Obama Meets with the House Republicans

If you haven't seen this footage yet, you really should. The House Republicans had a retreat in Maryland this past Friday, and invited Obama. He accepted, and his staff suggested that his brief speech and longer Q&A be aired and taped. The Republicans agreed.

Basically, Obama has the usual false talking points thrown at him, and he bats them down, one by one. There are maybe two Republican ideas with merit, but as Obama points out, they're good only with caveats and as part of a larger framework that's been ignored by the GOP. It's unfortunate but unsurprising that the GOP now regrets that they allowed the session to air. America would be much better off with more sessions like this. If the Republicans (and to a lesser degree the Democrats) actually offered good, reality-based policies that would benefit the country as a whole, that would be absolutely fantastic. Sessions like this can only help that.

If you can only see some of it, Talking Points Memo has many clips up, including Obama objecting to health care being portrayed as a Bolshevik plot:



You can see most of Obama's exchange with Jeb Henserling here (it's one of the best bits, and it's the last question he takes). Steve Benen has a good post on the cash-and-trash strategy by Republicans Obama refers to (although not in those words) - Republicans are happy to take credit back home for the stimulus money they voted against in D.C.

The whole thing is definitely worth the time to watch or at least listen to, though. Here's the C-Span page for the event, and Steve Benen has the MSNBC footage of the Q&A posted. The Washington Post has a transcript. Here's the YouTube version posted by the White House:



Meanwhile, if you missed the State of the Union, you can view it here. It was better than I expected, but I'm very concerned about the spending freeze talk. Eliminating waste is great, but boxing one's self in isn't, and exempting military spending ignores the biggest problem. See Krugman here and here, as well as Spencer Ackerman. The public seemed to like it in at least one poll, though. Some of the other proposals, including a reduction in the costs of student loans (more generous for those going into public service), and a targeted tax cut for small businesses, could be great. We'll see how it all plays out.

Upcoming - Blogroll Amnesty Day 2010

Blogroll Amnesty Day is Wednesday, February 3rd this year. Blue Gal's updated her video, which you should feel free to use:




Some background is here, but basically - link good small blogs and spread the luv.

Health Care Reform and Football

Sports metaphors can be overused, but the Super Bowl is fast approaching and football works pretty well as a metaphor for some current political situations.

First up, Tom Toles from Friday, 1/22/10:


The little tag in the lower right, if you can't read it, says "We can kick ourselves after." (I'm assuming most people know basic football scoring rules.)

Moving on, Steve Benen wrote on 1/27/10, before the State of the Union:

Post Script: Paul Glastris, the Monthly's editor in chief, will be on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" in a few minutes, talking about this and other issues related to the State of the Union. (Paul served as President Clinton's chief speechwriter, and offers a great perspective on this.)

When I talked to Paul earlier, he told me the line he'd like to hear the president say tonight: "Health care reform is the Super Bowl of issues, we're on the one yard line, and the other team has walked off the field. Let's pick up the ball and walk across the goal line."

Maybe Glastris saw Toles cartoon, but that's pretty good.

This next one requires more set-up. Back to Steve Benen, in a piece on Evan Bayh (emphasis mine):

EVAN BAYH'S MORAL WRONGS.... The solution to the health care reform debate seems pretty obvious -- the House approves the Senate bill; the Senate agrees to improvements through reconciliation. One of the obstacles, of course, is the group of center-right Democrats who not only don't want to return to the issue, but are staunchly opposed to using reconciliation.

It's worth fully appreciating, though, why reconciliation is considered so distasteful. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) explained that the procedure should be avoided because it may bother Republicans. And if Republicans are bothered, they may not work with Democrats on bipartisan solutions. Seriously, that's the argument.

"There would be some real consequences from that for the legislative agenda for the rest of the year," Bayh told me last night, "the other things the president called for: cooperation on education, financial reform, a whole host of other things."

Bayh says he sees a real prospect for bipartisanship on those issues, but that Republicans will walk away if Democrats play hardball on health care.

"The problem with reconciliation is that it runs a real risk...of poisoning the well on progress on some of these areas," Bayh said.

This is so hopelessly misguided, it's hard to know where to start. I'd remind Bayh, for example, that reconciliation has been used plenty of times in recent years, and the institution and its members survived just fine. I'd also ask why on earth Bayh think Democrats giving up on their signature domestic policy initiative would suddenly make Republicans -- who've run a scorched-earth campaign since Day One -- open to bipartisan compromise on a whole host of issues.

But let's put all of that aside and characterize this in a way that too often goes overlooked. Bayh isn't just wrong about the legislative process; he's wrong about morality.

Read Benen's post for the links, and his moral argument – helping out tens of millions of Americans obviously should be more important: "Helping those who are suffering isn't as high a priority as maybe getting some GOP help on a few issues?" Glenn Greenwald also provides some good background on Bayh in "The face of rotted Washington."

Bayh and the Blue Dog Democrats remind me of the Cincinnati Bengals of the 90s under owner Mike Brown. The Bengals actually won their division this season, and made the playoffs, although they lost in the first, Wild Card Round. Before that, though, they had one winning season out of 19 and were the worst team of the 90s. One sportscaster called them "an embarrassment to sport," as in, the entire human endeavor of sports, where a team supposedly should try to win, perhaps out of basic competitiveness or pride or shame. During the 90s, some critics felt that Mike Brown had no real interest in or commitment to fielding a competitive team. This was because he could field a lousy team and still make a tidy profit – and his profit margin would actually be higher. Sure, he wouldn't sell out the stadium, or sell as many seats, or sell as much merchandise, but there were enough Bengals fans out there, and enough NFL TV cash coming in, to make him good money.

Evan Bayh and most of the Blue Dog Democrats (we'll include Lieberman) aren't really interested in reforming health care, helping their constituents significantly, or making the country a better place. They're happy with the status quo, and as long as they think they can stay in business and make a profit, they want to field, or sell, an inferior product. In fact, they don’t like it when they're any pressure to win, to deliver to the loyal fans, and will actively seek to hobble their teammates. It's contemptible, but that's the way it is.

Let's take another look at Bayh's line: "The problem with reconciliation is that it runs a real risk...of poisoning the well on progress on some of these areas." At this point, only an idiot or a shill would pretend that the GOP is acting in good faith and will vote with Democrats. Republicans have practiced obstructionism at unprecedented levels, and they've expressed their intent to continue. Giving up on health care will only make them much, much bolder, and it's easy to write the midterm campaign ads now. It's deeply unfortunate that American politics is currently a zero-sum game between the two major political parties – but that's the way it is – and that's primarily the fault of the GOP.

So, in football terms, Evan Bayh (a senator from Indiana) is saying that, in the upcoming Super Bowl, the Indianapolis Colts shouldn't score on the New Orleans Saints, because that might make the Saints upset, and if only the Colts don't make the Saints upset, the Saints might allow the Colts to score later. Hey, maybe not in this game, but at some point in the future. (After the November midterm elections, maybe.) Maybe they'll let them score - but maybe only if the Colts don't play to win now, because winning (even with a big lead and good field position) would be terribly rude.

Did we mention this was the championship game?

Bayh's argument is that stupid. Bayh is openly rooting for his own team to lose, and working to make it happen. Sadly, he's not alone in the Democratic caucus. The Blue Dog crowd is almost as bad as the Republicans.

(It might be more apt to say Bayh is telling the Colts to throw the Super Bowl and let the woeful Detroit Lions win. This will alllow the Colts to maybe have a shot at winning again in 20 years.)

As for the Democrats dealing with the GOP - strangely, when a group openly seeks your defeat and destruction, the best move is to kick their collective ass.

As for our vapid Beltway chatterers, they mostly consist of gossip columnists and bad sportscasters. To borrow from an earlier post:

Even if we view the press as sportscasters, or even home-team sportscasters, our press corps lacks good play-by-play announcers, but is positively overflowing with really bad color commentators.

To strain this metaphor even further (and apologies to all non-sports fans), say the Green Bay Packers were playing the Chicago Bears and scored the first two touchdowns. If our political reporters were sportscasters, David Broder would insist that the Packers should let the Bears score, Sean Hannity would loudly proclaim that the Bears did score, and Cokie Roberts would misreport the score and then proceed to ignore the game.

There's a saying that politics is the blood sport of Washington, but we've got awfully idiotic sportcasters for it.

There's one more metaphor plenty of people have used to describe how foolish it is to trust the Republicans on health care reform. We'll end with it, because it still may be the best:



(Previous posts using sports to discuss politics: "Hall of Fame Material", "The Sporting Life" and "Political Football Theater.")

(Updated with one link.)

Your Weekly Snark (1/29/10)

Roy Edroso on Jonah's latest:

Goldberg trying to do nuance is like a drunken bear trying to do origami, but I think he means that while independents don't care about gay people's civil rights, they do have a guilty conscience about it.

Ouch. Jonah mostly tries the "you people pointing out our bigotry are the real bigots" and "I know you are but what am I" schtick that made Liberal Fascism such a noteworthy piece of crap. But there are more choice Roy quips, so head over and enjoy.

Badly Drawn Boy - "Is There Nothing We Can Do?"

If This Is a Man

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. (There are other memorial days, including Yom HaShoah on April 12th this year.) This year, I wanted to focus on Primo Levi's extraordinary book If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo), known in the U.S. as Survival in Auschwitz. I only just read it, although I've previously read Levi's The Drowned and the Saved.

The Drowned and the Saved is powerful as well, and explores (among other things) the fallibilities of memory, the re-writing of history and (I'd say) the dangers of granting undeserved forgiveness to evil men who knew quite well what they were doing. ("The Drowned and the Saved" is also the title of a chapter in If This Is a Man.) The Drowned and the Saved is one of the best Holocaust books I've read, but as I've written before, I think it's better for readers who know the basics of the Holocaust already. If This Is a Man is similarly thoughtful and arresting, but also provides a strong portrait of the grueling daily existence in the camps and the constant struggle to survive. In that respect, it reminded me of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, although Levi apparently took issue with taking such comparisons too far. This is because the death rate was so much higher in the Nazi camps, and in some Nazis camps murder was the express aim. In any case, If This Is a Man is probably the best account I've yet read of the black market in the camps, and all the intricate dealing required to survive (in addition to sheer luck). You're not liable to forget Primo Levi's description of emptying the hut's latrine bucket at night, or many other details. He explains how essential spoons are, how to make or barter for a more valuable knife-spoon, and how shoes (most of the prisoners have ill-fitting wooden ones) can become a matter of life and death. Levi is a chemist, which aids him later in the book, but he's a slight man, and there are times during harsh physical labor where he's terrified and exhausted, and really not sure he can make it.

Younger readers might be better off starting with Night, Maus or The Diary of Anne Frank. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning holds a special place for me. However, If This Is a Man is a powerful introduction to the Holocaust as well, and easily one of the best memoirs on the subject. (It may help to know some French, though, as Levi often uses it to communicate with other prisoners in his accounts, and does not always translate.)

I had read that Levi committed suicide late in life, which seemed especially tragic, but apparently this is disputed and his death may have been accidental.

In one chapter, "The Canto of Ulysses," Levi relates trying to teach a friendly younger prisoner, Pikolo, some Italian as they run a camp errand getting the soup. Levi starts quoting and translating stanzas from... Dante's Inferno. Pikolo is very interested, and this energizes Levi, but his memory fails him, leaving him both excited and frustrated:

I would give today's soup to know how to connect 'the like on any day' to the last lines. I try to reconstruct it through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers – but it is no use, the rest is silence. Other verse dance in my head: '...The sodden ground belched wind...' no, it is something else. It is late, it is late, we have reached the kitchen, I must finish:

'And three times round she went in roaring smother
With all the waters; at the fourth the poop
Rose, and the prow went down, as pleased Another.'

I keep Pikolo back, it is vitally necessary and urgent that he listen, that he understands this, 'as pleased Another' before it is too late; tomorrow he or I might be dead, or we might never see each other again, I must tell him I must explain to him about the Middle Ages, about the so human and so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism, but still more, something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today...

We are now in the soup queue, among the sordid, ragged crowd of soup-carriers from other Kommandos. Those just arrived press against our backs. 'Kraut und Rüben? 'Kraut und Rüben.' The official announcement is made that the soup today is of cabbages and turnips: 'Choux and navets. Kaposzia és répak.'

'And over our heads the hollow seas closed up.'

[pp. 114-115]

It's more striking in full context, but it reminds me of Frankl's passages about how art, imagination and simple, genuine human connection kept him going. Primo Levi writes movingly of the handful of people who aid him. In the tense days near the end of the war after most of the Germans have left and the prisoners await possible liberation, Levi relates how he and two Frenchmen work together, basically to reclaim their humanity by providing for their small hut of survivors.

The best testament to Levi is of course his work itself. Here's a selection from chapter 13, "October 1944." "Lager" means "camp," "Ka-Be" is the infirmary, and I imagine most people know what a "selection" means in the context of Auschwitz:

We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter. We clung to all the warm hours, at every dusk we tried to keep the sun in the sky for a little longer, but it was all in vain. Yesterday evening the sun went down irrevocably behind a confusion of dirty cloud, chimney stacks and wires, and today it is winter.

We know what it means because we were here last winter; and the others will soon learn. It means that in the course of these months, from October till April, seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from the morning before dawn until the distribution of the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our arms under our shoulders against the cold. We will have to spend bread to acquire gloves, and lose hours of sleep to repair them when they become unstitched. As it will no longer be possible to eat in the open, we will have to eat our meals in the hut, on our feet, everybody will be assigned an area of floor as long as a hand, as it forbidden to rest against the bunks. Wounds will open on everyone's hands, and to be given a bandage will mean waiting every evening for hours on one's feet in the snow and wind.

Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say 'hunger', we say 'tiredness', 'fear', 'pain', we say 'winter' and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one's body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.

In the same way in which one sees a hope end, winter arrived this morning. We realized it when we left the hut to go and wash: there were no stars, the dark cold air had the smell of snow. In roll-call square, in the grey of dawn, when we assembled for work, no one spoke. When we saw the first flakes of snow, we thought that if at the same time last year they had told us that we would have seen another winter in Lager, we would have gone and touched the electric wire-fence; and that even now we would go if we were logical, were it not for this last senseless crazy residue of unavoidable hope.

Because 'winter' means yet another thing.

Last spring the Germans had constructed huge tents in an open space in the Lager. For the whole the good season, each of them had catered for over a thousand men: now the tents had been taken down, and an excess two thousand guests crowded our huts. We old prisoners knew that the Germans did not like these irregularities and that something would soon happen to reduce our number.

One feels the selections arriving. 'Selekcja': the hybrid Latin and Polish word is heard once, twice, many times, interpolated in foreign conversations, at first we cannot distinguish it, then it forces itself on our attention, and in the end it persecutes us.

This morning the Poles had said 'Selekcja'. The Poles are the first to find out the news, and they generally try not to let it spread around, because to know something which the others still do not know can always be useful. By the time that everyone realizes that a selection is imminent, the few possibilities of evading it (corrupting some doctor or some prominent with bread or tobacco; leaving the hut for Ka-Be or vice-versa at the right moment so as to cross with the commission) are already their monopoly.

In the days which follow, the atmosphere of the Lager and the yard is filled with 'Selekcja': nobody knows anything definite, but all speak about it, even the Polish, Italian, French civilian workers whom we secretly see in the yard. Yet the result is hardly a wave of despondency: our collective morale is too inarticulate and flat to be unstable. The fight against hunger, cold and work leaves little margin for thought, even for this thought. Everybody reacts in his own way, but hardly anyone with those attitudes which would seem the most plausible as the most realistic, that is with resignation or despair.

All those able to find a way out, try to take it, but they are the minority because it is very difficult to escape from a selection. The Germans apply themselves to these things with great skill and diligence.

Whoever is unable to prepare for it materially, seeks defense elsewhere. In the latrines, in the washroom, we show each other our chests, our buttocks, our thighs, and our comrades reassure us: 'You are all right, it will certainly not be your turn this time,... du bist kein Muselmann... more probably mine...' and they undo their braces in turn and pull up their shirts.

Nobody refuses this charity to another: nobody is so sure of his own lot to be able to condemn others. I brazenly lied to old Werthheimer; I told him that if they questioned him, he should reply that his was forty-five, and he should not forget to have a shave the evening before, even if it cost him a quarter-ration of bread; apart from that he need have no fears, and in any case it was by no means certain that it was a selection for the gas chamber; had he not heard the Blockältester say that those chosen would go to Jaworszno to a convalescent camp?

It is absurd of Werthheimer to hope: he looks sixty, he has enormous varicose veins, he hardly even notices the hunger any more. But he lies down on his bed, serene and quiet, and replies to someone who asks him with my own words; they are the command-words in the camps these days: I myself repeated them just as – apart from details – Chajim told them to me, Chajim, who has been in Lager for three years, and being strong and robust is wonderfully sure of himself; and I believed him.

On this slender basis I also lived through the great selection of October 1944 with inconceivable tranquility. I was tranquil because I managed to lie to myself sufficiently. The fact that I was not selected depended above all on chance and does not prove my faith was well-founded.

[pp. 123-125]

Éric Rohmer (1920-2010)

French filmmaker Éric Rohmer (Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer) died earlier this month. Here's the Wiki and imdb entries, and the Washington Post piece. The New York Times obituary is good, and also links an excellent profile from 2001 by A.O. Scott and a slideshow. He was one of the last remaining old masters who came to prominence in the 50s and 60s.

Rohmer's films are not for all tastes. Several obituaries have quoted a line from Gene Hackman's character in the film Night Moves: "I saw a Rohmer movie once. It was kind of like watching paint dry." However, as with Ozu, if you like one of Rohmer's films, you're liable to like them all, and enjoy them very much. Most of his films had only the slightest of plots, so much so that they could be hard to describe – they're more about human interactions, personal realizations and self-deception, all told with wry humor and affection by Rohmer. He was very wise about human relationships. In a review of Ingmar Bergman's film Saraband, I wrote about how both filmmakers captured intimacy so well:

Eric Rohmer, another great master, comes closest to Bergman in terms of capturing the complexities and subtleties of real life on film, but Rohmer is French and far happier than the brooding Bergman. Rohmer is the cinematic equivalent of Chekhov without the extreme tragedy, while Bergman is pure Dostoevsky.

Like Bergman and several other directors, Rohmer drew from something of a company of actors. In Rohmer's case, most were non-professional, and he elicited very naturalistic performances from them. He used many of the same people over the course of decades, so that a young woman's teenaged friend in one film might later pop up later in middle age as the center of another film. It's a neat dynamic. Natural light master Néstor Almendros was the cinematographer for several of his films, and they were a good fit.


(Claire's Knee, shot by Almendros.)
Many of Rohmer's films belonged to one of three loose series: the Six Moral Tales, the Comedies and Proverbs (another six films), and the Tales of the Four Seasons. One summer, the National Gallery in DC ran all of them (apart from one yet to be filmed), and I was lucky enough to catch most of them. The audiences really enjoyed the films. Rohmer's works often have funny moments, but I think the real delight comes from how he views human foibles and frailties with such forgiveness and affection. The diplomat's quest to touch Claire's knee in Claire's Knee could easily be creepy in another film, but instead he comes off as mostly harmless and deluding himself above all, and his first ploy is suspenseful and hilarious. The female lead in The Winter's Tale is on the one hand blithely careless about her own life and those of the lovers she juggles, but there's also little artifice or malice there. We're waiting to see how her life will turn out as much as she is, and as surprised and delighted by the twists that occur. The Green Ray (normally known as Summer over here) climaxes with a sunset and a natural phenomenon that drew appreciative gasps from the crowd. I need to see it again, but it may be one of the most Zen endings in cinema. Rohmer films don't always end neatly, but in most, we're left with the sense that we peeked in on these characters' lives briefly and that life goes on. At least for fans, the feeling leaving the theater is one of warmth and thoughtfulness, not dissatisfaction.


(The Winter's Tale, although the film itself is in color.)
If anything, Rohmer's artistry is more impressive because it's generally so unobtrusive. In Chloe in the Afternoon, he moves the pieces into place early to set up a key moment late in the film. Better than virtually anyone, he manages to make a simple object and everyday action suddenly takes on great significance. We experience an epiphany simultaneous with the main character. (This moment also drew audible gasps from the crowd when I saw it.) I was going to explain this further - and consider this an art house flick poetic moment spoiler alert - but then I discovered A.O. Scott's 2001 portrait of Rohmer (linked earlier), which does it beautifully near the end:

From ''La Collectioneuse'' (1967), in which he was able to move from black-and-white to color, to ''Autumn Tale'' in 1998, Mr. Rohmer's films have refused to date. Yes, the haircuts and fashions alter somewhat, and the technological environment changes perceptibly, but the basic shape of civilization -- in particular its sexual mores and idioms of feeling -- seems remarkably constant, and seems, moreover, to be observed with almost documentary naturalism. Mr. Rohmer's casting of nonprofessional actors and his disdain for showy camera techniques and background music disguise the crystalline artifice of his plots, which becomes apparent only in retrospect.

Just as the world they depict is, for all its hectic quotidian rhythms, governed by invisible norms and patterns of behavior, so are the films, for all the breezy haphazardness with which they unfold, governed by a fierce formal intelligence and a classical sense of symmetry. In the late 60's and early 70's, directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini and François Truffaut (in ''Day for Night'') argued that cinema should self-consciously reflect on its own techniques and procedures. Mr. Rohmer preferred to transfer this self-reflexiveness to his characters, and to maintain an illusion of transparency and detachment.

But this illusion is sustained by a remarkable sense of spatial composition and narrative symmetry -- the invisible source of the perfection that is Mr. Rohmer's critical legacy. ''Chloe in the Afternoon'' (1971), for example, unfolds out of the daydreams and random encounters of Frédéric, a prosperous young businessman who is devoted to his wife, Hélène, and their children, but nonetheless tempted by the wild vulnerability of Chloe, the ex-lover of an old friend, who turns up unexpectedly in Frédéric's office. The middle sections of the film follow their friendship as it develops, in the course of lunches and shopping excursions, into something riskier.

What appear at first to be the trivial occurrences of ordinary life turn out to be subtle motifs. In both the film's opening and its climax, a woman -- first Hélène, then Chloe -- emerges naked from her shower into Frédéric's embrace. The offhand words the characters exchange -- Hélène warns Frédéric against getting wet; Chloe assures him that water won't stain his clothes -- turn out to be loaded with psychological subtext, and the movie's moment of moral crisis is the result of Frédéric's fondness for turtleneck sweaters. Midway through the movie, he pulls his turtleneck up around his ears to make funny faces at his infant son. Later, in the midst of undressing, about to make love with Chloe, he catches sight of himself in the mirror with his shirt in the same position, and flees without a word.

There is a comical absurdity to this scene, as there is to the perfect, color-coordinated pairing off that concludes ''Boyfriends and Girlfriends'' (''L'Ami de mon Amie,'' 1987), in which the woman in the green dress ends up with the man in the blue shirt and the woman in the blue blouse goes off with the man in green -- but also a surprising emotional charge. Frédéric and Hélène shed real tears at the end of ''Chloe in the Afternoon'' -- tears of relief, compassion and estrangement. For all his light-hearted sense of comedy and complication, such estrangement, the sense that modern relationships are at bottom the persistence of failed connections, is at the heart of Mr. Rohmer's perfect vision of an imperfect world.

Stills from Chloe in the Afternoon:

Gary Farber

Blogger Gary Farber, who's done some valuable work, is in a serious bind right now. He explains his situation in "Health Care Reform Won't Save Me." Times are tough for many folks, but any assistance would be appreciated, and a little goes a long way. Thanks.

Podcasts 1/25/10

Tired of vapid, counter-factual Beltway conventional wisdom? You're in luck.

Blue Gal and Driftglass are doing regular podcasts now. Here's the second one (43 min) in the series. Among other things, they discuss Blogroll Amnesty Day, which is coming up on February 10th 3rd. Plan ahead!

Digby and McJoan insightfully discuss recent events here (90 min).

Glenn Greenwald speaks with ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero here (~20 min), and a transcript is also available.

Kate & Anna McGarrigle - "Hard Times Come Again No More"

RIP Kate McGarrigle. Hat tip TBogg.