The Obama Code

While the pundits are shrieking at each other over what President Obama said and whether Bobby Jindal is really Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock, George Lakoff, the linguist, published a really interesting piece called "The Obama Code," just hours before Obama addressed a joint session of Congress.

George Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley and was insistent that the reason why Democrats weren't getting through to voters was that their messages weren't framed with underlying values. He deconstructs what he means by this in "The Obama Code," and quite clearly exposes the values Obama is communicating without expressing them explicitly: values over programs; progressive values are American values; new bipartisanship (yes, he is really trying to end some of those useless battles despite Bobby Jindal and Michael Steele's stupidity this week); government that works; morality and economics fit together, etc. It's a good read.

In conclusion, Lakoff says: " The Obama Code is based on seven deep, insightful, and subtle intellectual moves. What President Obama has been attempting in his speeches is a return to the original frames of the Framers, reconstituting what it means to be an American, to be patriotic, to be a citizen and to share in both the sacrifices and the glories of our country. In seeking "bipartisan" support, he is looking beyond political affiliations to those who share those values on particular issues. In his economic plan, he is attempting to realign our economy with the moral missions of government: protection and empowerment for all."

I'm so excited: my Kindle just arrived, a gracious gift from some friends: Thanks, Runi, Dev, Christine, and Rob. I've already downloaded my first two books: The Ascent of Money and The Outliers. I won't be blogging for a few days since I will be off to New Hampshire to a retreat to discuss social justice issues.

Whose Reality Is It , Anyway?

There are multiple realities, a common experience, especially after eight years of Bush where the rich lived one kind of life, ordinary working people another, and the media projected something entirely different.

I heard one "ordinary" person interviewed on NPR express relief that we finally had a State of the Union-type address without any mention of 911.

That creeps out Fox News, but somehow allows the rest of us to wonder which is more devastating to us personally and as a people: losing our jobs, home, health care, and our children's futures or living in a constant state of "orange" over inflated threats of terrorism?

After eight years we have grown accustomed to fearing those darkish men with Middle Eastern accents. On the first flight I took after 911, two South Asian men, both exceptionally well dressed, who along with me were flying from JFK to San Francisco on an early Saturday morning (not exactly prior time for a media event) were taken out of the waiting room, not once, but twice before boarding. Shame and embarrassment were what I read on their faces.

It's easier for white people to choose dark skinned people as the enemy, so long as you aren't one of them.

But the real enemies are white guys in suits: bankers, lawyers, mortgage executives, guys with MBAs from Harvard, Wharton, and Yale, the clever folks who created new ways to make money, created new property to own. The insecurity and devastation that the alleged "best and brightest" have brought us is far more undermining than most of what Jack Bauer might be imagining.

That's why we need regulation, and the only entity large enough to regulate is the federal government. So, shut up, Republicans. When money is at stake, greed and avarice appear. Then there is no such thing as self-regulation.

First Impressions

President Obama spoke to us as adults. Jindal speaks to us like we were children. I watched the speeches on MSNBC and noted on the graph below the picture how partisan the reactions of viewers were to the Jindal response. There will always be opposition. We need opposition to clarify, to define. Hopefully opposition will make the solutions finer. However, this opposition seems petulant, like a stubborn child, although with cameras rolling even John McCain was forced to leap to his feet in seeming approval of the President's words and ideas. Then why did all of those Republicans vote against the stimulus package, and Michael Steele, Chair of the Republican National Committee threaten to withhold funds from the three Senators who didn't?

It warmed me to see Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Congress tonight and to see the genuine affection extended to her by the President.

Obama is charming. He has substance. He seems to have aged already. Did you notice how gray his hair has gotten?

It doesn't seem possible to do it all: stimulate the economy, provide health care, and offer the best in education. I don't believe in American exceptionalism, which so infused the President's speech. But he is giving us hope, and for now, that is certainly an awful lot.

Community Action

I admit to being jittery yesterday, working alone in my office, trying to deal with all of the unexpected: someone tried to charge $8,000 through our website, and tried over 200 times. The filters worked, but I unexpectedly spent time increasing the available protections through the guidance of a young, patient support person over the telephone. Thank you, Traver, for your kindness and patience.

All day long the day got more complicated. One vendor said a bill was past due; that required finding an image of the canceled check and sending it out. A conference call had to be arranged for 9:00 pm. Everyone I spoke with was feeling overwhelmed. Somehow I managed to admit that I was and with that out in the air, others confessed their unease.

On my way to a late afternoon meeting the traffic was horrendous, meaning that I had to get off the highway and wind my way through the back roads to get there during rush hour. I didn't have the confidence I ordinarily have while driving, so the added complexity of driving on streets with stop lights and cross streets made me wary.

And I was late. I hate being late. My arrival did constitute a quorum at least, so I was welcomed.

And then the meeting began, a group of concerned citizens who care about our communities, diverse, every shade of skin, every accent, every primary identity. We wanted to do something to relieve the community of its angst in a way that created community.

As the conversation continued, as each of us participated, and everyone did in a lively discussion, all of the jitteriness disappeared. All of it dissipated.

Because we had gotten outside of ourselves and become a creative, living, consensus.

We are going to explore having public hearings where people from around the county can come and tell their stories about housing: buying an inflated valued home that required too much income to maintain, predatory lending and how it feels to be conned into financing, losing a job and therefore losing a home, and perhaps the most pervasive, fear of losing a home. What we realized was that because of the complicity involved in many of these predatory mortgage deals, homeowners knowing that their income was been inflated on the application forms, people feel shamed into silence. We want to get through that silence and listen.

We want to let everyone know they are not alone. We are not alone. And our insecurity and fear are isolating. We have to work through it and find the commonality.

Releasing Anxiety

Yesterday I participated in a teleconference meditation to relieve ourselves of the anxiety, fear, insecurity, and negativity that continued and unrelenting stress has produced. Mary Swanson, a deeply wise spiritual woman, led the meditation for world peace. As the hour-long experience progressed, I felt enormously unburdened.

As Americans we are accustomed to being consumers. Now we are consuming anxiety and filling ourselves up with imaginings of worst case scenarios. According to Mary, by looping negativity through our minds and bodies, we are not only pushing out our own creativity, love, and kindness--the qualities we need to get through difficult times, but we are filling the planet with energy that will only hurt us and keep us apart.

Energy is real.

We must be conscious to bring love and kindness into ourselves, not allowing anxiety, insecurity, and self-doubt to consume us, and consequently making the world a more loving and kinder place.

Mary will be leading these meditations on the fourth Sunday of every month. Check out her website for more information.

A Failure of Political Will

The collapse of the US and European economic systems that we call the Great Depression of 1929 was the result of ignorance; no one understood just how a global economy worked. The Great Depression heralded in domestic and international regulation of finance and commerce. By the time FDR came into office in 1933, after years of inaction, unemployment was stunningly high; there remain discrepancies in how it was measured. Some place it as high as 25% of workers, or 37% of all non-farm workers. We aren't there yet. But don't take solace in that.

This time we understand what happened and there are a lot of wagging fingers.

Here's an explanation of the world financial collapse. We lived beyond our means. Housing was a big part of it: unregulated and often predatory, discriminatory lending offered fast commissions to unscrupulous brokers. Those brokers enabled the purchase of over-priced, inflated value homes to buyers who couldn't afford to live there unless the value of the homes continued to rise and everything in their precarious financial world stayed steady. The rich, the middle income, the working class--everyone lived beyond their means. The predatory lending, however, was aimed at the poorest, and was clearly racial. It has a name "reverse redlining."

These unregulated, often predatory, discriminatory mortgages offered quick profits to the mortgage companies and banks that bundled these mortgages up and resold them as a new form of unregulated paper that didn't require reserves. Everyone was buying up these securities--banks, countries, hedge funds--and guess what?

George Soros, the international financier and hedge fund operator, came out of retirement in the summer of 2007 to personally guide his company's voyage through these turbulent times. Back in April 2008, Soros said: “I consider this the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime.” This is a man who escaped the Nazis in Hungary where extermination was especially effective, so when he speaks in hyperbole, we should listen.

At a private dinner at Columbia University Friday night, Soros had some gloomy predictions. Why should we listen to him? He is an extravagantly generous philanthropist who through a network of foundations supports projects in 50 nations, spending $400 million annually. He makes that much money that he can afford to give away $400 million annually. And in 2008, the worst performing year in stock market history, Soros' Quantum Endowment Fund, a hedge fund, made 8% whereas the average hedge fund lost 18%.

He didn't invest with Bernie Madoff. (Just as an aside. According to reports, Madoff had not make a single investment on behalf of his clients in at least the last 13 years.)

Deregulation of the financial markets, something that started in the 1980s under Ronald Raygun, began the progression that created this mess, according to Soros. A failure of regulation has brought about the "end of the free-market model" that has dominated capitalist societies. Just as the Communist economies collapsed in the 1980s, so ours is collapsing now.

Although no one has ever seen anything like this, there is agreement that radical solutions are needed. Forget these Republican governors who are refusing to take stimulus funds to extend unemployment for their residents. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, are saying NO to unemployment extensions, but might take construction funds. Mississippi and Louisiana are on the bottom of US states economically, and their leadership will keep those states so poor. In 2007 13% of the US population lived in poverty; Mississippi was well over the national average at 20.6% and Louisiana, still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, was at 18.6%. So I doubt these guys will become national leaders for their political savvy.

We need the political will to tax the rich, the rich who got so much richer during the free market orgy these last thirty years. We need to turn back the Bush tax cuts. We need to tax the gains of those who gamble in hedge funds, yes, even Mr. Soros, at ordinary income rates. There is no other way. Nationalizing zombie banks will wipe out all of the taxpayers who invested their retirement funds into "safe" investments like Bank of America, CitiBank, and other failing banks. Is that fair? We have to trust other, smarter people to make those decisions. Pouring money into insolvent, zombie banks without accountability and requirements for lending certainly isn't working.

What next?

Two things will keep me going today. First, at 5:00 pm est I will participate in a teleconference mediation for world peace. Mary Swanson, a dear friend, and gifted spiritual woman, will be leading it. Browse through her website: http://maryswanson.net/. You can sign up to participate by going to her website and clicking on "Make Payment," and sign up for a single "teleclass." The power of the collective is enormous. Remember, none of us can get through this alone.

The second thing that I am looking forward to: The Academy Awards. Give me some glamour!!!

A Story of Skulls and What Goes On Inside

Late yesterday afternoon I walked into my "zombie" bank with deposits from work, rumors of nationalization still ringing in my ears, those rumors causing wild fluctuations in the stock market. There was a line. There were only three tellers open although several were just sitting there zombie-like with "closed, next window please" signs protecting them from any expectation of service.

A woman in her forties, was just finishing filling out her deposit slip when I walked into the line. I gestured for her to go ahead of me.

"In this world, right now, we need a little fairness," I smiled.

Which began our conversation about how in these hard times, everyone is suffering, so we have to be kind and open with each other, or else there will be nothing much to live for.

Then she told me her story: About eighteen months ago, she was driving her mother to her four-hour-a-week job when a rock rolled off a truck and came smashing through the windshield of her car. Within seconds, the rock was embedded in her mother's skull and she died immediately.

"We just never know. One moment she was alive, and the next she was dead."

The story was a reminder of just how little control we have over our lives. To cement this ubiquitous realization, we happened upon Parker Palmer on Bill Moyers' Journal last night. His insights and clarity on illusion and how illusion leads us to darkness are extraordinary. He provided comfort and a path to get through these crises. It's worth a quiet view, perhaps sitting alongside someone you love, as we did last night.

Another aspect of skulls came up in a February 19 story in the New York Times. The descendants of Geronimo want the "skull" of the secret "Skull & Bones" society at Yale returned to the family. Legend has it that George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott S. Bush, stole the skull from the grave of this legendary Native American and brought it to Yale along with other stolen artifacts, which remain on secret display. Oh, boys will be boys!

Respect for human life and the understanding that we are all connected, well, that gene seems to be missing from the Bush lineage.

How Much Change Is In Change We Can Believe In

I adore Propublica.org, the investigative journalism site that shares its finds with NPR and the New York Times and then posts everything on its website. It's really cool, which is why it's a featured blog on mine.

Propublica has launched a new feature: ChangeTracker. It follows any changes made on a variety of Obama websites--whitehouse.gov, Recovery.gov, financialstability.gov--and here is why it's so fabulous: the software employed, something called Versionista places the original text next to the modified text so that we can see what has been changed.

This certainly will signal movements within the administration that otherwise we wouldn't even notice. This is a use of technology that can inform the electorate and perhaps help the Obama administration be more accountable. Maybe that's why the Republicans hate technology except when it comes to munitions and fundraising.

Now for those of you who are out of work or under-employed, you can sign up for a feature that alerts you to every change on every tracked website. Or you can take the Versionista software and follow other sites, hopefully not an estranged spouse's Facebook page.

I chose the daily update so that I can continue to function in the real world. Try it, you might like it.

What's Wrong With the Media? Plenty!

OK, so I haven't been sleeping well: too much on my mind although at least I have stopped checking for anyone I ever knew on the interactive Madoff client list. (My husband just handed me the March 2009 issue of Conde Nast Portfolio which has a cover story about Bernie, which I will read later tonight.) This morning I gave up pretending to sleep at 5:00 and while working out to try to energize myself, I channel surfed.

Everything on cable news was about Eric Holder's speech yesterday on race. What disturbed me was that there wasn't much difference in the way it was reported on Fox News, Morning Joe, and CNN.

The sound bite was: Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

And most of the commentators, foaming at the mouth, were furious that Holder, the first African American Attorney General serving the first African American President, seemed so pessimistic about the state of race relations in this country. How can that be? Didn't white people vote for Barack Obama? Doesn't that mean that we are post-racial?

First, let's look at the numbers of white people who did vote for Obama. It wasn't a majority. According to Pollster.com: There is considerable variation in the percentage of whites who voted for Obama. Where African Americans made up less than 20% of the vote (according to exit polls), whites varied from 30% to 60% in their support for Obama but with no relationship to the size of the African American vote. As the African American electorate rose above 20%, white support for Obama fell sharply to barely 10%.

So let's not delude ourselves into believing we are living in some kind of suddenly racially clean world.

Second, how about reading what Eric Holder actually said? I suspect that none of the commentators did, because every one of them wildly distorted a very nuanced and interesting speech. It was too long for them, probably. But if we aren't in a post-racial world, perhaps we can insist on being in a post-sound bite world.

Here is the text of the speech.

Not only did Holder say we didn't know how to speak with each other comfortably about race, he noted that although we are working together, we live voluntarily segregated lives:

As a nation we have done a pretty good job in melding the races in the workplace. We work with one another, lunch together and, when the event is at the workplace during work hours or shortly thereafter, we socialize with one another fairly well, irrespective of race. And yet even this interaction operates within certain limitations. We know, by "American instinct" and by learned behavior, that certain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks, at best embarrassment, and, at worst, the questioning of one’s character. And outside the workplace the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some fifty years ago. This is truly sad. Given all that we as a nation went through during the civil rights struggle it is hard for me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated.

And just when we thought we might be willing to take a baby step towards racial harmony, that paragon of journalism, the New York Post, published a cartoon, which is at best ambiguous, and at its worst, downright incendiary and racist. You can find the cartoon yourself. It disgusted me.

Anxiety, Anxiety, Anxiety

Like a fool I checked my retirement plan on-line yesterday. I had avoided doing it since back in October when everything started collapsing. I needed to waste some time before leaving for work, because I had to stop at the bank to make a deposit. I don't even know the user name and password. I have to fumble through piles of papers to find it. That should have been a deterrent. It should have been a sign to just read through another blog, change my sweater, or email a friend on the West Coast who might still be sleeping.

Since October, I've lost 38% of my retirement fund, which is conservatively invested in diversified stocks along with bonds and fixed income investments.

This is the reason why we should never privatize Social Security.

When I did get to work, my daughter sent me the long email the president of her college sent to students. It was about how the significant operating deficit because of the loss of an undisclosed portion of the college's endowment would impact the daily life at school.

As I read through the email, I realized that ordinarily, institutions offer early retirement as an incentive to older employees whose salaries once freed could be used to bring in younger and less expensive workers. But the problem now with buying out older employees is the problem I faced yesterday morning: profound losses of retirement investments. The college president mentioned that a different kind of incentive was being developed to help people make a "voluntary" decision to retire.

I didn't like the way that sounded.

And then there was the NPR story about "zombie banks." "A zombie bank keeps draining bailout capital from the government but doesn't respond with any meaningful lending that helps the economy recover."

My bank takes bailout money. Is it making loans? Last week I closed another bank account because suddenly the bank started charging me $10 a month. I didn't notice at first, but when I did, I went into the branch and asked what was happening. No one knew, so I withdrew all of the money and closed the account. That bank took bailout money. Was that bank a "zombie," too?

Years ago I read all three books of Isaac Asimov's Foundation in three days when I was trying to quit smoking cigarettes. I needed some perspective because I had just finished taking the New York Bar Exam. I recall only one aspect of Asimov's premise: a society collapses when a worker accidentally drops a wrench into a nuclear reactor. No one knows how to stop the chain reaction, no one knows how anything works, it has all become so complicated.

It's all become so complicated.

Another Reason Why I Want Sarah Palin to Disappear

In an inane interview with Greta Van Susteren, Bristol Palin speaks inarticulately about being a teenage mother. Then Sarah arrives on the set to make sure that Bristol has given out the right message.

With the California legislature deadlocked over how to fill an obscene budget shortfall, because Republicans refuse to raise any taxes, with our society inordinately sexualized, and with other forms of activities just too damned expensive for our young people, abstinence is not a "realistic" message, even according to Bristol, the nation's most famous teenage mother.

The Palin family soap opera is one I can easily miss.

When It Smells, It's Usually Rotten

When then-governor Rod Blagojevich played the race card and nominated Roland Burris to be the replacement for Barack Obama in the US Senate, representing the State of Illinois, people blanched. At least I did. Although on the surface, Burris appeared to have qualifications: he served as attorney general and as comptroller for the state, he had run unsuccessfully for several state-wide offices, and he claimed to be clean. However, having been nominated by Blagojevich, everyone considered the nomination tainted, since the governor had already been indicted for trying to sell Obama's senate seat.

First, the Senate Democrats said they wouldn't seat Burris. Then they recanted. Some press revealed some not so pleasant aspects about him. For reasons we don't know, Burris was sworn in and seated on January 15, 2009.

After Blagojevich was impeached and convicted, Burris' story began to change. OK, Rod's brother might have asked him to raise money for Blagojevich's campaign, more than once actually. And now, today, Burris admitted that he even tried to raise money for the former governor.

What does this mean? On the same day that yet another Ponzi scheme was uncovered--the Stanford Financial Group out of Texas-- a mere $8 billion this time, President Obama signed the stimulus package into law which will haunt America through several generations, America's car industry announced job layoffs of 50,000, and the stock market fell nearly 300 points, America needs legislators we can trust.

Recently I've been struck by the desperation of some men's ambition, their need to leave an imprint on the world. When that ambition is solely self-centered and corrupting, then we can do without the imprint, please.

February 20 update: Burris' list of lobbying clients leaves out important names when he appeared at Rod' s impeachment hearing.

Che

We tried to sit through all 4 hours and 37 minutes of Che tonight after a martini and dinner. I was willing to stay, but my husband, a veteran of combat, could not bear another minute. As soon as the word "intermission" came onto the screen, he was out of there.

I don't know if it's fair to critique a film having seen only half of it, even if the half was two hours and forty five minutes long. Che is based upon "Reminiscenses of the Cuban Revolutionary War" by Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine doctor who joined Fidel Castro and at the age of thirty defeated Batista, the corrupt leader of mafia-dominated Cuba.

Benicio Del Toro looks eerily like Che, and watching him on screen, his moody integrity, his righteousness, his belief in revolution, his discipline, is fascinating. Del Toro won best supporting actor for his work in Traffic in 2001, and his cinema personas are varied and subtle. My problem with Che is not Del Toro. It's with creating an icon who is too opaque to be real in any sense. Although the scenes where Che can hardly breathe because of his asthma are truly breathtaking, and at times, I believed I could smell him, because of the hardship of living and fighting under cover in the countryside, who was Che remains elusive.

Why did Che join the Cuban revolution? For those of us who read the book or saw the film "The Motorcycle Diaries," we know that this brilliant yet restless doctor was radicalized when he traveled through Latin America. But there is no explanation, no insight into his character in the film Che to inform the audience about Che pre-revolution. That is a flaw, a big flaw.

I liked the switching back and forth between the battles of the revolution and a series of interviews, speeches, and events surrounding Che's visit to New York City in December 1964. Those New York scenes are in black and white and done in cinema verite, contrasted with the sprawling color of the battles for independence in Cuba. Watch for the cars in Cuba. They are what we think of when we think of Cuba.

There is no sex. There is no humor. In one interview with Steven Soderbergh, he said that it wasn't fun on the set. He was terrified of anyone getting hurt because of all of the explosives. However, the cinematography, Peter Andrews, is stunning and the structure of the scenes, despite the monotony of the battles and the poverty, worked to keep my interest. Obviously, it didn't keep my husband's.

I don't know if I will go back for Part Two. We did see the play "School of the Americas" written by Jose Rivera, the screenwriter for the film "The Motorcycle Diaries." It was a production during the 2005-2006 season for Labyrinth Theater, and it was grueling in its detail about the capture and death of Che. I suspect that Soderbergh will be even more grueling in his portrayal of Che's capture, interrogation, and assassination in 1967 in a one-room school house in the jungles of Bolivia.

I was looking forward to a scene when Che and Fidel triumphantly enter Havana in victory, but learned that it just doesn't happen. I doubt I will go back for more fighting in the Bolivian jungles this time.Of course, we won't in our lifetimes know what really happened, since fifty years afterwards, the history of the Cuban Revolution remains shrouded in histories that are still too self-serving to be truthful yet.

For Profit Prisons Suck

In yet another fraud, this time involving at least two judges in Pennsylvania, we are learning more about how corrupting the transformation of essential government functions into private businesses for profit can be. This seems to have been one of the chief objectives of ideological Republican law making.

This time, however, the corruption becomes sickening, because it involves our children.

Operating under the rather benign name "Western PA Child Care" and "PA Child Care," these companies operate juvenile facilities for wayward teens. But the companies were wayward, kicking back $2.6 million to two judges to reward the jurists for sentencing kids to time rather than compel participation in programs that would keep families intact. The real pity is that the children sentenced to time in Child Care come from some of the most economically devoured communities in Western Pennsylvania.

As if Halliburton in Iraq and Blackwater, aka Xe, anywhere it operated, didn't provide enough evidence to warn us about the dangers of removing essential functions out of government into profit companies, especially companies whose stock might not be publicly traded and therefore shrouded in secrecy. Accountability, remember? Xe will now be shifting its work from providing security to training governments in security. And we know how much Blackwater aka Xe, appreciates those rules contained in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Remember New Orleans post Katrina? Remember Baghdad?

The Face of Economic Upheaval

I've been in Boston at meetings and yesterday, while waiting for the Commuter Rail to take me to visit my college-aged daughter, I met up with two people. The first was a young man, maybe 22 or so, who slightly frenzied, came up to me and asked me for a dollar so that he could get to Worcester. On Saturdays, the trains only run hourly, and we had about fifteen minutes left. At first I refused. I was alone in a stairway leading to the platform and didn't want to open my wallet in front of him. Who knows. But after he went through the door onto the platform, I took out a dollar and went to find him. He was asking everyone.

I came back to the stairway to get out of the wind and noise. The young man returned and told me that it had been his intention to get everyone on the platform to give him just a dollar, not a big contribution, so that he would have the $6.75 needed for the train fare. A woman, who turned out to be 49, who had two small children with her, gave him some coins. I threw in the remainder. He thanked us genuinely. Something important was in Worcester.

The other woman and I noted that at least we knew he was using the money for train fare and nothing else. And then our conversation began. It turns out that she is the grandmother of the two children--a boy in kindergarten and a girl in first grade. Her daughter and husband lost their jobs, then their home, and she took them in. They are trying to keep their lives together. And suddenly at the age of 49, she is in charge of two young children once again.

She was exhausted, so I had the children sit with me on the train so that she could rest. They were a handful, vying for my attention and approval.

Her daughter would have become homeless if not for having the opportunity to move back in with her own mother. Although the little girl told me that her new school wasn't as good as her old one, at least this family had the option of extending. Many families don't. And that's what my new friend and I spoke about. The economic hardship of this failed economy took on a face yesterday: a young man desperate to get to Worcester and a mother helping her adult daughter.

Will the stimulus package work? I don't know, and frankly, I don't think anyone knows. But we can help: we can open our wallets, we can open our homes, we can open our hearts. Because it's up to us, creating communities that care.

I'm Not Coming But You Are

New research reveals that women are far less likely than men to have an orgasm during sex whether casual, repeated without intentions, or in a relationship. Ummmm, I hope none of the stimulus package is going to fund further research into this arena. (By the way, here is a great chart from propublica.org on what the stimulus plan really offers.) A stop by Starbucks on an afternoon would confirm this research in a min-second.

According to a post "The Orgasm Gap" on TheDailyBeast.com written by Hannah Seligson: "In a study to be published later this year by W.W. Norton in the book Families as They Really Are, researchers found that college women have orgasms half as often as men on repeat hookups (meaning hooking up more than twice) and only a third of the time in first-time hookups. And they concluded that a lack of sexual reciprocity could be a key reason for this orgasm gap. The study was conducted by a team of researchers from Stanford and Indiana University."

Further research explains why women are less likely than men to have orgasms even in committed relationships, although women report having 80% of the orgasms men have: men don't care.

Michael Kimmel, author of Guyland and a leading writer on men and masculinity, sees the male psychology on orgasms as comparable to housework: “Men don’t pull their weight on either front because no one makes them.” But he also sees sexual asymmetry as an impoverished view of sex.

Advice to my daughter and her friends: Be assertive in bed. Make a guy wear a condom and make a guy understand what brings you pleasure. Sex isn't just masturbation with a partner. Even casual sex offers an opportunity for intimacy. But I suspect this generation understands how to text message better than they do eye to eye, face to face, genitals to genitals.

Finally!!! Ah, but ...

This afternoon three major banks--Bank of America, CitiBank, and JP Morgan Chase--announced a moratorium on new foreclosures of owner-occupied homes, until March 6th, claiming they are giving time to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to announce a new plan.

Since we know banks don't operate for the common good, I suspect there are some financial reasons why they don't want to invest anymore in legal costs, eviction proceedings, and the cost of holding onto real estate throughout the country. There is nothing humanitarian about this gesture.

The White House Goes Modern

Michelle Obama is featured in the March issue of Vogue, wearing her own clothes, including some J. Crew and some more Jason Wu, who designed her inaugural gown. Read the feature and fall in love with our new First Lady.

And now the Obamas want to put modern art into the living quarters of the White House! David Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Museum, has some ideas on what the Obamas might want to hang. It's fun, take a look.

State Secrets

There might be reasons, legitimate reasons, why the Obama administration used the same defense originally raised by the Bush administration in the Ninth Circuit case brought by five victims of post-911 extraordinary rendition. Let's remember what extraordinary rendition is: kidnapping a person, stripping them of their identity and clothing, sometimes beating or drugging them, flying them to a secret prison either under the control of the United States or one of our more brutal allies, and then keeping them in a secret site for "enhanced interrogation," i.e. torture at the hands of CIA, military, or some of the thugs hired by our government or a brutal ally.

The defense raised by Bush and by Obama was the same: state secrets.

Read about the Ninth Circuit case at the ACLU website.

President Obama did on day three of his administration issue executive orders suspending military commissions, holding interrogations to the US Army Field Manual, and ordering Guantanamo Bay prison closed within the year.

That was good. But why did the Obama Department of Justice continue the state secrets defense? Watch Ben Wizner from the ACLU for his explanation on Rachel Maddow last night.

OK, Eric Holder's confirmation as attorney general was held up. That might have delayed a thorough review of all pending cases.

But I don't understand why the Department of Justice didn't ask for an adjournment rather than use state secrets as a defense to allegations of kidnapping, torture, and maiming of foreign nationals caught up in the Bush "war on terror."

I am hoping that as each of the Bush policies gets reviewed, things will change. I'm hoping. I'm still hoping.

A Bailout From an Unexpected Place

There is a silver lining in this economic downturn, and it's unexpected. With state and county governments in dire financial straits, they are looking for places to save. And one place that would work to save millions of dollars: the jail and prison system.

Yesterday a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order that would make California release up to a third of its prisoners--57,000, many held on "three strikes and you're out" or on non-violent charges, in order to end the notorious overcrowding of the state's prisons.

Building prisons during the 1980s and 1990s had been a boom industry for the Golden State. Now it is draining the resources needed to keep the state economically vibrant. 170,000 men and women are locked up in the state. Now that's a crime.

Take a look at this handy interactive map to see just how big an industry prisons have become in this country.

The United States not only has the largest prison population, but the highest incarceration rate. Check out this world map.

Here in New York, it's time to reexamine the Rockefeller Drug laws that jail folks who should be in recovery.

He's So Damned Smart

On the same day that I deflated over the news that the Obama Department of Justice used the same state secrets defense in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to prevent a full airing in a rendition case that the Bush administration had used, I rushed home tonight to watch the news conference Barack Obama promised this evening. And although I have issues with some of his appointments and some of his policies to date, I have no problems with how he conducted himself at this press conference: intelligent, charming, integrity.

Or is it that we are so relieved that it isn't Bush?

What I focused on was his refusal to talk down to people. Without sounding like a policy wonk, or a professor, Obama spoke clearly about his intentions for the stimulus package and how he would assess its success: creating jobs, loosening credit, stabilizing the housing market, and stopping the job contraction. When asked about foreign policy, Obama was unflinching in his commitment to diplomacy and multilateralism.

Can I exhale yet? Well, not quite.

Without sounding like he was still on the campaign trail, but sounding like he is the President of the United States, Obama refused to answer questions he wasn't ready to answer: like whether there are nuclear arms already in the Middle East, whether Patrick Leahy's "truth and reconciliation" proposal was something he could live with, and whether he had nixed the idea of prosecuting Bush administration officials for violating American law and the traditions we hold dear.

He asked for some time to review Bush era policies and put his own in place. I hope that's true regarding the use of state secrets to defend against rendition, to end warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, including news media, and holding everyone--FBI, CIA, NSA, and the military--to using humane techniques of interrogation.

Dick Cheney is a "has been." He's gone. We need to stop paying attention to his cries of "the sky is falling." He is setting up a defense of "it's a political witch hunt" in the event Obama decides to prosecute Cheney, Addington, Gonzales, and Bush himself for war crimes.

Fear makes people stupid, and it will take time, we must have patience, but I suspect we can change our culture to be more engaged, more cognitive, and more tolerant.

If iPods and iPhones can change how people communicate with each other, don't you think we can change our culture to bring out the best not the stupidest in each other?

The Reader

Despite the sound bites and the hyperbole of political discourse, there is no such thing as a binary world. Issues don't have two sides; they have many subtle interplays. Events can be interpreted by as many people who participated. We are rarely confronted by easy choices.

The Reader is a stunningly complex, slowly developed film, worthy of watching before dinner, before a glass of wine, so that you are prepared for not quite understanding why the characters acted as they did.

Bernard Schlink, a public law and philosophy professor in Berlin, wrote the novel. David Hare wrote the screenplay. He joins Stephen Daldry, the director, once again, after their successful collaboration in The Hours.

There are too many spoilers to truly review The Reader. It is a intricate ambiguous story set in Germany that involves the love affair between a fifteen year old boy, Michael, and a thirtysomething year old transit worker, Hanna. The summer they spent together began a life long challenge to Michael's morality, and it is those decisions that he must make, all stemming from his love for Hanna, that become the heart of the story. For anyone who wants a fast paced morality tale, you won't get it here. I went to see the film with two women friends, Nicky and Christine, and we talked over three bottles of wine until after midnight, gently pulling off layers of the story, but never finding all of the answers.

Which brings me to the performances by Kate Winslet, David Kross, and Ralph Fiennes. Winslet is up for a best performance Oscar for her portrayal of Hanna. Nothing is explained, yet Winslet brings the humanity of her secrets to the audience without hysteria or melodrama. There is something strangely simple about the world that Hanna has constructed around herself without going into the familiar. This is not another German bystander film for either Winslet's character or for Michael, whether as a boy or as a man. This is a film that celebrates the passion of reading, the redemptive quality of ideas, the depth of shame, and an intricate intimacy between a boy and a woman with a string of dangerous secrets. Michael is played as a boy by German actor David Kross with an innocence and passion of a truly privileged and intelligent child who is alienated from his father and protected by his mother. As an adult, Michael is portrayed by Ralph Fiennes who brings his melancholy, his ability to say nothing with words and tell us everything with a look, a faint smile, or doing nothing. His brooding, yet the hope he brings to the story, draws us in. We want him to do the right thing.

Then there is the cinematography and the score by Nico Muhly. The editing of the love making scenes between the boy Michael and the woman Hanna brings us into their shared bed. There is nothing pornographic or exploitative about these scenes. They remind me of my youth, of those lost afternoons, lost in my first love, the slow love making, the all consuming passion, and the isolation.

This is not a film that gives us answers to the moral quandaries that we face. Instead it is a quiet meditation on the fact that we are faced with turning points, and why we act or don't act can change the course of our lives. And the film is about secrets, and the hierarchy of those secrets, how idiosyncratic that hierarchy might be. Yes, the film dragged at points, but the film is yet another step taking us out of the simplistic thinking that has so plagued American society. We need to retrain ourselves so that we can tolerate the subtle, the complex, and the moral ambiguity of real life.

The Reader has quite a few Oscar nominations for such a difficult film, yet this year, difficult films are the stars of the Academy Awards. In addition to Winslet's nomination for best actress, The Reader is up for : best cinematography, best direction, best picture, and best adapted screenplay.

Waltz With Bashir

Leon Panetta, Obama's nominee for CIA chief, just disappointed every person with an understanding of human rights and dignity when he fell into the "24" hole: during his confirmation hearings, he said that the United States would continue the practice of rendition, picking terrorism suspects off the street and sending them to a third country for questioning. Although he said the agency would refuse to deliver a suspect into the hands of a country known for torture or other actions "that violate our human values," why else would the US kidnap and deliver a suspect to a third country?

In his second day before the Senate, Panetta retracted his earlier testimony that the Bush administration transferred prisoners for the purpose of torture. Soon he will be doing so, too, it seems.

With this understanding of just how far the United States has slipped in its public commitment to human rights, I say public commitment, because most presidents have engaged in secret, hopefully isolated acts of treachery. However, starting with Bush and Cheney, there were no attempts to cover up the departures from domestic and international law. As a matter of fact, instead, there were legal memoranda written to justify such departures. See Propublica.org's list of the memos produced by the Office of Legal Counsel to justify the "war on terror."

With our own country's abuses in mind, tonight we went to see Waltz with Bashir, an Israeli animated film that certainly won't elicit Disney happy feelings. The film examines memory, specifically the loss of memory of soldiers who participated in the first Lebanon War, when the residents of the Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, were massacred by Phalangist militias, those are Lebanese Christians, after their leader Bashir was assassinated. The camps were under the authority of the Israeli Defense Forces, with Ariel Sharon in command. The Kahan Commission later found Sharon personally responsible and the Israeli Defense Forces complicit in the massacre, and Sharon was forced to resign. However, he later successfully ran for Prime Minister of Israel and remains alive although in a vegetative state after a major stroke in 2006.

The first Lebanese War was Israel's first experience with urban warfare. Civilians were living in the same places where Palestinians were shooting. The Sabra and Shatila massacres, in which anywhere from 328 to 3500 men, women, and children were slaughtered was a step down into a level of depravity for Israel, according to my husband who is a former IDF officer. He left Israel in 1979 because he saw what was coming down the road and didn't want to be a part of it. Later last night while trying to digest the film which shook him deeply, he said: I'm ashamed of the officer class of the IDF, which should have stood up for what was right. I don't know if an officer class of the IDF still exists.

As told in Waltz with Bashir, these soldiers, young men merely nineteen years old in the case of filmmaker Ari Folman, were witnesses to savagery, yet merely saw themselves as "bystanders." They saw what was happening and did nothing. Their guilt has emptied their memories. And Waltz with Bashir insists on reconstituting those memories, as painful and horrific as they might be.

On a day when it was reported that 24 US servicemembers committed suicide in January, that is more than the combined combat fatalities for all of the military this month, Waltz with Bashir is not limited to a distant war in 1982 involving Israel. The impact of war that is examined is the same as US servicemembers are experiencing in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is an important, yet difficult film, made more viewable because of the strange and haunting animation under the direction of Yoni Goodman, and the amazing musical score by Max Richter.

Waltz with Bashir won best foreign language film at the Golden Globes and has been nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film.

See it so that we won't lose our memories, because of the guilt of remaining bystanders.

Obama Goes Straight to the People on Stimulus Package

In his weekly video address, President Barack Obama brought the reasons why the stimulus package is so important straight to the public, foregoing reporters.

Today President Obama also wrote an op ed for the Washington Post on the same subject.

I have to say that I'm impressed that he isn't talking down to us, but truly trying to inform as he explains.

But, and this is a big skeptical "but," when we hear about how much corruption there has been under the TARP, the Bush- Paulsen one that bailed out the banks so that they could refuse to loan money to ordinary people, choosing instead to buy up other banks and then reward their top executives with bonuses they didn't deserve, I'm wondering: does anyone know what they are doing?

The answer is no. No one knows anything. So, if we are going to spend to jumpstart the economy, let's really spend and not just create more corruption.

Today I heard disheartening news. I was told that the same brokers who sold those sub prime mortgages are now the same people who are selling their services to negotiate new terms on those same lousy mortgages to the same customers they cheated in the first place.

And The New York Times published the list of Madoff clients, not all of whom lost money, but who were at least at one point or another considered investors. The list is searchable by name with addresses, so you can see if any of your former friends and foes are bleeding.

Shut Up, Dick Cheney!

Two weeks into the Obama administration, and Dick Cheney gave an interview yesterday to Politico.com in which he warned the country that if there is another terrorist attack, and he suggested that there will be one and that this time it will be nuclear or biological, we can blame Obama.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Listen to Darth Vadar himself.

Of course, he is self-serving. In addition to the bad taste of criticizing his successor two weeks into the administration, Cheney is defending his policies as a way of pushing back against cries for accountability: prosecution of Bush administration officials who authorized wiretapping, surveillance, rendition, torture, and war crimes.

I've always found it amazing that Bush and Cheney begin their defense after the 911 attacks. They speak about protecting America for the seven remaining years of their administration. However, they had nine months to listen to Bill Clinton and Richard Clarke's warnings that Al Qaeda was the threat to the country. They did nothing. Bush cleared bush. Cheney had secret meetings to assure that his oil and energy guys made lots of money. Remember Enron? So the only attack on America's continent since the War of 1812 occurred during the Bush Cheney administration. Let's not forget that.

Read The New York Times editorial blog that debunks each of Cheney's scary and untrue assertions.

Bring in the Clowns

With Joe the Plumber advising the Republican members of Congress, no, I'm not kidding, and Sarah Palin arriving at the Alfalfa Club this weekend to hobnob with serious politicians (Robin Williams aptly called Palin "a contestant in Project Candidate."), one must muse about the state of the Republican Party.

I have my doubts about the efficacy of the stimulus package, because of its lack of discipline and failure to keep the pork to a minimum.

I have my doubts about anything, because, frankly, no one has ever seen anything like this before, and no one knows what they are doing.

But to merely say NO isn't political policy, it's political suicide.

To me, we need to revamp the bankruptcy laws which when amended in 2005, made it very difficult to rid oneself of credit card debt. And the next crisis staring down at us comes in the form of massive defaults, failure to even pay the monthly minimum on credit card debt. So, forget about tax relief for middle class people who will just try to save that money and not spend it, although where can anyone save anything now? With CD rates hovering within the 1.5% to 3.5% rate today, where does one put her money?

It's all too hard for any of us, so why does anyone think Joe the Plumber or Sarah Palin has the smarts to make this all go away?

Are We Safer When We are Not Biased?

While Rush Limbaugh blows steam as the right's "Chicken Little", hoping that President Obama will fail in everything he does, so that the "Magic Negro" isn't, a little known mathematical formula was released that shows us just how unimpressive racial profiling is, in terms of picking out the "bad guys" at airports.

This might cause Jack Bauer and those who follow his moves as if he weren't a fictional character on "24" to pause.

According to yesterday's New York Times, "Too great a dependence on profiling passengers by ethnicity or nationality is an ineffective way to conduct airport screening to catch terrorists, according to a statistical model for examining rare events."

William H. Press from the University of Texas at Austin wrote about the phenomenon: "Called square root biased sampling, it is a way to identify significant events that can be recognized when they are noticed but are otherwise lost in a sea of data. He uses it to find specific snippets of DNA in vast seas of genomic information."

Profiling is not the most effective way to screen passengers at an airport, especially when deciding whether to subject a person to a secondary search, being pulled out of the line at the security screening for further examination and questioning.

A simple calculus found the right combination of limited profiling and efficacy in discovering a viable suspect.

A simple calculus. See there was a reason for all of that math in high school, besides figuring out how much money we actually owe, how much we lost in the recent stock market collapse, and how much we will need in order to retire with the ability to eat something other than cat food and rice.

Realistic Ambitions in the Wake of the Equal Pay Act

My husband and I are visiting our college-aged daughter for a wintry few days. Last night we took out six students--five young women and a man-- for a long, relaxed dinner. Three of the students attend a business college; three of them attend a women's college. These kids aren't slackers.

Much to my daughter's dismay, I like to ask big questions and then listen intently to the answers. "What would be your absolutely ideal job, the thing you really want to do?"

Their answers were surprising.

Two of the young women said they wanted to balance their careers with having families. One favored business, the other was still unsure, vacillating between math and French. We joked that it sounded like she wanted to become Marie Curie, the only person to get a Nobel Prize in two categories: chemistry and physics.

An answer to this question that included balance would have been improbable just a generation ago. We didn't think in those terms. We thought in terms of having it all. Some of us were wildly disappointed, others made compromises, others abandoned, because neither the workplace nor the family structure considered a woman's needs in a two-career family.

And balance was made a bit more feasible this week when President Obama signed the Equal Pay Act, assuring women the opportunity to litigate compensation disparities when they are not paid equally with men. Thank you, Lilly Ledbetter. Thank you, Mr. President, for making the Equal Pay Act your first legislative act.

Perhaps my generation made this so much an issue because as the first women entered professional suites, our children felt our absences or our disappointments. With Michelle Obama as the First Lady, this discussion is hot and detailed, and goes beyond fluff by examining the policies that prevent women from balancing, like not being paid equally. Check out the New York Times continuing pieces on the Balancing Act. Click through it for some interesting contributions by policy advocates.

Back to the answers to my question: Another young woman wanted a job like her mother's who is a vice president in a health care company. "I loved going to work with her," she explained. "She has a great job." I suspect she also has a mother who enjoys her work.

Another young woman aspired to becoming a physician although she is worried that it has gotten so difficult to get into medical school, that she might have to go for a PhD. first, to get the research and science down.

Our daughter wants to be Secretary of State! She was raised by a mother who was a professor, then a nonprofit executive, so I managed to have it all, mostly because I gave up some of my ambition to become a mother. I surrounded her with a menagerie of women: all sorts so that she could find herself among them.

Today's New York Times Magazine focuses on college-educated women who chose to become mothers without men and without romance in their lives. It's a read.


And the young man wants to start a company around an invention of his own, but he doesn't want to be CEO! After a freshman course in entrepreneurism, he understands his limitations.

Are these kids realistic way beyond their years, or verging on burned out already?