Minnesota Nice — David Carr reports on the state that gave us Al Franken, Jesse Ventura, and Lake Woebegone.

At the St. Paul Civic Center in 1982, what should have been a routine re-election convention for the Republican Gov. Albert Quie was underway, but he had dropped out before it had begun.

A newbie reporter to Minnesota politics, I watched as democracy broke out in earnest on the convention floor over the fight to replace him. There were walkouts, prayer meetings, candidacies that came and went in the blink of an eye, all perpetrated by delegates who had the stamina of Marines. Their various causes righteous, their faces flushed with excitement, they went into extra innings, deep into the night. My head spinning, I climbed up into the bleachers and sat near a shaggy-looking guy in a shiny hockey jacket from Anoka. We watched the full pageantry of electoral politics silently and then I finally looked down the row and spoke. “Is it always like this?”

“Yes,” the man said, turning toward me. I recognized him as someone who should know: Garrison Keillor.

Mr. Keillor was already on his way to legend as the host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” but there he was staring in fascination at one of the most rococo expressions of state democracy in the land. Lately, everyone else has been watching Minnesota politics as well because the race between the Republican senator Norman Coleman and Al Franken, the comedian and radio host, ended in a deadlock. (A third-party candidate, a frequent feature of Minnesota elections, altered the math.) After a ruling of the Minnesota Supreme Court on Tuesday, more than seven long months after the election, Mr. Franken will become Senator No. 60 for the Democrats, a significant number because it could help make the Senate filibuster-proof.

It may not be a stretch to say that the nation’s governance hinges, in part, on the arrival of the man who played Stuart Smalley, a simp who was a bit too eager to put the self in self-help on “Saturday Night Live.” On Wednesday, a question I knew was coming arrived from a friend on the bus: “What is up with Minnesota politics, anyway?”

To which I say, as opposed to what? New York? Florida? California? And as a former Minnesotan who lives in New Jersey, don’t even get me started about politics, Garden State-style.

Yes, Minnesotans vote like crazy. At 77.8 percent, the state had the highest turnout in last year’s very busy presidential election. But yes, sometimes Minnesotans’ votes seem just plain crazy as well.

Continued below the fold.

The Downside of Being Mavericky — Sam Tanenhaus notes that Sarah Palin’s sudden announcement that she’s resigning as the governor of Alaska is just another in the interesting turn down the road to entropy for the GOP.

Grant the Republicans this much at least: they’re no longer boring. Just when the novelty of the Argentine dalliance of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina had begun to fade, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska enlivened a ho-hum Fourth of July with her announcement that she would abruptly terminate her first term and instead seek to “effect positive change outside government.”

Exactly what this might mean was not immediately clear. Some said her political career was done. Others speculated that Ms. Palin, eying the White House in 2012, plans to complete and then hawk her memoir (for which she reportedly had been seeking a seven-figure advance) and also increase her visibility along with her war chest by accepting lucrative speaking engagements — activities not so easily managed by a chief executive marooned in Anchorage.

“Some are going to question the timing of this,” Ms. Palin acknowledged when she made her announcement on Friday, though she said “this decision has been in the works for quite a while.”

Perhaps, but to judge by the surprised reactions of top Republicans across the country, very few seemed to have been consulted or even tipped off that it was coming.

The announcement by the freelancing politician may be the best example yet of the striking transformation in the current Republican Party. Only a few years ago, the party was considered a model of lockstep discipline with around-the-clock message control and seamless coordination of policy and politics. But from all appearances, it has entered a period of inner confusion, verging on the dysfunctional. Some of that dysfunction was on display earlier last week, when word surfaced of a Vanity Fair profile of Ms. Palin that showed her often to be at odds, and sometimes at swords’ point, with Alaska Republicans and also with party strategists when she ran on the Republican ticket with John McCain in 2008.

How did so organized a party come apart so swiftly? One explanation is that it hasn’t been swift at all. The Republicans have been in decline for some time — and in recent years, even in disarray. Since the peak years of Republican success in the 1980s, the party’s candidates have only sometimes been vote-snagging virtuosos. Dating back to 1992, Republicans have won a plurality in only one presidential election — and that lone victory, in 2004, was not nearly the triumph it appeared to be at the time. Its architect, Karl Rove, spoke of establishing a “permanent majority” for the Republicans, but in reality Mr. Bush won by less than 3 percentage points — one of the narrowest re-elections in presidential history. And although he claimed a mandate, his two big second-term initiatives — privatizing Social Security and immigration reform — were easily thwarted. Some of the strongest opposition came from within Mr. Bush’s own party — further evidence that the Republicans were even then losing their cohesiveness.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. — Mark Sanford did not make a mistake.

I have a proposal.

Next time some politician goes before the cameras with his figurative pants down around his metaphoric ankles and says, ”I made a mistake,” let’s form a mob and drag him from the podium. You bring the lanterns, I’ll bring the pitchforks.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is, of course, the latest. Having bought plane tickets, told his staff he would be away hiking the Appalachian Trail, left his wife and kids behind and flown to Argentina to rendezvous with his paramour, he apologized by saying he’d made a mistake.

Before we go any further, let me concede the obvious. Yes, all human beings make mistakes. That’s how you know they’re human beings.

But surely I’m not the only one to notice how ”I made a mistake” has become the go-to explanation for every human houndog in public office. It’s been dragged out by or on behalf of everyone from Jesse Jackson to Kwame Kilpatrick to John Edwards to L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to former Pennsylvania Rep. Don Sherwood to Gary Hart to Eliot Spitzer to Sen. John Ensign to Bill Clinton.

It isn’t the cheating I’m complaining about. Nor is it the lying (which is, after all, an integral part of the cheating.) And for our purposes today, we can even ignore the hypocrisy of self-proclaimed moral champions — particularly family-values conservatives like Gov. Sanford — getting busy with women who are not their wives.

No, what incites this diatribe is those four words of putative explanation: ”I made a mistake.” There is to them a connotation of honest error, unwitting miscalculation, accidental omission and ”Oops, my bad.” They allow the offender to appear to accept responsibility for his offense while at the same time, minimizing it. He just misjudged. It just happened. He was just careless, inattentive or forgetful. He couldn’t help it.

The excuse has never been flimsier than it is in the post-Bill Clinton era. I mean, if I put my hand into a fire because I’ve never seen fire before and I get burned, that is a mistake. If you see me get burned and then put your hand into the same fire, that’s not a mistake. That’s an idiotic calculation that somehow, the rules do not apply to you.

So what does it say about the politician who saw Clinton burn his public and political lives to bits, then turns around and does the same thing he did? I’ll tell you what it says. It says he’s a fool.

And it also says he’s a man, though some might argue that’s a synonym. But surely you’ve noticed that the list of cheating hearts in high office is rather, shall we say, testosterone-exclusive. It is not that women are paragons of marital virtue. A 2008 study by the National Science Foundation found that 15 percent of women over 60 admit to having had an affair in their lifetimes, and that the rate of female infidelity is actually growing faster than that of males.

And yet, when’s the last time you saw a woman governor saying, ”I made a mistake,” while her husband stood there looking as if he might toss up his lunch any second? Apparently, your average woman governor-elect has the good sense to tell Sven the Swedish poolboy that she’s about to enter the public eye, and their long lunches will have to end. The man governor-elect figures he can get away with it. With the arrogance, recklessness, self-delusion and lack of foresight common to my gender, he figures he can handle it, somehow. Granted, he does this figuring with the part of the body that does not contain the brain, but still, he does it. And then, when it all falls apart, he stands there and insults the intelligence of every human being within earshot.

”I made a mistake?”

Beg pardon, but what he made was a decision.

Doonesbury — Reading the epithets.

A True Grass-Roots Movement — Jeremy W. Peters in the New York Times on why there is no national leader of the gay-rights movement.

Every so often, the American social order is reshuffled. And that upheaval is typically accompanied by a prominent face.

Frederick Douglass became the face of the black abolitionist movement. A century later, Martin Luther King Jr. played that role in the civil rights movement. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem became the spokeswomen for the modern women’s movement.

Yet the gay rights movement, which is about to enter its fifth decade, has never had a such a leader despite making remarkable strides in a relatively short period of time.

Gay people have no national standard-bearer, no go-to sound-byte machine for the media. So when President Obama last week extended benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees, there was no alpha gay leader to respond with the movement’s official voice, though some activists criticized the president for not going far enough.

Until 1973, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. Today, same-sex couples can marry in six states. How did a group that has been so successful over the last generation in countering cultural prejudice and winning civil rights make it so far without an obvious leader?

One explanation is that gay and lesbian activists learned early on that they could get along just fine without one. Even in the movement’s earliest days following the violent uprising at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village 40 years ago this week, no singular leader emerged. Some historians believe this is in part because it was — and still is — difficult for the average American to empathize with the struggles of gay people.

“The gay movement has always had a problem of achieving a dignity or a moral imperative that the black civil rights movement had, or the women’s rights movement claimed,” said Dudley Clendinen, who co-wrote the book “Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America” and now teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University. “Because this movement is fundamentally about the right to be sexual, it’s hard for the larger public to see that as a moral issue,” he said.

Continued below the fold.

Standing on their own — Trudy Rubin in the Philadelphia Inquirer on not intervening in Iran.

The ongoing drama in Iran marks a turning point in Middle East history – precisely because the United States has chosen, so far, not to intervene.

The Republican politicians charging President Obama with failing to defend Iranian “freedom” have totally missed the significance of what happened last week in Tehran.

Whatever occurs next will not detract from this reality: The unprecedented protests in Tehran last week, with demonstrators marching peacefully for new and fair elections – and then being attacked violently by police and militia – were organized by Iranians themselves.

This flies in the face of the widespread Middle Eastern belief that the hidden hand of the West is always involved, either trying to impose regime change or trying to prevent it.

Iranians still obsess about the U.S. role in overthrowing elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossedegh in 1953. But in this case, even Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in his harsh speech Friday demanding an end to protests, couldn’t credibly claim the United States was behind the rallies. He could only charge that U.S. officials were encouraging the demonstrators with “remarks about human rights.”

The Obama administration did not organize or fund these marchers (nor is it calling for regime change, leaving that choice to the Iranian people). Khamenei may accuse opposition leaders of working with the CIA, but this time the charge will ring hollow to most Iranians – and to the wider Middle East.

Indeed, what Iranians have done so far is to put together an amazing campaign of (mostly) nonviolent protest, with brilliantly improvised tactics. The protests have been organized via networks, without any central leadership, said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University.

“People have used e-mails and word of mouth,” he said, “and even the postmen have given people directions to where demonstrations are happening,” adding, “People are awed by the level of cooperation.”

Peter Ackerman, founder of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington, and former board chairman of Freedom House, said he believed it was wise to let the Iranian opposition pick its own tactics without U.S. interference or direction.

“We don’t want to be an anchor on the opposition,” he said, “in a way that permits Ahmadinejad to claim they are stooges of Obama.” That, he said, would decrease the chance of crucial defections from inside the regime.

Just about every Iran expert with whom I’ve spoken echoed this thinking. So did Iranian opposition leaders I met in Tehran in 2006.

And so, by the way, do Republicans like Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State James Baker, and Sen. Richard Lugar. They know that Iran is not, I repeat NOT, a clone of Poland or Czechoslovakia when they rebelled against the Soviets. East European dissidents all wanted U.S. intervention. Iran is in the Middle East, where Western intervention has a bad name.

Tough Times — Former NFL star Bernie Kosar takes on the tackles off the field.

The IRS and the creditors and an angry ex-wife and an avalanche of attorneys are circling the chaos that used to be Bernie Kosar’s glamorous life, but that’s not the source of his anxiety at the moment. He is doing a labored lap inside his Weston mansion, the one on the lake near the equestrian playpen for horses, because he wants to be sure there are no teenage boys hiding, attempting to get too close to his three daughters. He shattered a Kid Rock-autographed guitar the other day while chasing one teenager out of his house because he doesn’t mind all of the other boys within the area code thinking the Kosar girls have an unhinged Dad.

”There are a million doors in this place,” he says. ”Too many ways to get in.”

So up and down the spiral staircases he goes, a rumpled mess wearing a wrinkled golf shirt, disheveled graying hair, and the scars and weariness from a lifetime’s worth of beatings. He has no shoes on, just white socks with the NFL logo stitched on because he’s never really been able to let go of who he used to be. He is coughing up phlegm from a sickness he is certain arrived with all the recent stress of divorce and debt, and now he doesn’t walk so much as wobble his way into one of the closets upstairs, where he happens upon some painful, wonderful memories he keeps sealed in a plastic cup.

His teeth are in there. So is the surgical screw that finally broke through the skin in his ankle because of how crooked he walked for years. He broke that ankle in the first quarter of a game against the Dolphins in 1992; he threw two touchdown passes in the fourth quarter anyway. Don Shula called him the following day to salute him on being so tough, but Kosar is paying for it with every step he takes today on uneven footing. The old quarterback shakes the rattling cup, then grins. There are about as many real teeth in the cup as there are in what remains of his smile.

Frank Rich — A hot summer for President Obama.

The test for Obama is simple enough. If the fortunes in American households rise along with Wall Street’s, he is home free — even if his porous regulatory fixes permit a new economic meltdown decades hence. But if, in the shorter term, the economic quality of life for most Americans remains unchanged as the financial sector resumes living large, he’ll face anger from voters of all political persuasions. When the Fox News fulminator Glenn Beck says “let the banks lose their tails, they need to,” he illustrates precisely where right-wing populism meets that on the left.

It’s still not too late for course correction. Before rolling out his financial package, Obama illustrated exactly what’s lacking when he told John Harwood on CNBC: “We want to do it right. We want to do it carefully. But we don’t want to tilt at windmills.”

Maybe not at windmills, but sometimes you do want to do battle with fierce and unrelenting adversaries, starting with the banking lobby. While the restraint that the president has applied to the Iran crisis may prove productive, domestic politics are not necessarily so delicate. F.D.R. had to betray his own class to foment the reforms of the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson had to crack heads on Capitol Hill to advance the health-care revolution that was Medicare. So will Obama for his own health-care crusade, which is already faltering in the Senate courtesy of truants in his own party, not just the irrelevant Republicans.

Though television talking heads can’t let go of the cliché that the president is trying to do too much, the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll says that only 37 percent of Americans agree. The majority knows the country is in a crisis and wants help. The issue has never been whether Obama is doing too much but whether he will do the big things well enough to move us forward. Now that the hope phase of his presidency is giving way to the promised main event — change — we will soon find out.

Doonesbury — Is the caller there?

Hard Lessons — Michelle Rhee is learning that it’s no picnic running the D.C. school system.

In her quest to upend and transform the District’s long-broken school system, Rhee has acquired a sometimes-painful education of her own. The lessons, in many respects, tell the story of her tenure as her second school year draws to a close Monday: that money isn’t everything; that political and corporate leaders need to be stroked, even if you don’t work for them; that the best-intentioned reforms can trigger unintended consequences; and that national celebrity can create trouble at home.

Rhee arrived in 2007 as the surprise choice of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), who introduced her hours after he took control of what was a 49,000-student system (now down to about 45,000). Compared with predecessors, she had scant experience. Then 37, the former Baltimore grade-school teacher had spent the past decade at a teacher recruiting and research firm she founded. She also had the effusive endorsement of her mentor, New York Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, who had retained Rhee as a personnel consultant.

Even by the high-turnover standards of D.C. public schools leadership, Rhee’s watch has been brief — well below the average of three years, three months for her seven predecessors, most recently Clifford Janey (two years, nine months).

But new pockets of promise — some initiated by Janey and sustained by Rhee, others forged by her — are visible. Three freshly restored schools — Phelps High in Northeast, Hardy Middle in Northwest and Sousa Middle in Southeast — are the leading edge of a $2 billion plan to modernize a crumbling campus inventory. An “academic power hour” of extra instruction is part of a revamped after-school program in 100 schools.

Last year’s DC-CAS standardized tests showed increases in reading and math proficiency rates of 8 to 11 percentage points since 2007. A handful of schools are piloting efforts to reach the most neglected and vulnerable students: those in special education, those with emotional or family issues and those at risk of dropping out. High school students, plagued for years by shoddy recordkeeping and class schedules that often left them with insufficient credits to graduate, can take “credit recovery” courses on weekends, after school and in the summer. Although not as complete or as rigorous as regular offerings, they create a path to a diploma for students who were barred through no fault of their own.

Spending for professional development is up 400 percent since 2007 in an effort to establish a coherent set of expectations about what constitutes good teaching.

Rhee acknowledges that the successes pale in comparison to the task of reversing decades of failure.

“The reality in Washington, D.C., is that we continue to fail the majority of kids who are put in our care every day,” she said at a panel discussion last month. In a draft five-year action plan, introduced in October, she targets 2013 as the year when the D.C. student experience will be “dramatically different.”

Continued below the fold.

Full disclosure: Ms. Rhee and I attended the same school in Toledo, but at different times. While we have many friends in common, I have never met her in person.

Stolen — Laura Secor reports for The New Yorker on the Iranian election.

There can be no question that the June 12, 2009 Iranian presidential election was stolen. Dissident employees of the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of President Ahmadinejad and is responsible for the mechanics of the polling and counting of votes, have reportedly issued an open letter saying as much. Government polls (one conducted by the Revolutionary Guards, the other by the state broadcasting company) that were leaked to the campaigns allegedly showed ten- to twenty-point leads for Mousavi a week before the election; earlier polls had them neck and neck, with Mousavi leading by one per cent, and Karroubi just behind. Historically, low turnout has always favored conservatives in Iranian elections, while high turnout favors reformers. That’s because Iran’s most reliable voters are those who believe in the system; those who are critical tend to be reluctant to participate. For this reason, in the last three elections, sixty-five per cent of voters have come from traditional, rural villages, which house just thirty-five per cent of the populace. If the current figures are to be believed, urban Iranians who voted for the reformist ex-president Mohammad Khatami in 1997 and 2001 have defected to Ahmadinejad in droves.

What is most shocking is not the fraud itself, but that it was brazen and entirely without pretext. The final figures put Mousavi’s vote below thirty-five per cent, and not because of a split among reformists; they have Karroubi pulling less than one per cent of the vote. To announce a result this improbable, and to do it while locking down the Interior Ministry, sending squads of Revolutionary Guards into the streets, blacking out internet and cell phone communication and shuttering the headquarters of the rival candidates, sends a chilling message to the people of Iran—not only that the Islamic Republic does not care about their votes, but that it does not fear their wrath. Iranians, including many of the original founders and staunch supporters of the revolution, are angry, and they will demonstrate. But they will be met with organized and merciless violence.

Ugly — Leonard Pitts, Jr. on the consequences of racism.

We act as if it were all a game, as if it means nothing when people of position and visibility spew garbage, validating and galvanizing the unhinged and the disaffected who need little encouragement to believe all their problems are caused by Them. We act as if we do not toy with fire when people of authority claim white Christians are a victimized minority or Hispanics a threatening and faceless Other. We act as if we were not heirs and witnesses to a blood-soaked history that tells us exactly where this hate some of us so fecklessly stoke will logically, inevitably lead.

Hate groups standing now at record numbers. One dead. Ten dead. Six million dead.

I’ve always liked the Holocaust Museum because it is a stark reminder in an era where too many are in a hurry to forget. And so it is even today, even quiet and locked up tight. Behind yellow tape it sits, scene of a hate crime authored by an old man who thought he was great because his skin was pale. An American flag droops limply at half staff as if tired of waiting, waiting for the last days of creatures such as this.

Frank Rich — Enabling the haters.

Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

Doonesbury: Summer daydreams.

Two Roads Diverged —

If Judge Sonia Sotomayor joins Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, they may find that they have far more than a job title in common.

Both come from the humblest of beginnings. Both were members of the first sizable generation of minority students at elite colleges and then Yale Law School. Both benefited from affirmative action policies.

But that is where their similarities end, and their disagreements begin. For the first time, the Supreme Court would include two minority judges, but ones who stand at opposite poles of thinking about race, identity and opportunity. Judge Sotomayor and Justice Thomas have walked parallel paths and yet arrived at contrary conclusions, not only on legal questions, but on personal ones, too.

Judge Sotomayor celebrates being Latina, calling it a reason for her success; Justice Thomas bristles at attempts to define him by race and says he has succeeded despite the obstacles it posed. Being a woman of Puerto Rican descent is rich and fulfilling, Judge Sotomayor says, while Justice Thomas calls being a black man in America a largely searing experience. Off the bench, Judge Sotomayor has helped build affirmative action programs. On the bench, Justice Thomas has argued against them with thunderous force.

The two may sit together on a court that is struggling over whether race and ethnicity should be a factor in legal thinking, each pitting his or her hard-won lessons against the other’s. Both judges are passionate about minority success, dedicating countless hours to mentorship. But Judge Sotomayor sees herself as the successful product of diversity initiatives, whereas Justice Thomas, who thinks of himself as a scarred survivor of those efforts, believes they often backfire.

The two judges have lived, not just argued, the strongest cases for and against affirmative action, said Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University. With both on the court, he said, “their voices are going to come to exemplify the contending positions.”

Continued below the fold.

When Ms. Sotomayor and Mr. Thomas arrived at college — she at Princeton in 1972, he at Holy Cross in 1968 — they worried about the same thing: what others would think when they opened their mouths.

Ms. Sotomayor had grown up in the Bronx speaking Spanish; Mr. Thomas’s relatives in Pin Point, Ga., mixed English with Gullah, a language of the coastal South. Both attended Catholic school, where they were drilled by nuns in grammar and other subjects. But at college, they realized they still sounded unpolished.

Ms. Sotomayor shut herself in her dorm room and eventually resorted to grade-school grammar textbooks to relearn her syntax. Mr. Thomas barely spoke, he said later, and majored in English literature to conquer the language.

“I just worked at it,” he said in an interview years later, “on my pronunciations, sounding out words.”

For many East Coast colleges, it was a new era. After the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Holy Cross pledged to do its part in the civil rights movement by recruiting black students; just a few months later, Mr. Thomas became one of six in his freshman class.

Princeton was integrating not only by race and ethnicity, but also by gender. Ms. Sotomayor was one of 20 Hispanics in her class, students estimate. Princeton had admitted women just a few years earlier, and “husband-hunters,” as one of the alumni still campaigning against their presence called them, were vastly outnumbered at the college.

When the students arrived, they were subject to constant suspicion that they had not earned their slots. “It was a question echoed over and over again, not only verbally but in people’s thoughts,” said Franklin Moore, a former Princeton administrator. Ms. Sotomayor and Mr. Thomas, honors students in high school, considered themselves qualified. But to prove their critics wrong, they studied with special determination.

“We can’t let these people think we just came off the street without anything to offer Princeton,” said Eneida Rosa, another member of the Hispanic contingent, describing how seriously she and Ms. Sotomayor took their studies.

The two future judges led similar student organizations — Mr. Thomas helped found a black student group, while Ms. Sotomayor was co-chairwoman of a Puerto Rican one — and shared the same liberal politics. They graduated at the top of their classes. And afterward, they each headed to Yale Law School.

But perhaps because of their backgrounds, Judge Sotomayor and Justice Thomas came to view their campus experiences in very different ways.

Leonard Pitts — We’ve Been Punk’d.

So Newt Gingrich now says Sonia Sotomayor is not a ”racist” after all. She must be trembling with relief.

Gingrich’s backpedaling came last week in an article on HumanEvents.com. It leaves just two high-profile Republicans, former Rep. Tom Tancredo and radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh, still clinging to that absurd allegation.

As you know unless you are just back from Antarctica, this sudden spasm of righteous Republican rage is because of a speech Sotomayor gave in 2001 about the role gender, ethnicity and other characteristics play in a judge’s judgment. ”I would hope,” she said, ”that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

It is, yes, a wince-inducing statement. You might even call it a tone deaf and culturally chauvinistic one. But does it support comparisons to the Ku Klux Klan such as Tancredo and Gingrich have made? Not in a million years.

The attempt to paint Sotomayor as such represents more than political overreach. No, this is part and parcel of a campaign by conservatives to arrogate unto themselves and/or neutralize the language of social grievance. We’ve seen this before. They sullied the word ”feminist” so thoroughly even feminists disdain it. They made ”liberal” such a vulgarity you’d never know liberals fought to ban child labor, end Jim Crow or win women the right to vote.

Having no record of their own of responding compassionately to social grievance (ask them what they did during the civil rights movement and they grow very quiet) conservatives have chosen instead to co-opt the language of that grievance. And if what they did to the language of women’s rights and progressivism took some gall, what they are seeking to do to the language of race suggests a testicular circumference of bovine proportions. There is something surreal about hearing those who have historically been the enemies of racial progress define racial progress as looking out for the poor white brother.

And whatever comes beyond surreal is what describes these three men in particular, none of whom has ever been distinguished by his previous tender concern for racial minorities lied upon, denied upon and systematically cheated of their square of the American Dream, telling us ”racism” is what happens when a Hispanic woman says something dumb about white men. We are, after all, talking about a man (Tancredo) who once called majority Hispanic Miami ”a third world” country, and another man (Limbaugh) who advised a black caller to ”take that bone out of your nose.” These are fighters against racism?

You keep waiting for someone to break up laughing. You keep looking for Ashton Kutcher to say you’ve been punk’d.

Ugh — Brian Dickerson of the Detroit Free Press holds his nose and defends the free speech rights of fanatics.

Defending free speech is like being in love with a gifted but temperamental artist who is forever embarrassing you with his drunken public outbursts. You want to nurture your beloved’s creativity, but sometimes you wish you could just leave the bloviating SOB at home.

It is thus with mixed emotions that I rise — on second thought, I think I’ll stay seated — to champion the First Amendment rights of one Rev. Donald Spitz.

Spitz, the nominal leader of an anti-abortion extremist group that modestly styles itself the Army of God, has spent much of the last week celebrating the murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.

Spitz has never shot anyone himself, that we know of, but he has made it clear that he considers the whackadoo who gunned down Tiller an American hero. He likens the murder of Tiller, who was passing out programs in the vestibule of his church when he was shot in the head, to the execution of a madman who has opened fire on a playground full of preschoolers.

“I understand perfectly why someone would take action like that,” Spitz says.

The slaying of Tiller has triggered an emotional backlash among proponents of abortion rights, many of whom are urging Congress to toughen a 15-year-old federal law that restricts abortion foes from interfering with abortion clinics and their patients.

The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act made it a 10-year felony to physically interfere with an abortion clinic’s employees or patients. The act also established federal penalties for trespassing on or vandalizing abortion clinics anywhere in the United States.

Since the FACE Act’s passage, many states (but not Michigan) have also established buffer zones designed to keep protestors at a respectful distance from patients entering and exiting an abortion clinic. Abortion rights advocates like the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Eleanor Smeal want Congress to mandate buffer zones at all clinics, and some want criminal sanctions for people who encourage violence against abortion providers.

Blogging to Nowhere

“Hi, I’m Judy Nichols. Welcome to my rant.”

Thus was born Rantings of a Crazed Soccer Mom, the blog of a stay-at-home mother and murder-mystery writer from Wilmington, N.C. Mrs. Nichols, 52, put up her first post in late 2004, serving up a litany of gripes about the Bush administration and people who thought they had “a monopoly on morality.” After urging her readers to vote for John Kerry, she closed with a flourish: “Practice compassionate regime change.”

The post generated no comments.

Today, Mrs. Nichols speaks about her blog as if it were a diet or half-finished novel. “I’m going to get back to it,” she swears. Her last entry, in December of last year, was curt and none too profound. “Books make great gifts,” she began, breaking a silence of nearly a month.

Like Mrs. Nichols, many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

Back to the Future — From the CBC in the early 1990’s, the wonder of “internet.”

Doonesbury — the mighty have fallen.

Good Relations — Leonard Pitts on Sonia Sotomayor.

A few words about identity politics.

That’s the knock on Sonia Sotomayor, who was nominated to the Supreme Court last week by President Obama. If confirmed, Sotomayor, who is Puerto Rican, will be the first Hispanic to sit on the nation’s highest tribunal.

That has traumatized some titans of the right. George Will, for instance, complains that ”she embraces identity politics, including the idea of categorical representation: A person is what his or her race, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference is, and members of a particular category can be represented, understood, empathized with only by persons of the same identity.” Some go further, alleging that Sotomayor’s ethnicity carried greater weight with Obama than her qualifications.

That argument would be a lot more persuasive if the right (Will, to his credit, was the exception that proved the rule) had raised it when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate on the basis of her chromosomal makeup. Sotomayor, at least, has the aforementioned qualifications. Palin, not so much.

Point being, so-called ”identity politics” are practiced at both ends of the political spectrum. And I’m not at all convinced that’s a bad thing — particularly where the high court is concerned.

[…]

Contrary to what they’d have us believe, legal judgment is not simply a matter of quoting precedent and applying logic.

It is also a matter of interpretation, and interpretation is shaped by who you are and what you’ve known.

If precedent and logic alone were definitive, the court could not have decided, for instance, to endorse segregation in 1896 in clear violation of the 14th Amendment. But because of who they were and what they had known, that panel of white men somehow interpreted the amendment as allowing Jim Crow — a tragic travesty that stood for 58 years.

Would the court have been well-served in 1896 had someone likely to be affected by the ruling been there to offer a counterbalancing interpretation? If the court is debating an issue of importance to women, is not the quality of its deliberation improved if someone in the room is in possession of a uterus?

Yes, emphatically, to both.

Ensuring the presence of diverse people in the deliberation chamber betrays no American principles. Rather, it affirms a core American promise: Liberty and justice.

For all.

From another perspective, what is the trashing of Judge Sotomayor telling the Hispanic community about how the conservatives and the GOP really feel about them? Matthew Yglesias fires back:

As anyone who knows me can attest, I don’t have what you’d call a strong “Hispanic” identity. Three of my four grandparents are Jews from Eastern Europe. My paternal grandfather, José Yglesias, was a Cuban-American born in Florida. But that puts the family’s actual Hispanic ancestry pretty far back in the past. He grew up in a Spanish-dominant immigrant community, but spoke English fluently. My dad grew up in an English-speaking household and knows some Spanish. I took a semester of Spanish at NYU one summer. And Cuban-American political identity in the United States is heavily oriented around a highly ideological far-right approach to Latin America policy that neither I nor anyone else in my family shares. The Yglesiases emigrated from Cuba before the Revolution, José was initially a Castro supporter, and though he gave that up he and my dad and I all share what you might call anti-anti-Castro views.

But for all that, I have to say that I am really truly deeply and personally pissed off my [sic] the tenor of a lot of the commentary on Sonia Sotomayor. The idea that any time a person with a Spanish last name is tapped for a job, his or her entire lifetime of accomplishments is going to be wiped out in a riptide of bitching and moaning about “identity politics” is not a fun concept for me to contemplated. Qualifications like time at Princeton, Yale Law, and on the Circuit Court that work well for guys with Italian names suddenly don’t work if you have a Spanish name. Heaven forbid someone were to decide that there ought to be at least one Hispanic columnist at a major American newspaper.

Somehow, when George W. Bush affects a Texas accent, that’s not identity politics. When John Edwards gets a VP nomination, that’s not identity politics. But Sonia Sotomayor! Oh my heavens!

A Different Kind of Identity Politics — President Obama’s picture is everywhere.

Perhaps not since John F. Kennedy, whose dusty portraits can still be seen in kitchens and barbershops and alongside the antique beer cans at bars like Manuel’s Tavern in Atlanta, has a presidency so fanned the flames of painterly ardor among hobbyist and professional artists.

Mr. Obama’s campaign was well known for inspiring art, including Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous “Hope” poster, a version of which is now in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Months after the election, with the glow of the administration’s first 100 days dimming, it might have been expected that enthusiasm for Obama art would be dimming, too.

Yet the still-ample offerings of original paintings of the president and the first family on eBay and at places like the annual Affordable Art Fair in New York — along with a crop of presidential-art-obsessed Internet sites including obamaartreport.com, artofobama.com and, inevitably, badpaintingsofbarackobama.com — are indications that it might just be a growth industry.

The phenomenon has been a boon to the near-anonymous painting factories crowded together in the suburbs of Shenzhen, China, famous for cranking out copies of masterpieces, along with landscapes and semitasteful nudes. Another one, seemingly based in Germany, offers stately Obamas amid air-brushy likenesses of Tupac Shakur, Bruce Lee and Al Pacino (in his “Scarface” role), advertised as “real hand-embellished” paintings on canvas.

Can black velvet renderings be far behind?

Frank Rich — The GOP blame game.

The harrowing truth remains unchanged from what it was before Cheney emerged from his bunker to set Washington atwitter. The Bush administration did not make us safer either before or after 9/11. Obama is not making us less safe. If there’s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone’s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.

Doonesbury — God and money.

No More Waiting – Frank Rich makes a powerful case for moving forward on marriage equality.

It would be easy to blame the Beltway logjam in gay civil rights progress on the cultural warriors of the religious right and its political host, the Republican Party. But it would be inaccurate. The right has lost much of its clout in the capital and, as President Obama’s thoughtful performance at Notre Dame dramatized last weekend, its shrill anti-abortion-rights extremism now plays badly even in supposedly friendly confines.

Anyone with half a brain in the incredibly shrinking G.O.P. knows that gay bashing will further dim the party’s already remote chance of recruiting young voters to replenish its aging ranks, much as the right’s immigrant bashing drove away Hispanics. This is why Republican politicians now say they oppose only gay marriage, not gay people, even when it’s blatant that they’re dissembling. Naked homophobia — those campy, fear-mongering National Organization for Marriage ads, for instance — is increasingly unwelcome in a party fighting for survival. The wingnuts don’t even have Dick Cheney on their side on this issue.

Most Congressional Republicans will still vote against gay civil rights. Some may take the politically risky path of demonizing same-sex marriage during the coming debate over the new Supreme Court nominee. Old prejudices and defense mechanisms die hard, after all: there are still many gay men in the party’s hierarchy hiding in fear from what remains of the old religious-right base. In “Outrage,” a new documentary addressing precisely this point, Kirk Fordham, who had been chief of staff to Mark Foley, the former Republican congressman, says, “If they tried to fire gay staff like they do booting people out of the military, the legislative process would screech to a halt.” A closet divided against itself cannot stand.

But when Congressional Republicans try to block gay civil rights — last week one cadre introduced a bill to void the recognition of same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia — they just don’t have the votes to get their way. The Democrats do have the votes to advance the gay civil rights legislation Obama has promised to sign. And they have a serious responsibility to do so. Let’s not forget that “don’t ask” and DOMA both happened on Bill Clinton’s watch and with his approval. Indeed, in the 2008 campaign, Obama’s promise to repeal DOMA outright was a position meant to outflank Hillary Clinton, who favored only a partial revision.

So what’s stopping the Democrats from rectifying that legacy now? As Wolfson said to me last week, they lack “a towering national figure to make the moral case” for full gay civil rights. There’s no one of that stature in Congress now that Ted Kennedy has been sidelined by illness, and the president shows no signs so far of following the example of L.B.J., who championed black civil rights even though he knew it would cost his own party the South. When Obama invoked same-sex marriage in an innocuous joke at the White House correspondents’ dinner two weeks ago — he and his political partner, David Axelrod, went to Iowa to “make it official” — it seemed all the odder that he hasn’t engaged the issue substantively.

“This is a civil rights moment,” Wolfson said, “and Obama has not yet risen to it.” Worse, Obama’s opposition to same-sex marriage is now giving cover to every hard-core opponent of gay rights, from the Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean to the former Washington mayor Marion Barry, each of whom can claim with nominal justification to share the president’s views.

In reality, they don’t. Obama has long been, as he says, a fierce advocate for gay equality. The Windy City Times has reported that he initially endorsed legalizing same-sex marriage when running for the Illinois State Senate in 1996. The most common rationale for his current passivity is that his plate is too full. But the president has so far shown an impressive inclination both to multitask and to argue passionately for bedrock American principles when he wants to. Relegating fundamental constitutional rights to the bottom of the pile until some to-be-determined future seems like a shell game.

As Wolfson reminds us in his book “Why Marriage Matters,” Dr. King addressed such dawdling in 1963. “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait,’ ” King wrote. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ ”

The gay civil rights movement has fewer obstacles in its path than did Dr. King’s Herculean mission to overthrow the singular legacy of slavery. That makes it all the more shameful that it has fewer courageous allies in Washington than King did. If “American Idol” can sing out for change on Fox in prime time, it ill becomes Obama, of all presidents, to remain mute in the White House.

Doonesbury – No memorial.

Frank Rich: We can’t move on.

To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.

That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.

There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

[…]

I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

Ready, Fire, Aim — The conservatives are ready to raise a row — and money — no matter whom President Obama nominates to the Supreme Court.

If President Obama nominates Judge Diane P. Wood to the Supreme Court, conservatives plan to attack her as an “outspoken” supporter of “abortion, including partial-birth abortion.”

If he nominates Judge Sonia Sotomayor, they plan to accuse her of being “willing to expand constitutional rights beyond the text of the Constitution.”

And if he nominates Kathleen M. Sullivan, a law professor at Stanford, they plan to denounce her as a “prominent supporter of homosexual marriage.”

Preparing to oppose the confirmation of Mr. Obama’s eventual choice to succeed Justice David H. Souter, who is retiring, conservative groups are working together to stockpile ammunition. Ten memorandums summarizing their research, obtained by The New York Times, provide a window onto how they hope to frame the coming debate.

The memorandums dissect possible nominees’ records, noting statements the groups find objectionable on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, the separation of church and state and the propriety of citing foreign law in interpreting the Constitution.

While conservatives say they know they have little chance of defeating Mr. Obama’s choice because Democrats control the Senate, they say they hope to mount a fight that could help refill depleted coffers and galvanize a movement demoralized by Republican electoral defeats.

“It’s an immense opportunity to build the conservative movement and identify the troops out there,” said Richard A. Viguerie, a conservative fund-raiser. “It’s a massive teaching moment for America. We’ve got the packages written. We’re waiting right now to put a name in.”

It’s almost like the right wing is more interested in raising money than they are in actually discussing the merits of the nominee. What a shock.

One of the issues the Court will face is the question of marriage equality.

“It is now the flash point where politics and law meet. That flash point used to be abortion. I don’t think anybody thinks that’s going to be the flash point in this nomination,” said William A. Jacobson, a Cornell University law professor and conservative blogger.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), another GOP member of the Judiciary Committee, said conservatives are particularly eager to avoid a Supreme Court ruling akin to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion nationwide and has divided the country ever since. “I don’t think members of the court, or any of us, ever want to see a decision like that again,” Hatch said. Obama assured the senator in a recent meeting that he will not pick a “radical” to replace Souter, but Hatch added: “Presidents always say that. That’s why we have the hearing process.”

Same-sex marriage gained national resonance in the wake of last month’s Iowa Supreme Court ruling that legalized the practice in that state. And in the two weeks since Justice David H. Souter announced his retirement, Maine also legalized same-sex marriage, becoming the fifth state to do so; the New Hampshire legislature sent a marriage-equality bill to the governor; the New York State Assembly approved gay-marriage legislation; and the District of Columbia voted to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.

Those actions, in so short a time, have outstripped the ability of Democrats in Washington to stake out their public position on the issue.

Obama has said that he personally opposes same-sex marriage, based on his Christian faith, but the White House said after the Iowa ruling that the president “believes that committed gay and lesbian couples should receive equal rights under the law.”

Most Republicans and Democrats — Obama included — agree that individual states should determine their own marriage laws. But Congress complicated that process by approving the Defense of Marriage Act.

Rushed through by Republicans and signed by President Clinton on the eve of the 1996 election, the law allows states to ignore marriages performed in other states and denies federal recognition of legal gay marriages.

Under that law, same-sex couples are barred from receiving a long list of federal benefits — more than 1,100. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the most recent addition to the Supreme Court, acknowledged during his January 2006 Senate hearing that “several constitutional doctrines seem to be implicated” in the legislation, including the “full faith and credit” clause that compels states to honor judgments by other state courts. Legal scholars differ on the clause’s application to gay marriage, Alito noted, and “that’s an issue that may well come up within the federal courts” and is “almost certain to do so.”

It’s more than a little ironic — not to mention hypocritical — that many Republicans and conservatives can’t see the implications of privacy and equality in the text of the Constitution when it comes to such issues as reproductive choice and same sex marriage, yet they are able to discern the Founding Fathers’ thoughts when it comes to allowing the president to set aside habeas corpus or the Fourth Amendment on his say-so. You would think that if they can find the intent for the president to become a military dictator in a time of war, they would get the concept of equal protection under law as it is explicitly stated in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Rest Easy: It’s still not a crime in Florida to have sex with animals, tattoo artists don’t need a note from home, and you won’t be able to get a license plate with Jesus on it. At least not this year.

Legislation that failed to pass during regulation time of the 2009 session of the Florida Legislature would have:

Negated a Florida Supreme Court ruling and restored the ability of theme parks and other businesses to use parental waivers to avoid liability for injury or death by children due to risky activities such as motor sports, bungee jumping and horseback riding.

Made it a crime to have sex with animals.

Increased the minimum value of stolen property needed for a felony grand theft conviction from $300 to $600 to keep up with inflation.

Made it a third-degree felony for tattoo artists to ink up minors without first getting parental consent.

[…]

Created one specialty license plate with the image of Jesus and another with a cross.

Created specialty license plates for the St. Johns River, Korean War Veterans, Fraternal Order of Police, Autism, Go Green Florida (renewable energy), Catch Me, Release Me (fishing) and Endless Summer (surfing).

On the other hand, they did a lot for Miami-Dade County:

With a record budget deficit, this was a year legislators went home with little to brag about.

Unless they were from Miami-Dade.

During the legislative session that ended on May 8, Dade lawmakers found money for a medical school at Florida International University at a time when higher education was being cut.

They inserted last-minute language into the budget that gave local school boards the opportunity to temporarily raise property taxes to cover funding shortfalls.

They tucked a provision into an 11th-hour gambling deal to the shuttered Hialeah Park racetrack, and they put plans for a $1 billion Port of Miami tunnel back on track after state transportation officials had declared the project dead.

”I’d be hard pressed to name a county that did better than we did,” said Rep. Juan Zapata, a Miami Republican and Dade delegation chairman. ”In a very difficult year, I think we had some significant successes.”

Lawmakers traveled to Tallahassee with a $6 billion budget hole. Even with money from the federal stimulus package shrinking the deficit to $3 billion, legislators had to look to new fees and service cuts to close the gap.

Despite a budget year that was so brutal it kept lawmakers in Tallahassee an extra week, Dade legislators protected funding for Jackson Memorial Hospital, found $11 million for FIU’s fledgling medical school and secured funding for smaller local agencies like La Liga Contra el Cancer.

To give school districts more funding flexibility, lawmakers included a provision in the budget to allow school boards to increase property taxes by a rate of about $25 per $1,000 in taxable value.

To keep the tax hike, voters will have to sign off on it in the 2010 general election.

Doonesbury: Tweeting twit.

Where One Stands — Leonard Pitts, Jr. on black homophobia.

”The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

That’s for Marion Barry, who seems to need the reminder.

The former mayor and current city councilman of Washington, D.C. is a longtime supporter of gay rights. So observers were stunned last week when a bill committing the city to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere passed the council on a vote of 12-1.

The ”one” was Barry.

Wait, it gets worse. Barry said his position hasn’t changed but warned that the council needs to move slowly on this issue. ”All hell is going to break loose,” Barry said. ”We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this.” Indeed, after the vote, a group of black ministers reportedly ”stormed” the hallway outside the council chambers, vowing political reprisals.

The Washington Post quotes Barry as saying he voted as he did because ”I am representing my constituents.” He reminded reporters that ”98 percent of my constituents are black, and we don’t have but a handful of openly gay residents.”

That’s a lot of words to say what he could have said in three: I punked out.

There’s something to be said for representing one’s constituents. But there is more to be said for leading them. Barry’s failure to understand the difference is galling in light of the fact that he was once a leader in the civil-rights movement.

One wonders how differently that movement might have turned out had white people such as Clifford Durr, Viola Liuzzo, Ralph McGill, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and Lyndon Johnson allowed themselves to be cowed by the angry voices of white men and women saying, ”All hell is going to break loose.” For that matter, how much longer might the long night of slavery have lasted had white people like Elijah Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucretia Mott and Thaddeus Stevens bowed to the fact that the white community was ”just adamant” against freedom.

One wonders, too, whether those black ministers in the hall see their mirror image in generations of white ministers who have used the Bible to condone the evil of slavery (”Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters.”) and the fiction of African-American inferiority (the ”curse” of Ham).

At day’s end, though, the great tragedy here is neither historical amnesia nor moral cowardice. No, the tragedy is embodied in Barry’s description of African Americans as a people for whom open homosexuality is rare. That description is, unfortunately, too accurate — not simply for black Washington, but for black America. We are a socially conservative people.

And our conservatism is, quite literally, killing us.

Tough Times in Toledo — The Washington Post looks at the loss of white-collar jobs in my home town.

Rob Noonan’s friends think he’s a sucker. Laid off from his $140,000-a-year construction management job when the credit markets froze, he still shows up at work, one man working without pay in a cluster of vacant cubicles, trying to make something out of nothing.

While friends are mystified that he would toil for the developer who fired him after 16 years, Noonan figures voluntary work is his best path to a real job at real pay. And in an employment market this awful, he adds, “I really don’t have anything better to do.”

Noonan, 56, is a casualty of an economic crisis that has reached into the white-collar ranks, costing the jobs of thousands of executives, supervisors and office workers who never thought the paychecks would stop. Watching with disbelief and then despair as their comfortable lifestyles washed away, they are recalibrating their expectations in ways they never imagined.

“The key is to keep a lot of stuff going on,” Noonan said during his fifth jobless month. “The most important thing is that going in to work has given me a feeling of significance. It still keeps my spirits up.”

In this corner of Ohio, the workforce is contracting at an alarming speed, with unemployment climbing to rates more typical of counties in Appalachia. In March, unemployment in Toledo reached 12.6 percent, an increase of more than 50 percent over March 2008.

More than 1,200 people attended a Toledo Zoo job fair to fill about 200 minimum-wage summer jobs running the carousel or selling hot dogs. Another 500 dropped off résumés.

The city and its economy, long tied to the auto industry in nearby Detroit, never recovered from a downturn at the beginning of the decade. A nascent wind- and solar-power sector offers hope and some jobs, but not nearly enough to keep up with recent losses in manufacturing, real estate and finance.

Larry B. Dillin, head of Dillin Corp. and Noonan’s former boss, laid off 60 percent of his workforce of about two dozen in the Toledo suburb of Perrysburg. In a period that reminds him of the weeks after the 2001 terrorist attacks, he sees “a lot of people with a deer-in-the-headlights stare, people not knowing what normal is anymore.”

As President Obama’s economic recovery policies are tested, employees cut from the hardest-hit sectors are calculating what their recoveries will require. It takes the average worker about five months to find a new job, a month longer than a year ago. The new position often comes with a drop in salary, seniority and security.

“The quality of people coming to my door is incredible, and the options are minimal,” said Bruce Rumpf, president of Toledo-based temp agency Job1USA. “What I’m seeing is a lot of talented people with an inability to recapture anything near what they were at. Everyone’s going backwards.”

Frank Rich — The web and the future of journalism.

One of the freshest commentators on Internet culture, Clay Shirky, has written, correctly, that nobody really knows what form journalism will take in the evolving post-newspaper era. Looking back to the unpredictable social and cultural upheavals brought about by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, he writes, “We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.” So who will do the heavy journalistic lifting? “Whatever works.” Every experiment must be tried, professional and amateur, whether by institutions like The Times or “some 19-year-old kid few of us have heard of.”

What can’t be reinvented is the wheel of commerce. Just because information wants to be free on the Internet doesn’t mean it can always be free. Web advertising will never be profitable enough to support ambitious news gathering. If a public that thinks nothing of spending money on texting or pornography doesn’t foot the bill for such reportage, it won’t happen.

That’s why the debate among journalists about possible forms of payment (subscriptions, NPR-style donations, iTunes-style micropayments, foundation grants) is inside baseball. So is the acrimonious sniping between old media and new. The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail?

It’s all a matter of priorities. Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard.

By all means let’s mock the old mainstream media as they preen and party on in a Washington ballroom. Let’s deplore the tabloid journalism that, like the cockroach, will always be with us. But if a comprehensive array of real news is to be part of the picture as well, the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up. Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.

Doonesbury — Click to upgrade now!

Bait and Switch — Why politicians switch parties and the people who love/hate them.

Last summer at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, The New York Times conducted a just-for-kicks survey of delegates over which of the previous two vice-presidential nominees they were angrier at, John Edwards or Joseph I. Lieberman. Both had become party pariahs but for different reasons: Mr. Edwards for having an affair while his wife was treated for cancer, Mr. Lieberman for hooking up with the enemy party (and, at the time, campaigning for John McCain).

Mr. Lieberman dominated the unpopularity contest. While Mr. Edwards was hardly beloved, his sins were dubbed milder. As one delegate from Massachusetts, Phil Johnston, put it: “Edwards was only unfaithful to his wife. Lieberman was unfaithful to his entire party.”

We are living in a time when bipartisanship and independence are supposedly virtues. Yet allegiance to party never seems more sacred than when people decide to leave theirs. This came to mind again last week after Senator Arlen Specter (rhymes with “defector”) turned from the R’s to the D’s. It set off one of those Washington-stopping stirs that seems to drown out everything else for approximately 11 hours until the next spectacle (President Obama’s news conference), stunner (David Souter’s quitting), or shoe story (Michelle Obama’s $540 sneakers).

Like professional wrestling, politics loves a good turncoat tale. We seem to get a satisfying one every few years here: Mr. Lieberman straying from the D’s in 2006 (but never fully leaving, still calling himself an “Independent Democrat”), Senator Jim Jeffords bolting the R’s to become an Independent in 2001.

What’s always striking about these instances — and the Specter shocker has been no different — is the passions they elicit. “It’s like Johnny Damon going from the Red Sox to the Yankees, which will take years to forgive,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican (and Red Sox fan) of Maine.

“Party switching has all the emotional edges and baggage of divorce,” said Mark McKinnon, a longtime Democratic media maestro who fell hard for George W. Bush in 1997 and remained one of his closest aides and confidants into his White House years. “Rejection, betrayal, humiliation, jealousy and anger for the aggrieved party. Jubilation, titillation, pride and power for the successful seducer. Everything but the broken glass.”

That pretty much summed up the vibe on Capital Hill after Mr. Specter announced his switch on Tuesday. Conservative purists said good riddance (“Dead weight,” Rush Limbaugh called him); Republican leaders like Senator John Cornyn of Texas derided him for acting out of “political self-preservation.” (Imagine a politician acting out of self-preservation!)

Indeed, more often than not, parties are vehicles of self-interest — which was one reason the country’s framers were suspicious of them to begin with, said Ted Widmer, a historian at Brown University. “It’s odd that parties are sacrosanct to so many people now, given how little the founders liked them or how fluid they have been in American history,” Mr. Widmer said. “George Washington detested the ‘baneful effects’ of parties, and spent considerable time warning against a mentality that placed party over nation, even then.”

Frank Rich — This way lies madness.

Arlen Specter’s defection is the least of the Republicans’ problems, a lagging indicator. Though many characterize his departure as a “wake-up call” for the party, it’s only the most recent of countless wake-up calls the party has slept through since 2006. That was the year that Specter’s Pennsylvania Republican colleague in the Senate, Rick Santorum, lost his seat by a margin of more than 17 percentage points. Despite that rout and many more like it of similar right-wing candidates throughout America, the party’s ideological litmus test is more rigid than ever. The G.O.P. chairman, Michael Steele, and enforcers of Republican political correctness like William Kristol and the blogger Michele Malkin jeered Specter and cheered his departure. A laughing Limbaugh seconded e-mail from listeners commanding Specter to “take McCain with you — and his daughter.”

You can’t blame the president if he is laughing, too. As The Economist recently certified, the G.O.P. is now officially in the throes of “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” The same conservative gang that remained mum when George W. Bush praised Putin’s “soul” and held hands with the Saudi ruler Abdullah are now condemning Obama for shaking hands with Hugo Chávez, “bowing” to Abdullah, relaxing Cuban policy and talking to hostile governments. Polls show overwhelming majorities favoring Obama’s positions. But his critics have locked themselves in the padded cell of an alternative reality. Not long before The Wall Street Journal informed its readers that 81 percent of Americans liked Obama, Karl Rove wrote in its pages that “no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly.”

From derangement it’s a small step to madness. Last week, the president of a prime G.O.P. auxiliary, the Concerned Women for America, speculated that the president’s declaration of “a state of emergency about the flu was a political thing” to push through Kathleen Sebelius’s nomination as secretary of health and human services. At those tax-protesting “tea parties” on April 15, signs and speakers portrayed Obama as a “fascist,” a “socialist,” a terrorist and Hitler. Republican governors have proposed rejecting stimulus money for their states (only to fold after constituents rebelled) or, in the notorious instance of Rick Perry of Texas, toyed with secession from the union.

But this is funny only up to a point. It was in 1937 — the year after the Democratic landslide left the Republican national ticket with a total of eight electoral votes — that a hugely empowered F.D.R. made two of the biggest mistakes of his presidency. He tried to pack the Supreme Court with partisan allies and, overconfidently judging the economy recovered, retreated from the New Deal by instituting spending cuts that prompted a fresh economic tailspin.

After Gitmo — The anxiety of locals who live near the brig at Charleston, S.C., one possible place Guantánamo detainees may be sent, is typical of opposition nationwide.

Once a storage depot for Cold War missiles, this military base is quiet these days, with miles of oak and pine, freshwater marshes, fishing piers, and a sleepy golf club.

But the serenity of the 16,000-acre base could change soon if, as nearby residents suspect, the Obama administration chooses suburban Charleston as the next lockup for some of the 240 or so detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Debate has simmered here for months, mostly out of the national spotlight, over whether the base should be the next lockup for the men accused in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or swept up early in the war on terror.

”I’d like to see them out in the middle of the desert somewhere,” said Mayor Michael Heitzler of Goose Creek, which, along with the town of Hanahan, abuts this sprawling, secluded base.

”But you don’t win wars by pushing responsibility down the road. If it’s our time to serve, it’s our time to serve.”

On his third day in office, President Barack Obama fulfilled a campaign pledge by ordering that the prison camps at Guantánamo be emptied within a year. Attorney General Eric Holder is leading a task force to determine which detainees to transfer to the United States and prosecute for alleged crimes and which to send oversees.

Holder said the detainee dilemma was ”indisputably the most daunting challenge I face” as the country’s top law enforcer.

So far, only France has agreed to accept a single prisoner.

The Long and Winding Road — A 1971 Mustang with 619,284.5 miles (and the records to prove it) keeps on going.

IF you visit Richard Fuchs, an inventor with six patents — “all income generators,” he says — you are likely to see a few curious things.

Mr. Fuchs might walk you to the back patio and ask you to push a metal switch, which automatically opens an umbrellalike line for drying clothes.

In the kitchen, you would encounter a sink that operates without faucet handles. Nudge the left cabinet door below the sink with your knee to get hot water. Push the right cabinet for cold.

There are other inventions, devices and models lying around his modest suburban house, but you are most likely to end up in the garage where he parks his 1971 Ford Mustang, which has gone more than 600,000 miles and counting.

And counting is what Mr. Fuchs does.

Actually more than count — he has two 2-inch-thick binders in which he has logged every mile, every trip, every hour and every fill-up relating to the car. Indeed, counting does not do Mr. Fuchs’s endeavor justice. While the Mustang packs a 351 cubic-inch Cleveland V-8 with a four-barrel carburetor, Mr. Fuchs has spent most of his life in pursuit of low fuel consumption.

“First drive, 13 miles, from the dealership,” reads the first line of the log, which included details of his first fill-up. “I averaged 16.3 miles per gallon and spent $6.81 on gas.”

Wearing a loose red-and-green flannel shirt and dark brown corduroy pants, Mr. Fuchs sat at a table in his clean, sparse kitchen, hunched over the log as if he were analyzing satellite data. He is 81 years old and “speeding up,” he says. The log charts are neatly delineated in columns for date, mileage, fuel economy and notes. He brought out a magnifying glass.

“Here, I changed the rear axle ratio from 3.25 to 2.75,” he said. “I guessed I would get a 12 percent improvement. That’s what I got.”

Doonesbury — Peers.

The First 100 Days — How President Obama is doing so far in South Florida.

It’s nearly 100 days into his presidency, and Barack Obama has yet to disappoint Jean Acevedo, a small-business owner who ardently cast her vote for the Democrat in November.

Acevedo praises Obama’s juggling of big issues. In her estimation, the president has made all the right moves in redirecting environmental policy and revitalizing foreign relations, and in aggressively tackling the economic trouble he inherited — although like many people she is wary of massive bailouts and ballooning federal deficits.

”I can’t believe how much he is trying to handle and how well he is doing it,” said Acevedo, 61, who lives in Delray Beach and describes herself as a fiscally conservative Democrat who also voted for Republican Gov. Charlie Crist.

The president’s policies have yet to make a significant mark on South Florida. Economic stimulus money is just starting to wend its way here, and Obama has not tackled broad healthcare reform, a critical campaign promise for a region with one of the highest rates of uninsured people in the country.

And Obama’s aggressive deployment of the government purse has solidified an apparently small but determined opposition across the region.

But Acevedo’s faith in the president’s ability to steer the best course remains firm — a confidence shared by a solid majority of Floridians at this early but symbolically important juncture in Obama’s presidency, surveys suggest.

”Obama has a team of smart, competent people that’s allowing him to multitask, and he’s shown the courage to try and do what he has,” Acevedo said. ”No one would argue this man is very smart, whether you agree or disagree with his positions.”

The Historians Compare Notes

For three months, five presidential historians have been writing online columns comparing Barack Obama’s initial 100 days in office with those of some of his modern predecessors’. These are their final installments. The full series, along with an interactive timeline of presidential history can be found in the 100 Days blog.

Frank Rich — The Original Sin.

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

[…]

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

Doonesbury — Tweet Bird of Youth.

Testing, Testing — Andres Oppenheimer says in the Miami Herald that the Obama administration may be testing Cuba’s resolve to rectify mistakes and deal with issues like human rights and freedom of the press.

After President Barack Obama’s opening speech at the summit stating that ”the United States seeks a new beginning with Cuba,” several top Latin American and U.S. officials told me — granted, with various degrees of conviction — that there are a few concrete signs that Cuba may accept Obama’s olive branch.

Obama aides are cautiously encouraged by Cuban leader Raúl Castro’s statement Friday in Venezuela that Cuba may have made some ”mistakes” in the past and that ”we are willing to discuss everything,” including human rights, with he U.S. government.

U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough told me Saturday that ”we are mostly struck by President Castro’s admission that they could be wrong. That strikes me as a degree of candor that we haven’t seen heretofore.” He added, ”But the fact remains that the steps [President Obama] outlined in the last week are steps that he has been talking about for two years, since he wrote an op-ed for The Miami Herald in August 2007.”

The Obama opinion piece called for, among other things, the release of political prisoners in Cuba.

Another senior U.S. official cautioned, however, that ”we are at the very beginning of the search for a new relationship with Cuba, and that’s going to take time. We are going to take a deep breath, go through the summit, get some time to reflect and then think about future steps.”

Grabbing the Reins — Faye Fiore and Mark Z. Barabak in the Los Angeles Times look at President Obama’s first 100 days so far.

Direct, assertive and utterly self-assured, Obama has used his broad popularity, a driving ambition and a sweeping agenda to move America in a wholly new direction.

Just shy of 100 days in office, he has ordered the closure of the Guantanamo Bay military prison and a troop withdrawal from Iraq; made it easier for women to sue for job discrimination; eased a ban on stem cell research; extended healthcare coverage to millions of children; ousted the head of General Motors; reached out to the Muslim world; moved to ease tensions with Cuba; traveled to Canada, Europe, Turkey and Latin America; and set aside huge tracts of wilderness for federal protection.

More broadly, Obama has seized on the worst economic crisis since the 1930s — exploiting it, critics say — and set out to reshape major aspects of everyday life: the price we pay to see a doctor, the size of our children’s classrooms, the fuel we put in our cars.

If Obama’s history-making campaign offered hope, the nation’s first black president has delivered audacity; his vision of an activist government has been so vast, Washington now guarantees not only savings accounts but brakes on a Buick.

“You can carp and gripe,” said Allan Lichtman, a historian at Washington’s American University. “But you really have to go back as far as Franklin Roosevelt for this much coming out of a newly elected president.”

Whether dealing with imperious bankers or Somali pirates, Obama as chief executive looks a lot like Obama the candidate: the calmest one at the table, ribbing stressed-out aides and sipping bottled water as his lieutenants guzzle caffeine.

Not that his performance was always so smooth.

After a quick start, a series of controversies slowed hiring for the administration, leaving hundreds of desks vacant and phones unanswered; it took three tries to land a Commerce secretary. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, the point man on the economy, relied on holdovers from the Bush administration to shape Obama’s policies, and botched his debut so badly that he helped send markets off a cliff.

For a man who considers himself a good listener, Obama sometimes appeared tone-deaf, underestimating public disgust with a would-be healthcare czar who rode around Washington in a chauffeured Cadillac and failed to pay taxes on the perk. He was slow to detect the populist backlash brewing when tens of millions in taxpayer-funded bonuses went to executives who helped tank the economy.

At times, the nation’s orator in chief struggled to find the right tone — sometimes too grim, sometimes too glib — when talking to a country that needed to hear both hard truths and gentle reassurance. (Last week, Obama gave a speech touting economic improvement the same day lousy consumer spending figures came out.)

When Obama’s agenda threatened to hit a wall inside the Washington Beltway, he took to the road — reporters in tow — to soak up support from friendly, campaign-style crowds.

But more important than personal adulation was something else Americans seemed willing to give their young president, something apparent in robust poll numbers and a recognition that things weren’t going to improve overnight: The country was willing to be patient.

A Big Man Does Beckett — John Goodman takes on the tough role of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot.

IN his dressing room last week John Goodman stood up, emitted a long, blaring foghorn blast and then announced in a loudspeaker voice, “Now docking. …” He was describing his Act I entrance as Pozzo, his first theatrical role in four years, in the Roundabout Theater Company production of “Waiting for Godot,” which opens April 30 at Studio 54.

John Goodman in his dressing room. He is back onstage for the first time since 2005 in a new production of “Waiting for Godot,” in which he plays Pozzo.

Mr. Goodman is a big man — he’s 6 foot 3, and his weight these days hovers around 300 pounds — and in his Pozzo getup he seems even bigger. He wears a derby, boots and a voluminous riding suit with jodhpurs, and when he comes onstage, at the end of a long rope attached to his hapless slave, Lucky (played by John Glover), he does seem a bit like an ocean liner. Vladimir and Estragon (played by Bill Irwin and Nathan Lane) look astonished, and rightly so.

Pozzo is the least sympathetic and in some ways the trickiest character in “Godot.” He cruelly mistreats Lucky, and yet he is as lost and vulnerable as all the others. He is “an insecure gasbag who needs to be listened to and have things done for him,” as Mr. Goodman put it. “He’s like the Macy’s blimp no one wants to look at.” Pozzo spouts a lot of fustian and hot air, and Mr. Goodman said he was still trying to figure out the right voice for it. His Pozzo speaks in a deep, Goodmanesque rumble but with a lordly British accent.

“It’s just a voice I heard in my head,” Mr. Goodman explained, “along with all the other voices there — the barking dogs and the rest. I need to make it more distinctly American, sort of like Bill Buckley. I’m trying to make it more a patrician Yankee voice, but I worry that’s not going to sell. It’s going to sound like a bad English accent. So it’s something I’m still searching for.”

Mr. Goodman is good at voices. In the course of a hour or so he imitated Peter O’Toole, Joe Franklin, a pretentious critic and an aged horse, complete with snuffling and foot stomping. But there were also sighs, long pauses, Beckett-like silences and moments when Mr. Goodman’s inner critic would cut him off midsentence.

Mr. Goodman, as anyone knows who has seen one of his several “Saturday Night Live” performances, can be a very funny man. His huge face is rubbery and expressive, made for comedy. He moves lightly and is a more than decent blues singer.

Over four decades, appearing in roughly three movies a year, he has played a king, a governor, Babe Ruth and a Stone Age caveman, Fred Flintstone. On “The West Wing” he has been a Republican speaker of the House who temporarily takes over for the president. But as is so often the case with actors his size, he is more often the second banana, the comic foil. His most famous role is Dan Conner, the henpecked husband on “Roseanne.”

In person Mr. Goodman is not the stereotypical jolly fat man. For all his success, he remains full of self-doubt. Compliments make him wince, and his conversational default mode is self-deprecation. He sometimes seems to be eyeing himself with suspicion.

Frank Rich says the “Gathering Storm” ad by the National Organization for Marriage signals a turning point in the demise of the anti-gay movement.

Far from terrifying anyone, “Gathering Storm” has become, unsurprisingly, an Internet camp classic. On YouTube the original video must compete with countless homemade parodies it has inspired since first turning up some 10 days ago. None may top Stephen Colbert’s on Thursday night, in which lightning from “the homo storm” strikes an Arkansas teacher, turning him gay. A “New Jersey pastor” whose church has been “turned into an Abercrombie & Fitch” declares that he likes gay people, “but only as hilarious best friends in TV and movies.”

Yet easy to mock as “Gathering Storm” may be, it nonetheless bookmarks a historic turning point in the demise of America’s anti-gay movement.

What gives the ad its symbolic significance is not just that it’s idiotic but that its release was the only loud protest anywhere in America to the news that same-sex marriage had been legalized in Iowa and Vermont. If it advances any message, it’s mainly that homophobic activism is ever more depopulated and isolated as well as brain-dead.

Doonesbury — Proud Papa.

Steering Clear — Marriage equality is moving through the states via the courts and judicial rulings. Adam Liptak writes that this may be the best way for the issue to gain acceptance, as opposed to submitting it to a ruling by the United States Supreme Court; the lesson of Roe v. Wade looms large.

And now there are four. In the space of a week, the number of states allowing same-sex marriage has doubled, with Iowa and then Vermont joining Massachusetts and Connecticut. In California, gay and lesbian couples were exchanging vows for five months before voters put a stop to the practice in November. Californians are still talking it over, though, and loudly. New York and New Jersey may be next to debate the question.

In other contexts, this sort of turmoil might amount to an invitation for the United States Supreme Court to step in. But there are all sorts of reasons the court is likely to keep its distance, and a central one is the endlessly debated 1973 decision that identified a constitutional right to abortion.

“The concern about creating another Roe v. Wade looms large,” said Nathaniel Persily, who teaches law and political science at Columbia. “At least five members of this court, if not more, would probably be reluctant to weigh in on this controversy, especially given the progress that is being made in state legislatures, state courts and public opinion.”

Court decisions on issues like school desegregation, abortion and same-sex marriage can raise questions about the judicial branch usurping the democratic process. But there are strategic issues as well. The Supreme Court not only decides cases but also decides which cases to decide. In jurisprudence as in life, timing is everything.

Even some strong supporters of abortion rights believe, for instance, that Roe went too far too fast and may have been counterproductive. One of them is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“The court bit off more than it could chew,” Justice Ginsburg said in remarks after a speech at Princeton in October. It would have been enough, she said, to strike down the extremely restrictive Texas law at issue in Roe and leave further questions for later cases.

“The legislatures all over the United States were moving on this question,” she added. “The law was in a state of flux.”

Roe shut those developments down and created a backlash that lasts to this day.

“The Supreme Court’s decision was a perfect rallying point for people who disagreed with the notion that it should be a woman’s choice,” Justice Ginsburg said. “They could, instead of fighting in the trenches legislature by legislature, go after this decision by unelected judges.”

It’s Their Move — When President Obama lifts the travel restrictions on Cuba, what will the Cuban government do in response? Lesley Clark looks at the implications.

If, as expected, the Obama administration lifts travel restrictions on Cuban Americans this week to allow them to freely visit Cuba, it would mark the most significant overture toward the island nation by an American president in decades.

The advantages for Cuban Americans eager to visit family members on the island more frequently are obvious — as are the benefits for Cuba’s cash-starved government: hundreds of millions of dollars in additional income yearly from exiles visiting family members and dropping money on flights, lodging, meals and gifts for relatives.

But the gain for the administration — and President Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to bring ”libertad” to Cubans on the island — may be some time coming, if at all. As 10 other American presidents have discovered, the Castro regime is not interested in relaxing its grip on power.

Experts on Cuba-U.S. relations say pressure on the Obama administration from Latin America and Europe to bring Cuba in from the cold, combined with congressional efforts to ease sanctions and Havana’s storied resistance to the United States, may lead Raúl Castro’s government to consider itself in a position of strength.

Yet Obama represents a potential challenge for a Cuban regime headed by white septuagenarians. The majority of Cuba’s population is black or of mixed race, and the young U.S. president is popular among everyday Cubans, which may prod Havana into acknowledging, however slightly, his gesture.

”There is a concern [among Cuban leaders] that if they don’t respond somehow to Obama’s overture, it will be seen as a slight,” said Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. ”The president is talking about talking to everyone, so they can’t be entirely recalcitrant. They’ll play the game a little bit.”

Yet, Suchlicki and other Cuba watchers believe that Havana is unlikely to reciprocate with any grand move, beyond perhaps releasing a few political prisoners or shedding some of the bureaucracy it imposes on Cuban Americans traveling to the island. Changing Cuba’s economic and political system has long been a nonstarter.

”So, the question is, is the U.S. going to be satisfied with token gestures, or do they want more?” Suchlicki said. ”We are dealing with a hardened dictatorship. They’re not going to step down for Obama.”

Criticized by his rivals during the presidential campaign for suggesting that he would meet with Raúl Castro without preconditions, Obama pledged during a campaign speech in Miami to focus his Cuba policy on libertad — freedom.

”The road to freedom for all Cubans must begin with justice for Cuba’s political prisoners, the right of free speech, a free press, freedom of assembly, and it must lead to elections that are free and fair,” he said then. ”That is my commitment.”

Hard Times on Worth Avenue — Even the tony and the trendy face hard times in the playground of the rich. Want to by Bernie Madoff’s pants?

LONG before the number was redolent of bailouts and bank failure, David Neff decided that Trillion was the perfect name for his clothing store here on Worth Avenue, this town’s boulevard of luxe retail.

The idea was to brace customers for the you’ve-got-to-be-joking price tags — $6,800 for a sport jacket, $800 for a button-down shirt — and to convey unparalleled opulence.

“We wanted people to know that this is a lot,” Mr. Neff says, gesturing to the clothing, “and we didn’t want anyone to open next door with a store that sounded like it might be more.”

Until last year, this idea actually seemed reasonable.

Then the meltdown vaporized the portfolios of multimillionaires here and, soon after, a beloved Wall Street wizard and Palm Beach homeowner named Bernie Madoff was unmasked as a fraud.

For years, Mr. Madoff’s elusive genius act beguiled his Jewish neighbors, as well as friends of those neighbors, and so on, and so on, until vast chunks of local money were hoovered into his Ponzi scheme. Life savings, dreams, and countless inheritances, gone.

“A guy stood right there and cried,” says Mr. Neff, pointing at a table covered with $800 cashmere cable knit sweaters. “And he told me he’d lost it all, his wife lost it all, his daughter lost it all. He said to me, ‘I had everything with Bernie.’ ”

A lot of regular customers haven’t been seen in Trillion since Hurricane Madoff struck in December — including, of course, the hurricane himself.

The last time he was here, he fell for a $2,000 pair of worsted spun cashmere pants, which Trillion didn’t have in his size, and had to be ordered from Italy.

After the slacks arrived, but before Mr. Madoff could come by for a fitting, he was arrested.

“I remember I heard about the arrest and I went directly to the store to charge those pants on his credit card,” recalls Mr. Neff, a fit, gray-haired man in perpetual motion. “But the card had already been canceled.”

So, what happened to the pants?

“They’re in the racks, over there,” Mr. Neff says, nodding toward the trouser section.

Wait a minute.

You have Bernie Madoff’s unclaimed $2,000 pants, on a rack, in this store?

“Uh-hmm,” he says, with a slightly abashed grin. “Would you like to see them?”

Frank Rich — Looking at the career of Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers, the lesson is to do what you love, not what makes you wealthy.

Clearly the last person to serve as an inspiring role model for alternative values would have been Summers. But in her first baccalaureate address last June, his successor as Harvard president, Drew Gilpin Faust, stepped into that moral vacuum, zeroing in on the huge number of students heading into finance, consulting and investment banking. “Find work you love,” she implored the class of 2008. The “most remunerative” job choice “may not be the most meaningful and the most satisfying.”

This same note was hit a month earlier by the commencement speaker at Wesleyan University, Barack Obama. “The big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy,” he said, amount to “a poverty of ambition.” He wasn’t speaking idly. As America knows, Obama turned down the lucrative career path guaranteed to the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review to pursue the missions of service and teaching instead. The potential rewards for our country, now that that early choice has led him into the White House, are enormous.

But it’s hardly a given that the entrenched money culture has evaporated along with the paper profits it generated. One skeptic is Howard Gardner, the Harvard education professor who has created seminars at several elite colleges to counsel students in the notion of pursuing meaningful, ethical and effective work — “Good Work,” as he has titled it. He believes that many students may still be operating on the assumption that the world of finance will just pick up where it left off in a few years. “But we’re not going to be back there,” Gardner told me last week, “and we shouldn’t be back there.”

Doonesbury — Getting to know you.

The Confidence Game — President Obama takes on the challenges facing him, the one thing he has plenty of is confidence.

As he cashiered the head of one of America’s storied automakers last week, President Obama declared that he remained “confident that G.M. can rise again.” Then he flew to London to meet with counterparts to try to turn the world economy around, vowing once again to restore “confidence in the financial markets.”

By the time he got to France, he told a town hall meeting that he was “confident that we can meet any challenge as long as we are together.” For good measure, he repeated the phrase twice more in his opening remarks. And in case the folks back home missed it, Mr. Obama taped a message for broadcast Saturday declaring that “I am confident that we will meet this challenge.”

Confidence is the name of the game for a new president trying to calibrate his message to match the moment, searching for a way to inspire a recession-weary country and convey hope that better times are ahead. It is a tricky balance to strike. If he sounds too gloomy, he could further depress a nation desperate for any sign of progress. If he sounds too optimistic, he risks looking as if he’s trying to pull something over on the nation, a different sort of Confidence Man.

“You don’t want to overlook the misery and not look like you’re in touch with the challenges they’re facing,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. “On the other hand, you’ve got to give them a sense that there’s a light on the horizon that you’re pointing to and it’s visible.”

Mr. Obama finds himself the leader of a nation with depleted confidence in all sorts of institutions of American life, from the banks and auto industry to government and the news media. America’s very place in the world seems in doubt to some, as China and Russia push to create a new international currency to replace the dollar and others challenge the nation’s economic, military and cultural dominance.

This is hardly the first time a president has confronted such a challenge. Franklin D. Roosevelt arguably turned around the mood of a country that appreciated his buoyant style, reassuring fireside chats and certitude that the only thing to fear was “fear itself,” even as the Great Depression raged on for years. Ronald Reagan took over a country following Vietnam and Watergate that suffered what Jimmy Carter had called a “crisis of confidence” and proceeded to emulate Roosevelt with a series of radio addresses and speeches expressing restless faith in the American spirit.

Regardless of how much credit they really deserve, Roosevelt and Reagan, or their legends, certainly have driven successive presidents to focus on their tone, knowing that they will be judged on it. George W. Bush projected steady assurance in the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But his relentlessly upbeat assessments of the war in Iraq later made him seem disconnected until he eventually acknowledged that the war was going badly and changed his strategy.

The Plane Facts — Following up on this story, the Sun-Sentinel continues to look into the travels of Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp.

Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp says he flew his family on a state plane for a weekend trip to historical St. Augustine in April 2007 so he could attend a federal Small Business Administration event.

Kottkamp said he was on official business, but records obtained by the Sun Sentinel show he had nothing scheduled that weekend. And SBA officials said they had no events during Kottkamp’s visit.

Questions over whether Kottkamp used state aircraft for personal trips are the latest developments in a controversy surrounding Florida’s lieutenant governor, whose extensive use of state planes has sparked scrutiny from lawmakers and ethics complaints.

On another trip over Thanksgiving weekend last year, Kottkamp traveled on a state plane to Tallahassee with one main event on his calendar: the annual grudge match between the University of Florida and Florida State University football teams.

Kottkamp’s public schedule lists no events that weekend. A calendar maintained by his scheduler shows Kottkamp attending pregame events and a “jazz brunch” at a lobbyist’s home the day after the game, before flying home to Fort Myers.

Kottkamp’s wife, Cyndie, accompanied him onboth trips.

State law says aircraft can be used only for “conducting official state business.”

The governor’s office did not answer questions about the purpose of Kottkamp’s trips, saying the lieutenant governor was unavailable.

The Sun Sentinel first reported on Kottkamp’s travel in February, detailing 365 flights on the state’s executive planes, a King Air 350 turboprop and a Cessna Citation jet. The planes are reserved for top officials and legislators at a cost to taxpayers of $3.5 million a year.

Most of Kottkamp’s flights were to get him back and forth between Fort Myers and Tallahassee, where he owns a second home.

After media reports, the lieutenant governor reimbursed the state $10,400 for flights his wife and young son took on those planes and a Florida Highway Patrol aircraft, which he also uses.

Kottkamp has defended his air travel, including the flight on the FHP plane to St. Augustine.

“I can tell you that not everything I do is on the calendar, that’s for certain,” Kottkamp told reporters when asked about that trip. “I think the issue there was a Small Business Administration event.”

But officials in the governor’s office said they have no record of an SBA event. And the day before the trip, Kottkamp’s scheduler distributed an internal e-mail listing his agenda for that weekend as all clear, marked as “personal days” in neighboring Ponte Vedra.

Officials at the SBA’s Jacksonville office, which serves north and central Florida, said they had no events scheduled in the area that weekend.

“I found our archive calendars from that time — there’s nothing on there,” said spokeswoman Lola Naylor. “It would’ve been a big enough event that it would’ve been on our calendar.”

In a brief interview Thursday, Kottkamp said he had no more details. Asked about the nature of his official business, he responded, “I don’t know.”

Frank Rich — Double-Header.

EVEN among pitchfork-bearing populists, there was scant satisfaction when the White House sent the C.E.O. of General Motors to the guillotine.

Sure, Rick Wagoner deserved his fate. He did too little too late to save an iconic American institution from devolving into a government charity case. He embraced the Hummer. G.M.’s share price fell from above $70 to under $3 on his watch. Yet few disputed the judgment of the Michigan governor, Jennifer Granholm, that Wagoner was a “sacrificial lamb,” a symbolic concession to public rage ordered by a president who had to look tough after being blindsided by the A.I.G. bonuses. Detroit’s chief executive had to be beheaded so that the masters of the universe at the top of Wall Street’s bailed-out behemoths might survive.

On this point even the left and the right could agree. The union leader Andy Stern publicly wondered why the administration didn’t also dethrone Ken Lewis of Bank of America. Thaddeus McCotter, a conservative Republican congressman from suburban Detroit, asked, “When will the Wall Street C.E.O.’s receiving TARP funds summon the honor to resign? Will this White House ever bother to raise the issue?”

When reporters did raise the issue of a double standard to the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, they got double talk: “I don’t have anything specific on Bank of America.”

But even as that unanswered question hangs in the air, a more revealing inquiry might be this: Why is there any sympathy whatsoever for a Detroit C.E.O. who helped wreck his company, ruined investors and cost thousands of hard-working underlings their jobs, when there is no mercy for those who did the same on Wall Street? Might we, too, have a double standard? Could we still be in denial of the reality that greed and irresponsibility were not an exclusive Wall Street franchise during our national bender?

Doonesbury — Phoning it in.

Dr. More — Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, has emerged as President Obama’s toughest critic from the left. Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas profiles him and his complaints about how the administration needs to spend more to rescue the economy.

In his twice-a-week column and his blog, Conscience of a Liberal, he criticizes the Obamaites for trying to prop up a financial system that he regards as essentially a dead man walking. In conversation, he portrays Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and other top officials as, in effect, tools of Wall Street (a ridiculous charge, say Geithner defenders). These men and women have “no venality,” Krugman hastened to say in an interview with NEWSWEEK. But they are suffering from “osmosis,” from simply spending too much time around investment bankers and the like. In his Times column the day Geithner announced the details of the administration’s bank-rescue plan, Krugman described his “despair” that Obama “has apparently settled on a financial plan that, in essence, assumes that banks are fundamentally sound and that bankers know what they’re doing. It’s as if the president were determined to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch, that their economic vision is clouded by excessively close ties to Wall Street.”

If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he’s wrong, and you sense he’s being a little harsh (especially about Geithner), but you have a creeping feeling that he knows something that others cannot, or will not, see. By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking. The in crowd of any age can be deceived by self-confidence, as Liaquat Ahamed has shown in “Lords of Finance,” his new book about the folly of central bankers before the Great Depression, and David Halberstam revealed in his Vietnam War classic, “The Best and the Brightest.” Krugman may be exaggerating the decay of the financial system or the devotion of Obama’s team to preserving it. But what if he’s right, or part right? What if President Obama is squandering his only chance to step in and nationalize—well, maybe not nationalize, that loaded word—but restructure the banks before they collapse altogether?

Compared to the over-the-top screeching and ridiculous epithets of “socialism” and “fascism” that have passed for the Republicans’ critiques of the first two months of the Obama administration, it is both refreshing and educational to hear some cogent and considered discourse from the left. Plus, being told he’s not liberal enough from a Nobel laureate gives Mr. Obama some room to maneuver.

They Got Nothing — Waterboarding a terror suspect led nowhere.

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations,” and other top officials called him a “trusted associate” of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 — and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

Abu Zubaida’s case presents the Obama administration with one of its most difficult decisions as it reviews the files of the 241 detainees still held in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Abu Zubaida — a nom de guerre for the man born Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein — was never charged in a military commission in Guantanamo Bay, but some U.S. officials are pushing to have him charged now with conspiracy.

C’mon, Get Happy — Roberta de Boer says what we really need is a happiness stimulus.

Job losses. Plant closings. Home foreclosures. Bankruptcies. Bailouts. Industries teetering.

As we near the end of the first decade of our new century, everyday life can feel like Chinese water torture – a steady and inescapable drip, drip, drip of depressing news.

And no, it’s not just you.

Each year, the American Psychological Association measures stress nationwide. The latest findings show some 80 percent of us felt that money and the economy are significant stressors, up from 66 percent. Some 60 percent also felt irritable and angry, and more than half worried about job security and even lay awake at night. And now, consider: This latest APA survey was wrapped up by September, before the worst of the economic cascade.

But if you’re almost afraid these days to read the newspaper, take heart. Turns out mom had a point when she said, “Chin up, Kiddo, and find the silver lining.” The difference now is that proponents of a de-liberately cultivated sunny outlook wear lab coats, not aprons.

In just the last 10 or so years, psychologists have shown that we are indeed what we think and what we do.

A growing body of research suggests that specific thoughts and actions can yield measurably “happier” lives.

Given the national mood, could the timing be any better?

Where The Boys Were — The small hotels on the beach in Fort Lauderdale that have hosted generations of spring breakers are fading away, falling to the luxury resorts that don’t cater to vomiting frat boys.

If this hotel could talk, it might hiccup. Or belch.

Heaven knows, enough beer has flowed through it.

Over the decades, Spring Breakers have flocked to the Tropic Cay Beach Resort in Fort Lauderdale Is your Fort Lauderdale restaurant clean? – Click Here., and no wonder.

Cheap rooms. The ocean yards away. And a deskman who doesn’t notice when nine kids pile into Room 213 with enough beer to fuel a frat house.

But the Tropic Cay, a 43-room hotel built in 1954, is an endangered species.

One by one, the wrecking ball is wiping the low-slung mom ‘n’ pophotels — ground zero for Spring Breakers — off the map.

In their place: luxury hotels offering concierges and caviar, housing guests geared to Cristal, not Jell-O shots.

The remaking of “The Strip” is a generation in the making, and growing up has been painful.

After 9-11, tourism — the city’s lifeblood — took a dive. Recent financial fiascoes have created the worst economic slide since the Great Depression, delaying beachfront building projects that would replace modest hotels with glitzy resorts.

Even with financial setbacks, that once-infamous piece of real estate has, like South Florida, changed drastically in the nearly 25 years since 370,000 college kids swarmed the beach.

Fort Lauderdale isn’t just a beach town anymore. It boasts a performing arts center, a convention center and other cultural attractions.

These days, the tourism bureau targets a mix of people, including families and the wealthy.

“You can’t cater to MTV and Girls Gone Wild and expect anyone else to want to come here,” said Nicki Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau. “It demeans your destination.”

Luxury resorts, including The Trump, The W Hotel and the Ritz-Carlton now dominate the landscape where wet T-shirt contests were once the draw. Last year the city approved a 22-story building, the Ocean Wave Beach Resort, where the Tropic Cay and another hotel now stand.

“Every year something happens that makes bringing Spring Break back further and further from reality,” Grossman said.

Doonesbury — Plan B.

Little Things Mean a Lot — How the art of political distraction works.

The questions flew hard and fast at President Obama last week as he stood on the White House South Lawn, preparing to escape for California’s gentler climes. How, Mr. Obama was asked, would he quell public anger over $165 million in bonuses for employees of the bailed-out insurance giant, A.I.G.?

“I don’t want to quell anger,” he replied. “I think people are right to be angry. What I want us to do, though, is channel our anger in a constructive way.”

It was too late. By the time Air Force One took off, Congress was in full-recriminations mode, with the usual hearings and declarations of outrage. The A.I.G. chief executive, Edward M. Liddy, was pleading with bonus-takers who got more than $100,000 to give half the money back. The search for culprits — Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner? Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Banking Committee chairman? Mr. Obama himself? — was in full bloom. That old Washington question was back: Who knew what, and when?

But something else about the scene rang familiar: it was a sliver of news, seemingly a side issue, run amok. In the grand scheme of today’s taxpayer expenditures — $787 billion for economic recovery; another $700 billion to shore up shaky financial institutions; who knows how many more billions tomorrow — the A.I.G. bonuses amount to small change. But the small change became a big deal in an instant, dominating the talk shows and threatening to undermine Mr. Obama’s domestic agenda.

“This is the kind of issue Washington chases like catnip,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, lamented in an interview. “What would be a mistake would be to get so distracted by the catnip-chasers that we lose our own path. We are not going to do that.”

Mr. Obama is hardly the first American president to grapple with a distraction, a diversion — an outright red herring, some might call it — that grew bigger than itself. Ronald Reagan had the Air Force’s $7,622 coffeepot and the Navy’s $435 claw hammer, as well as an ill-fated effort to save money by classifying ketchup as a school lunch vegetable. Bill Clinton had midnight basketball and a high-priced haircut from a Beverly Hills stylist aboard Air Force One. George W. Bush was blindsided by an executive branch decision to contract with Dubai Ports World, an Arab-owned company, to manage terminals in six American ports.

What these stories share is a simple and clear narrative that captures the public imagination by tapping into some larger fear or existing perception — “a proxy for a bigger concern,” in the words of Ed Gillespie, former counselor to Mr. Bush. If that concern runs deep enough, the side issue becomes the main issue.

Thus did the A.I.G. bonuses become a symbol of long-simmering taxpayer resentment over Wall Street bailouts, and economic inequity in general, raising essential questions about fairness and personal responsibility — themes Mr. Obama has repeatedly evoked. The story line had shock appeal: fat cats get rewarded for driving the economy into a ditch.

Frank Rich — Obama’s Katrina Moment?

A CHARMING visit with Jay Leno won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: “President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.”

Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country’s surge of populist rage could devour the president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn’t get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.

Otherwise it never would have used Lawrence Summers, the chief economic adviser, as a messenger just as the A.I.G. rage was reaching a full boil last weekend. Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy.

Bob Schieffer of CBS asked Summers the simple question that has haunted the American public since the bailouts began last fall: “Do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through these bailouts?” What followed was a monologue of evasion that, translated into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it.

Yet even as Summers spoke, A.I.G. was belatedly confirming what he would not. It has, in essence, been laundering its $170 billion in taxpayers’ money by paying off its reckless partners in gambling and greed, from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on Wall Street to Société Générale and Deutsche Bank abroad.

Summers was even more highhanded in addressing the “retention bonuses” handed to the very employees who brokered all those bad bets. After reciting the requisite outrage talking point, he delivered a patronizing lecture to viewers of ABC’s “This Week” on how our “tradition of upholding law” made it impossible to abrogate the bonus agreements. It never occurred to Summers that Americans might know that contracts are renegotiated all the time — most conspicuously of late by the United Automobile Workers, which consented to givebacks as its contribution to the Detroit bailout plan. Nor did he note, for all his supposed reverence for the law, that the A.I.G. unit being rewarded with these bonuses is now under legal investigation by British and American authorities.

Within 24 hours, Summers’s stand was discarded by Obama, who tardily (and impotently) vowed to “pursue every single legal avenue” to block the bonuses. The question is not just why the White House was the last to learn about bonuses that Democratic congressmen had sought hearings about back in December, but why it was so slow to realize that the public’s anger couldn’t be sated by Summers’s legalese or by constant reiteration of the word outrage. By the time Obama acted, even the G.O.P. leader Mitch McConnell was ahead of him in full (if hypocritical) fulmination.

Not Getting Any Younger — Harley-Davidson faces a greying future and tries to go after the youthful market.

After riding high for two decades, the company that makes the hulky bikes that devoted riders affectionately call Hogs is sputtering. Harley’s core customers are graying baby boomers, whose savings, in many cases, have gone up in smoke in the market downturn. Few are in the mood to shell out up to $20,000 or more for something that is basically a big toy, and the company, in turn, has not captured much of the younger market.

And though Harley’s woes pale in comparison to what the automakers face — Harley’s revenue dipped 2 percent last year while Detroit was crashing — overproduction and loose lending practices have burdened the company’s finances.

In a pattern similar to that of the housing bust, Harley goosed sales by luring many buyers with no-money-down loans. A subsidiary created about 15 years ago, Harley-Davidson Financial Services, made those loans and packaged them into securities to sell to investors. As the credit market skidded, so did this subsidiary.

As much as one-fourth of the $2.8 billion in loans issued by Harley-Davidson Financial Services last year were subprime, with interest rates as high as 18 percent. As the downturn took hold, some borrowers started defaulting on loans and investors stopped buying the securities, forcing Harley to write down $80 million of debt last year, analysts said. Although it recently tightened lending standards, the company is still chasing buyers by offering credit.

Amphi-Truck — A display on Calle Ocho in Miami pays tribute to the automotive/maritime ingenuity of a man trying to drive out of Cuba.

Motorists traveling along Southwest Eighth Street in Miami have been slowing down to check out a fluorescent green 1951 Chevy pickup parked in front of the Maroone Chevrolet dealership.

It’s not for sale, though.

Consider the retrofitted antique a salute to the imagination of the so-called Cuban ”truck-o-nauts.”

During the summer of 2003, an identical model was ingeniously adapted to float in calm waters. The truck was ”driven” across the Florida Straits all the way from Cuba, hauling 12 Cuban refugees seeking new lives in the United States.

Although the group was intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard and the ’51 Chevy sunk by the guns of a cutter, the tale of the amphibious pickup circled the world. To the Cuban exile community, it became a symbol of the ingenuity and perseverance of people trying to escape Cuba.

The truck on display pays homage to the original.

”My dream was to build a replica of the truck that was used in the first attempt, to keep it as a museum piece. And here it is, six years after the voyage, it’s incredible,” said Luis Grass, 41, the man who came up with the idea of the seafaring truck and made history by escaping from Cuba twice in amphibious vehicles.

Grass made the first attempt with family members and friends, including Marcial Basante and Rafael Diaz, both now living in Miami.

Diaz was the first Cuban ”truck-o-naut,” using a modified 1948 Buick to try to escape the island with his family during the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis. On that first attempt, he had electrical problems was forced to turn back.

Diaz finally escaped in 2005, along with his wife and kids, aboard a 1948 Mercury that he adapted for the ocean voyage.

They were detained just a few miles from Key West and held temporarily at Guantánamo. U.S. authorities allowed them to travel to Miami a few days later because they had immigrant visas.

The ’48 Mercury was also sunk. Diaz now works as a mechanic for Kendall Chevrolet in South West Miami, but did not participate in rebuilding the vehicle now on exhibit on Calle Ocho.

In 2004, Grass drove an old Buick that also ended up being sunk by the Coast Guard, after the passengers on board had been rescued. He and his wife and kids spent several months in Guantánamo — after avoiding a second repatriation — and ended up in Costa Rica, where they remained until mid-February of 2005.

Finally, Grass, who had decided to enter the United States at all costs, traveled from Costa Rica to the U.S.-Mexican border. He and his wife, Isora Hernandez, and their 5-year-old son, Angel Luis, walked across the border.

Doonesbury — Try this.

Coral Gables Corruption — The “City Beautiful” has some flaws in the make-up.

Coral Gables has long been Miami-Dade’s grande dame, majestic with her canopied streets, historic landmarks and stately homes, imperious in her municipal rectitude.

In the past three years, however, the City Beautiful has plunged headlong into a starring role in its own tawdry reality series.

It features:

• The city manager who had a fling with the mayor’s secretary and indulged in fancy steak and red-wine lunches on the taxpayers’ tab, and then, when caught, tried to cover it up.

• A lawsuit-wielding, wire-wearing whistle- blower.

• Sex in the office at public works. Cocaine and ghost employees at building and zoning.

Anything else? Oh, yes: the new purchasing director who quit on her first day on the job, apparently after the whistle-blower filled her in on the juicy tidbits.

What in city founder George Merrick’s name is going on at Coral Gables City Hall?

”We’re not used to being in the spotlight,” said Vice Mayor William Kerdyk. ”We’ve always prided ourselves on being a community that has very few issues outside of dealing with the quality of life.

”This is something totally off our scale.”

Although the waves of scandal have subsided since City Manager David Brown, faced with certain termination by the City Commission, took early retirement from his $185,000-a-year post in November, the city is struggling to ride out the backwash.

Last week, the commission named Brown’s successor, former Sunrise manager Pat Salerno, amid grumbles that few A-list candidates had come forward.

And as the April 14 election approaches, two veteran commissioners, Maria Anderson and Ralph Cabrera, have drawn challengers who criticize the incumbents’ oversight of the manager — or lack of it. Anderson, who unlike Cabrera defended Brown, may be especially vulnerable.

Anderson insists that she’s done discussing the former city manager. ”I know there are issues that we are going to be dealing with that may be a result of his actions, but we’ve had enough,” Anderson said. ”This is over. We put a bad chapter behind us. Let’s move on.”

The Replacement — Jeffrey Toobin on the rise of Roland Burris.

Few senators in history have made a more ignominious national début than Roland Burris. Blagojevich appointed Burris, a former Illinois comptroller and attorney general, just three weeks after the Governor had been arrested and taken from his home in handcuffs. Blagojevich was charged with crimes relating to his alleged attempts to exploit his office for personal and political gain, including trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat. (Blagojevich maintains he did nothing wrong.) The entire Democratic caucus in the Senate, as well as the President-elect, asked Burris to refuse the appointment, and Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office a few days later. Burris ignored the entreaties, assumed the office, and plunged almost immediately into another scandal.

In a succession of raucous public appearances, Burris gave contradictory, perhaps even self-incriminating, explanations of the circumstances leading to his appointment. (He has both denied and admitted discussing the Senate seat with Blagojevich’s advisers in advance of his selection.) In short order, editorials in the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times called for Burris’s resignation, a demand echoed by the new governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, and by Dick Durbin, the state’s senior senator. “As far as my colleagues here in the Senate, they are grasping as I am to try to get to the truth of this situation,” Durbin said after failing to persuade Burris to quit. “They are confused and concerned about the disclosures that have been made.” An Illinois prosecutor is investigating Burris for possible perjury and related crimes, and the matter is also before the Senate Ethics Committee.

During his long career in Illinois politics, Burris has encountered many of the state’s most influential figures, some of them principled risk-takers and some corrupt rogues. And it’s been clear that Burris belongs to neither category. He is a conventional politician, one guided far more by cautious self-interest than by ideological passion. His self-regard may be greater than that of some of his peers; he is especially known for the words of self-celebration carved into the wall of a mausoleum that is waiting for him in a Chicago cemetery. (The structure bears the inscription “Trail Blazer” and lists such accomplishments as being the first African-American undergraduate at Southern Illinois University to be an exchange student at the University of Hamburg, in Germany.) “He was a figure of fun, because he was highly egocentric,” Alan Dobry, a former Democratic ward committeeman in Chicago, said of Burris’s years as a local politician. “When he was in office, he had two aides who went around with him, and they were generally referred to as the ‘Rolaids.’ ” According to the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, a longtime student of Chicago politics, Burris “was a soldier, part of the machine. He’s not a distinguished politician. He’s not a powerful political thinker.” Of course, this description hardly distinguishes Burris from many of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. In his very ordinariness, Burris may represent a triumph of sorts for the civil-rights movement, which was, at least in part, a struggle for black people to be seen as just like everybody else.

Frank Rich — The Culture Warriors are fading into irrelevancy.

It’s not hard to see why Eric Cantor, the conservative House firebrand who is vehemently opposed to stem-cell research, was disinclined to linger on the subject when asked about it on CNN last Sunday. He instead accused the White House of acting on stem cells as a ploy to distract from the economy. “Let’s take care of business first,” he said. “People are out of jobs.” (On this, he’s joining us late, but better late than never.)

Even were the public still in the mood for fiery invective about family values, the G.O.P. has long since lost any authority to lead the charge. The current Democratic president and his family are exemplars of precisely the Eisenhower-era squareness — albeit refurbished by feminism — that the Republicans often preached but rarely practiced. Obama actually walks the walk. As the former Bush speechwriter David Frum recently wrote, the new president is an “apparently devoted husband and father” whose worst vice is “an occasional cigarette.”

Frum was contrasting Obama to his own party’s star attraction, Rush Limbaugh, whose “history of drug dependency” and “tangled marital history” make him “a walking stereotype of self-indulgence.” Indeed, the two top candidates for leader of the post-Bush G.O.P, Rush and Newt, have six marriages between them. The party that once declared war on unmarried welfare moms, homosexual “recruiters” and Bill Clinton’s private life has been rebranded by Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter and the irrepressible Palins. Even before the economy tanked, Americans had more faith in medical researchers using discarded embryos to battle Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s than in Washington politicians making ad hoc medical decisions for Terri Schiavo.

What’s been revealing about watching conservatives debate their fate since their Election Day Waterloo is how, the occasional Frum excepted, so many of them don’t want to confront the obsolescence of culture wars as a political crutch. They’d rather, like Cantor, just change the subject — much as they avoid talking about Bush and avoid reckoning with the doomed demographics of the G.O.P.’s old white male base. To recognize all these failings would be to confront why a once-national party can now be tucked into the Bible Belt.

Doonesbury — Iraq for $500.

Why Rush is Wrong — David Frum, the conservative speechwriter who gave the world “the axis of evil” during the recent Bush administration, begs to differ with his fellow Republicans and their new party leader, and has taken a great deal of heat for his apostasy.

Every day, Rush Limbaugh reassures millions of core Republican voters that no change is needed: if people don’t appreciate what we are saying, then say it louder. Isn’t that what happened in 1994? Certainly this is a good approach for Rush himself. He claims 20 million listeners per week, and that suffices to make him a very wealthy man. And if another 100 million people cannot stand him, what does he care? What can they do to him other than … not listen? It’s not as if they can vote against him.

But they can vote against Republican candidates for Congress. They can vote against Republican nominees for president. And if we allow ourselves to be overidentified with somebody who earns his fortune by giving offense, they will vote against us. Two months into 2009, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have already enacted into law the most ambitious liberal program since the mid-1960s. More, much more is to come. Through this burst of activism, the Republican Party has been flat on its back.

Decisions that will haunt American taxpayers for generations have been made with hardly a debate. The federal government will pay more of the cost for Medicaid, it will expand the SCHIP program for young children, it will borrow trillions of dollars to expand the national debt to levels unseen since WWII. To stem this onrush of disastrous improvisations, conservatives need every resource of mind and heart, every good argument, every creative alternative and every bit of compassionate sympathy for the distress that is pushing Americans in the wrong direction. Instead we are accepting the leadership of a man with an ego-driven agenda of his own, who looms largest when his causes fare worst.

In the days since I stumbled into this controversy, I’ve received a great deal of e-mail. (Most of it on days when Levin or Hannity or Hugh Hewitt or Limbaugh himself has had something especially disobliging to say about me.) Most of these e-mails say some version of the same thing: if you don’t agree with Rush, quit calling yourself a conservative and get out of the Republican Party. There’s the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don’t care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That’s not the language of politics. It’s the language of a cult.

I’m a pretty conservative guy. On most issues, I doubt Limbaugh and I even disagree very much. But the issues on which we do disagree are maybe the most important to the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party: Should conservatives be trying to provoke or persuade? To narrow our coalition or enlarge it? To enflame or govern? And finally (and above all): to profit—or to serve?

Frank Rich — Art reassures life in the form of Our Town.

“Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense,” says the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Those words were first heard by New York audiences in February 1938, as America continued to reel from hard times. The Times’s front page told of 100,000 auto workers protesting layoffs in Detroit and of a Republican official attacking the New Deal as “fascist.” Though no one was buying cars, F.D.R. had the gall to endorse a mammoth transcontinental highway construction program to put men back to work.

In the 71 years since, Wilder’s drama has become a permanent yet often dormant fixture in our culture, like the breakfront that’s been in the dining room so long you stopped noticing its contents. Requiring no scenery and many players, “Our Town” is the perennial go-to “High School Play.” But according to A. Tappan Wilder, the playwright’s nephew and literary executor, professional productions have doubled since 2005, including two separate hit revivals newly opened in Chicago and New York.

You can see why there’s a spike in the “Our Town” market. Once again its astringent distillation of life and death in the fictional early-20th-century town of Grover’s Corners, N.H., is desperately needed to help strip away “layers and layers of nonsense” so Americans can remember who we are — and how lost we got in the boom before our bust.

At the director David Cromer’s shattering rendition of the play now running in Greenwich Village, it’s impossible not to be moved by that Act III passage where the Stage Manager comes upon the graves of Civil War veterans in the town cemetery. “New Hampshire boys,” he says, “had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than 50 miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends — the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”

Wilder was not a nostalgic, sentimental or jingoistic writer. Grover’s Corners isn’t populated by saints but by regular people, some frivolous and some ignorant and at least one suicidal. But when the narrator evokes a common national good and purpose — unfurling our country’s full name in the rhetorical manner also favored by our current president — you feel the graveyard’s chill wind. It’s a trace memory of an American faith we soiled and buried with all our own nonsense in the first decade of our new century.

No School Left Behind — One Miami high school that was on the brink of failure is fighting to make the grade.

The school bell peals. Doors fling open and a thousand teenagers spill into the halls.

”You know the rules, people,” a man bellows through a bullhorn. ”No headphones. No hats. Get your ID badges out and get moving!”

Students have six minutes to crisscross the sprawling two-block campus. When the bell rings a second time, classroom doors shut and the halls are strangely quiet.

Loitering is not an option.

There’s too much at stake.

Miami Central — a high school historically beset by chronic truancy, declining enrollment, dispirited staff and general disrepair — is fighting to avoid a grim distinction. It could become the first school in the state to face a federally mandated overhaul because of repeated failures on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

Over the past five years, the school has received five consecutive F grades. One more, and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho will be forced to make radical changes under a new federal mandate.

That could mean stripping the curriculum down to its bare bones — cutting art, music and electives — and replacing dozens of teachers and administrators, including the principal.

Carvalho could even shut down the 50-year-old school.

Enter Doug Rodriguez, the state’s No. 1 principal, now at the helm of the school with the state’s worst academic record.

Rodriguez, a 20-year veteran of the school system, left a coveted job at a top high school on a mission to shake things up at Central.

In a two-month flurry, he cleaned up the halls, shipped dozens of troubled students to alternative schools, designated a dean of discipline, appointed as many as four teachers to the same classroom and boosted morale.

And when The Miami Herald sought to chronicle Central’s efforts to meet the challenge, Rodriguez and Carvalho agreed, giving a reporter and photographers unfettered access.

”Things are changing around here,” said Shelby LaBeach, 18, a senior who is Miss Miami Central, the official student ambassador. ”We have our own Obama.”

Into Training — Andy Isaacson of the New York Times travels across the country on Amtrak.

SOMEWHERE on the west side of Illinois, the Amish men broke out a deck of Skip-Bo cards and I joined them as the cafe car attendant, using an iPod and a set of portable speakers, broadcast Eckhart Tolle, author of “A New Earth,” discoursing on the virtues of stillness.

“Life gets discombobulating,” the attendant said, calmly. “This helps.”

On both sides of the train window, American scenery unfolded. A dirty layer of ice and snow subdued the still cropland to the distant horizon. At the next table a woman stuck her nose in a novel; a college kid pecked at a laptop. Overlaying all this, a soundtrack: choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k — the metronomic rhythm of an Amtrak train rolling down the line to California, a sound that called to mind an old camera reel moving frames of images along a linear track, telling a story.

The six Amish men were in their mid-20s, and they were returning home to Kolona, Iowa, after a three-week cross-country tour. They had especially liked the Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Ky., and Niagara Falls. As we rolled across white plains, they pointed out which plots grew beans and which grew corn. To my eye, the dormant land revealed few clues.

Around the train car lounged Americans traveling for work and others for family, people for whom train travel is a necessity and those for whom it’s merely quaint, first-time riders and probably even a few “foamers” — the nickname that train workers privately give the buffs who salivate over the sight of a locomotive.

I had ridden long-distance trains in India and China but never across my own country. I suppose that after two years of receiving images saturated in red, white and blue from all corners of the nation, I wanted to make my own. The fading glow of the Inauguration, I thought — a moment for national unity and new beginning, both imagined and real — would be a good light in which to meet the country again. And it was winter, after all; I didn’t feel like driving.

With every uptick in gas prices, Americans in general are thinking less about driving. With each degree of global warming, trains become even more sensible. And with each new surcharge and each new item of clothing one is required to remove to board an airplane — and with every small-town commercial airport and cabin amenity that vanishes forever — the rails beckon. Last year, Amtrak set all-time ridership records.

Traveling cross-country by train takes time, but less than I expected: within four days, one crosses the Hudson River and reaches San Francisco Bay at Emeryville, Calif. I gave myself a week, stopping in Chicago, Denver and, for variety, a remote town in Nevada that had a nice ring to its name.

Doonesbury — The time tunnel.

Full Days — The life inside the White House bubble for a man who is new to the confinement.

Each morning when he arrives at the Oval Office, President Obama asks his staff to deliver him a package containing 10 letters. It is a mere sampling of the 40,000 or so that Americans send to the White House every day — a barrage of advice from students and teachers, small-business owners and the unemployed. In between his daily meetings with senior staff members and Cabinet secretaries, Obama has made a habit of sitting alone behind his desk and reading one letter at a time, friends and advisers said. The exercise is intended to help keep him grounded, but it also provides Obama with a glimpse beyond the White House walls and the Secret Service perimeter into what the president sometimes refers to as “the real world.”

Obama has learned during his first 40 days in the White House that he must fight to preserve such direct connections to the citizens he leads. Obama’s life as president is outsourced to about 25 assistants, 25 deputy assistants and 50 special assistants who act as a massive siphon to control the information that reaches his desk and schedule the meetings and public appearances that shape his days. A correspondence staff sorts through his mail and selects the 10 letters that he reads. Three calligraphers write his invitations and thank-you notes. Two “body men” follow him in lockstep to carry his jacket, supply his ChapStick and place his telephone calls.

The same culture of delegation has governed life in the White House for decades, but Obama’s popularity has heightened the need for so many gatekeepers. As the country’s first African American president, he receives an unprecedented number of requests for autographs, interviews, photographs and speeches, aides said, and less than one request in every thousand merits Obama’s attention.

Friends and advisers said Obama has chafed at some aspects of his presidential existence. He campaigned tirelessly for 18 months to reach the White House, but, finally there, he seems eager to escape its smothering confines. Obama has asked his advisers to schedule at least one campaign-style trip out of Washington each week, and he has fled the White House to eat meals out, visit Camp David in Maryland and spend a weekend with old friends in Chicago. On Friday night, he sat courtside at Verizon Center and watched the Wizards trounce his hometown Bulls. One afternoon last month, Obama and his wife, Michelle, visited wiggly second-graders at a local public school because, Obama explained, “we were just tired of being in the White House.” The first lady chimed in: “We got out! They let us out!”

Frank Rich — Catch-22 for the president.

The good news for Obama is that he needn’t worry about the Republicans. They’re committing suicide. The morning-after conservative rationalization of Jindal’s flop was that his adenoidal delivery, not his words, did him in, and that media coaching could banish his resemblance to Kenneth the Page of “30 Rock.” That’s denial. For Jindal no less than Obama, form followed content.

The Louisiana governor, alternately smug and jejune, articulated precisely the ideology — those G.O.P. “policies” in the Times/CBS poll — that Americans reject: the conviction that government is useless and has no role in an emergency. Given that the most mismanaged federal operation in modern memory was inflicted by a Republican White House on Jindal’s own state, you’d think he’d change the subject altogether.

But like all zealots, Jindal is oblivious to how nonzealots see him. Pleading “principle,” he has actually turned down some $100 million in stimulus money for Louisiana. And, as he proudly explained on “Meet the Press” last weekend, he can’t wait to be judged on “the results” of his heroic frugality.

Good luck with that. He’s rejecting aid for a state that ranks fourth in children living below the poverty line and 46th in high school graduation rates, while struggling with a projected budget shortfall of more than $1.7 billion.

If you’re baffled why the G.O.P. would thrust Jindal into prime time, the answer is desperation. Eager to update its image without changing its antediluvian (or antebellum) substance, the party is trying to lock down its white country-club blowhards. The only other nonwhite face on tap, alas, is the unguided missile Michael Steele, its new national chairman. Steele has of late been busy promising to revive his party with an “off-the-hook” hip-hop P.R. campaign, presumably with the perennially tan House leader John Boehner leading the posse.

[…]

But that good news for Obama is countered by the bad. The genuine populist rage in the country — aimed at greedy C.E.O.’s, not at the busted homeowners mocked as “losers” by Santelli — cannot be ignored or finessed. Though Obama was crystal clear on Tuesday that there can be “no real recovery unless we clean up the credit crisis,” it was telling that he got fuzzy when he came to what he might do about it. He waited two days to drop that shoe in his budget: a potential $750 billion in banking “asset purchases” on top of the previous $700 billion bailout.

Therein lies the Catch-22 that could bring the recovery down. As Obama said, we can’t move forward without a functioning financial system. But voters of both parties will demand that their congressmen reject another costly rescue of it. Americans still don’t understand why many Wall Street malefactors remain in place or why the administration’s dithering banking policy lacks the boldness and clarity of Obama’s rhetoric.

He’s in the Army Now — The economy has grandfathers joining up.

As the South Florida real estate market disintegrated and the number of jobless rose, 40-year-old Jorge Gil Muela made a young man’s decision.

The five-foot-seven, 235-pound property appraiser walked into a recruiting center in a Kendall strip mall in December to join the Army. He was told to shed 50 pounds. It’s a small price, he said, for the job security and pay, family health insurance and new career as a cargo handler.

A 185-pound Muela will report for duty at Fort Sill, Okla., next month, leaving his wife, children and grandchildren behind in Miami.

”It’s the only answer for me to secure our way of life right now,” he said soberly, noting that the 21st century GI bill means that he can pass college benefits along to his 18-year-old son.

Muela’s tale shows how the financial crisis may be subtly aiding the Army, which struggled to meet its recruitment goals in 2004 and 2005.

Muela was able to become ”GI Jorge” because Congress in 2006 raised the Army’s age cap from 35 to 42.

Analysts anticipate that these hard times may help build a more mature, discerning Army less reliant on bonuses and waivers for would-be soldiers with health issues or criminal records.

”Since the economy has gone into the tanks, the recruiting environment has gotten a lot better,” says Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington policy research group.

President Barack Obama even made a pitch of sorts for military service in his speech to Congress last Tuesday. He pledged pay raises and better veterans benefits and announced plans to grow the Army and Marines, which together make up about half of the 1.4-million-member active U.S. military.

Military life is not a viable midlife career change for everybody. But Staff Sgt. Javier Rabell, who recruited Muela, says he has handled three 40-something Army enlistments in recent months. The two other men were moving from the Navy Reserve to the Army for the possibility of promotions that came with raises, healthcare and a GI bill that lets them pass college tuition along to their children.

Doonesbury — chick magnets.

More Than a Moment — Leonard Pitts, Jr, writes that it will take more than just one event, such as the election of the first African-American president, to move us beyond our struggle with racism.

On the day after the day we never thought we’d live to see, in the first dawn of what some regarded as post-racial America, historian Lerone Bennett Jr. awoke and turned on the television. There, he says, he saw “this great and beautiful sister, one of the great products of our tradition who has lived through all these disappointments and she saw triumph and she was crying and she was saying, ‘America has changed. We won, we won.’

”I cried in that moment for the sister and with the sister, because I looked out my window and I looked to the east and I saw huge condominiums marching down the lakefront, far as I could see. White people are the primary occupants of those condominiums. I looked to the west and I could see evidence of the terrible housing, the terrible facilities prepared for black people in this country in 2008 and 2009. And I looked downtown and I saw these great cathedrals and skyscrapers. All that money, as far as I could see on the day after the election, controlled by white people.”

You may, if you wish, call this a reality check. You know how, when there’s a close play at the plate, the sportscasters will go to the instant replay to dissect what really happened? That’s what this is.

In commemoration of Black History Month, I have engaged a group of African-American historians to tell us all, even as time closes over it like waters, what happened that night in November 2008 in Chicago’s Grant Park.

We know what we saw, of course. We saw the photogenic African-American family come to the stage, waving to the many vibrant colors of us, saw Oprah Winfrey leaning on a stranger, her makeup running, saw memories of Selma and Birmingham glisten in Jesse Jackson’s eyes, saw TV talking heads coughing into fists, voices snagging on the rough shoals of sudden feeling.

What is less obvious than what we saw is what it meant. All those people crying and sighing and saying over and over again, ”I never thought I would live to see this day.” All those learned people jousting over whether we had now entered a new, ”post-racial America.”

Occasionally, one is privileged to live through a moment when history doesn’t just open wide like a door on a hinge, but you know it for what it is even then, even as it it is happening, so you can fix the details in your mind, rehearse the stories you will tell your grandchildren someday. The night Barack Obama was elected president was one of those moments.

But what did that tell us about who we are, what we are, where we are on the road to racial reconciliation? What, indeed, will we tell the grandchildren about that moment we saw?

The Gatekeeper — Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker profiles White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Rahm Emanuel’s office, which is no more than a three-second walk from the Oval Office, is as neat as a Marine barracks. On his desk, the files and documents, including leatherbound folders from the National Security Council, are precisely arranged, each one parallel with the desk’s edge. During a visit hours before Congress passed President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, on Friday, February 13th, I absently jostled one of Emanuel’s heavy wooden letter trays a few degrees off kilter. He glared at me disapprovingly. Next to his computer monitor is a smaller screen that looks like a handheld G.P.S. device and tells Emanuel where the President and senior White House officials are at all times. Over all, the office suggests the workspace of someone who, in a more psychologized realm than the West Wing of the White House and with a less exacting job than that of the President’s chief of staff, might be cited for “control issues.”

Because the atmosphere of crisis is now so thick at the White House, any moment of triumph has a fleeting half-life, but the impending passage of the seven-hundred-and-eighty-seven-billion-dollar stimulus bill provided, at least for an afternoon, a sense of satisfaction. As Emanuel spoke about the complications of the legislation, he was quick to credit colleagues for shepherding the bill to victory—Peter Orszag, the budget director; Phil Schiliro, the legislative-affairs director; Jason Furman, the deputy director of the National Economic Council––but, in fact, nearly everyone in official Washington acknowledges that, besides Obama himself, Emanuel had done the most to coax and bully the bill out of Congress and onto the President’s desk for signing.

Not Gone Yet — There’s still some fight left in Ted Kennedy.

Since the diagnosis of his brain cancer last May, Mr. Kennedy has been given all manner of tributes and testimonials, lifetime achievement awards, medals of honor and standing ovations. But even as those accolades have provided sweet solace — and even some dark humor — as he endures grueling treatments, Mr. Kennedy, who turns 77 on Sunday, has been intent on racing time rather than looking back on it.

He considers unnecessary what his son Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island calls “the premature eulogizing,” or what Mr. Biden terms “a bordering on an obituary,” that has accompanied his life in recent months.

“Obviously I’ve been touched and grateful,” Mr. Kennedy said in a phone interview Friday from the rented home in Miami where he has spent most of the winter. “Beyond that, I don’t really plan to go away soon.”

Friends who have seen Mr. Kennedy describe him as driven and focused on work. He sometimes gets angry watching C-Span, pores over memorandums and speed-dials staff members and colleagues (sometimes from his sailboat, the Mya). He speaks frequently — and often on his trademark issue, overhauling the nation’s health care system — to President Obama; Mr. Biden; the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel; and checks up on the Senate “chatter” with lawmakers.

Between chemotherapy treatments, physical therapy sessions and naps, Mr. Kennedy has been lobbying the White House on possible nominees for secretary of health and human services. (He has heard good things about the leading candidate, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, though he does not know her well and has been pressing for other candidates.)

While his office said he planned to return to Washington in a few weeks, Mr. Kennedy has been orchestrating efforts from afar, setting the foundation for legislation on what he calls “the cause of my life.”

“What has been essential to his recovery and motivation has been setting goals,” said Dr. Lawrence C. Horowitz, a former Kennedy staff member who has been overseeing his care. The first goal the senator set after cancer surgery in June was to speak at the Democratic National Convention (he did, despite kidney stones); then he resolved to attend Mr. Obama’s inauguration (he did, though he had a seizure afterward).

“Now, his goal is to play a central role in health care reform,” Dr. Horowitz said. “That’s what keeps him going.”

Frank Rich — What we don’t know will hurt us.

AND so on the 29th day of his presidency, Barack Obama signed the stimulus bill. But the earth did not move. The Dow Jones fell almost 300 points. G.M. and Chrysler together asked taxpayers for another $21.6 billion and announced another 50,000 layoffs. The latest alleged mini-Madoff, R. Allen Stanford, was accused of an $8 billion fraud with 50,000 victims.

“I don’t want to pretend that today marks the end of our economic problems,” the president said on Tuesday at the signing ceremony in Denver. He added, hopefully: “But today does mark the beginning of the end.”

Does it?

No one knows, of course, but a bigger question may be whether we really want to know. One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable. Obama’s toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized G.O.P. but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door.

Doonesbury — Shovel-ready.