alias Bruce.

Not Exactly Bipartisan: Addendum.

What is most striking about party-line Republicans' opposition to the Obama stimulus plan is their claim to its offending their sense of fiscal responsibility and their aversion to big-ticket deficit spending. Talk about hypocrisy. This is the party that gave a blank check to George W. Bush's reckless deficit spending for a disastrous and immoral war and to outrageously unnecessary tax benefits for the richest American individuals and corporations. Now, faced with huge federal spending that might actually do some good for the general population and the economy, these same Republicans feign principled revulsion. Spare me.

Not Exactly Bipartisan.

Well, the stimulus package has passed the House, which is a good thing for more than 200 million Americans who have been waiting for eight years for a broken and corrupt government to do something big in their general interest. It's not a perfect bill. But then, a decently honest crane operator with a half-full tank of gas on a desperately-needed construction job is a lot better than a gaggle of lobbyists with shovels. I think the package is certain to also pass the Senate, where, as I heard a radio commentator say yesterday, members represent entire states and not narrower congressional constituencies with local beefs.

The bad thing is the congressional party-line vote -- not a single Republican voted "yea" -- which is a defeat for new President Obama's trumpeted quest for concerted bipartisan action to get a grip on the economic crisis and to invest in ways to rebuild a failing nation, such as education and infrastructure. Current Republicans' stubborn insistences on even more tax cuts, which failed as a purported economic engine for business in the Bush administration and would fail again now, seem to be reflexive holdovers from eight years of supply-side thinking. A healthy chunk of the blame for the antipathy in Congress has to go to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (photo above, with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer), whose "Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election" statement was one of the politically dumbest public gestures we've seen recently, even as a form of understandable Democratic payback for the bullying Republicanism of the Bush years.

I do think the new-era-of-bipartisanship pitch is overrated, and has more to do with Obama's political desires than with putting sound policy into place when Obama-supporting Democrats have solid majorities in both houses. (It is worth remembering that the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was filibustered for 54 days, and that 95 percent of Southern Democratic senators and 100 percent of Southern Republicans voted against it, while 98 percent of Northern Democrats and 84 percent of Northern Republicans voted in favor of it. Not to draw equivalencies between 1960s southern segregationists and the range of modern Republicans who oppose Obama's bill, which would be absurd. But some bills you have to fight for.) But if your party is going to talk bipartisan talk, Speaker Pelosi, you also have to walk the walk and do what Democrats did in the Senate, which was to sit down and talk with Republicans while drafting policy that the Dems still knew they had the muscle to force through.

One of the big questions (and hopes) about Obama, I think, is whether he truly is the kind of transformative, magnetically compelling politician who can pull people together, at least to a reasonable extent, in a traumatized nation. It's not fair to claim, after this one vote a mere week into his presidency, that he can't. It is fair to continue to ask if he can.

But it is also fair to ask those of us who claim to care about policy to stand up and make some noise. One president does not a government make. Relative silence from a suffering population is one more reason for politicians to continue to feel safe hewing to party-line positions that resist the policy changes most of us want.

Moot Point.

So the new senator from New York is Kirsten Gillibrand (left photo), a second-term congressperson representing a mostly-white-Republican suburban and rural district near Albany. She beat out other candidates for the appointment, among them her former boss, the eloquent and high-profile son-of-a-governor Andrew Cuomo, after one-time frontrunner and current New York media slapdown target Caroline Kennedy (right photo) abruptly dropped out. More about Kennedy in a minute.

If, like me, you asked, "Kirsten who?," it's a question you won't be asking for long. She is a ruthless campaigner who took down a seemingly unbeatable Republican incumbent in 2006 with her own brand of shit-kicking unconventionality. She has a 100 percent rating from the NRA and she is pro-choice. She takes the English-only position on immigrants and she told gay activists she will support gay marriage. She voted in favor of bringing troops home from Iraq and against the bank bailout. She is from a political family and she started thinking about running for office when she was a child. She is a Dartmouth grad married to a financier. She drives some other Democrats crazy because she says and does whatever she wants as a politician, but she is treated gingerly because, if not for her, the district would be in Republican hands. She thinks three moves ahead on every maneuver. People who know her are already talking about her seeking the presidency. You could say she is the anti-Caroline.

Anybody with a 100 percent NRA rating gives me the willies. But there is a lot to be said for Gillibrand. She could be good for an Obama administration that is trying to bring Republicans on board with a post-Bush economic stimulus package. She proves that issues like Iraq and gay rights and abortion do not have party labels attached. She is a fierce and smart campaigner who has good odds of retaining her seat in the next election. And, not insignificantly, she is a woman, which means her appointment brings no net loss of female members in the Senate. We'll have to see how she votes and what issues she embraces, but she looks to me like a judicious choice by New York governor David Paterson and a potential plus for Obama. 

And as for Caroline Kennedy -- I just don't know. Who can figure what she was thinking and how we should view her? On the one hand, she had so little fair claim to inherit a vacant senate seat that it wasn't even funny. She has never held public office, has never had to compete for anything substantial as far as I know, and has nothing even close to public presentation skills. I felt actual pain at her heartfelt but wooden (make that oaken) introduction of her uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, at the Democratic convention.

But on the other hand, she is easily as qualified for public office as a good portion of current United States senators, who have earned their way into public life through shilling for donors, pandering to bozos, and mugging for cameras -- a less noble trajectory by any stretch than Caroline Kennedy's background as an author and a fundraiser for education. Further, if an ill-spoken and mentally shiftless cynic could be elected to the presidency in 2000 and 2004, why can't an ill-spoken, smart, socially conscious do-gooder be temporarily appointed to the U.S. Senate?

But on the other hand, if not for her imperial Kennedy pedigree, we all know that she would never have made it past the outer ring of security at the New York governor's mansion.

But on the other hand, if it's clear that the political blank spots in her resume are glaring, it's also clear that her being a woman makes her quirks and shortcomings that much more fodder for public ridicule. I mean, come on. There are more male public office appointees with no electoral experience, and more ungainly male political dorks in public life, than you can shake a stick at.

But on the other hand, there was no getting around Kennedy's mediocrity, at best, as a contender.

Anyway, it's over. Gillibrand deserves her shot. Kennedy did the right thing by bowing out. What she should do now, if she still has any appetite for public life after the flogging she has taken in the New York press, is gird her loins and prepare to run for the (sadly) soon-to-be-open Kennedy senatorial seat in Massachusetts. Then she, and the nation, can see what she is really made of.

Adult Supervision.

 
At last: we have an adult in the White House.

The joy on The Mall, where a million-plus of us stood gleefully freezing our asses off to personally experience the transfer of power; the satisfaction that must now be felt by the Iraq vet who once told me that if Dick Cheney had paid a review-the-troops visit to his unit he would have shown Cheney his back and accepted the consequences; the calmly surgical tone with which the inaugural Obama politely dressed down the joy-riding Bush and challenged we citizens to heft the nation's instruction manual and begin repairs of the wreckage; the global relief and celebration at the moment of the inauguration. It all comes down, I think, to the same shared feeling: Whew. Thank God there is now an adult in charge in Washington.

That is what this is about. Beneath the crying need for new policy, for honesty and trust, for intelligent and well-informed governance, is our simple need to know that the United States is no longer being led by a child, a churlish boy who lied when it suited him and blamed others for his failures and who could not be bothered to think hard or to govern thoughtfully. And so off he trots now, back to his spread in Texas, grinning about his presidential frolic, joking about the good times he's had, high-fiving his half-ruined country and the smoking wreckage of Iraq on his way out the door.

And at the presidential podium, shortly after noon on Tuesday, an actual adult stood and took his place. And not just any adult, but one with the potential to redefine the presidency at least as dramatically as in 1933.

Obama's inaugural speech fell short of media hopes for record-busting oratorical legend. Along with praise for his poise and nerve came the complaints: Obama failed to soar to JFK's verbal heights; his proposals lacked specificity; he was too stern and insufficiently comforting. Fair enough.

But here is what I believe the complaints miss: Obama was aiming for neither oratorical glory nor policy proof nor comfort. His aim instead, I think, was to simply tell the nation, You have a president now. Not a glad-hander, not a pal, not an audience-pleaser, not a phrase-tooler. But a president. A leader who will not pretend to offer anything instant or miraculous. A leader who will study the briefings, question his advisors, and speak unhesitatingly of the weaknesses of both his political peers and his citizenry. As in his urge that we "put away childish things." As in, Stop falling for this stupid self-flattering pseudo-patriotic sh-t. As in, This is ridiculous. We are not the global royalty we think we are. But we are far too good a people for what we have allowed to happen. It is time we reclaimed us.

As for specificity, in Obama's first two days in office he has forcefully impeded the revolving door of lobbyists and ordered the closing of Guantanamo Bay within a year. Not bad for 48 hours.

But -- and I say this as someone who has been and likely will be critical of Obama on some policy questions -- I think he has a deeper agenda, which has to do with reestablishing essential White House credibility. In that sense, I think Obama is ahead of the media, and he sees beyond conventional expectations.

Which is another way of saying he is a leader.

Or, put another way, he is a grownup in a house overrun for too long by children.

Obama Inauguration Photos.

Here are photos I took at the Obama inauguration at the National Mall. To see the actual-sized photo, click on the thumbnail.

   

   

   

     

   

  

   

  

   

   

   

   

Hello from St. Augustine.

Hello from St. Augustine, Florida, where I am giving two talks at St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church, which is determinedly rebuilding itself. More about that in a minute.

St. Augustine is the oldest European-settled city in the United States, and it burned its way into the national civil rights movement in 1964 when nonviolent anti-discrimination protests led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. met violent and inflammatory responses. King and a body of black and white organizers and protesters joined existing anti-discrimination efforts in St. Augustine, which had gained steam in 1963. In the summer of 1964 the lid blew off. When nonviolent black demonstrators trying to desegregate beaches were attacked by white mobs, white police unenergetically moved to intervene. When demonstrators jumped into the pool of the segregated Monson Motor Lodge to protest its no-blacks policy, Monson manager James Brock poured gallons of highly corrosive muriatic acid into the pool to try to force them out (photo above). Police then forcibly removed and arrested the protesters. When marchers led by then-King-lieutenant Andrew Young attempted to cross downtown King Street (the name is no relation to Rev. King, for whom the city's Martin Luther King Avenue was later named, which ironically intersects King Street), Young was savagely beaten by white toughs at each successive attempt to cross the street until his will overcame theirs and they finally backed out of his way.

The brutal scenes from St. Augustine, especially the photos of Brock pouring acid into a pool filled with protesters, shook the world. Events there so mortified President Lyndon B. Johnson (on a telephone tape he can be heard worrying that the St. Augustine debacle might completely derail the policy credibility of his Administration) that it is broadly believed to have helped pass the LBJ-supported Civil Rights Act of 1964. For more about this story, including vivid footage of the events I have described, see the documentary film Dare Not Walk Alone.

St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church, for its part, was founded in the 1890s as a place of worship for blacks who were barred from white Episcopalian churches. It is the oldest surviving church building in St. Augustine's Lincolnville neighborhood, an old and traditionally black section in this still-segregated city. Recently, the bulk of the St. Cyprian's congregation left to join a non-Episcopalian church as a protest against Episcopalianism's increasing embrace of gay rights. (You read correctly: most of a predominantly-black congregation picked up their marbles and left rather than acknowledge the rights of another historically oppressed minority, gays. Bigotry comes in all colors.) The souls who stayed on, led by new St. Cyprian's vicar Ted Voorhees, are building a congregation open to all. I came here to speak, at their invitation, in support of their inclusiveness; I have written before about the need for black progressives to speak out against black anti-gay bigotry, and I also support St. Cyprian's entire mission of community service. What better place to be on a weekend when we celebrate King's birthday and we prepare to inaugurate the nation's first black president? It was at another church led by Ted Voorhees, in fact, St. Mark's Episcopal in Toledo, Ohio, that I spoke on behalf of racial truth and fairness in 2003. Ted took over as vicar at St. Cyprian's only two months ago, so recently, in fact, that the church's website does not yet reflect the change. He and his wife, writer Caren Goldman, are the kinds of leaders that modern organized religion needs more of.

The Shoe Must Go On.

Let's get back to the question of shoes and politics.

A few blogs back, as W was making his Administration an even more ghastly embarrassment by ducking a journalist's shoe in Iraq, I mentioned the speculation over whether Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev actually banged his shoe on the desk in the infamous 1960 U.N. incident or merely banged his fist while holding the shoe.

Hey, this matters. I'm not sure why, but it does. So I did a little digging.

What we know for sure is that on October 13, 1960, the notoriously trigger-tempered Kruschev, inflamed by the oratory of a Philippine delegate about the imperialist wrongs of the Soviet Union, wielded his right shoe while making an enraged rejoinder.

But did he bang the shoe?

William Taubman, in a 2003 International Herald Tribune article, waded through newspaper accounts and testimonies of people who insisted that they clearly saw Kruschev bang the shoe, and others who swore just as adamantly that they saw him not bang the shoe. For instance, Taubman cited a 1960 New York Times account that reported that Kruschev brandished and then banged the shoe. But, says Taubman, another Times reporter who was there remembered it later as a definite nonbanging in which Kruschev waved the shoe "pseudomenacingly" and placed it on the desk without banging it. A KGB guy claimed Kruschev not only banged the shoe but did so rhythmically. A UN staffer said Kruschev didn't remove his shoe himself because his stomach was too big, but it fell off his foot and when someone handed it to him he then banged it. A Life photo editor told Taubman that Kruschev never banged it and the whole thing was a myth. Yet another witness insisted that Kruschev held the shoe and banged the desk but that his hand, not the shoe, made contact with the desk.

That last one is interesting. The hand came between the desk and the shoe? Let's take a closer look:

It does look plausible, doesn't it? But it depends on his arm trajectory. If he swung the shoe like a mallet, the top surface of the shoe, rather than his hand, would have struck the desk. But if he slammed the shoe straight down on the desk like a stone, his hand may indeed have gotten in the way and precluded any direct shoe-to-desk contact.

And then there was the shoe-banging investigation mounted by Kruschev's granddaughter.

In 2000, the granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, in a piece in The New Statesman, agonized about the alleged shoe-banging as a scar on her family's cultural legacy, one that she had hoped to erase by discrediting the event as a fiction. But sadly, as she revealed in her essay, her probing led her to accept the shoe-banging as a crude fact. She reached this conclusion, she wrote, after being dismayed to discover photographs of her grandfather wielding his shoe in his hand above the desk. So it appears that she either didn't know about, or rejected, the accounts that claim that the shoe never actually struck the desk.

What I find most interesting, and kind of surreal, about Khrushcheva's account is the way her shoe story becomes a (failed) search for emotional redemption, and the personal angle she brings to explaining Kruschev's shoe stunt. As she tells it, in the heat of the Cold War her grandfather needed a way to defy the West and its friends that wouldn't force him into the ill-fitting style of Western erudition. Her family, she wrote, explained to her that Kruschev chose to theatrically bang his fist on the desk on that fateful day, whereupon, she said, the following happened:

"As a good performer, Khrushchev needed a strong, convincing exit [from the U.N. session], true to the role he chose, and that is what happened: in the excitement of fist banging, his watch fell off. Meanwhile, his shoes, made of durable Soviet leather in a special shoe atelier for the Soviet nomenclature, were too new and too tight, and he removed them. He bent down to pick up the watch and saw his empty shoes. How lucky!"

As for me, I was five years old when this happened. My retroactive opinion is that Kruschev banged the shoe. The photos show him in just too shoe-banging a stance for me to believe otherwise.

In any case, you might want to visit The MorningCall.com's Shoes and Politics: Moments in History, a photo procession that includes the recent Anti-Bush Show Throw, ex-Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos posing with some of her more than 1,200 pairs of shoes, the fizzling sneaker that busted "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. and more.

Thanks to Cathleen for background info.

Israel and Gaza: A Debate Among Jews Gains Steam.

This just in: Alex Thurston has posted an extremely thoughtful treatment of the debate that is heating up among American Jewish supporters of Israel regarding the escalation in Gaza.

This open debate needs to happen. Many Zionist supporters of Israel, and many non-Zionists who respect Israel's right to exist, perceive that Israel's titanically disproportionate use of force and its near-colonial economic and political treatment of Palestinians are bad policies for Israel as well as for the entire region. Moreover, such vocal pragmatists, centrists, and progressives are no longer willing to let a misguided and increasingly isolated Israel speak for them.

Precisely because things have gotten so bad, this much-needed debate -- challenging the shopworn excuses for Israel's sense of entitled excess -- is good.

Bad Taste, Example #1,217.

Hey, I'm all for bikes that make a statement. My ruby-red chrome-laden '85 Yamaha Virago 700 (a glitzy Harley imitator for sure) gave me major kicks. But get a load of this furry provocation on wheels, seen in southern Pennsylvania. It's sure to be a hit with deer along the roadside. Not to mention seriously bad karma for its rider. (And note the red nose.)

Thanks to Cathleen for passing along the photo.

Reality Check.

I am glad to have spurred some impassioned comments with my recent blogs about Israel and Gaza. Pro-Zionists who stick up for Israel's behavior (and not all pro-Zionists do, by the way) need to get used to being on the defensive on this issue. They already find themselves increasingly out of step globally with many constituencies who have been generally supportive toward Israel. They also find their arguments less and less persuasive to some here in the United States, which has been one of the long-standing bubbles of uncritical support for Israel's massive militarism. There are and will continue to be honest disagreements about how to achieve justice between Palestinians and Israelis. But the familiar old selective rationalizations about bad faith (and there is plenty on both sides) will not cut it in a conflict this horrifically imbalanced, nor will gargantuan force ever win long-term safety and stability for Israel. A growing proportion of the world understands this. Pro-Zionists who hitch their positions to the military excesses of Israel are eventually going to have to deal with these realities. The fact that these staunch defenders of Israeli policy are now feeling the heat on this issue is a good thing.