In my recent stroll down the memory lane of Dance Crazes of My Youth, I came across this one, known as the Mashed Potato.
Which started a long time ago.
I never could do this particular dance. Maybe the problem was the turned-in stance; as a ballet dancer, that posture was especially hard for me. And looking at it again, it still seems really difficult:
Dances were awfully bouncy back then, weren’t they?
If you want to read at length about the latest in the fiscal cliff negotiations and legislation, go to Memeorandum and get cracking.
But here’s my shorter two cents:
After doing a lot of reading on the right side of the blogosphere, in articles and especially comments sections, I get the impression that a lot of conservatives are hopping mad that the Republicans in Congress voted to raise taxes for those who make over 450/400K (that is, those conservatives who hadn’t already deserted the GOP prior to the vote). I agree that it’s incredibly frustrating that Boehner et. al. didn’t see fit to do something stronger and more conservative, just as a statement, knowing that it would be defeated in the Senate.
But as I (and others) have written before, the defeat in the 2012 election—not just Obama’s victory, but the failure to do better in the Senate—sealed the Republicans’ fate and took away a great deal of their negotiating power. This doesn’t mean that Boehner is not at fault; he is, most particularly for setting up this situation in the first place during negotiations last year.
But it’s important to note that, in the political sense, this bill may remove at least some of the tried-and-true “Republicans won’t cooperate” argument. They did.
John Hinderaker looks on the bright side:
But what happens now that Obama has gotten his way? It will soon become apparent that the fiscal cliff deal, including precisely the tax increases that Obama has been demanding for four years, makes hardly a dent in the deficit. At best, it will reduce the deficit by five or six percent. We will continue to run up deficits of close to $1 trillion a year, and the national debt will continue to grow, as Obama has always intended. This fact can’t be hidden; it will be reported. Journalists who have pulled their punches in the past because they wanted Obama to be re-elected will now begin to ask, what are we going to do about the deficit and the debt? At some point, perhaps sooner rather than later, interest rates will begin to rise, at which point the debt issue will become a crisis. And Republicans will say: we told you so.
That’s too optimistic for me. For example, I can’t even imagine that Hinderaker is correct about the MSM.
The most important negotiations are still to come, the ones where Obama refuses any cuts except in defense, and the Republicans either go belly-up or belly-partway-up.
And as this article points out, the current bill will have the effect of raising payroll taxes for middle class Americans:
But lawmakers’ decision not to reverse a scheduled increase in the payroll tax that finances Social Security, while widely expected, still means that about 77 percent of households will pay a larger share of income to the federal government this year, according to the center’s analysis.
The tax this year will increase by two percentage points, to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent, on all earned income up to $113,700.
Indeed, for most lower- and middle-income households, the payroll tax increase will most likely equal or exceed the value of the income tax savings. A household earning $50,000 in 2013, roughly the national median, will avoid paying about $1,000 more in income taxes ”” but pay about $1,000 more in payroll taxes.
I don’t even pretend to know what effect this will have on the American public, except to say I think that, although “widely expected,” most people don’t follow politics that closely and therefore this aspect of the bill will still be a surprise. As to who will be blamed for it, I’m not at all sure. Previous experience says it would be the Republicans—that’s Obama’s and the left’s and the MSM’s specialty. But something in my gut says that the American public might just give this one bipartisan credit/blame. Congress in general hasn’t exactly ingratiated itself with voters in recent years.
[ADDENDUM: Many more links here from Instapundit on why this isn’t necessarily such a bad deal for the Republicans.]
Quite a few people have recommended this Victor Davis Hanson article about some of the problems we’re likely to be dealing with in the coming year. One of the points Hanson makes is that the true face of the left is increasingly being revealed in articles such as the Seidman critique of the Constitution (which I discussed at length yesterday, here).
Hanson writes:
These are the most foreboding times in my 59 years. The reelection of Barack Obama has released a surge of rare honesty among the Left about its intentions, coupled with a sense of triumphalism that the country is now on board for still greater redistributionist change.
I agree.
One of the many negative results of the 2012 election has been the sense, among so many on both left and right, that so-called progressivism has won the battle in this country—perhaps permanently, but at any rate for a very long time.
Let’s not argue right now over whether this perception is correct or not; we’ve certainly done plenty of that before. But perhaps we can agree that the belief, right or wrong, is one of the prime movers of this coming-out-of-the-leftist-closet trend that seems to be occurring for so many op-ed writers. It’s not just the heady victory of the moment that’s motivating them, it’s their conviction that it’s clear sailing from here on that empowers the left to openly up the ante and signal their next steps in establishing and capitalizing on their hegemony. No need to hide anymore when there’s nothing the right can do about it.
In some ways the anti-white-man rhetoric that has become standard and acceptable lately is the worst sign of all. If the term “hate speech” has a meaning, it most definitely would apply to a great deal of what has been said recently about that despised group. Those who are first to shriek “racism” and “sexism” when criticism is launched against a group defined as oppressed (blacks, women) are turning the tables and dissing white men with impunity. It is both hypocritical and vile, and especially offensive when cloaked in the sanctimony of those on the left who believe they occupy the moral high ground (that would be everyone on the left).
A goodly portion of the preening triumphalism that has followed in the wake of the 2012 election involves just this kind of hatred: towards white men, the rich, Republicans, Christians, gun owners. There’s a lot of talk about how the demographics have permanently changed in this country, and perhaps that’s correct—and now the tables are being turned, with glee. It’s been a long time since the expression of real racism against black people (as opposed to imaginary and/or astroturf-generated racism) was acceptable in this country. But it’s now completely acceptable against white men, and this is an exceedingly ominous sign.
Expert at gaining, holding, and wielding power, he could outmaneuver the opposition and finesse the elections. But health is another thing entirely.
It’s hard to say exactly what’s going on with him right now, but it sounds quite dire. Then again, his good buddy Castro was rumored to be at death’s door in recent years, and he’s still chugging along.
Yesterday there was a big brouhaha over an op-ed of Louis Michael Seidman’s that appeared in the New York Times.
It was the type of piece that, on first reading, appears to be some sort of ironic Onion-esque parody—but sadly, it’s not. It’s also the sort of thing you’d expect from a leftist college student with no knowledge of history and no understanding of the Constitution.
But author Seidman is a well-known professor of constitutional law at Georgetown, one of the most elite law schools in the nation. He’s also a baby boomer, which is probably no coincidence, given his views (and I say this as a full-fledged, card-carrying member of that tiresome generation).
Seidman writes:
As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions…
Imagine that after careful study a government official – say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress – reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?
Read the whole thing if you can stomach it, just for the flavor, and the exposure to the strangely tortured logic (and lack of historical accuracy) of this particular law professor. Seidman not only shows a lack of knowledge (actual? or strategic?) of the true position of most of the Founders regarding slavery, he also expresses the typical leftist position that we should throw away the wisdom of the past (wisdom? how can that be; they’re just a bunch of propertied white guys—just like Seidman, by the way) because we want to do something, and that pesky old white-guy document stands in our way.
There were many takedowns of Seidman published yesterday, such as this one by John J. Vecchione, who says Seidman’s op-ed “reads like a parody of liberal thinking”—although, unfortunately, he’s not joking. Vecchione also has a counter-proposal:
What he more seriously proposes, the radical rejection of binding any polity, is not only silly but unworkable. But we should take a small step in a very small universe and test it anyway: Get rid of tenure, and job security more broadly, at Georgetown Law. Every year, nay every minute, each faculty member should be judged on how they are doing at that instant of time. If they are found wanting by the standards of the hour they should be fired. Surely deep, radical thinkers like Professor Seidman and his confreres at Georgetown would not sacrifice the new and untried for the old, stolid, and hidebound edifice that is tenure? Why should current students suffer under the methods that were deemed acceptable by a faculty panel 30 years in the past, all of whom abjured same-sex marriage and none of whom used the Internet?
In his piece, Seidman goes on to cite instances in the past where he believes the letter of the Constitution was violated, and says we’re doing just fine nevertheless: “Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper. ” So, which is it, Professor Seidman? Is our government broken, as you say at the outset, or are we doing just peachy-keen?
Seidman then states which parts of the Constitution we should preserve—the parts Seidman likes, of course—and the parts we should jettison (the ones he doesn’t like).
Glenn Reynolds calls our attention to this:
This editorial makes a lot of good points about Seidman’s piece. There’s also a good old-fashioned rant about it here. And Carl Scott has a question for Georgetown Law School regarding Seidman, the very same one I’d like to ask them:
Now, granting that it is impressive, as your website indicates, that “After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1971, Professor Seidman served as a law clerk for J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall,” do you not think that a professor who professes that he no longer believes his area of expertise matters, should be obliged to step aside? How can constitutional law be seriously taught by a man who thinks it is a kind of “divination?” Surely you are aware that along with Carl Eric Scott, there are 5,631 eager young professors without tenure in the nation capable of teaching constitutional law, both conservative and liberal ones, who nonetheless all think that the subject is a real one? That one can arrive at a genuinely wrong or right answer as to whether something is constitutional? So if you will not call upon the law faculty to fire Dr. Seidman, and replace him with Carl Eric Scott or another of those 5,632 (much less expensive, incidentally) professors, can you explain why you won’t? Is Georgetown University in the habit of handing the teaching of key subjects over to those who think they are worthless ones?
Not that Georgetown would ever think of doing such a thing. Steven Hayward notes that attitudes such as Seidman’s are not unusual in constitutional law professors:
I frequently bait the law professoriate with the axiom that if you really want to understand constitutionalism, and the U.S. Constitution in particular, don’t take constitutional law at an elite law school. There you will only receive systematic mis-instruction in the subject.* Joe Knippenberg reminds me that my AEI colleague Walter Berns always said that the problem with law professors is that they taught constitutional law, not the Constitution. Hence most constitutional law professors treat the Constitution as a plaything from which to extract whatever outcome they want.
He adds the one good thing we can say about Seidman’s essay:
…[I]t is helpful when a liberal’s impatience with constitutionalism yields to the impulse to rip the faé§ade away and declare their contempt for the Constitution. Georgetown Law School professor Louis Seidman thus does us the favor of candor with his New York Times op-ed today…
As for why the Times decided to publish this piece right now, one can only conclude they see the time as ripe for delegitimizing the Constitution in order to further the leftist agenda, and seek to use Seidman’s credentials to make the argument from authority. The ground has been well prepared for this by our president, the MSM, and our educational system, so their calculations may indeed be correct.
Here’s the way it stands so far:
”” Tax rates will permanently rise to Clinton-era levels for families with income above $450,000 and individuals above $400,000. All income below the threshold will permanently be taxed at Bush-era rates.
”” The tax on capital gains and dividends will be permanently set at 20 percent for those with income above the $450,000/$400,000 threshold. It will remain at 15 percent for everyone else. (Clinton-era rates were 20 percent for capital gains and taxed dividends as ordinary income, with a top rate of 39.6 percent.)
”” The estate tax will be set at 40 percent for those at the $450,000/$400,000 threshold, with a $5 million exemption. That threshold will be indexed to inflation, as a concession to Republicans and some Democrats in rural areas like Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mt.).
”” The sequester will be delayed for two months. Half of the delay will be offset by discretionary cuts, split between defense and non-defense. The other half will be offset by revenue raised by the voluntary transfer of traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs, which would tax retirement savings when they’re moved over.
”” The pay freeze on members of Congress, which Obama had lifted earlier this year, will be re-imposed.
”” The 2009 expansion of tax breaks for low-income Americans: the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the American Opportunity Tax Credit will be extended for five years.
”” The Alternative Minimum Tax will be permanently patched to avoid raising taxes on the middle-class.
”” The deal will not address the debt-ceiling, and the payroll tax holiday will be allowed to expire.
”” Two limits on tax exemptions and deductions for higher-income Americans will be reimposed: Personal Exemption Phaseout (PEP) will be set at $250,000 and the itemized deduction limitation (Pease) kicks in at $300,000.
””The full package of temporary business tax breaks ”” benefiting everything from R&D and wind energy to race-car track owners ”” will be extended for another year.
”” Scheduled cuts to doctors under Medicare would be avoided for a year through spending cuts that haven’t been specified.
”” Federal unemployment insurance will be extended for another year, benefiting those unemployed for longer than 26 weeks. This $30 billion provision won’t be offset.
”” A nine-month farm bill fix will be attached to the deal, Sen. Debbie Stabenow told reporters, averting the newly dubbed milk cliff.
It’s gotten through the Senate and has yet to be passed by the House.
As for the consequences, this certainly does very little to solve our difficulties in financing government. It’s very much a case of jockeying for political gains and kick the can down the road.
That said, it seems somewhat better than I thought it would be in the political sense, although that’s a tentative conclusion at this point. I thought Obama would get much more from the Republicans and give up even less.
But the bottom line, politically—at least as best I can figure it—is that for most voters this is very much inside baseball. Bloggers and pundits can jaw-jaw all they want about it, and each side can claim some sort of victory (or criticize a perceived defeat), but my sense is that most Americans are heartily sick of the bipartisan lack of ability of our “leaders” to tackle our serious problems.
There’s something about 2013 that doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue.
A friend pointed out that it’s the first year since 1987 that doesn’t have a double digit in it. Perhaps that’s it. Or perhaps it’s that 13.
Whatever. Let’s hope it’s a very good year, and much better than the last one.
…as Grande Conservative Blogress Diva, an honor bestowed by Gay Patriot, via all of you who voted.
There—did that sound Diva-esque enough? I’ve got to practice my Diva ways.
Although I suspect that I was the only blogger who pushed the voting much, I’ll still take the win. My court as Diva consists of blogger buddies Sarah Hoyt and Bookworm, so all’s very friendly in the Diva world.
Thanks for all your voting efforts. And Happy New Year!
…to ask this question:
Me? A quiet night. Ordinarily I’m not a keen New Year’s eve reveler, although if some wonderful revels presented themselves, I wouldn’t say no.
Note the question mark; I don’t trust any reports of a deal until it’s set in stone.
Maybe not even then.
So, for what it’s worth, here are the supposed details of the supposed agreement. You can wade through them if you wish; or look at Ace’s summary of the main points.
It seems that liberals are not all that happy with it, which surprises me. Neither are Republicans, which does not surprise me. I’ve always felt that Obama held most of the cards in this matter, and that it would take the sort of courage and creativity that the current crop of Republicans appears to entirely lack to turn this around in any meaningful way. And Obama and the MSM would make sure Republicans got blamed no matter what the outcome (short of complete and total capitulation by the GOP, and even then the Republicans would have gotten blamed for taking too long to go belly-up).
…this story recalls the revolutionary ardor of the 60s:
The daughter of a prominent New York doctor and her Occupy Wall Street-organizer boyfriend were arrested after police discovered an explosive used for making bombs and a cache of weapons in their upscale New York City apartment, it was claimed.
Morgan Gliedman, 27, and Aaron Greene, 31, were taken away from their home in Manhattan’s pricey Greenwich Village on Saturday.
Gliedman, who is nine months pregnant, is the daughter of a top Brooklyn cancer doctor and was educated at the Dalton School…Greene, the father of the child, went to Harvard University for his undergraduate degree and did graduate work at the Kennedy School of Government there, as well.
The New York Post reports that police found seven grams of HMTD, a high explosive powder that was reportedly used in the 2005 London Underground bombings.
Officers discovered bomb-making instructions, including one document titled ‘The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’ according to the newspaper…
There’s much more, but you get the picture. The 60s-era incident it reminds me of actually occurred in the very early 70s (March 6, 1970, to be exact), and it was another one in which highly privileged, Greenwich-Village-dwelling scions of the wealthy were involved in planning political terrorist activities that did not come to fruition. That earlier bomb-making spree cost some of them their lives (one of the hazards of their dangerous trade is the work-related accident; these people are literally playing with fire):
The Greenwich Village townhouse explosion occurred on March 6, 1970, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. It was caused by the premature detonation of a bomb that was being assembled by members of the American radical left group, the Weather Underground. The bomb was under construction in the basement of 18 West 11th Street when it accidentally exploded ”“ the blast reduced the four-story townhouse to a burning rubble-strewn ruin. Three persons preparing the bomb were killed instantly, and two others were injured but escaped from the scene.
The townhouse was owned by the father of one of the survivors, Cathlyn Wilkerson, who along with another survivor (and daughter of a prominent leftist attorney) Kathy Boudin went underground for many years and later served some time for her misdeeds. In the case of Wilkerson it was less than a year; Boudin, on the other hand, was convicted of felony murder for her part in the related Brinks robbery in which two police officers and a security guard were killed, and served approximately twenty years, the result of a plea bargain. Wilkerson was not a participant in the robbery, but “surrendered in 1980 [after 10 years of hiding] and pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of dynamite” connected with the townhouse explosion and was sentenced to three years of which she served only eleven months.
There are so many ironies in these cases it’s hard to know where to begin. For one thing, the inadequate sentences the perpetrators received (for example, the bomb on which the Greenwich Village crew were working that night was apparently intended “an attack on a non-commissioned officers dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey that night”). For another, the largely unrepentant attitudes of some of the survivors (for example, Wilkerson’s 2003 views are discussed in some depth, here—and note that she’s been a teacher for many years). Still another is that Boudin’s son was adopted by none other than fellow-educators Bill Ayers and wife Bernardine Dohrn during Boudin’s prison sojourn.
More about other 60s radicals and what they’re doing today (that is, ten years ago, when the article was written):
Linda S. Evans, who was granted clemency by President Bill Clinton for convictions related to bombings and released from prison in 2001 after serving nearly 16 years, lives in Santa Rosa, Calif. She received a Soros criminal justice fellowship from the Open Society Institute and works to restore civil rights to felons. ”I’m trying to make things better in our society,” she said in a telephone interview. ”I just feel really strongly that the policies of our government are just anti-human at every level.”
Mark Rudd, the Students for a Democratic Society leader from Columbia, teaches mathematics at the Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute, a community college. He, too, has called the group’s violence a ”terrible mistake.”
Of course it was a mistake, compared to the turn the left has taken in recent decades, which is to accomplish the same leftist ends by using the inattention of most people to the agenda, as well as the leniency of the system itself, to undermine that system by means of that long Gramscian march we’ve heard so much about.
Here are the oldest living identical twins in the world:
Looking pretty good, aren’t they—for 103?
What’s more, they’re feeling pretty good. They both have all their mental faculties, which in itself is extraordinary. They do not use hearing aids or glasses. They each live independently, although both are recovering from recent falls. And from the looks of the photo, they both have a ton of hair for their age.
There are a few health divergences. One had ovarian cancer years ago and recovered. One appears (as best I can tell from the photo, anyway) to have a slightly different graying pattern, and although hair dye might be involved I don’t think it is because the hair looks gray rather than dyed.
As far as their lives go, these have been similar as well. They each had one child. They both outlived their husbands, and live in Florida. And they’re both pretty mum about the cause behind their longevity:
According to the Daily Mail, Primack credits genes and “never being fat” while her twin Eisgrou says it’s because she drank lots of milk.
“Everybody asks me that. I don’t know what it was,” Primack told ABC. “I didn’t watch my food when I was young. I smoked. We all smoked.”
Eisgrou added: “I don’t know the secret to a long life. And I wouldn’t tell you if I knew it.”
“We love each other and we always will,” Primack told ABC.
That last sentence may hold the key to at least some of it. Twins don’t always get along, but when they do the bond is like no other. As for the rest, I highly suspect genetics, although with identical twins both nature and nurture conspire to make them similar.
Oh, and as for the hair, this article from the time of the 100th birthday tells the tale (although the color looks somewhat different back then):
While they both used to dye their hair red, Primack let hers grow out to a natural gray when the dye began to bother her scalp.
But Eisgrou keeps the color on.
“I didn’t want to go all gray,” she said. “Everybody tells me ‘you look younger.'”
Is “everybody” right about that?
[NOtE: Here’s the literary reference for the post’s title.]