The New American Normal

By ROGER COHEN
LONDON — The “animal spirits” of which Keynes spoke are on the prowl across the United States. Their mood is ugly. The spirits are wary and troubled. Corporations and individuals are hoarding cash, when they have any, because they’re not buying into the recovery.
On a weeklong visit, I found a mood of deep unease in an America that seems to have descended into tribalism — not ethnic, but political, economic and social. Uncertainty is pervasive. The government’s rescue of Wall Street combined with the acute difficulties of a middle class struggling to get by on stagnant or falling incomes has sharpened resentments.
This is not a momentary phenomenon. Nobody seems to think unemployment is going to fall significantly from 9.6 percent — a level more often associated with France — in the near future. Get used to the new normal.
I spoke to a retired Wall Street executive who got out a few years back and set up a small business where he had to make payroll (sobering), but was freed from the debilitating short-termism of financial institutions that, over his career, had become dominated by traders “who look at economic opportunity rather than economic conditions.”
He said the final straw came in 2002. Top executives at the bank where he worked gathered to discuss their bonuses. The issue before them was whether to maintain those bonuses in a time of economic contraction, which would require firing 5 percent of the workforce, or take a 25 percent bonus cut, which would allow those jobs to be kept.
“The guy running the meeting asked for a show of hands on who would accept a reduced bonus,” he said. “There were 30 of us in the room. Three raised their hands. I was one of them.”
The job losses went through, this executive left, and the bank today is still trying to claw out from its uncontrolled excess.
America is a land of associations. Solidarity has not vanished from the land. But it’s in retreat. None of those guys who wanted all their yummy money was anything but rich.
Fragmentation holds sway. The stock market used to be a fair proxy for the state of the economy. Now it’s a market of traders, not investors. They want to know what the spread is today and tomorrow; they can make money on the way up or down; they care far less about U.S.A. Inc.
So the market goes where it goes — up of late but largely directionless (which makes it harder on those up-or-down traders) — while out on Main Street the struggle to make family payroll continues. People work longer hours, they juggle how to cover their kids’ needs, how to de-leverage just a little — and they’re still meant to “consume” for the economy’s sake.
The share of national income held by the top 1 percent of American families has doubled in recent decades to 20 percent. That’s a huge shift. I spoke to Doug Severance, a Vietnam vet who’s a hotel employee in Aspen, Colorado. “When I moved here in 1984 we were all family,” he said. “Now either you arrive in a Lear Jet or you’re a servant.”
Obama hope has dissipated in short order. He’s not entirely to blame and he’s not blameless. The exclamation from Velma Hart, a black Obama supporter, at a recent town hall meeting — “I’m exhausted of defending you,” — struck a national chord because so many people feel the same thing.
Arriving from the U.K., it was the uncertainty that was most striking. That’s about the worst thing for an economy. As one Chicago executive put it to me, people who are creative rise above a consistently applied set of rules. Opacity kills.
Britain has similar post-binge economic problems — of personal and national debt and spiraling deficits. But Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and his Liberal Democrat partners have actually put bipartisanship to work — did any Republicans notice? They are looking to lock in five years of stability through a new law and push through painful cuts across government departments.
Five years is a decent stretch. In America today, quarter-to-quarter concerns hem in even a visionary chief executive.
The policy debate in the United States is head-spinning. Nobody knows if there’s going to be more fiscal stimulus, after the first $787 billion, or how a row over taxes will end. Under an Obama proposal, Bush-era tax cuts are due to expire at year-end for affluent couples and small business owners earning over $250,000. Republicans are digging in, saying it’s crazy to raise taxes in a faltering economy.
It’s not crazy. Ending the tax cuts for the rich is a minimum signal for a divided land, a statement that the two Americas are acquainted with each other. But with Obama facing a stinging midterm defeat, it looks like a long shot. What is needed above all is some clarity and sense of direction — the kind Cameron has given in London and booming China consistently applies.
Without that expect the animal spirits to keep on hoarding, an inward-looking America bent on retrenchment, and a new normal that lasts and lasts.

Rove Returns, With Team, Planning G.O.P. Offensive

By JIM RUTENBERG NY TIMES
WASHINGTON — In 2004, the Republican master strategist Karl Rove led weekly sessions at his Washington residence where, over big plates of his butter-smothered “eggies” and bacon slabs, he planned the re-election of President George W. Bush — and what he hoped would be lasting Republican dominion over Democrats.
In April, Mr. Rove summoned several of the important players behind Mr. Bush’s ascendance to his home once again, this time to draw up plans to push a Republican resurgence.
Over takeout chicken pot pies, the group — the Republican fund-raiser Fred Malek, the onetime lobbyist and Bush White House counselor Ed Gillespie, and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary Cheney, among others — agreed on plans for an ambitious new political machine that would marshal the resources of disparate business, nonprofit and interest groups to bring Republicans back to power this fall.
When Mr. Rove left the White House in 2007, Democrats rejoiced at what they believed would be the end of his political career and the brand of Republicanism he espoused. This election season is proving that he is back — if he ever really left at all.
The landscape has changed, with Mr. Rove at times clashing with potent new Tea Party-style activists, some of whom view him as a face of the old party establishment they want to upend.
Already a prominent presence as an analyst on Fox News Channel and a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rove is also playing a leading role in building what amounts to a shadow Republican Party, a network of donors and operatives that is among the most aggressive in the Republican effort to capture control of the House and the Senate.
He has had a major hand in helping to summon the old coalition of millionaires and billionaires who supported Mr. Bush and have huge financial stakes in regulatory and tax policy, like Harold C. Simmons, a Texas billionaire whose holdings include a major waste management company that handles some radioactive materials; Carl H. Lindner Jr., a Cincinnati businessman whose American Financial Group includes several property and casualty insurance concerns; and Robert B. Rowling, whose TRT Holdings owns Omni Hotels and Gold’s Gym.
Their personal and corporate money — as well as that of other donors who have not been identified — has gone to a collection of outside groups Mr. Rove helped form with Mr. Gillespie, including American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which in turn are loosely affiliated with similar groups staffed or backed by other operatives and donors with ties to Mr. Rove. With $32 million and counting, they are now filling the void created by the diminished condition of the Republican National Committee, which has faced fund-raising difficulties under its embattled chairman, Michael Steele.
“A lot of what we’re doing would normally be done with the R.N.C.,” said Ms. Cheney, who is part of a group, the Alliance for America’s Future, that is working with the organizations Mr. Rove helped start on encouraging early voting in House races this fall. “There’s no money there.”
Crossroads officials say they are seeking to supplement party activities, not replace them.
In a brief interview, Mr. Rove said he was trying to help build something that would remain in place beyond November. “We want this to be durable,” he said.
Already, plans at American Crossroads include an anti-Democratic barrage of attack ads that will be run tens of thousands of times, a final get-out-the-vote push with some 40 million negative mail pieces, and 20 million automated phone calls, officials there say.
“They’re running a very proficient party operation funded by millions of dollars of undisclosed special-interest dollars,” said David Axelrod, a special adviser to President Obama. Referring to Mr. Rove and Mr. Gillespie, he added, “These guys are great political operatives, and they will have an impact in this election.”
But if Mr. Rove and his colleagues remain prime movers of the Republican establishment, it is less clear that their influence extends into — and will not be diminished by — the grass-roots conservative movement that has energized and somewhat reordered the party this year.
Mr. Rove has at times warned against insurgent candidates who in his view would reduce Republican chances of winning a seat. And as the embodiment of the inside-Washington power structure, he and his associates are viewed with some suspicion by the new forces driving the party, in particular former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska and the Tea Party activists who eschew the sort of big-tent, top-down party order Mr. Rove stands for.
Tensions boiled over recently when Mr. Rove publicly criticized as unelectable the Tea Party-backed candidate who won the Republican Senate primary in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell. His stance prompted blistering criticism from activists and Ms. Palin, who, in a “woodshed moment” clearly directed at least in part at Mr. Rove during a recent speech in Iowa, called for party unity, asking, “Did you ever lose a big game growing up?”
Richard Viguerie, a longtime conservative strategist who has allied with Tea Party activists, said, “We’re all on the same page until the polls close Nov. 2.”
But, referring to Mr. Rove and Mr. Gillespie as part of the “ruling class,” he added, “Then a massive, almost historic battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party begins.”
The longstanding descriptions of Mr. Rove as an all-powerful Republican puppeteer exaggerate and oversimplify his role. And he has no paid, official position with the Crossroads groups, serving instead as an informal adviser alongside Mr. Gillespie.
Operations are overseen by the chairman, Robert M. Duncan, a former Republican National Committee chairman and 40-year Rove associate, and the chief executive, Steven Law, a former general counsel to the United States Chamber of Commerce and a onetime chief of staff to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
Last year, Mr. Rove and Mr. Gillespie began reviewing the new landscape of groups Democrats had formed when they were out of power, asking themselves, Mr. Gillespie said, “What do they have that we don’t have?”
Mr. Law recalled first hearing of plans to form a more ambitious entity supporting conservative candidates and causes from Mr. Gillespie last October, when, he said, “I could just see the political atmosphere changing dramatically in the Republicans’ favor, and there really needed to be a professionally run, full-service political operation built up.”
Mr. Rove set out to raise money to build just such an operation at the same time he was trying to help unify the party behind the candidates he viewed as having the best chances to win in the midterm elections. But he encountered early resistance from the party’s new crop of activists.
At a meeting in Delaware, Tea Party-style leaders rebuffed Mr. Rove’s case for Representative Michael N. Castle as the party favorite for the Senate seat there.
“He started talking about the possibility of votes being split and the work we were doing could cost candidates the election,” said Russ Murphy, a retired electric company worker and executive director of a new group called the 9-12 Delaware Patriots, who also shared his story on Ms. O’Donnell’s victory stage. “I interrupted him and said, ‘With all due respect, we don’t endorse the party and won’t endorse the party; that’s not what this is about.’ ”
But Mr. Rove, along with Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Duncan, was having better luck on the fund-raising circuit.
American Crossroads formally registered with the Internal Revenue Service in March with an initial reported donation of $250,000 from B. Wayne Hughes of Kentucky, the chairman of Public Storage Inc. That was followed by a donation of $1 million in April from Trevor Rees-Jones of Texas, the chief executive of Chief Oil and Gas.
Around the same time, Mr. Rove came up with the idea of gathering other like-minded outside groups at his home on Weaver Terrace in Northwest Washington. Calling themselves the Weaver Terrace Group in honor of that first meeting, the participants now regularly reconvene at the Crossroads offices downtown to ensure that they work in tandem and avoid overlap.
Central to the effort is the development of a sophisticated list of voters that several of the groups share and contribute to, helping organizations like Ms. Cheney’s, for instance, to identify people likely to vote by early absentee ballot in House races.
Officials at American Crossroads later started a new entity, Crossroads GPS. Registered under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code — a designation that in theory requires it to focus primarily on issues rather than candidates — it has raised roughly half of the $32 million the Crossroads groups have reported raising between them.
At least until recently, Crossroads GPS had served as the dominant conduit for advertisements. It has not shied away from running commercials helpful to Tea Party-backed Senate candidates like Rand Paul of Kentucky, and, in a large way, Sharron Angle in Nevada.
(Several of its ads have been criticized for “badly misleading claims” by FactCheck.org, the political advertising monitoring service of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.)
Whatever battle Mr. Viguerie predicts, Mr. Duncan said the group would have staying power. “We’re going to be involved in 2012,” he said. “That’s what we’re gearing for.”

Sizing Up Consciousness by Its Bits

By CARL ZIMMER NY TIMES
One day in 2007, Dr. Giulio Tononi lay on a hospital stretcher as an anesthesiologist prepared him for surgery. For Dr. Tononi, it was a moment of intellectual exhilaration. He is a distinguished chair in consciousness science at the University of Wisconsin, and for much of his life he has been developing a theory of consciousness. Lying in the hospital, Dr. Tononi finally had a chance to become his own experiment.

The anesthesiologist was preparing to give Dr. Tononi one drug to render him unconscious, and another one to block muscle movements. Dr. Tononi suggested the anesthesiologist first tie a band around his arm to keep out the muscle-blocking drug. The anesthesiologist could then ask Dr. Tononi to lift his finger from time to time, so they could mark the moment he lost awareness.

The anesthesiologist did not share Dr. Tononi’s excitement. “He could not have been less interested,” Dr. Tononi recalled. “He just said, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and put me to sleep. He was thinking, ‘This guy must be out of his mind.’ ”

Dr. Tononi was not offended. Consciousness has long been the province of philosophers, and most doctors steer clear of their abstract speculations. After all, debating the finer points of what it is like to be a brain floating in a vat does not tell you how much anesthetic to give a patient.

But Dr. Tononi’s theory is, potentially, very different. He and his colleagues are translating the poetry of our conscious experiences into the precise language of mathematics. To do so, they are adapting information theory, a branch of science originally applied to computers and telecommunications. If Dr. Tononi is right, he and his colleagues may be able to build a “consciousness meter” that doctors can use to measure consciousness as easily as they measure blood pressure and body temperature. Perhaps then his anesthesiologist will become interested.

“I love his ideas,” said Christof Koch, an expert on consciousness at Caltech. “It’s the only really promising fundamental theory of consciousness.”

Dr. Tononi’s obsession with consciousness started in his teens. He was initially interested in ethics, but he decided that questions of personal responsibility depended on our consciousness of our own actions. So he would have to figure out consciousness first. “I’ve been stuck with this thing for most of my life,” he said.

Eventually he decided to study consciousness by becoming a psychiatrist. An early encounter with a patient in a vegetative state convinced Dr. Tononi that understanding consciousness was not just a matter of philosophy.

“There are very practical things involved,” Dr. Tononi said. “Are these patients feeling pain or not? You look at science, and basically science is telling you nothing.”

Dr. Tononi began developing models of the brain and became an expert on one form of altered consciousness we all experience: sleep. In 2000, he and his colleagues found that Drosophila flies go through cycles of sleeping and waking. By studying mutant flies, Dr. Tononi and other researchers have discovered genes that may be important in sleep disorders.

For Dr. Tononi, sleep is a daily reminder of how mysterious consciousness is. Each night we lose it, and each morning it comes back. In recent decades, neuroscientists have built models that describe how consciousness emerges from the brain. Some researchers have proposed that consciousness is caused by the synchronization of neurons across the brain. That harmony allows the brain to bring together different perceptions into a single conscious experience.

Dr. Tononi sees serious problems in these models. When people lose consciousness from epileptic seizures, for instance, their brain waves become more synchronized. If synchronization were the key to consciousness, you would expect the seizures to make people hyperconscious instead of unconscious, he said.

While in medical school, Dr. Tononi began to think of consciousness in a different way, as a particularly rich form of information. He took his inspiration from the American engineer Claude Shannon, who built a scientific theory of information in the mid-1900s. Mr. Shannon measured information in a signal by how much uncertainty it reduced. There is very little information in a photodiode that switches on when it detects light, because it reduces only a little uncertainty. It can distinguish between light and dark, but it cannot distinguish between different kinds of light. It cannot tell the differences between a television screen showing a Charlie Chaplin movie or an ad for potato chips. The question that the photodiode can answer, in other words, is about as simple as a question can get.

Our neurons are basically fancy photodiodes, producing electric bursts in response to incoming signals. But the conscious experiences they produce contain far more information than in a single diode. In other words, they reduce much more uncertainty. While a photodiode can be in one of two states, our brains can be in one of trillions of states. Not only can we tell the difference between a Chaplin movie and a potato chip, but our brains can go into a different state from one frame of the movie to the next.

“One out of two isn’t a lot of information, but if it’s one out of trillions, then there’s a lot,” Dr. Tononi said.

Consciousness is not simply about quantity of information, he says. Simply combining a lot of photodiodes is not enough to create human consciousness. In our brains, neurons talk to one another, merging information into a unified whole. A grid made up of a million photodiodes in a camera can take a picture, but the information in each diode is independent from all the others. You could cut the grid into two pieces and they would still take the same picture.

Consciousness, Dr. Tononi says, is nothing more than integrated information. Information theorists measure the amount of information in a computer file or a cellphone call in bits, and Dr. Tononi argues that we could, in theory, measure consciousness in bits as well. When we are wide awake, our consciousness contains more bits than when we are asleep.

For the past decade, Dr. Tononi and his colleagues have been expanding traditional information theory in order to analyze integrated information. It is possible, they have shown, to calculate how much integrated information there is in a network. Dr. Tononi has dubbed this quantity phi, and he has studied it in simple networks made up of just a few interconnected parts. How the parts of a network are wired together has a big effect on phi. If a network is made up of isolated parts, phi is low, because the parts cannot share information.

But simply linking all the parts in every possible way does not raise phi much. “It’s either all on, or all off,” Dr. Tononi said. In effect, the network becomes one giant photodiode.

Networks gain the highest phi possible if their parts are organized into separate clusters, which are then joined. “What you need are specialists who talk to each other, so they can behave as a whole,” Dr. Tononi said. He does not think it is a coincidence that the brain’s organization obeys this phi-raising principle.

Dr. Tononi argues that his Integrated Information Theory sidesteps a lot of the problems that previous models of consciousness have faced. It neatly explains, for example, why epileptic seizures cause unconsciousness. A seizure forces many neurons to turn on and off together. Their synchrony reduces the number of possible states the brain can be in, lowering its phi.

Dr. Koch considers Dr. Tononi’s theory to be still in its infancy. It is impossible, for example, to calculate phi for the human brain because its billions of neurons and trillions of connections can be arranged in so many ways. Dr. Koch and Dr. Tononi recently started a collaboration to determine phi for a much more modest nervous system, that of a worm known as Caenorhabditis elegans. Despite the fact that it has only 302 neurons in its entire body, Dr. Koch and Dr. Tononi will be able make only a rough approximation of phi, rather than a precise calculation.

“The lifetime of the universe isn’t long enough for that,” Dr. Koch said. “There are immense practical problems with the theory, but that was also true for the theory of general relativity early on.”

Dr. Tononi is also testing his theory in other ways. In a study published this year, he and his colleagues placed a small magnetic coil on the heads of volunteers. The coil delivered a pulse of magnetism lasting a tenth of a second. The burst causes neurons in a small patch of the brain to fire, and they in turn send signals to other neurons, making them fire as well.

To track these reverberations, Dr. Tononi and his colleagues recorded brain activity with a mesh of scalp electrodes. They found that the brain reverberated like a ringing bell, with neurons firing in a complex pattern across large areas of the brain for 295 milliseconds.

Then the scientists gave the subjects a sedative called midazolam and delivered another pulse. In the anesthetized brain, the reverberations produced a much simpler response in a much smaller region, lasting just 110 milliseconds. As the midazolam started to wear off, the pulses began to produce richer, longer echoes.

These are the kinds of results Dr. Tononi expected. According to his theory, a fragmented brain loses some of its integrated information and thus some of its consciousness. Dr. Tononi has gotten similar results when he has delivered pulses to sleeping people — or at least people in dream-free stages of sleep.

In this month’s issue of the journal Cognitive Neuroscience, he and his colleagues reported that dreaming brains respond more like wakeful ones. Dr. Tononi is now collaborating with Dr. Steven Laureys of the University of Liège in Belgium to test his theory on people in persistent vegetative states. Although he and his colleagues have tested only a small group of subjects, the results are so far falling in line with previous experiments.

If Dr. Tononi and his colleagues can get reliable results from such experiments, it will mean more than just support for his theory. It could also lead to a new way to measure consciousness. “That would give us a consciousness index,” Dr. Laureys said.

Traditionally, doctors have measured consciousness simply by getting responses from patients. In many cases, it comes down to questions like, “Can you hear me?” This approach fails with people who are conscious but unable to respond. In recent years scientists have been developing ways of detecting consciousness directly from the activity of the brain.

In one series of experiments, researchers put people in vegetative or minimally conscious states into fMRI scanners and asked them to think about playing tennis. In some patients, regions of the brain became active in a pattern that was a lot like that in healthy subjects.

Dr. Tononi thinks these experiments identify consciousness in some patients, but they have serious limitations. “It’s complicated to put someone in a scanner,” he said. He also notes that thinking about tennis for 30 seconds can demand a lot from people with brain injuries. “If you get a response I think it’s proof that’s someone’s there, but if you don’t get it, it’s not proof of anything,” Dr. Tononi said.

Measuring the integrated information in people’s brains could potentially be both easier and more reliable. An anesthesiologist, for example, could apply magnetic pulses to a patient’s brain every few seconds and instantly see whether it responded with the rich complexity of consciousness or the meager patterns of unconsciousness.

Other researchers view Dr. Tononi’s theory with a respectful skepticism.

“It’s the sort of proposal that I think people should be generating at this point: a simple and powerful hypothesis about the relationship between brain processing and conscious experience,” said David Chalmers, a philosopher at Australian National University. “As with most simple and powerful hypotheses, reality will probably turn out to be more complicated, but we’ll learn something from the attempt. I’d say that it doesn’t solve the problem of consciousness, but it’s a useful starting point.”

Dr. Tononi acknowledged, “The theory has to be developed a bit more before I worry about what’s the best consciousness meter you could develop.” But once he has one, he would not limit himself to humans. As long as people have puzzled over consciousness, they have wondered whether animals are conscious as well. Dr. Tononi suspects that it is not a simple yes-or-no answer. Rather, animals will prove to have different levels of consciousness, depending on their integrated information. Even C. elegans might have a little consciousness.

“Unless one has a theory of what consciousness is, one will never be able to address these difficult cases and say anything meaningful,” Dr. Tononi said

Palin waits to pounce as the Tea Party rolls on
Andrew Sullivn London Times

It is rare to see Karl Rove, George W Bush’s arch strategist, forced to squirm on Fox News. But squirm he did last week when he had to retract his immediate reaction to the remarkable victory of one Christine O’Donnell in the Republican primary for the Delaware Senate seat.
He had first called the Sarah Palin-clone candidate “nutty”. Now he pledged a personal donation. If there was a moment to mark when the Tea Party movement supplanted what’s left of the Republican establishment, this was it.
Or maybe it was when O’Donnell’s idol, Palin, on the same cable network, visibly gloated over Rove’s discomfort. She had good reason to gloat. Her endorsement of a young woman who looks uncannily like her, and who, like her, is a religious fanatic and regards Barack Obama, as “anti-American”, was the core reason O’Donnell won. On Fox, Palin, rejoicing in another scalp for the Tea Party insurgency, subsequently dismissed Rove as a “good old boy”, the term of abuse she once deployed against her old foes in the Alaskan Republican establishment.
Democrats and liberals were elated. An extremely electable, experienced and widely popular Republican candidate, Mike Castle, had been replaced by a woman who had had no life experience except as a political activist, who had publicly condemned masturbation, who believed the Earth was 6,000 years old, who opposed women serving in the military, who believed gay people could and should be cured, who owed $11,000 (£7,000) in taxes and who had once sued a conservative organisation for gender discrimination.
No wonder Rove had spluttered when she won. Even he knew her extremism might be a little much for the moderate voters of Delaware.
The Democrats should hold off on the celebrations, though. In the micro-sense, O’Donnell almost certainly cannot win her seat and makes a Republican take-back of the Senate — already unlikely — less plausible. But the Democrats will not be able to make this national mid-term election about O’Donnell’s views on evolution.
The economy is swamping everything else. In the macro-sense, therefore, O’Donnell’s emergence is a sign of a massive electoral wave that could not only mean a Republican sweep of the House, but a purge of even the slightest semblance of pragmatism or bipartisanship in their ranks.
The revolt doesn’t, moreover, appear to be about policy. The polls show that on specific issues, voters still back most Democratic positions over Republican ones.
They don’t want to go back to the Bush era. But with the highest number of people living in poverty since 1959, the realisation that this recession is not a blip but the new reality, the further collapse of the housing market, the surge in repossessions and the national debt pointing to potential default levels in the not-so-distant future, voters are simply venting.
Incumbents of all sorts are vulnerable — even the Republican governor of Texas is in a tight race. Both parties are despised — the Republicans still more than the Democrats.
And so the amorphous Tea Party movement — partly because of its plain orneriness, irrationality and anti-establishment fervour — has captured the mood. What matters is that it is angry at Washington, angry at government and, in the immortal words of Howard Beale in the film Network, “mad as hell and not going to take it any more”.
There is a dark side to the Tea Party as well, of course. It’s hard to miss its overwhelmingly white and older core constituency, or the way in which it has seized on anti-Muslim sentiment and conflated Obama with jihadist terrorists.
Small-government conservatism was indeed trashed by Bush, and fiscal discipline desperately needs to be restored But this cultural emotion fuels what it insists is its main aim: a war on government spending.
The Republican base watched as Bush spent the country into bankruptcy, created the most expensive new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson in medicine for the elderly, did nothing to stop abortion, backed what it regards as an amnesty for illegal immigrants and distinguished between mainstream Islam and Al-Qaeda. Through all this, they kept mum.
But when this was followed by a black president who, facing a depression, was forced to borrow even more money to keep the economy afloat — and did not produce a miracle overnight — they burst a blood vessel.
Their movement is a disorganised, devolved, amorphous entity — and thereby hard to defeat or even easily describe. It also has a critical media wing — from talk radio to Fox News, which has become in effect a 24-hour propaganda channel for Tea Party paranoia and extremism. Increasingly, Tea Party members and supporters have shut themselves off from any other source of news.
In some respects, one can sympathise. Small-government conservatism was indeed trashed by Bush, and fiscal discipline desperately needs to be restored.
For partisan and cultural reasons, the Tea Party cannot see Obama as the moderate he is, or grasp a critical opportunity to forge a bipartisan deal on the debt with him. But with no new taxes, maintenance of all of Bush’s tax cuts and no desire to cut defence, the kind of entitlement cuts required to balance the budget on purely Tea Party terms would make George Osborne look like Lady Bountiful.
Worse, the more radical it becomes, the more likely the Tea Party will produce total fiscal gridlock in Washington — which would make the debt worse, rather than better, and bring default closer, rather than further away.
And so one senses that, like true revolutionaries, these Tea Partiers are willing to take the country to the brink rather than sacrifice an ounce of ideological purity.
Obama will retain a veto. But it seems likely to me that these radicals, once in Congress, will wage war on him more intensely than they once did on Bill Clinton, until their warrior queen arrives to take the White House back.
Yes, Palin is waiting in the wings. And this strange and ugly time is the beginning of the cathartic and seemingly inevitable Obama-Palin showdown

Myth and Madness

By MAUREEN DOWD NY TIMES
Christine O’Donnell is in a fantasy world. Literally.
The pretty Palin Mini-Me identifies with the women of Middle Earth, comparing herself to the female characters in the “Lord of the Rings” novels by J. R. R. Tolkien.
“Look at the significance that he gives to Eowyn, the Lady of Rohan,” O’Donnell said on C-Span in 2003. “She was a warrior spirit and, to me, that’s who I love. I mean, I aspire to be soft and gentle like Arwen, but realistically, I’m a fighter, like Eowyn.”
O’Donnell said she liked Tolkien’s outlook on gender: “On the one hand, there’s the attitude that’s normally on the conservative side — as a conservative woman, I feel I can say this — that stifles women. There’s almost the stereotypical attitude of, to be a true woman, you have to stay at home. And I’ve actually had people say to me, ‘Why do you choose a career over marriage?’ Honestly, I’ve had only a few significant relationships, and they’ve broken up with me. And one of the things I’ve been told is, ‘If you weren’t so strong, you’d be married by now.’ ”
This anti-abortion, anti-masturbation, anti-premarital-sex, anti-stem-cells, anti-gay-marriage, dubious-about-evolution Christian conservative has rocked politics by snatching the Delaware Republican nomination for the Senate away from the seemingly sure-thing moderate Mike Castle.

At the Values Voter Summit here on Friday, the 41-year-old O’Donnell cited another fantasy world to conjure up a Christlike image for the Tea Party.
“We’re rowdy, we’re passionate,” she told the enraptured crowd. “It reminds me of the C. S. Lewis Narnia books, where the little girl asks someone about Aslan the lion, who represents God, and she says with a little concern over such a fearsome lion, ‘Is he safe?’ And her friend says, ‘Safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.’ ”
She’s right that there’s an untamed beast rampaging through American politics. But this beast does not seem blessed; rather it has loosed a kind of ugliness and wildness in the land.

Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox, Karl Rove dismissed O’Donnell as an absurd choice with a sketchy background and dubious character. He alluded to facts in The Weekly Standard that chronicled her lawsuit against her former employer, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative nonprofit based in Delaware.

Although O’Donnell said in 1998 that wives should “graciously submit” to their husbands, her 2005 suit charged that she suffered “mental anguish” after being demoted and fired because the institute’s conservative philosophy deemed that women must be subordinate.
We the People in the Ruling Class Elites do think O’Donnell comes across as alarmingly loopy. But maybe she’s smart as a fox in doing a Single-White-Female, Fox anchor makeover to look more like her queen-maker, Sarah Palin.
She’s also smart to think of politics in terms of passion and myth — two elements Barack Obama was able to summon during his campaign that are sorely missing from his presidency.
She might have gone a broom too far, though, when she once told Bill Maher that she had “dabbled into witchcraft” and went on a date with a witch that included “a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.”

Obama’s bloodless rationality has helped spawn the right’s bloodletting of irrationality. His ivory tower approach to the nation’s fears and anxieties about the economy gave rise to a tower of angry babble. Tea Party is basically a big tent for anger.

The president’s struggle to connect and inspire passion is a dispiriting contrast to, as Yeats said, the worst, full of passionate intensity.
The first African-American president, who wrote in his memoir that he trained himself as a young man not to let his anger show in a suspicious white society, now faces anger on an unprecedented scale from a mostly white movement.
He seems weary of crisis management, conveying the attitude of the hero in “The Incredibles” who has to keep saving the world: “Sometimes I just want it to stay saved!”
The president seems put upon and impatient with reality while his foes seem happy to embrace fantasy.
Obama can connect with policy. He just can’t connect with the objects of policy. Empathy seems more like an abstract concept than something to practice.
He has never shaken off that slight patronizing attitude toward the working-class voters he is losing now, the ones he dubbed “bitter” during his campaign. There is no premium in trying to save people’s jobs and lift them up and give them health care if they feel that you can’t relate to them. That’s how Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his job, despite D.C.’s progress on schools and crime.

The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.
When Rahm Emanuel leaves to go run for mayor in Chicago, all the blood will drain out of the White House. And Obama can go to Ben’s Chili Bowl for lunch every day and it won’t matter.

Pair of monster storms stir up double trouble
BY CURTIS MORGAN MIAMI HERALD
Hurricane Julia morphed from from mild to monster early Wednesday, joining Igor for much of the day at Category 4. It was the first time since 1926 that two such strong storms have simultaneously stalked the Atlantic.
National Hurricane Center Director Bill Read called the rarity the result of ``a classic environment for intensifying hurricanes.''
``Warm water would be the No. 1 factor,'' Read said. ``As long as you have warm water, you have the fuel.''
That fuel was running near record highs in the Atlantic, helping make Julia, at least briefly, become the strongest storm ever recorded so far east in the Atlantic. At 5 p.m., forecasters knocked Julia down to a formidable 125-mph Category 3, but Igor hung on at Category 4 with 135 mph winds.

In record books going back to 1900, there have only been nine years when two major storms of Category 3 or stronger have existed simultaneously, most recently Floyd and Gert in 1999. Only once before have two Category 4 storms prowled the waters together -- back before storms were given names on Sept. 16, 1926, with storm No. 4 and the infamous Great Miami Hurricane.

Fortunately -- for every locale but Bermuda, which lies in Igor's path -- forecasters expected both hurricanes to remain far from the Caribbean and United States.
But Read said Julia's remarkable surge underlined what remains a sobering gap in the complex business of hurricane forecasting. Scientists have whittled down track errors by half over the last decade, but gauging growth has proven dicier -- particularly the timing of a critical phase hurricane experts call rapid intensification, when wind speeds can jump several rungs in hours.

While Julia is mainly fascinating to meteorologists, the consequences can be significant for the public if forecasters badly misread a storm near landfall. Read pointed to Hurricane Charley in 2004 as an example. The storm blew up from a Category 3 to the top of the Category 4 chart at 150 mph in its last hours, then jogged slightly east to plow into Southwest Florida. ``That's my biggest fear,'' he said. ``Just because this one happened to be far out to sea, that doesn't mean they're all going to be like that.''

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Karl made landfall on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula on Wednesday, hitting a sparsely populated stretch of Caribbean coast. It came ashore about 30 miles up the coast from the Quintana Roo state capital of Chetumal, with winds of about 65 mph.

The storm then moved inland and its winds declined to about 45 mph.
Karl was expected to quickly weaken into a tropical depression as it slogged across the flat peninsula before heading back out over the Gulf of Mexico. Once in the Gulf, it was expected to strengthen into a hurricane by the end of the week and threaten the central Mexican coast.

This article was supplemented with material from The Associated Press.

The Day After Tomorrow

By DAVID BROOKS NY TIMES
Every political movement has a story. The surging Republican Party has a story, too. It is a story of virtue betrayed and innocence threatened.
Through most of its history, the narrative begins, the United States was a limited government nation, with restrained central power and an independent citizenry. But over the years, forces have arisen that seek to change America’s essential nature. These forces would replace America’s traditional free enterprise system with a European-style cradle-to-grave social democracy.
These statist forces are more powerful than ever in the age of Obama. So it is the duty for those who believe in the traditional American system to stand up and defend the Constitution. There is no middle ground. Every small new government program puts us on the slippery slope toward a smothering nanny state.
As Paul Ryan and Arthur Brooks put it in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, “The road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America’s enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.”
Ryan and Brooks are two of the most important conservative thinkers today. Ryan is the leading Republican policy entrepreneur in the House. Brooks is president of the highly influential American Enterprise Institute and a much-cited author. My admiration for both is unbounded.
Yet the story Republicans are telling each other, which Ryan and Brooks have reinforced, is an oversimplified version of American history, with dangerous implications.
The fact is, the American story is not just the story of limited governments; it is the story of limited but energetic governments that used aggressive federal power to promote growth and social mobility. George Washington used industrial policy, trade policy and federal research dollars to build a manufacturing economy alongside the agricultural one. The Whig Party used federal dollars to promote a development project called the American System.
Abraham Lincoln supported state-sponsored banks to encourage development, lavish infrastructure projects, increased spending on public education. Franklin Roosevelt provided basic security so people were freer to move and dare. The Republican sponsors of welfare reform increased regulations and government spending — demanding work in exchange for dollars.
Throughout American history, in other words, there have been leaders who regarded government like fire — a useful tool when used judiciously and a dangerous menace when it gets out of control. They didn’t build their political philosophy on whether government was big or not. Government is a means, not an end. They built their philosophy on making America virtuous, dynamic and great. They supported government action when it furthered those ends and opposed it when it didn’t.
If the current Republican Party regards every new bit of government action as a step on the road to serfdom, then the party will be taking this long, mainstream American tradition and exiling it from the G.O.P.
That will be a political tragedy. There are millions of voters who, while alarmed by the Democrats’ lavish spending, still look to government to play some positive role. They fled the G.O.P. after the government shutdown of 1995, and they would do so again.
It would be a fiscal tragedy. Over the next decade there will have to be spending cuts and tax increases. If Republicans decide that even the smallest tax increases put us on the road to serfdom, then there will never be a deal, and the country will careen toward bankruptcy.
It would also be a policy tragedy. Republicans are right to oppose the current concentration of power in Washington. But once that is halted, America faces a series of problems that can’t be addressed simply by getting government out of the way.
The social fabric is fraying. Human capital is being squandered. Society is segmenting. The labor markets are ill. Wages are lagging. Inequality is increasing. The nation is overconsuming and underinnovating. China and India are surging. Not all of these challenges can be addressed by the spontaneous healing powers of the market.
Most important, it would be an intellectual tragedy. Conservatism is supposed to be nonideological and context-driven. If all government action is automatically dismissed as quasi socialist, then there is no need to think. A pall of dogmatism will settle over the right.
Republicans are riding a wave of revulsion about what is happening in Washington. But it is also time to start talking about the day after tomorrow, after the centralizing forces are thwarted. I hope that as Arthur Brooks and Paul Ryan lead a resurgent conservatism, they’ll think about the limited-but-energetic government tradition, which stands between Barry Goldwater and François Mitterrand, but at the heart of the American experience.

Cuba’s Public-Sector Layoffs Signal Major Shift

By ELISABETH MALKIN NY Times
MEXICO CITY — In perhaps the clearest sign yet that economic change is gathering pace in Cuba, the government plans to lay off more than half a million people from the public sector in the expectation that they will move into private businesses, Cuba’s labor federation said Monday.
Over the past several months, President Raúl Castro has given stern warnings that Cuba’s economy needs a radical overhaul, beginning with its workers. With as many as one million excess employees on the state payroll, Mr. Castro has said, the government is supporting a bloated bureaucracy that has sapped motivation and long sheltered a huge swath of the nation’s workers.
“We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working,” he told the National Assembly last month.
Since permanently taking over from his brother Fidel two years ago, Mr. Castro has often pledged to make Cuba’s centralized, Soviet-style economy more efficient and open up opportunities for people. The government has handed tens of thousands of acres of state-held farmland to private farmers and begun freeing up a market for agricultural supplies. It has loosened restrictions on cellphones and other electronics, and created a few areas for private business, allowing barbers’ shops to become cooperatives and giving more licenses to private taxi drivers.
But these initial reforms have been comparatively limited, many analysts contend, and Cuba’s economy — grappling with the fallout from the global financial crisis and the aftermath of devastating hurricanes in 2008 — appears to be in dire shape.
Tourism revenues have flagged, the country has faced rice shortages and its sugar crop has been disastrous. Last year, as the government tried to hold onto desperately needed hard currency, imports fell by 37 percent.
In its statement Monday, the Cuban Workers’ Central, the country’s only recognized labor federation, openly acknowledged the nation’s troubled economy, saying that changes were “necessary and could not be delayed.”
“Cuba faces the urgency to advance economically,” the statement said. “Our state cannot and should not continue supporting companies” and other state entities, “with inflated payrolls, losses that damage the economy, which are counterproductive, generate bad habits and deform the workers’ conduct,” the labor federation added.
To that end, the government has previously said that it would grant new licenses to entrepreneurs, vastly expanding the kinds of businesses that can be run privately. But the announcement on Monday — saying that the layoffs would be completed by next March — suggested that Mr. Castro now intended to move ahead vigorously.
“What’s stunning today is that they put a date and they put a number on it — 500,000,” said Philip Peters, who follows Cuba for the Lexington Institute. “It’s a very substantial decision,” he added. “It’s a major shift towards a larger private sector in a socialist economy.”
New openings in the private sector would be welcomed by many Cubans, who are weary of the island’s stagnation and desperate for new opportunities.
Even so, the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of jobs — and with them the security of a salary, workplace meals and the chance to make extra money through tips in some cases — would come as a shock.
While Cubans have access to free health care, education and subsidized food and housing, the government has already cut some of the subsidies that many Cubans rely on to supplement their average monthly wage of about $20. And given the government’s record of introducing new areas for enterprise only haltingly, it is unclear that new jobs can be created as quickly as the public sector positions will be cut.
“They are in the process of massively reducing the size and participation of the state in Cuban life,” said Julia E. Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who was in Havana a couple of weeks ago. “There is a belief that there is so much pent-up demand on the one hand and so much skill on the other that the private sector will absorb them pretty rapidly.”
Ms. Sweig said that it appeared the government was preparing to open up a vast range of activities, including light manufacturing like furniture making and garment production. Cuba’s underground economy already provides a broad array of products, she said, but under the new arrangement the government would begin to tax those new businesses.
To absorb all those workers who will be laid off, the federation said that hundreds of thousands were expected to move into some form of private enterprise over the next few years.
Just how strongly the government plans to hold onto its traditional economic philosophies are a matter of debate.
In an interview published online by the Atlantic last week, Fidel Castro said that the Cuban model no longer worked. But in a speech at the University of Havana shortly after his remarks were published, he said that he had been misinterpreted and that what he meant was that capitalism did not work.
Ms. Sweig, who was present for the first interview, said that Mr. Castro’s speech correcting himself was not backtracking. Instead, she said his words were most likely intended to reassure Cubans that he did not intend to import American-style capitalism. “It is a hybrid that is evolving,” she said.
Still, John Kavulich, a senior adviser for the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, warned that it would be difficult for Cuba to follow through on the full scale of its announcement. On a practical level, he asked, would the government be able to import all the tools the new entrepreneurs or small manufacturing cooperatives will need?
There is also a larger question that goes to the heart of Cuba’s ideology, Mr. Kavulich said. “The Cuban government is going to allow and by definition encourage people to go into private sector opportunities,” he said. “What happens when some people get rich?”
“The government is going to have to determine whether it will allow and embrace success, not just opportunity,” he said.

Denounce this nut-job or the world will burn
America is in danger of letting reckless and fanatic pastor Terry Jones' plan to burn the Koran drag it into a destructive war with Islam

ANDREW SULLIVAN London Sunday Times
One of the stranger things I learnt as a student of history was the notion that at some point the forces pushing for war and conflict become “unstoppable”. I often wondered what that could possibly mean.
Was no one capable of steering, say, a newly powerful Germany in the 20th century away from conflict with Britain and France? Was Stalin’s rise truly impossible to resist? And the answer to the question is always, it seems to me: things can be stopped. Nothing is ever inevitable.
But the cycle towards conflict can be harder and harder to restrain by one person or one speech or one diplomatic manoeuvre once the human psyche — poisoned by nationalism or fascism or racism or religious fanaticism — whips itself into a fervour of such emotion that rationality is drowned out.
I think of 9/11 — a hideous, transformative atrocity that by its emotional power shut down reason until we found our soldiers embedded for ever in Kandahar and the deserts of Iraq. I am not writing this to judge. I was a victim of it myself. And there is no emotion more powerful or harder to resist than a genuinely righteous one.
Except, perhaps, a self-righteous one. That’s why religious fanaticism is still so dangerous. In its more zealous forms, it does not just overwhelm rationality; it justifies such a shutting-down by the highest authority humans can concoct or imagine — the divine. Europe discovered this the awful way — centuries of bloody civil religious warfare before the exhaustion of secular moderation emerged from the ashes.
America was founded on this knowledge — of the dreadful violence that religion fused with politics can unleash. And so its first amendment forbade any government sanction of any faith in particular. It drew a line across an ocean, and vowed never to return. And the corollary of that separation of church and state was total religious freedom of expression and association, freedom from the coercion or sanction of government, protected by the highest law of the land.
The country grew both more innocent of religious war and more faithful, blessed with such enormous space that any prophet or fool, priest or fanatic, could find a place somewhere to flourish. Even unspeakable acts of religious persecution — such as those endured by the early Mormons — were dealt with in the end by simply moving on.
Nothing un-American is represented by Pastor Terry Jones, and it is vital to defend his right to burn Korans, as it is to condemn him for it And so the notion that some fringe religious nut-job could set up a congregation of a couple of dozen people and decide to organise a “burn the Koran day” is not exactly bizarre or even rare in American history. This is a country where crosses have been burnt in public spaces, where David Koresh’s Waco compound went up in flames, where Pastor Fred Phelps can show up at an Aids funeral with posters declaring, “God hates fags”, and where neo-Nazis have a constitutional right to march down any high street they want, given the same permission as any other group.
When an atheist blogger decided to take a consecrated Catholic host, stab it with a rusty nail and throw it in the rubbish bin, he was perfectly entitled to do it.
And the only legitimate response is for someone else to point out his insensitivity, to use good speech against bad speech, rather than to suppress the hatred altogether.
Nothing un-American is represented by Pastor Terry Jones, and it is vital to defend his right to burn Korans, as it is to condemn him for it. The question is whether this American experience is solely American any more, and therefore whether America’s historical exceptionalism is sustainable in a new age of religious global conflict.
In a globalised world of instant and unfiltered social media, where a long war is being fought against religious fanatics who despise everything the first amendment stands for, the innocence of America is being lost, because America now reaches deep into societies with none of the cultural and historical legacy of the American experiment.
We can blame the media for hyping Jones’s actions, for paying attention to such a marginal crank. But does anyone think that if major news organisations refused to cover Koran-burnings, or some other stunt, someone with a mobile phone and an internet connection wouldn’t? There is no stopping these images of bigotry; just as there is no stopping the rights of those who wish to disseminate them.
Much of this, it seems to me, we can do nothing about. We should not even think of infringing the first amendment to appease Islamist hysterics in Pakistan or Afghanistan. But Americans, especially conservative and religious Americans, must speak out far more forcefully against the fringes in their ranks.
Alas, they have been doing the opposite. By stirring up the controversy over the mosque near Ground Zero in New York, many Republicans too glibly conflated all American Muslims with the mass murderers of 9/11 in the ears of their less educated followers. This is far too dangerous to go uncontested.
We need more Republicans like Colin Powell, George W Bush’s first secretary of state, to stand up for the New York mosque and for American Muslims, whose admirable conduct these past nine years has been in stark contrast to much of the extremism in Europe.
We need Republican leaders aggressively to counter myths that the president too is a Muslim, to reiterate at the same time that being a Muslim and being an American is no contradiction and no conflict, and that our war is absolutely not with Islam, but with those who pervert it and take it to violent extremes.
We are in a religious war; but it is emphatically not a war of one religion against another. It is for freedom of religion against those who would destroy it by violence and tyranny. In the reckless grandstanding of these days, we are losing this distinction. If we lose it, we are lost ourselves.