onparkstreet

“But the Democrats have a policy response: they are about to vote on hundreds of billions in new taxes, a regimen of new fines and mandates for businesses, and a takeover of the health-care industry.”

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Jennifer Rubin at Commentary on the newest unemployment figures and the health care bill.

An unwieldy bill – of truly gargantuan proportions – hastily and stealthily voted on, in the cover of night, er, I mean, on Saturday or Sunday. Sounds prudent. The very picture of competence. The height of clear thinking, modesty and servant-of-the-people servanting! Why worry? What could possibly go wrong?

Update: HEALTHCARE BILL PASSES HOUSE, 220-215. Elections matter. Well, yeah, kinda. Also, please do read Michael Kennedy’s comment in the comments section, below.

Posted without comment

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Well, not really. Is this really so? Will he not attend?

1. Germany is going to have to wait longer than expected for US President Barack Obama’s first official visit. Citing government sources in Berlin, Reuters reported on Friday that Obama will not attend the anniversary festivities marking two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. –  Spiegel Online/International

2. Spouses and even children–researchers combing the Stasi files after the Wall fell were horrified to discover the payroll included 10,000 informers under the age of 18–were potential eyes and ears of the regime; friends were suspect; and strangers were presumed to be Stasi until proven innocent, and probably well beyond that. “Relations between people were conditioned by the fact that one or the other of you could be one of them,” writes Australian journalist Anna Funder in Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. “Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence.” –  Glenn Garvin, Reason

3. The pivotal scene in the magnificent new ( OPS: it’s a 2006 film) German movie The Lives of Others–which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last week–takes place in an elevator. The year is 1984, and the occupant of the elevator is a severe and profoundly intelligent senior functionary of the East German security service named Wiesler. A stray word about the inhumanity of Stasi interrogations, or a joke about the dictator Erich Honecker, is all Wiesler needs to hear to make a simple mark on a piece of paper that will ruin someone’s life. – John Podhoretz, The Weekly Standard

UPDATE: Communist-era store windows, via boing boing.

“All children live in blocks of flats or in houses,” says Amalie. “Every house has rooms. All the houses together make one big house. This big house is our country. Our fatherland.”

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From the Herta Müller novel The Passport. As previously mentioned on chicagoboyz, Herta Müller is the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. The above excerpted passage continues:

Amalie points at the map. “This is our Fatherland,” she says. With her fingertip she searches for the black dots on the map. “These are the towns of our Fatherland,” says Amalie. “The towns are the rooms of this big house, our country. Our fathers and mothers live in our houses. They are our parents. Every child has its parents. Just as the father in the house in which we live is our father, so Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our country. And just as the mother in the house in which we live is our mother, so Comrade Elena Ceausescu is the mother of our country. Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of all the children. And Comrade Elena Ceausescu is the mother of all the children. All the children love comrade Nicolae and comrade Elena, because they are their parents.”

Chilling, no?

On the emotional nature of work and business

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As a medical student during the early nineties, I used to ‘decompress’ by reading light-hearted fiction; warm, simple stories about normal human problems. No War and Peace for me. Too ambitious. At the time, I liked to read Maeve Binchy. You’ve probably seen her fiction displayed in bookstores. One story in particular, titled “Marble Arch”, about a young female entrepreneur, struck a chord. By a lot of unglamorous hard work, she’s learned to make a living selling hand-stitched handbags. Her family is nonplussed that she left a salaried position selling cosmetics to strike out on her own:

“Her mother had worked regularly and quietly in a restaurant. She said that her one ambition was that Sophie should never have a job which meant walking and standing, and dealing with dirty plates and difficult customers. She was happy when Sophie was selling nice, fresh, good-smelling oils and paints for people’s faces. She was worried when she seemed to become a person of no account sitting in a little stall shouting her wares to the public.”

It’s an attitude I heard growing up – where a nice safe credentialed job was lauded, while business was seen as mercurial and unsafe. Well, starting a small business is risky. The story continues:

“Sophie sighed, thinking how little everyone around her knew about business…….Really she had made very little impression on anyone, with her own businesslike attitudes. Nobody realized that it wasn’t easy to be organized and disciplined and to make money. It took a lot of time, and worry, and ate into all those hours you could be sitting around and enjoying yourself. Nobody ever got drawn into her belief that people might be on this earth to work hard.”

Nobody ever got drawn into her belief that people might be on this earth to work hard.  Sounds like every lecture ever given to me – as a young person – by my parents. I think they were exasperated by my youthful ideas about work and life. I thought, I really thought, that everything should be sweet, easy and pleasant. Ah, that dangerous expectation: that work should always and everywhere be fulfilling, whatever that means.

“When the President chose a partisan path in his speech, he pushed the real debate behind closed doors. This is now a debate among House and Senate Democrats”

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The real action is not taking place at markup.  It is taking place behind closed doors, away from the markup.  When the President chose a partisan path in his speech, he pushed the real debate behind closed doors.  This is now a debate among House and Senate Democrats.  Republicans can influence that debate only to the extent they can change the decision-making process of Democratic members, since everyone assumes that almost every Republican will vote no. 

Keith Hennessey

The comments to the above linked post are utterly depressing. Elections have consequences: I wonder how the ‘Obama’ libertarians and the ‘teach the GOP a lesson’ conservatives are feeling about their respective votes, now? Yes, in a moment of frustration I am being unfair; I barely managed to pull the lever for McCain. In the comments, Keith Hennessey shows up to make the following suggestion:

Call your Representative and Senators (in their DC office). Don’t email them. Call them. Email is largely ignored. Phone calls are not. As an individual citizen, your greatest impacts are (1) speaking up at town meetings, (2) calling, (3) meeting with your representatives and/or their staff, (3) voting, and (4) letters to the editor.

Each individual call has a trivial impact. If enough people call, it can have a big effect.