From WJLA Television:

Chuck Brown, the legendary musician who is known as the "Godfather of Go-Go," passed away Wednesday, his daughter confirmed to ABC7's Sam Ford.

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Chuck Brown in Performance

DC Celebrates the Life and Art of Chuck Brown

In response to Burr Deming's
Creating Jobs: The Talented Mr Romney

Adam Smith's invisible hand raises the tide. As to whether your own boat floats or is swamped by larger vessels is a combination of good luck, brains, and diligence. It's your boat and it's every boat for himself.

Mitt Romney did not screw over anyone, at least not on purpose. Just as he did not create any jobs on purpose. Destroying jobs, creating jobs, neither was Mitt Romney's aim. Jobs were not his job. Mitt's job was to create a profit, no matter who was hurt, no matter who happened to be helped along the way.

- Burr Deming, May 16, 2012

What is special about being a so-called job creator?

Republicans still sometimes elect people with little to no business experience even over others who do have it. It's clearly not an essential quality to the very people who trumpet it. In fact, most of the support for Romney has nothing to do with his business experience, but instead with getting rid of Obama. Otherwise, the likes of Perry and Santorum would never have had the lead over him.

More importantly, the label of "job creator" doesn't come with details: How were the jobs created? How long did it take? Who else deserves credit? Why were jobs created? How much money did they pay? How long did they last? Were jobs destroyed as well? Can the methods by which one created jobs be replicated today?

In any case, the only special knowledge a job creator brings to the table concerns his specific industry. Even then, a president can simply surround himself with people who are knowledgeable where he is ignorant. Romney would have to do the same.

The idea of a job creator--a sort of savior--hides a pretty important component of job creation: demand. Without it, there is no profit; without profit, there are no jobs. Therefore, insofar as I fuel demand, I am a job creator as well. It may not be my intent to create jobs with my purchases, but that is fine; it was not Romney's intent to create them either. Such benefits were incidental to his self-interested pursuit of profit.

I already miss the days when people simply said that they have business experience. Now we have to deal with the myth of the job creator, a wise, conservative hero who acts alone and without altruistic motives but expects our praise and admiration anyway.

But perhaps Romney deserves a round of applause for his work. What is the sound of one invisible hand clapping?

Ryan writes for his own site, where wisdom is intentional and applause is robust, two-handed, and deserved.

Please visit Secular Ethics.

From The Times of Israel:

It seems that Congressman Joe Pitts (R-PA) is a tad out of the loop on matters of Middle East peace. If it were up to him, Israelis and Palestinians would restart peace talks under the guidance of their respective leaders, Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat.

His advice does not seem to take into account the fact that Arafat died in 2004 and Sharon has been in a coma since 2006.

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The recent one day ad personally approved by President Obama (he says so himself at the end) seems modeled, in part, on a series of primary ads launched against Governor Romney by his Republican opponents. The ads in the primary season, and the Democratic ad, carried a similar message. Mitt Romney was a pillager, moving in on vulnerable companies and finishing them off, throwing thousands of workers out while he made tons of cash.

A typical Gingrich run carried a narrative augmented by worker voices but, unlike the Obama ad, had melodramatic music, a sneering narrator, and brief appearances by actors portraying menacing cigar smoking job destroyers. The Obama ad lets those workers carry the narrative. There is low key music to convey sadness, and brief shots of candidate Romney giving speeches about how joblessness just breaks his heart.

The ad by the Obama campaign is more subtle than the Republican ads of the primaries in the same sense that a chainsaw massacre would be more subtle than a thermonuclear attack. The moralism is left to the viewer. And it really doesn't take much prodding to feel for those who worked hard and lost everything.

The Romney folks have responded on a number of fronts: That Obama has done his own share of damage, that the economic recovery would have been more robust if a European style austerity had been imposed, that Obama just doesn't understand a free market.

That last is a bit of shorthand, permissible in political campaigns. A more accurate response, the long form, would not have been not as effective. Complete explanations seldom are. The economic message that Mitt Romney embraces is not complex. Most certainly the President understands it. The ad featuring workers just does not convey that understanding.

On the other hand, neither do Mitt Romney's. In his campaign for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, Governor Romney claimed to have created 10,000 jobs. He made the assertion to the point where friend and foe alike could recite it from memory. It wasn't hard, it was short, it was easy. 10,000 jobs. That's what Mitt had created. How many jobs had Kennedy created? Throw him out and elect a job creator.

At the core, the economic principle that is Romney's own is straight out of Adam Smith in the 1700s. All the graphs, all the intersecting lines as supply and demand get to an equipoise of balance, all the benefits, come from self-interest. People operate selfishly. They end up doing good, a great deal of good, so much good that all boats are raised in the resulting tide. But it is incidental to each person's motivation.

The number of jobs Mitt Romney has created tends to grow in explosive force with each new campaign season. Mitt Romney has not been in the business of business since the anti-Kennedy days. But those 10,000 jobs have become a claim of 100,000 jobs in the campaign for President. A ten fold increase with no effort, in fact without a glance.

The exact number is a myth, such results being hard to measure. The deeper truth is that is exactly the way the free market works, when it works. Jobs are created without effort because there is no effort to create jobs. They are a side effect of an effort of the Mitt Romneys of the business world to create bigger bank accounts with their names on them.

In the short term, sometimes people get hurt. Overall, in the aggregate, with many thousands of Mitt Romney's at play, more people get jobs than lose them. Most of the time. Recent times are an exception, we hope. The workers whose lives were harmed so profoundly were, in theory, earlier exceptions. Even in good times, there are winners and losers.

Adam Smith's invisible hand raises the tide. As to whether your own boat floats or is swamped by larger vessels is a combination of good luck, brains, and diligence. It's your boat and it's every boat for himself.

Mitt Romney did not screw over anyone, at least not on purpose. Just as he did not create any jobs on purpose. Destroying jobs, creating jobs, neither was Mitt Romney's aim. Jobs were not his job. Mitt's job was to create a profit, no matter who was hurt, no matter who happened to be helped along the way.

Mitt Romney did his job. It is the same job he will do as President. Aside from profits for his wealthy investors, his job was to not care.

He was very good at it.

From the Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, Australia:

For almost half a century, Don Ritchie would approach people contemplating suicide at the edge of The Gap, just 50 metres from his home in Watsons Bay, his palms facing up.

Mr Ritchie told his daughter Sue Ritchie Bereny he would smile and say: "Is there something I could do to help you?"

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President George W. Bush was campaigning for re-election in 1992. The country was in an economic slump. The President appeared detached, unaffected by the suffering of his constituents. His staff pushed him to acknowledge and emphasize some feeling for those for whom unemployment was not a statistic: those who had lost jobs, or were afraid of losing jobs, or knew others who had lost jobs.

He was speaking to a group of employees in New Hampshire and began expressing his own disregard for political adversity. The hardship of others was the important thing. The rock musical "Evita" about the political evolution of Evita Peron from Argentina's first lady to a sort of activism for the poor had had a successful run on Broadway and was still playing in dinner theatres across America. So the President, in a moment of semi-hipness, used a phrase from one of the Evita songs to express the thought that the real trials were felt in the homes of Americans, not by him. "Don't cry for me, Argentina," he said.

Most Americans are not into cutting edge phraseology. So the point was getting lost in the weeds. The staff, trying to get on track, supposedly put up a cue card, to get the President back on target. Express in clear, emotional terms an empathy for people hurt by the economic downturn.

The cue card read, "Message: I care."

President Bush saw the card and went from the baffling "Don't cry for me, Argentina" directly to what he saw. "Message, I care," he said obediently.

The moment was a small one, but it became iconic. It was used as a minor line in a larger theme. Democrats were successful in portraying the President as artificial and uncaring, having to be cued into caring, and stepping even on that. "The economy, stupid" was really "They don't care about the hardships you face."

The perpetual awkwardness of Governor Mitt Romney sends a similar message. It aligns with policy, but transcends it. For the most part, he does well in prepared speeches. It's the unscripted moments that cause him to trip over his shoelaces.

He laughs at the cheap makeshift rain gear worn to NASCAR events. He tries to make it up with a sort of kinship with the masses, telling folks that, like them, he also enjoys stock car racing. He is personal friends with some of the wealthy NASCAR owners. He can chuckle, while meeting with unemployed workers in Tampa Florida, at the pain of unemployment, because he is also unemployed. Little joke there. He tells the Detroit Economic Club how much he appreciates GM, because his wife drives "a couple of Cadillacs."

When I heard about the bullying incident, I was a little sore. The major purpose of growing up is to mature. And part of the completion of that maturity is the development of a decent respect for the personhood of others. Attacking Mitt Romney as a child, even after that child is grown, is out of line.

And I was irritated from a partisan point of view as well. It was so transparently unfair to bring up events from teenage years, that another Hilary Rosen controversy seemed to be brewing. Attack Mitt Romney for a horrible bullying incident from when he was growing up? Mitt Romney could hit it out of the park in a solemn acknowledgement of the pain he must have caused for this callused, youthful cruelty. That was then, this is a regretful, mature, empathetic now.

Instead, he reminded me of the villain Boone in one cinematic version of The Jungle Book. Immediately after a fellow traveler dies horribly in quicksand, Boone remarks casually, "Well, let's not be discouraged by every little thing."

Romney said the following, chuckling as he began:

They talked about the fact that I played a lot of pranks in high school, and they described some that, boy, you just say to yourself, "Back in high school," you know, "I did some dumb things." If anyone was hurt by that or offended by that, obviously, I apologize. But overall, high school years were a long time ago.

It was a bit jarring that he still considers an instance of teenage cruelty to be a prank. What doesn't come across in the print version is the mirth he seems to feel. He laughs in another interview as he protests his lack of memory those pranks. The amused chuckles may be a simple nervous reaction, an awkward, ever awkward, mark of not quite knowing what to do or say.

But they are also reminders of earlier chuckle at what cannot simply be written off as a nervous reaction. When he told what he said was a humorous incident, it was about his father as CEO of American Motors closing a plant in Michigan, throwing people out of work. Mitt chuckles at the humorous story of his father's discomfort at reminders to Michigan workers of the incident as he later campaigned for governor.

Certainly a high school teenager might consider his cruelties to be pranks. That's part of the immaturity of youth. We grow out of that view to a grownup regret for hurtful actions we took as kids.

Conservative publications were able to find an incident of cruelty from Barack Obama's book Dreams from My Father. When a group of students teased ten year old Obama, jeering that he was the boyfriend of a girl he just met, he pushed her away hard enough so that she stumbled back. His reward was that he suddenly switched to the jeering majority, leaving her as the victim. His 1995 rendition is tinged with regret. Later in his book, his young self-examination led him to conclude that fear had been the motivator and that he needed to overcome fear to be a complete human being.

The importance of childhood cruelty fades to triviality with time. A bullying incident from half a century ago does not demonstrate a lack of character or compassion in an adult today. A laugh does not prove a lack of compassion, especially if it is a simple nervous reaction. A series of awkward moments does not show to a certainty an out of touch lack of caring. We look instead to adult values, sometimes including how such things are remembered.

Those of us who are Christians are joined by others who are mindful of our own cruelties, and have a strong belief in the power of redemption. Governor Romney is now presented with an opportunity to demonstrate a level of introspection, empathy, and regret at the pain we as children often cause to others as we grow toward a compassionate adulthood.

So far, Mitt Romney seems determined not get caught up in ancient tales of youthful pranks. Let's not be discouraged by every little thing.

Millstones were used since prehistoric times to crush grain into flour for baking. Mills were turned by animals power and the millstones attached to a shaft would turn over the grain. Millstones eventually had to be replaced. They found their way other uses in those barbaric times.

When a crime was deemed so heinous it deserved a punishment more horrible even than crucifixion, the millstone sometimes came into final use. The Gospel of Matthew makes reference to that form of execution in describing the souls of those who would make advances on children, enticing them into sins: "it were better for him that millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

Largely because of that stray reference, the millstone came to a place in our language. It became known as a heavy, painful, perhaps fatal burden. It later evolved into its current definition: the traditional Republican attack on the patriotism of Democrats.

I thought about it this past week as conservative blogger John Houk reviewed a piece I had forwarded to him. He derided the very idea that "that a Liberal could possess Patriotism..." I suspect John may have meant "liberal." You know, with a small "L"? Anyway, he goes on:

Making ugly epithets about military personal is not an abundance of Patriotism (you know e.g. baby killers, murderers and the such thinking).

[Italics are John's]

Even combat heroes like Max Cleland, who had lost three limbs in Vietnam, and John Kerry were attacked as unpatriotic by opponents who had never served. Max Cleland opposed an anti-Union provision of a portion of Homeland security legislation. So he was portrayed as soft on terrorism. Kerry was attacked by fellow veterans, most of whom had never met him. They were recruited and financed by a small and secretive group of conservative billionaires, then propped up to appear as if they were exposing some wartime fraud they had themselves witnessed.

This was a new variant, but it's the sort of thing that has been going on for as long as I can remember. Even clear personal sacrifice can be turned around and used to show a lack of patriotism.

Al Gore, who served in Vietnam as a military reporter with the 20th Engineer Brigade in Bien Hoa, is routinely attacked because of his activism on global warming, for which he has been awarded the Nobel Prize. He is attacked as ... you guessed it ... unpatriotic for believing the clear evidence on global climate change.

It is the millstone around our necks. If we oppose an unwise war, we are unpatriotic. If we are pro-union, we are unpatriotic. If we are for a rational environmental policy based on science, we are unpatriotic. If we sneeze, we are unpatriotic.

One leader of the shouting is Michele Bachmann, who once begged reporters to investigate the patriotism of Democrats in Congress.

So we might not expect restraint among Democrats as Ms. Bachmann achieves a feat most of us thought was impossible, increasing the proportion of Swiss citizens in the US Congress by ... well ... how do you calculate a percentage of increase from a base of zero? She has applied for and been granted citizenship by the government of Switzerland. Yeah that Switzerland. Right in the middle (I think) of that part of Europe derided by Dick Cheney. A chocolate republic. Wouldn't stand up to the Nazis or to the USSR. Geneva Convention. Peace.

It seems she did it for the children. Her husband is of Swiss descent, which made her eligible. According to her spokesperson, "...some of their children wanted to exercise their eligibility for dual-citizenship so they went through the process as a family."

It seems harmless to me. Still, we can speculate what her reaction might have been had a Democrat become a citizen of a European country with a national identity known for neutrality.

We do not have to wonder about the reaction of some on the right. Their knives are sharpened, they are on the attack. Mark Krikorian, writing in National Review Online, is brutal.

The fact that even a patriot like Bachmann would do something like this is testament to how thoroughly the moral relativism of the post-national Left has permeated our culture.

Yup. You read it right. Ms. Bachmann became a European citizen because of a lack of patriotism on the part of liberals. We leftist hippies made her do it.

More proof we are unpatriotic.

In response to Burr Deming's
The Great DINO Hunt and Its Older Sibling, the RINO Hunt

At the source is technology. The Republican base is insulated from political reality. The GOP emulates Shakespearean drama. Hamlet's Ophelia, incapable of her own distress, drowns without knowing she is drowning. And the Republican Party puts on stage makeup and follows suit. Purge follows purge as the party of Lincoln rushes toward the Old Confederacy.

- Burr Deming, May 8, 2012

I believe that the RINO hunt is partly based on the belief that any compromise with Democrats ("big government" lovers) represents a victory for Democrats because the government still grows, albeit more slowly than it would if Democrats always got what they want. The solution is to create a true party of "no."

Then there is the matter of "moral" principles. The Religious Right demands that candidates reject gay marriage, abortion, drugs, sex education, secularism, non-Christian religions, the consensus in climate science, and often evolutionary science as well. These are all treated as great evils that are crippling our country by undermining our "moral foundation" and steering us away from God. There is no comparable force on the Left, which accepts more ideological variety. However, it seems to me that, perhaps in a competitive response to Republicans, Democrats are becoming less tolerant as well.

And we can't forget the GOP's hatred for Obama. It is not just his policies, but the man himself: he is an arrogant elite, a pretender, the "liberal Messiah," an opportunist, an "affirmative action President," a terrorist lover, a freedom and market hater, a Marxist communist socialist fascist crony capitalist. He signifies everything that is wrong. Consequently, everyone connected to him, from Democrats to the Republicans' very own Jon Huntsman, is poisoned.

It helps that conspiracy theorists are often either embraced (some even become politicians) or tolerated, but rarely rejected. Without them, I wouldn't have known that Obama isn't even American, which is probably why he wants to destroy our country by eliminating the private sector and introducing sharia. And did you notice that his middle name is Hussein? That's something to ponder.

Of course, liberals are also capable of developing conspiracies. But the motivation just isn't as strong when you don't think that everyone from communists to Muslims to atheists to big government is out to get you.

Given the RINO hunting, the conspiracy theorists, the religious dogma, and the Tea Party, I find it incredibly difficult to respect the GOP. I can only hope that we will soon see a backlash against these problems and the implementation of a more reasonable conservatism.

Ryan writes for his own site, where no amount of conspiracy or dogma will turn participants away from entertaining and informative debate.

Please visit Secular Ethics.

I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back.

 - - former Governor Mitt Romney, May 7, 2012

From the New York Times:

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn.

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This was a great interview with Mr. Sendak on Colbert: Part 1

Continued - Part 2

The downward spiral of the Republican Party is similar to previous lurches in American political history. In most cases, political parties that run too far from the political center get punished at the polls, go through a period of painful political introspection, and trudge back to the political center where their political recovery takes place.

Republicans have gone through it. Democrats have too. British Tories and Labourites have done their stints. Like Henry II paying penance for Beckett, they have undergone their lashings and, properly chastened, crept back to power.

Republicans have, since Ronald Reagan, avoided that process. Over the last quarter century, defeats have been larger, and successes smaller, as the tides of political fortune have come and gone. When economic winds grow to political hurricane force, the slow political tides become less apparent. But they are still there. And so we speculate here about the declining fortunes of the GOP. Races that should have been won decisively are taken narrowly. Races that should have been won narrowly are lost.

At the source is technology. The Republican base is insulated from political reality. The GOP emulates Shakespearean drama. Hamlet's Ophelia, incapable of her own distress, drowns without knowing she is drowning. And the Republican Party puts on stage makeup and follows suit. Purge follows purge as the party of Lincoln rushes toward the Old Confederacy.

One persistent question involves a sort of political symmetry. Are Democrats not subject to the same technology? Why would they be immune to the same political temptations?

We have speculated. No one answer is quite satisfying. Perhaps an accident of history, or a series of accidents, have delayed a similar pattern. The election of centrist Bill Clinton, terrorist attacks and a subsequent rallying around President Bush, the election of centrist Barack Obama, may have combined over time to push the inevitable down the road. Where Republicans go, Democrats will eventually follow, although on the other side of that wide, wide ideological road.

Newsweek columnist John Avlon acknowledges that the Republican Party has gone off the deep end with it's new bloodsport, RINO hunting. Long time arch-conservatives are attacked from the right for insufficient extremism.

But he detects a similar trend among Democrats. He finds two examples to prove his thesis, Pennsylvania Representatives Jason Altmire and Tim Holden, both Democrats who lost in primaries.

In the case of Altmire, a vote against health care reforms, which matching his constituent’s views, was nonetheless considered a hanging offense by his fellow party member. In the northeastern stretch of the state, the unions backed a trial lawyer with predictable sympathies, Matt Cartwright, over 20-year centrist incumbent Tim Holden. The decisive factor in ousting both Democrats was the financial and organizational strength of the unions, who have been as empowered as corporations by Citizens United—but with considerably less outrage on the left.

He points to the shrinking number of conservative blue-dog Democrats to hammer the point home.

Here's the problem. John Avlon is performing a bit of cherry picking. And the cherries he is picking are not the sort a discerning cherry picker would want. Neither Jason Altmire nor Tim Holden could be reasonably considered moderate. Yes, both opposed Obamacare, and did their best to block it. But that was not the only departure from Democratic orthodoxy of either representative. Both were also in open league with climate deniers.

Mr. Avalon mentions Jason Altmire's opposition to health care reform as "matching his constituent’s (sic) views..." A greater contributor to his defeat than any organized group of working people was the fact that he was re-districted out of office. He was not defeated by some insurgent. He ran against another Congressional Representative, Mark Critz.

Tim Holden was also largely the victim of redistricting. He did not run against another incumbent but he did find his district substantially changed. Large areas in 4 counties that he had represented since 2003 were suddenly gone, replaced with more urban, more liberal centers. His conservative stands were less popular with his very new constituents than with Mr. Avalon.

These are not perfect examples of a DINO hunt, but they are the best available to Mr. Avalon.

Indeed they are the only examples of Democratic opponents of Obamacare that lost their seats in a Democratic primary. Of 34 other Democrats who voted against health care reform, none lost renomination. None. Zero. These two were the very first. Instead, blue dog Democrats found their numbers reduced in the 2010 tea party surge.

To be fair, Mr. Avalon describes the party polarization as "asymmetrical." He devotes some journalistic effort to today's anticipated take down of conservative stalwart Senator Dick Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary. Senator Lugar is now considered insufficiently conservative. John Avalon describes the Republican RINO hunt as considerably advanced when compared with the more subdued hunting spree among Democrats for DINOs. "Democrats are amateurs compared to Republicans when it comes to taking down their own..."

Yeah.

We can learn something about a trend from this article. It touches only peripherally on politics. It is that modern journalism no longer draws conclusions from a dispassionate examination of facts. The search for truth has been supplanted. Balance is the new holy grail. Square facts can be always be pounded into round conclusions to reach that venerable standard.

From Kevin Drum at Mother Jones: