Something About Today

Who: Gail Collins
What: "Sacred Cows, Angry Birds", The New York Times
When: February 19, 2011

The House of Representatives has been cutting like crazy! Down with Planned Parenthood and PBS! We can't afford to worry about mercury contamination! Safety nets are too expensive!

But keep your hands off the Defense Department's budget to sponsor Nascar racers.

"It's a great public/private partnership," said Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Republican.

The Defense Department claims racecar sponsorships are an important recruiting tool for the Army. The House agreed — although this might be news to the Navy and Marines, which decided a while back that a Nascar presence wasn't worth the money.

"What makes U.S. Army's motorsports initiatives successful?" Ryan Newman, driver of No. 39 U.S. Army Chevrolet asked his Facebook readers as he urged a show of support for the program. "In a 2009 study among fans nationwide, 37% feel more positive about the Army due to its involvement in motorsports."

I know. I know ... I know, I know, I know, IknowIknow ... I know!

Just ... let it go. Look, it's easy to pick on Gail Collins, but just ask yourself this:

A Fundamental Question: What, exactly, are we doing?

Who: Paul Krugman
What: "Eat the Future", The New York Times
When: February 14, 2011

Republican leaders like to claim that the midterms gave them a mandate for sharp cuts in government spending. Some of us believe that the elections were less about spending than they were about persistent high unemployment, but whatever. The key point to understand is that while many voters say that they want lower spending, press the issue a bit further and it turns out that they only want to cut spending on other people.

That's the lesson from a new survey by the Pew Research Center, in which Americans were asked whether they favored higher or lower spending in a variety of areas. It turns out that they want more, not less, spending on most things, including education and Medicare. They're evenly divided about spending on aid to the unemployed and—surprise—defense.

The only thing they clearly want to cut is foreign aid, which most Americans believe, wrongly, accounts for a large share of the federal budget.

Pew also asked people how they would like to see states close their budget deficits. Do they favor cuts in either education or health care, the main expenses states face? No. Do they favor tax increases? No. The only deficit-reduction measure with significant support was cuts in public-employee pensions—and even there the public was evenly divided.

The moral is clear. Republicans don't have a mandate to cut spending; they have a mandate to repeal the laws of arithmetic.

Strange times.

One For the Long, Long Road A-Windin'

Who: Charles Mudede and Dominic Holden
What: "Meeting the Main Man of Maker's Mark", The Stranger
When: December 21, 2010

That's all I wanted: to drink my favorite bourbon with this Bill Samuels Jr. And what does Dominic do? He tells this known Republican (and known fan of horse racing and college basketball) that I'm a Marxist, and that I have been in the habit of calling my brand of Marxism "Maker's Marxism": a political program seeking to end capitalist exploitation, strengthen social safety nets, liberate knowledge, and make higher learning accessible to all—and yet a program that's not unaware of the humanness of humans, of the fact that the pursuit of truth sometimes gets boring and tiresome, and of the fact that a few strong drinks can do a world of good.

I did not expect Samuels to grasp these and other subtleties of my program. And besides, I didn't want to talk politics. I just wanted to drink and hear yarns about the tradition of distilling this excellent stuff up in them there hills of Kentucky (Kentucky has hills, right?). I have always had a cosmopolitan weakness for pastorals. I had watched The Dukes of Hazzard as a boy and loved it—the corrupt cops, the car chases on dusty roads, the good old boys, the General Lee, and so on. I was happy to have these fantasies entertained as I sipped Maker's Mark.

But right off the bat, Dominic makes sure the jig is up: Samuels knows I'm a Marxist. This is a man who grew up in the 1950s! The height of the red scare. Those dark "duck and cover" days. For him, the fall of the Berlin Wall probably meant the death of all that red stuff and a real victory of liberty and freedom. And after all that—after the Sputnik, the Bay of Pigs, the Tet Offensive—here he was sitting next to a fucking commie!

And why not open with an ode to bourbon?

And what more can I say?

Welcome to Digest Left. Pour yourself a round; 'tis a long search on which we are about to embark.