Don Draper may have decided against a quickie last night, astounding the Mad Men voyeurs, but here is a little post for a Monday morning.  It is based on this and a similar entry on the New Republic site which I cannot access in full and don't care to given its editor's comments of the past week. 

But keep this in mind:  the "Franklin Roosevelt" who we correctly honor was dragged into the New Deal by his "brain trust" and wise heads in Congress (Glass and Steagall for instance).  As Krugman has pointed out, he had this budget balancing thing still in him until after 1938, when he made a big mess trying to do just that.

A presidency is full of fits and starts.  The current one said they would make mistakes on their way to getting it right.  That he has done so hardly justifies the hand wringing we are seeing.

It seemed impossible to post here yesterday, and I thought that was curtains for Barth at TPM Cafe.  Today, I find that I continue to exist, so here is what you would have seen here yesterday, if I could have posted it.

No, not of "shock and awe." Just plain awe. The ten days which begin on Rosh Hashanah and end on Yom Kippur are collectively the days of awe. They began on Wednesday evening and rather quietly this year. Maybe it escaped this blogger's ears, but the ritualistic best wishes to "our Jewish friends" did not seem as prevalent this year as in other years. Maybe it is because while bashing Muslims, sending greetings to Jews seems somehow unfair or contradictory.

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We saw this first during the primary campaign in late 2007 and the first half of 2008, where the dueling factions supporting either Senator Obama, Senator Clinton or even Senator Edwards felt it necessary to demonize the candidates they did not support. One candidate was a "war monger," another was unelectable and shallow, and so on and so forth.

The idea that a unified party finding a way to support a single candidate and to try to get him or her elected seemed quite out of reach. To some people, indeed, the idea that one might support a different candidate than the one he first supported seemed somehow dishonest or a betrayl of important beliefs, though to others, this blogger included, the idea was to elect someone---not just anyone but either Senator Obama or Senator Clinton.

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A special midweek post:

You were not born in 1939, no doubt, and neither was I, but yet this date has great resonance even today. It is the day when, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland and the day on which the Second World War began.

By the time it ended the world had changed substantially. The forces of hate had been defeated but at a terrible cost. Aside from the many millions who perished, at war and as civilians, the world which emerged, particularly in Europe, was a shell of the civilization which existed at the turn of the twentieth century and the era of scientific progress had shown its ugliest side.

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Well, this was not easy---finding out how to post under the secret identity I have established for myself.  As I have explained elsewhere this assumed identity is necessary only because of how and by whom I am employed, and the need to protect that officeholder from being held responsible for opinions that are those of Barth, and nobody else.

I do not expect my secret to remain intact.  It would take very little effort to identify the human being masquerading in this guise but that guy may not necessarily own up to Barth's views in any event.  Barth is his own person, y'know, even if he does not exist away from a computer.  Here's what he has to say this week:

There was a week in May when two stories appeared in what we used to call "the press" that captured the source of my sadness and fear for the world my daughter and whatever other twenty-somethings that might be available will have to try to fix. One story talked about school districts being forced into draconian cutbacks and the other about Texas politicians and other useless fools requiring schools to teach things that are not so: sort of a might makes right for education.

Just as Clark Kent, seeing people in danger, will take his glasses off and leap into action, a blogger will publish and for this blogger that meant, in May, yet another version of virtually the same post repeated over and over about the country that is increasingly stupid and proud to be so.

Now, the New York Times chimes in with this little number. Coming after a few weeks of mosque hysteria, and while people collect under the banner of one of the most prolific of the many mean spirited among us to take advantage of our growing ignorance who has fooled the easily fooled into thinking that their hope to destroy the New Deal's safety net is somehow akin to the speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. forty-seven years ago today, it is impossible to resist posting more of the same today.

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So many of the people with who we commune said it that we allowed ourselves to at least consider the possibility that the election of President Obama marked the end of the racial politics that had bedeviled the nation from its first days. Yet even in our euphoria we knew better or at least suspected the truth:

There is every reason to believe that the general election will be a rout. It will have no precedential value because, like 1932 and, to a lesser extent, 1976, there are aberrational forces at work which will alter normal voting patterns.

or

This is not a new or original thought but it is worth repeating that this whole election is skewed by the presidency of G W Bush

We know this truth now. We are not only far from the post-racial period of our dreams, we have disintegrated into thousands of small communities, bound together by race, religion, ancestry or political views, each more than simply suspicious of the other, but hostile almost to the point of warfare.

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It is unclear to me exactly what the White House is trying to say in the face of Peter King's blustering and other sad sacks impugning the comments the President made last night.

There is no reason for him to get into the NYC approval rules, zoning, etc., but, of course, these are not the real issues.  The only issue is should Muslims be able to build a mosque on property they own, wherever it may be.

In a country whose first European settlers came to these shores seeking the right to worship freely the way their faith dictates, the answer is so unbelievably obvious that this "controversy" is sickening.

I worked in the World Trade Center for several years early in my professional life, and commuted through the Trade Center for many years later after my office moved a few blocks away. I still frequently commute through the PATH Station there and it is not "ground zero" to me but, as it has been for as many years as I have spent there, "the Trade Center."

I lost several  former co-workers and my next door neighbor on 9/11 and I attended funerals and memorials for several others who I did not know personally, but who were related to friends of mine.  I am entitled to no special consideration for that, but to say that I am offended by people who are building a mosque is almost obscene and unquestionably un-American.

For most of the time I worked in 2 WTC, my office overlooked a statue of a woman holding up a lamp which sits in the harbor between New York and New Jersey south of the Trade Center. I believe there is an inscription on the statue which says something about sending the tired and the poor here as well as "huddled masses yearning to be free."  It does not indicate which religions will be tolerated here and, well, thank God for that since I imagine that if such a rule existed, this Jew might not have had the opportunities he has had by the grace of this nation of ours.

There are few independent economists (that is, someone who has not singed up as a partisan for any of the political arguments we have) who do not look at the situation we are in and does not see the need for massive government spending. The best ways to get the most stimulus out of that spending may be worthy of reasoned debate. What strings, if any, should be attached to federal funds sent to state and local governments also presents a legitimate subject for debate.

Expressing concerns about excessive government spending, when unemployment is as high as it is, particularly when those raising this issue want to cut taxes on the wealthy and had no problems with running up a deficit as long as the president was a Republican, is to advance partisan political goals and to subordinate the well being of the public at large to the desire for control of the government.

Yet that is exactly the debate we are having. Why is that?

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Legend has it that Thou must read Trashy Novels Whilst on a Beach, or otherwise vacationing, but some of us did the next best thing: we read about the decline and fall.

Not Gibbon: too much heft in that even with Kindles, Nooks and their Droid/Ipod apps to make the physical weight of the book irrelevant.

Besides, while Gibbon described how feckless politicians, obsessions with sex and religious othodoxy can bring a nation down, there is no reason to dwell on that past since we now have the opportunity to watch it up close and personal.

Yes, as discussed ad nauseum both here and elsewhere, anti-intellectualism and know nothingism have always had a major place in this nation which progressed in fits and starts despite it. Still, the idea that we can better our lot by education, and that a ditch digger should want his children to do something which, while physically easier, could do more for the society in general as well as improving her or his own lifestyle has been the prevailing one even before Thomas Jefferson championed the idea of public education.

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I missed the McCarthy era. Technically speaking, I was around at the tail end of his tenure as ruler of the airwaves and print, but, as a new born, my access to those organs of communication was quite limited, and "Winky Dink and You" might have had more appeal to me than Joseph Welch lecturing McCarthy about his lack of decency.

Still, we all know the story. Bad man uses his position as chairman of a Senate committee to accuse the government of harboring communists who are aiding the Soviet Union to acquire the same atomic bomb as our country used to defeat Japan a few years earlier. Crusading television broadcaster and his producer expose the ruthless techniques used by the villainous Senator and the nation, aroused by such a telecast, proprel the Senate to censure said Senator and goodness triumphs.

But if that is the story of that era, why does it happen over and over and over again since then? How is it that we can go to a George Clooney movie, cluck about how stupid people were "back then" and just let the same thing happen again without seeing the pattern, and what is being done to our country and our politics.

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We all know now, after months of this, that oil which does not remain where nature placed it, or does not get "harvested" in a way where we can use it, spews. Apparently, after more than 80 days of continuous spewing, it has been contained and, at least for now, we have been spared further spewing of oil.

So, where else can we find spewing? Spewing, is unquestionably a bad thing and, if you listen to those In the Know, it is almost always the fault of the President of the United States.

Yet the spewing that seems to be doing the most damage---at least beyond the massive oil already spewed---comes principally from two places which do not appear to link to President Obama: those who report what they call the news, and those of define what will be reported---the ever shrinking, and ever crazier group of crackpots called the Republican Party.

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A week or so ago, a cellist named Dan Cho, a young husband and father who also covered soccer for a few publications in his spare time, drowned in Lake Geneva. I did not know him, but his death has moved me almost as much as his music has. From what I know of him, his shirt life was filled with beauty and he gave me something that will be with me for many years to come.

He often played with a man named Kaoru Ishabashi



and the other night K (as he is called) sang to Dan