Alert: The U.S. has likely relapsed into recession.

John Cassidy, ace New Yorker economics writer, says the U.S. has likely already relapsed into recession. Bad news for Canada, with 20% of our economy tied to U.S. exports.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The drivers of U.S. growth - consumer spending, chiefly, but also government spending, have stalled and been cut back, respectively. Cassidy's message to Tea Partiers: the proof is in, government cutbacks have been a drag on the economy.

You would expect this news to be splashed across world front pages, notably the NYT, FT and WSJ. But the officially released government figures don't quite show a recession, but a marked slowdown - bad enough news, to be sure.

Cassidy's gone to the trouble of drilling deep into those official figures released by Uncle Sam and make some inevitable conclusions from what he finds. To start with, figures on GDP growth are always annualized, and so they measure the economic activity in a given quarter multiplied by four. When you divide by four for this year's first two quarters, as Cassidy does, you find the U.S. economy has gone into stagnation.

Worse, as in Canada, official GDP and leading indicators released by government and high awaited by all - such as this week's latest U.S. job numbers - are almost always subsequently revised. This year's Q1 GDP numbers were later revised sharply downward, and looking at the fundamentals since then, Cassidy I believe is right in expecting the anemic Q2 numbers to meet a similar fate.   

Post-recession, a recovering economy typically grows at a torrid 6% or more. In stable times, healthy GDP is 3%. By contrast, GDP "growth" so far this year has been a negligible 0.1% in Q1 and 0.3% in Q2. And that second figure is subject to (likely downward) revision.

Unless consumers, who account for more than two-thirds of GDP, go on a spending spree in the second half, the U.S. will show "negative growth" for the year. That is to say, recession. With unemployment still high, house values still dropping, and governments still slashing budgets, that's a very unlikely prospect. "I think," says Cassidy, "it is fair to say that the dreaded double-dip recession is at hand."

Here's Cassidy:

Official statistics have now caught up with what many ordinary Americans have been saying to each other all along. Five years after the bursting of the housing bubble, the country is still living through tough times. The economic “recovery” is so weak as to be virtually nonexistent.

Once the debt-ceiling impasse is resolved—and I still believe it will be resolved—the President needs to do something he should have done months ago: go all out for a meaningful jobs program. This could be in the form of subsidies to employers, job sharing, public-works projects, or targeted tax cuts. If the Republicans resist, as they surely will, he can portray them as do-nothings more concerned with ideological posturing (c.f. the debt-ceiling talks) than getting people back to work.

Over to you, Mr. President. Time is fast running out…

 

Weekend reads.

Canada's scenic passenger rail revival. (Monte Paulsen, Canadian Geographic)

Dear Jack Layton. (Heather Cleland, Walrus)

The scourge of "peak oil." (Dahr Jamail, Al Jazeera)

It's official: rock is now a mere niche genre, with the death of WRXP, Gotham's last rock station. (Michael Idov, New York)

Xenophobia has crept into mainstream Scandinavia. (Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail)

How historic leaders have coped with depression. (Nasser Ghaemi, WSJ)

The rise of the radical right. (Jamie Bartlett and Jonathan Birdwell, Foreign Policy)

Enough about Britain, time to scrutinize Murdoch's U.S. behavior. (Michael Massing, New York Review of Books)

A parting shot at Murdoch by the late U.K. screenwriter Dennis Potter ("The Singing Detective") (video) (DangerousMinds.com) "Rupert was my cancer." 

How to fix humanities grad schools, starting with the exploitation of academic temps. (William Pannapacker, Slate)

Why sexting has become the love letter on campus. (Belinda Luscombe, Time)

The West's complicity in the disastrous one-child practices that are depopulating the developing world of women. (Mara Hvistendahl, Foreign Policy)

How Google dominates us. (James Gleick, New York Review of Books)

How pollsters rig opinion surveys. (Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias)

"Sorry, son, I'm not an outdoors guy." (Graeme McRanor, Globe and Mail)

 

The Bulwer-Lytton awards are out!

For the uninitiated, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, launched at San Jose State University 29 years ago, invites contestants to conceive the worst opening line possible for a prospective novel. This year's much-anticipated winner is Sue Fondrie of Oshkosh, Wis. with this start to what I, for one, consider a promising novel indeed:

Cheryl's mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

A nice a contemporary nod to wind power, there, and delightfully succinct. At a mere 26 words, Fondrie claims the shortest winning entry ever.

Click here for all the winning entries, in categories ranging from romance to adventure to "vile" puns.

I must say, this year's yield fell a bit short of the gold standard. Which for me is a toss-up between these two 1987 entries:

The sun rose slowly, like a fiery fur ball coughed up uneasily onto a sky-blue carpet by a giant unseen cat.

It's that one word, "uneasily," that makes all the difference.

The notes blatted skyward as the sun rose over the Canada geese, feathered rumps mooning the day, webbed appendages frantically pedaling unseen bicycles in their search for sustenance, driven by cruel nature’s maxim, ‘Ya wanna eat, ya gotta work,’ and at last I knew Pittsburgh.

The winner that year was, deservedly, the latter, by Sheila Richter of Minneapolis. There's the Pythonesque absurdity, of course (Pittsburgh, whaa?), but also, again, the winsome contemporary touch, invoking the "you're on your own" ethic of Reagan's 1987 America,

There must be something conducive to the muse in the aching cold of adjoining Minnesota and Wisconsin - and of Canada, bagging three Man Booker nominations this year.

I've always thought Edward George Bulwer-Lytton got a raw deal from SJSU. He did give us "The pen is mightier than the sword," after all. To be fair, Peggy Noonan wasn't well known in 1982. It's just unfortunate that Bulwer-Lytton's publisher for the 1830 novel Paul Clifford let him get away with this opening:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

 

Whew, now I can get back to cleaning the basement.

Mitch McConnell, GOP senate minority leader, Sat. July 30:

Our country is not going to default for the first time in history; that is not going to happen. We now have a level of seriousness, with the right people at the table.

 

Kentuckians don't whistle in the dark. Do they?

 

 

The Man Booker long list is out.

 
Author Julian Barnes, 2011 Booker nominee for his The Sense of an Ending. (publisher handout)

The 2011 Man Booker Prize longlist is out: 13 nominees, only one previous winner (Alan Hollinghurst), four first-time novelists, and perhaps too many small presses and Canadians (!) So muse the New Yorker's Book Bench and some Tweeters ("Oh dear, Canadian writers ruining everything! MT" " Monster anglophile fail"). Mind you, the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph applauds "the bravest" Booker longlist ever.

As you know, the winner is awarded 50,000 pounds and explosive book sales. Candidates are from Commonwealth countries, Republic of Ireland, and Zimbawbe. (The former Rhodesia, if you're wondering why not Kazakhstan and Chile). The six-title shortlist is out in September, and the winner is announced October 18.

The nominees (we'll start with the three Canucks, since folks have made an issue of it):

 
1. Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

 
2. Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues

 
3. Alison Pick, Far to Go

4. Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

5. Sebastian Barry, On Canaan's Side

6. Carol Birch, Jamrach's Menagerie

 
7. Yvette Edwards, A Cupboard Full of Coats

8. Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child

 
9. Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English

10. Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

 
11. AD Miller, Snowdrops

12. Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb

 
13. DJ Taylor, Derby Day

See reviews of the nominated books at Omnivore and The New Yorker.

   

BrainQuest.

What's wrong with these sentences?

1. P, the periodic-table symbol for potassium.

2. David Howard Lawrence, author of Sons and Lovers.

3. Nanaimo, hometown of Avril Lavigne.

4. Meech Lake, the constitutional psychodrama that collapsed in 1989.

5. Lachlan Murdoch, who heads up dad's British newspaper operations.

6. The Twin Freaks, whose dad founded a cannery in the west end.

7. Playbook, Motorola Mobility's latest tablet.

8. David Johnson, the new governor-general.

9. New York, New York, the extravagant Atlantic City casino.

10. Margaret Atwood's 1966 breakout novel, The Circle Game.

 

Weekend reviews.

Exhibition

An overdue General Idea retrospective at the AGO. (James Adams, Globe and Mail)

Films

 
Steve Carell and Julianna Moore in Crazy, Stupid Love. (studio handout)

Crazy, Stupid Love. Consensus of reviews has this teen coming-of-age flick enjoyable if not profound. (Salon, CNN, Christian Science Monitor) Salon calls it "a mashup of Fight Club and American Beauty, with the laff-meter turned up and nobody getting killed." "Smart, sweet, funny," says Rick Groen, Globe and Mail.

 
Claire Sloma in Myth of the American Sleepover. (studio handout)

Myth of the American Sleepover. An exquisite teenage dream, says Salon. AP says "Not a single moment rings false" in this quiet film shot in Detroit on a $30,000 budget. Hope, confusion, anxiety, loss and love come together among teen friends on the last night of summer - a familiar but undocumented rite. 

Books

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Douglas Edwards' offers an even-handed look at how Google achieved world domination. (Nicholas Blincoe, Daily Telepgraph) And James Gleick in the New York Review of Books has a more holistic look at Google by reviewing all the recent tomes spawned by the search juggernaut.  

 
Niccolo Machiavelli (Getty Images)

Alan Wolfe on Miles Unger's Machiavelli. (New Republic) The most famous Florentine advisor in history fails to follow his own best advice in this riveting bio.

 
Americans in Paris. (Getty Images)

David McCullough's The Greater Journey on Americans' long-standing love affair with Paris is under-researched but has moments of revelation. Paris, world capital of medical innovation in the 19th century, attracted U.S. med students, for whom cadavers were in short supply at home but could be had for $2.50 in the City of Light. (David Bell, New Republic)

Excerpt

 
Boys will be boys. (Wikipedia Commons)

In a brilliant introduction to a new edition of Lord of the Flies, Stephen King describes how William Golding tutored him for life on the dark side of human nature. (Daily Telegraph)

Essay

 
The late author Stieg Larsson. (Reuters)

Stieg Larsson and the Scandinavian right. (Joan Acocella, New Yorker) The late author's warnings about the rise of fascism movements in the region, dating from the 1990s, were ignored. Even now Larsson's prescience is ignored. Are the Norwegians in denial?

Related

What the popularity of book clubs tells us about social (and gastronomic) trends. (Nathan Heller, Slate)

Hooray for the bravest Booker longlist of all time.(Louise Doughty, Daily Telegraph)

 

Face it, the GOP are anarchists.

Slate's Jonathan Chait calls out the D.C. establishment for tragically mis-reading today's GOP. He notes that everyone from deficit-hawk think tanks to the Washington Post's editorial page came into this debt-ceiling debacle thinking that folks of goodwill on both sides of the aisle might usefully take this opportunity to get America's deficit under control.

Dems do care about the deficit. So much so that Obama - now suffering his lowest public-approval ratings, at about 40% - put even FDR's and LBJ's hallowed Social Security and Medicare, respectively, on the table in the expectation, or hope, of getting an agreement. 

But the Dems - and for that matter, traditional deficit hawks (hey, who wouldn't rather be deficit-free?) - are not dealing with folks of goodwill on the other side of the debate. As I said in an earlier post, we need to start calling today's GOP what it is, anarchists or normally reasonable folks currently under the spell of anarchism.

A strong word. Falls right into the stereotype of bloggers as serial exaggerators and sensationalists. But I swear, at this rate it won't be long before my fellow moderate progressives - Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall, Felix Salmon, Andrew Sullivan - are compelled to stop trying to figure out the governance principles of the Tea Partiers who run today's GOP and acknowledge, finally, that these extremists can be placated only by dismantling the Republic. And their method, no different from Gingrich's the last time there was a Dem in the WH, is to blow it up. My dictionary defines that as anarchism. You can work within the system to attempt reform - as Obama has done to a fault - or you can push for the change you seek by the crude methods of chronic mendacity, obstructionism, character assassination and incitement to fear and hate.

In attempting a semi-defense of Murdoch in a recent e-mail to my MP, she reminded me that his brand of casual inhumanity finds an especially large audience in times of economic distress. True, of course. In previous such times, we have demogogues like Father Coughlin, Huey Long and Westbrook Pegler during the Depression, and McCarthy soon after the Soviets stunned us by emerging with their own nuclear weapons. This is the Tea Partiers' moment, and it's the task of those seeking to preserve the Republic to somehow transcend it.

In the meantime, Chait moves further out along that branch toward what I'm afraid is a necessary incivility in identifying just who the American people are dealing with in the modern GOP. As Chait rightly notes, conservatives of good will in the Beltway were expecting the debt-ceiling crisis to be handled by backslapping moderates akin to Tip O'Neill and Bob Dole. But moderates on the right have long since left the building. The GOP House majority depends on the Tea Party cohort elected last November, each of whom can expect a primary challenge next year from Tea Party zealots if they don't oppose any attempted resolution of this crisis.

Between the two of them, Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann - each self-appointed leaders of the Tea Party movement - have outmuscled the comparatively moderate John Boehner, who like other GOP moderates is anticipating a primary challenge in his Ohio district. Somehow this dynamic - of Cantor openly lusting for Boehner's job, with necessary Tea Party backing - has not registered on Wall Street or Main Street. In business, we'd call this a "reverse takeover" in which a small firm acquires a much larger one. The Grand Old Party has been acquired by the upstart Tea Partiers, itself a cauldron of the aggrieved ranging from culture warriors to libertarians to tax revolters to one-world conspiracy theorists.

You can run through that destructive agenda and worry about its implications. But for now it's sufficiently alarming to heed what the new GOP already has bought into.

Here's Chait:

The main problem is that the Republican Party does not actually care very much about the deficit. It cares about, in order: Low taxes for high-income earners; reducing social spending, especially for the poor; protecting the defense budget; and low deficits. The Obama administration and many Democrats actually do care about the deficit and are willing to sacrifice their priorities in order to achieve it, a desire that was on full display during the health care reform debate. Republicans care about deficit reduction only to the extent that it can be undertaken without impeding upon other, higher priorities. Primarily 'deficit reduction' is a framing device for their opposition to social spending, as opposed to a genuine belief that revenue and outlays ought to bear some relationship to each other.

I keep reading these days that in dealing with this self-inflicted debt-ceiling threat Obama should act more like the Lincoln and FDR he so admires. This threat to the the poor, the elderly, the cash-strapped middle class, to national security, to a dynamic economy.

I'd ask these fellow moderate progressive commentators to read David Donald's definitive Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, 1995) and Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time (Simon & Schuster, 1995) on FDR and her more recent Team of Rivals (Simon & Schuster, 2005) on Lincoln.

Lincoln was so inept a judge of character in hiring generals that the nation's capital in danger of being overrun by Lee's forces through most of the Civil War. So at sea was Lincoln on how to deal with the internal threat of the Copperheads - Northern abolitionists who preferred the country be allowed to split apart into a slave South and free North, and so determined not to permanently alienate the South after an anticipated Union triumph - that he drafted but then for a year shelved his Emancipation Proclamation. Which in any case was a diluted call to emancipation that a Voltaire wouldn't recognize as remotely liberating.

FDR was similarly hog-tied, held hostage by Southern segregationist Dems on the Hill without whom his coalition would crumble. So Eleanor's pleas to Franklin for social justice for blacks were dismissed, on the weak argument that Social Security helped blacks along with everyone else. That's as much as FDR could do for them, he said. Having found that Keynesian government stimulus of the economy worked in his first term, a complacent FDR - who had come to office promising balanced budgets, after all - dropped state stimulus in his second term, promptly triggering a relapse of the Depression. For good measure he shed a great deal of his credibility in trying and failing to "pack" the Supreme Court. Then came the inaction ahead of a Pearl Harbor attack widely anticipated by the war and state departments, and the Japanese-American internments and confiscation of property. FDR's record four election victories were not all landslides, and they were delivered by Dem machines in the major cities that have long since ceased to exist.

And I write this never being able to decide which of these giants is my favorite U.S. president. Just don't imagine they would fare any better under the current circumstances than Obama.

Obama already has succeeded where FDR failed on health-care reform, and has kept more campaign promises more quickly than any of his 43 predecessors. If Obama had the votes on the Hill, there would be the second stimulus - the focus on jobs rather than deficits - that progressives are screaming for. Where were these progressives, I really want to know, in the lead up to the Dems' loss of the House last November?

If he got even just one thing right, it's Obama's observation years ago that what chiefly motivates legislators is their fear of being defeated at the next election. That's the prism through which lawmakers operate. And that fear ravages the body politic far more than money or lobbyists or media savagery. What ails governance most is a lack of independent-mindedness on the part of elected officials. As long as a majority of House members fear losing their jobs next year to Tea Party insurgents, you can pretty much forget about sound governance in the long-term interests of the people.

Until early last century, American tradition had aspiring office-seekers regarding such work as part-time and of brief duration. Lincoln served one term in Congress, was defeated after two years, and happily returned to Springfield to resume the more lucrative work of attending to the legal affairs of the Illinois Central Gulf railroad.

One can argue the merits of politics as a long-term vocation rather than a limited tour of duty. What can't be argued is that the preoccupation with clinging to office is behind the present difficulties, and those that came before and will lie ahead. The current widespread fear of standing up to, for instance, a public figure who actually believes Paul Revere set out to warn the Redcoats or an imbecilic proposal to turn Social Security into a voucher system is adequate proof that Invasion of the Body Snatchers is playing out in real life on the banks of the Potomac.

 

The twin ironies of the debt ceiling.

First, a clarification. This morning, a CBC national-affairs correspondent on "The House," the marvelous CBC Radio program devoted to all matters Parliament, gave an extended explanation of how absent a resolution to the U.S. debt-ceiling crisis by Aug. 2, "Timmy," given a U.S. Treasury bill as a downpayment on his college tuition, would discover that he now held a worthless piece of paper. Not true. Alas, my national public broadcaster misinformed me at length that America will renege on its Treasurys after Aug. 2 if the worst happens.

No. The U.S. will honor its Treasurys obligations always and forever. And it is easily able to do so. The U.S. Treasury will take in a projected $172 in revenues next month, more than enough to cover the $29 billion in principal on Treasuries that comes due in August. And as Obama decides what bills to pay, he and Geithner will make it their first priority to sustain America's creditworthiness in the world. Alexander Hamilton fought hard for this, for "the full faith and credit" of the new United States of America. Obama and Geithner at all costs will not trash that centuries' long priceless asset of global goodwill. So Timmy, hang on to that Treasury bill and when you get some spending money start buying some on your own.

Irony 1: The approximately $2 trillion worth of U.S. Treasurys held by the People's Republic of China will be honored in full - interest as it falls due, and principal at time of redemption - regardless of the hostage-taking now ongoing in D.C. (That would be the tiny Tea Party taking control of the world's lone superpower.)

Meanwhile, after honoring its Treasurys obligations to the Chinese, to Mexican monopolist biillionaire Carlos Slim, and to Hosni Mubarak (his purloined funds, stashed away outside Egypt and now frozen wherever they've been successfully located), there will be insufficient funds to pay Americans the funds they are owed. 

I'll repeat that. Foreigners, including America's traditional adversaries, will be paid. Many Americans will not be.

Should there be a failure to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis, a lot of Americans are going to get stiffed. Among the vulnerable are Medicare recipients; armed forces salaries; the budgets of the DEA, FDA, CIA and FBI; farmers awaiting U.S. government agricultural-support payments; hospital, college, recreation centers, and federal and municipal buildings under construction or repair that have a federal funding component; the FAA and paychecks for air-traffic controllers; salaries for federal ports staff; oil and other industries awaiting their subsidies...

That's right: America will make good on its debts to foreigners, while at home the cutbacks will be severe, widespread and unpredictable. When the money runs out, it will be American people to suffer from the looming default.

Irony 2: Failing an debt-ceiling agreement by Tuesday, the president and his treasury secretary will take on immense new powers, at the expense of a Congress that apparently can't run a two-car funeral.

Come a default, it's for the president alone, with advice from the treasury secretary who serves at his pleasure, to decide who gets paid and who doesn't. Do I pay the farmers or make good on the oil-industry subsidies? That's a decision for Obama alone to make, without reference to Congress. He does, after all, run the government as head of the executive branch. The Tea Partiers at this point become irrelevant, as do all 535 members of the House and Senate.

What funds the U.S. government continues to take in are for the president alone to dispense. The Hill and the Supremes have nothing to say on this. The dolts who brought the debt-ceiling provision into existence in 1917 - to better ensure Congress' constitutional authority to declare war, or starve a war they didn't approve - didn't foresee that someday it could be used to cripple the Republic.  

Or that it would destroy the balance of powers so obsessed over by the Founders. That it could end up  investing sole power over federal spending in the executive branch - in the Oval Office - rendering the other two branches of government impotent. That was not the intent, of course: The intent was to have Congress alone empowered to authorize federal spending, and to subordinate the president. But precisely the reverse will occur in the event of a default.

So a Congress that can't say "yes" to offers by Obama that are widely regarded as generous beyond belief ("Boehner took Obama to the cleaners," one observer has it) is flirting with surrendering its power to a president it is attempting to bring down. And chronic civil-rights violators abroad needn't worry about the continued soundness of their U.S. debt obligations, while many Americans will be reneged upon by their own government. If someone explained to Americans that this is what the Tea Partiers and their GOP surrogates in Congress are about, they'd be tarred and feathered.

____________________

 

Paul Martin (shown), the former Canadian PM and finance minister, was also on "The House" this a.m. He was asked about the Tea Partiers' obsession with a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. constitution. You could hear him over the airwaves shaking his head. "I've found that your word is your bond. When you make a promise to the people, you can't run away from that. But when you try to legislate things, you can revoke the legislation down the road, or just weasel your way around it." (Did someone say "earmarks"?)

Students of the nearly successful Equal Rights Amendment will recall how long it took to try to change the Constitution, which is designed to be amended only with difficulty. I assume Tea Partiers and those Republicans on the Hill who are ardent about this have taken their civics lessons. Which means they must be delusional in thinking any amendment to the Constitution can be achieved in less than two or three years, especially one, like a balanced-budget amendment, that would hamstring government in times of crisis. (What followed Pearl Harbor, for instance, or the 50% jump in U.S. defense spending after 9/11 - an over-reaction, to be sure.)

This is a prime distinction between America and other advanced economies. When America describes itself as a nation of laws, not men, we're all on the same page about equal justice for all under the law. But countries outside the U.S., and conspicuously those using the British parliamentary and legal systems, do not have the rage for codifying in law everything under the sun. The understand that (a) you cannot legislate everything (morality, for instance), and that (b), as Martin said, to create a law is to invite people from all walks of life to evade it, ignore the spirit of it, break it outright or, most often, unleash a swarm of lobbyists to get another law passed that exempts certain special insterests from certain provisions of the new law.

Hence Britain doesn't have even a constitution. It gets by on common law, which is a body of precedents themselves based on shared principles. Common law is open-ended. There are no loopholes, because it is sufficiently sweeping and non-specific to cover everything. A statute, by contrasts, invites contrary interpretation as to what it means, and under what conditions, and the phases of the moon.

"I said I would eliminate our deficit come hell or high water, and I used that expression for a reason," Martin continued. "No one would forget what I'd vowed to do. There was no way I could duck accountability for my promise to the people. If we'd tried to legislate that, I could have found all manner of ways of fudging and effectively reneging. The real bond you make with your people is a straightforward promise. Everybody gets it, and there's no getting around it.

Martin, for the record, erased the $43-billion deficit inherited by the Chretien government when it came to power in 1993, and set Canada on a path to 11 consecutive budget surpluses - a record unmatched by any G-8 nation.

Martin also said - and he can do this now that he's out of office - that the debt-ceiling debacle is part of a larger self-inflicted crisis the Republicans "want to hang around Mr. Obama's neck, and they want to keep it there until November of next year. It's a wholly political crisis." Of more importance, Martin said there's no bloody way" America will resolve its own deficit and debt issues, which he described as "urgent" in the long term - for itself, Canada, Asia and especially a currently troubled Europe - without raising taxes.

Martin did not say that the level of taxation in the U.S. is at a 60-year low, or cite any others among a multitude of facts that validate his assertion.

America is starving itself to death. And yes, that is the goal of the anarchists, which, if we weren't all so polite, is the label we accurately would give the modern Republican Party. I guess you have to work inside the Beltway not to grasp that, since it's plain as day to observers from Tokyo to Beijing to Zurich. Really, unless your country was premised on a notion that government is a necessary evil, you couldn't get away with this.  

Of course America will have to raise taxes. And because it can - because, as I've noted here before, America has known far, far higher tax burdens than those of this hour - it has the capacity to generate the revenue to save itself from long-term insolvency. And indeed to "Win the future," if by Obama's expression he means sustained larger investments in education, healthcare, infrastructure, 21st-century R&D and so on.

This is why we still buy U.S. Treasurys. We assume America will return to its senses. Our operating principle regarding the States continues to be Churchill's reassurance that America will do the right thing after exhausting all of the alternatives. We might be delusional ourselves in thinking this time is no different, apart from Michele Bachmann's $4,700 monthly hair and makeup tab.

       

Well, I guess he's heard of her now.

Doug Ford comments spark 'Atwood for Mayor' movement. -Toronto Star, July 31

 
A early return from the proprietors of the Cowbell Restaurant in Parkdale. (Twitter)

I'm still trying to figure out how one reaches adulthood in Toronto without having heard of "Peggy" Atwood. I mean, it's tough enough to do in Hamburg or Rio or London (Atwood is a repeated Booker Prize finalist), but the world-renowned author, poet and political activist is a lifelong Torontonian, for gosh sakes. She's been in the papers practically every week since I was born. (I'm 54.) So this is a case for a psychologist or anthropologist or expert in education methods - all three, I suspect.

It would do this town some good to get ourselves on the map with a viable grassroots campaign to hound the Twin Freaks out of office and replace them with Ms. Atwood. "Poet dislodges mayor in Canadian city." We didn't get much publicity mileage out of hosting the G20 (and what there was - nightsticks being cracked over demonstrators' heads - wasn't the ideal kind). Think Vaclav Havel, playwright-statesman. Have you thought of the Czech Republic the same way since? That's one neat place.