year long. Amid the buzz of phones ringing, copiers copying, staplers stapling, fingers typing, coffee dripping, files shredding, and bodies humming around on the paths that divide the cubicles from the edge offices, I sit, quiet. And I'm back under those cedars, watching the sun creep up the rain smoothed Roman busts of my balcony, smile as big as the North Atlantic, all thanks to the unseasonable warmth of a 30 degree Wednesday morning.

Paul K

If you haven't been reading Krugman on Social Security privitization, you should be. Always at his best when examining economic issues (as one would expect), he's been in top form over the past few weeks. Visit his NYT page here.

The Plot Against America

So, I know I'm really late to the party on Philip Roth's, "The Plot Against America." Everyone already wrote tons about it last year. And I don't even really know what they said. Whether they liked it or didn't. Whether it was an intellectual exercise or a warning to modern Americans. None of this will stop me from writing my own thoughts on the book.

As most of you know, the book is an alternative history, postulating the election in 1940 of an isolationist, accomodationist Charles Lindbergh instead of good old FDR. Lindy strikes a deal with Hitler, and hell ensues for the nation's 4 million+ Jews. If nothing else, the book makes for compelling reading.

But it also reveals Roth's genius in two ways. First, he has taken one of my hobby horses and shown its plausibility: namely, that America is not guaranteed to always be free, prosperous, and tolerant (on a relative scale, I mean), but that such wonders require diligence to be sustained, and even if such diligence is maintained over generations, it is a certainty that the United States will someday cease to be what it is today. Our freedoms are only as good as our willingness to defend them.

Now, many of us on the left have been known, particularly recently, to decry the oppressive encroachment of government on our freedoms, of religion on public life, and of militarism on every aspect of administration policy. Likewise, I'm sure, many on the left fear some combination of lawlessness stemming from godlessness, or maybe just socialism. The extent to which any significant number of people feel genuinely worried about their freedoms is unclear, but loyalty to political ideology over freedom is no way to protect our rights (I'm looking at you, Republicans), nor is reliance on histrionics or complacency in the face of bullying (I'm looking at you, Democrats). And while I feel in my heart of hearts that we should not give a shit what teenagers think, because they know less than nothing, it's still discomfiting to read this.

I guess what I'm saying is that those who would ignore history in favor of crap television are doomed to repeat someone else's crap history. And it will happen someday.

The second part of Roth's revealed genius is the way in which he enables those of us in large minorities to think like those in small, truly threatened minorities. I'm a Democrat, and I'm therefore just a shade in the minority. This leads me to be irked by Bush's roughriding, but it also assuages my concern, because honestly, how bad can the GOP make things if they have to worry about pissing 49% of us off? What Roth allows us to do, however, is feel persecuted in America by reading about his Newark Jews in Lindbergh's America. Not only that, but by keeping open the possibility for most of the book that the concerned Jews are way overreacting while the complacent Jews are more in touch with reality, it makes us question our grasp, or our ability to have a grasp, on political reality. When I get annoyed by lefty protestors, am I being the accomodationist, letting fascism slowly pull its wool over my eyes? How well do I actually know what "regular" Americans know, and what they are prepared to allow to happen?

What Roth's book leaves you with most is a desire to be vigilant. He makes you want to be on the right side of history, to know when the thundercloud threatens to darken America, and to do something about it, before it's too late. Knowing what I know, and fearing what I fear, I don't feel so bad taking the time to add one more opinion on Roth to the aether.