Let's see... There is North Korea, Israel/Palestine, Iran, Af-Pak... and don't forget Iraq, and this flu thing... that hasn't gone away either... Oh, yes, and the economy... "green shoots", some say, others say we are in for a long haul.

Any of these problems, would be a plateful for any US administration that I can remember, all together they give me the feeling of a chaos that I have often read about in history books, but have never personally experienced before.

Read more »

Right off the bat, Judge Sotomayor  is a very shrewd pick. but not only that, she is going to confirmed and she is going to be a very good Supreme Court Justice.

Having said that, she seems to be offering conservatives what is perhaps their first real opportunity since the election to get a hearing from from the American people, to leave a message with independents and with some of the white working class base that deserted them in November... if only they can avoid being loud, vicious and nasty. This is a tall order for a party which seems to be bent on its self-destruction, and totally in the hands of the Libaughs and Gingriches but maybe if they listen to the few of their number who still have some functioning gray matter left, they might just pull it off.

I found it interesting that perhaps the two conservative opinion mongers with the most bandwidth, Peggy Noonan and Charles Krauthammer coincide in their analysis of the opportunity that Judge Sotomayor offers the Republicans.

Peggy Noonan lays it out, all sweetness and light:

Don't grill and grandstand, summon and inform. Show the respect that expresses equality and the equality that is an expression of respect. Ask and listen, get the logic, explain where you think it wrong. Fill the airwaves with thoughtful exchanges.

In case you don't catch her drift, Charles Krauthammer, as is his wont, goes for the carotid artery right from the first line of his column:

Sonia Sotomayor has a classic American story. So does Frank Ricci.

Ricci is a New Haven firefighter stationed seven blocks from where Sotomayor went to law school (Yale). Raised in blue-collar Wallingford, Conn., Ricci struggled as a C and D student in public schools ill-prepared to address his serious learning disabilities. Nonetheless he persevered, becoming a junior firefighter and Connecticut's youngest certified EMT.

After studying fire science at a community college, he became a New Haven "truckie," the guy who puts up ladders and breaks holes in burning buildings. When his department announced exams for promotions, he spent $1,000 on books, quit his second job so he could study eight to 13 hours a day and, because of his dyslexia, hired someone to read him the material.

He placed sixth on the lieutenant's exam, which qualified him for promotion. Except that the exams were thrown out by the city, and all promotions denied, because no blacks had scored high enough to be promoted.

Ricci (with 19 others) sued.

That's where these two American stories intersect. Sotomayor was a member of the three-member circuit court panel that upheld the dismissal of his case, thus denying Ricci his promotion.

If the Republicans can only not forget to take their meds, they have the chance of turning the the Sonia Sotomayor hearings into the Frank Ricci hearings.

As Krauthammer tells it, it is one of the most unfair things I have ever heard in my life, you would have to have a heart of stone to be unmoved or angered by it, if all there is to it, is what Krauthammer tells.

So the Democrats had better be prepared to defend the Ricci decision, without trying to personally trash Frank Ricci. Fireman Ricci is not, repeat not, to be confused with Joe "the plumber".

Noonan describes Sotmayor thus:

Politically she's like a beautiful doll containing a canister of poison gas: Break her and you die.

The same is perfectly true of Frank Ricci, "break him and you die".

This game will have to be played with care.  

Three Iowa farm boys about the time of the First World War.

(From left to right, the future superintendent of a large school district, a farm dog named, "Cap'n", the future Chief Operating Officer of Illinois Bell Telephone and my dad, "the babe" who went on to run a large chain of sporting goods stores and about twenty rug mills).

Here's a staggering statistic: According to the Education Trust, the U.S. is the only industrialized country in which young people are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school. Bob Herbert - New York Times

I showed the paragraph to my German wife and she said, "that's the classic way of perpetuating a class structure in a traditional society." That, perpetuating a class structure, is, of course, precisely what the United State is not supposed to be about.

What is it supposed to be about?

Let me tell you a story.

With Obama's primary win there and the legalization of gay marriage a number of people may have been surprised to learn that Iowa is a "progressive" state.

It goes a lot farther back.

During the Civil War, a company of Iowa soldiers were captured by the Confederates. With the captured Iowans standing in formation, the rebel officer in charge ordered all the Iowans who knew how to read and write to take a step forward. The entire company took a step forward and the Confederates guarding them nearly panicked and shot them down, thinking that the Iowans were attacking them, because in a group of southern soldiers of that period, only perhaps ten out of a hundred would have stepped forward.

Iowa always has had good public schools. In a state of family farms and small businesses, education has always been seen as essential to prosperity and freedom.

An example from my family lore.

When my grandparents got married, they didn't have enough money saved to buy a farm, so my grandfather got a job running the dynamo at a gold mine in the jungles of Northern California named "The Sunny South".

As soon as they were married, my grandfather and his petite bride headed west. My two uncles were born in the mining camp. When my eldest uncle tried to find the mine in the 1950s, he and a local guide spent two weeks tramping around the dense temperate jungle of Placer County California using military maps and could find no more than some old wooden sluices hanging high in the trees.

Having made very good money for several years and with nowhere to spend it, my grandparents had saved up enough to buy a good farm. So with two baby boys in tow they went back to Iowa and bought the farm where my dad was born a few years later.

Happy ending? Not exactly.

For most Americans the great depression began in 1929, but for American farmers it had been going on for a long time. On my grandfather's farm there was a literal cornucopia of food: pork chops, bacon, corn on the cob, potatoes, tomatoes and gallons of strawberries drenched in fresh cream... but no cash money. My grandfather was lucky enough to stay out of debt, a dreamed of Christmas present for a little farm boy in those days might be a jackknife... with only one broken blade.

My father and my uncles went to a "little red schoolhouse", where they learned to memorize and recite speeches from Shakespeare and poems by Longfellow, to spell correctly and to do arithmetic. Later they went to the town high school and even learned Latin, a dead language, whose possibilities cannot be fully savored until you have heard it pronounced with an Iowa twang.

On graduating from high school they attended university at Iowa State in Ames.

This was all free.

Without going on and on, sufficient to say that my eldest uncle after graduating in electrical engineering was able to go on to be first, the financial vice president of Illinois Bell Telephone (when that was the only telephone company there was) and finally retire as the Chief Operating Officer of "Mother Bell". He also found time to be the president of Cook County Boy Scouts, (he was an Eagle Scout) and to found a small college.

If he had been born in Alabama, he probably would have ended up running a filling station and "speaking in tongues".

This, for me, is what America was supposed to be about.

How did America get where it is today? Spending half the taxes it collects on the military, fighting useless wars, while class divisions are hardening due to lack of education and health care.

During the primary campaign, Hillary Clinton made an interesting point when she said that Martin Luther King needed LBJ to change the face of America. What I don't remember her pointing out was that LBJ needed Martin Luther King just as much as King needed him.

LBJ was probably the only genuine social democrat to ever sit in the White House, but without the charisma of MLK and his struggle, Johnson could never have gotten wide enough support to pass his civil rights legislation, which he passed knowing that it would cost the Democrats the "solid South". We are talking about two men, King and Johnson, that had big, brass, balls. This is how change takes place, better believe it.

Many seem to think that voting for Barack Obama was "one stop shopping", Johnson and King rolled into one. That dog wont hunt.

Just for argument's sake, let us imagine that president Obama is as committed to helping the disadvantaged in America as Johnson was and willing to take the risks to do it that Johnson was: this requires a good imagination when talking about a "pragmatic centrist", but let's take it as given.

OK, so where is Obama's "Martin Luther King" to hold his feet to the fire, to build the public support in the street?

Without effective activism outside the party system, nothing is going to happen and stories like my uncle's will soon be like the tales of Daniel Boone or Johnny Appleseed.

It's fun to handicap sporting events, but you can look pretty dumb if you are wrong. Here is my take on tonight's Champions League final between Manchester United, the present champions and Barcelona Football Club, universally recognized as playing perhaps the most beautiful soccer ever seen on our planet:

The two teams are very evenly matched and everything will depend on how tolerant of physical play the referee will be.

If the ref allows United's defenders to play rough with the Argentinian wunderkind,  Leo Messi, and intimidate the pint-sized Spanish marvel, Andrés Iñiesta,  then United has a good chance of retaining its title, but if the ref protects Messi and Iñiesta, then Barça will win in a walk. No team in the world can survive against Barça if they are allowed to play football.

My hunch is that the ref will protect Messi. Why?

It's a "political" decision by Michel Platini, prez of UEFA.

How so?

Simply put, Manchester United is owned by two American brothers, the Glazers, who are domiciled in Nevada for tax reasons and that is not the direction Platini wants European football to take.

In my opinion this is why the referee of the second semi-final game between Chelsea and Barça clearly favored Barça. Chelsea is owned by a Russian oligarch, (read gangster) Abramovich, who has taken a little known team to world prominence strictly with his checkbook.

The supporters of both United and Chelsea are not really fans, they are "customers", while Barcelona on the other hand is not only "mes que un club", (more than an club) it is a "real" club, it is owned by the fans themselves, who can fire the management; is is also a team with a large amount of home grown players, developed from earliest childhood in its unique farm or nursery system. The Spanish national team, which is the reigning European soccer champion, is built around players from the Barcelona farm system.

In my opinion, that is the direction Platini wants European football to take: teams that are deeply rooted in their societies, teams that produce great players for their national teams. By simply not allowing Manchester United to violently neutralize players like Messi and Iñiesta this will be easily achieved.

So that is my prediction: the referee will be showing United defenders many yellow cards and Barça will win.