The Na-Na-Na Factor . . .

I'm starting today with Congress, although I could just as easily start with Glenn Beck. Because both

1. talk a lot; and 
2. taunt a lot, while they're talking. 

About Congress . . .

A shockingly humorous study came to light yesterday in the waning hours of funded Federal government. As members of Congress postured and squabbled over a tiny fraction of the federal budget, Harvard Professor Gary King announced he's discovered that these people use 27% of their written communications to taunt colleagues. Members with so-called "safe" seats are the worst (best?) taunters.

From the Washington Post:

Prof. Gary King

“It’s jarring and surprising,” said Prof. Gary King, an expert in using computers to find patterns in large amounts of data. And, King said, probably counterproductive if we want Congress’s members to trust one another enough to make deals. 

“The entire government may go bankrupt, I guess. This week, right?” King said in a telephone interview. “We probably want our representatives to be listening to each other rather than calling each other names.”

There's really no need for me to comment on this. I'm sure you can come up with plenty of pithy observations of your own. And maybe, heaven forbid, a few taunts, as well!

On to Glenn Beck, arguably the Grand Master of Taunting ...

As David Folkenflik reported last night on All Things Considered and writes on NPR.org:

At long last, we have an answer to the enduring question: Is it possible for someone to be too incendiary, even for the Fox News Channel? 

And the answer is yes. 

Glenn Beck's daily spot on the nation's leading cable news station is coming to a close little more than two years after his start on Fox News. While his contract runs through December, his show is not expected to last that long. . . .

Photo credit: Jose Luis Magana/AP

It was about ratings and revenue, rather than about ethics or anything to do with ignoring that pesky journalistic mandate for confirming the truth of one's assertions. The LA Times writes:

... Less than three years after joining Fox News from CNN's Headline News amid a burst of publicity, Beck is being booted off the air. His sinking ratings certainly didn't help — they fell 32% for the first three months of this year, to 1.9 million total viewers, according to the Nielsen Co. 

And after months of reported friction between the host and Fox News as well as an aggressive advertiser boycott after Beck dubbed President Obama a racist, analysts professed little surprise. ... 

"The ratings drop was significant and couldn't be ignored," McCall continued. "The advertiser boycott didn't hurt the program or FNC as much in terms of dollars as it did in terms of bad publicity. Beck was no longer just a personality with a show on FNC. He became an easy target for Fox News critics to characterize him as representative of the entire channel."

Calling President Obama a racist certainly qualifies as taunting, don't you think? Does this mean that Glenn Beck, in effect, taunted himself off the Fox News air?

If so, does this mean that Americans, across the board, are finally tired of people constantly and unproductively na-na-na-ing away at each other?

Perhaps it would behoove our elected representatives to use Glenn Beck as a role model for how not to keep a job -- no matter how "safe" it is considered.

Is that Glenn Beck riding that white-ish horse: the story of The O'Keefe Sting that at Least Partially Wasn't . . .

Not since prideful Elizabeth Bennett accepted help from prejudiced Mr. Darcy, has there been such a satisfyingly bamboozling alliance.

NPR's humiliated (and "rickety") management, caught last week in a front-page making James O'Keefe gotcha sting, has been partially vindicated by . . . Glenn Beck! Or at least the journalistic wing of Glenn Beck's enterprises, which he calls The Blaze.

Holy Jane Austen! 

Here's a bit of back-story on The Blaze/O'Keefe/NPR affair.

When The Blaze launched in September of 2010, Mr. Beck had this to say about his website's name:

The image of flame is powerful. It has long stood for a burning truth. A truth that is not consumed. The Blaze will pursue truth. Of course we will make mistakes. Honest mistakes. And we’ll be quick with corrections. We intend to earn your trust and keep it day in and day out with hard work and a lot of transparency. 

And don’t expect everything to be deadly serious. Boring is bad. We intend to have plenty of fun. 

We’ve put together a solid team of writers and reporters. I intend to keep them busy by sending a zillion story ideas at all hours.

Hmmmmmm. Okay. Pretty high-falutin' morality from the man who commented as forest fires raged in California:

 "I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today." 

Zip forward to last week. The story of O'Keefe's NPR sting on hapless Ron Schiller breaks big-time, garnering all kinds of splashy, front-page news coverage on both the Washington Post and the New York Times. At the time, I noted Glenn Beck's comments that included this rather diabolically gleeful description of the stingee, former NPR executive Ron Schiller:

"... this guy Schiller is not a leader of anything. He's a coward. He's an effeminate little waif sitting up there waxing eloquent about how woe is the country because not everybody is as smart as he is -- while he's being duped! He's in the middle of being duped here by a couple of people who have set him up royally. ..."

David Folkenflik

I tend to give myself a break from the news on Sunday, so the next major development I became aware of came yesterday, when I heard David Folkenflik's report on Morning Edition. According to research done by the staff at Glenn Beck's The Blaze, Mr. Fokenflik tells us, the O'Keefe sting tape had been seriously edited. Some of the statements on it are presented completely out of context. Thus, in many minds, the tape is a partial lie: David quotes Al Tompkins:

Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member for broadcasting and online at the Poynter Institute, says to David that he tells his children there are "two ways to lie. One is to tell me something that didn't happen. And the other is not to tell me something that did happen." After comparing O'Keefe's edited tape to the longer version, "I think that they employed both techniques in this," Tompkins says. 

One "big warning flag" Tompkins saw in the shorter tape was the way it made it appear that Schiller had laughed and commented "really, that's what they said?" after being told that the fake Muslim group advocates for sharia law. In fact, the longer tape shows that Schiller made that comment during an "innocuous exchange" that had nothing to do with the supposed group's position on sharia law, David reports.

Wow! Glenn Beck providing a soupçon of vindication for the antics of NPR's senior management! Off I go to The Blaze (for the first time ever, I blush to admit), where I read* this posted by Blaze Editor-in-Chief Scott Baker,

Plenty of readers felt the new NPR exposé justified any ethical misgivings involved in producing it. Others felt that those seeking truths should hold to higher standards. 

When undercover video like the NPR story first surfaces, we often look to see if there is raw video of the material used to produce the report as a basis for evaluating the accuracy of the representations made. 

And we decided to do that in this case. 

Pam Key

The Blaze’s Pam Key, who produces most of our original videos, is experienced in reviewing hours and hours of raw audio/video to find key sections that can then be used in proper context.  

Her review of the NPR exposé identifies a number of areas to examine.

Do these areas reveal problematic editing choices?  Are assertions made in the video misleading? Are the tactics used by the video producers unethical? 

Clearly the NPR executives, particularly Ron Schiller, show poor and, at times, despicable judgment.  Do any of the revelations from the raw video ameliorate that?  Do [sic] their wrongdoing justify any wrongdoing by the video producers?  

These are sometimes difficult matters to consider, especially for those who are pleased with the outcomes produced by the release of video reports like this; however, the ethical implications can be significant. And as we say around The Blaze watercooler…the truth has no agenda. Perspective and context are essential elements in bringing truth to the forefront.  To exclude or alter them can obscure truths rather than reveal them.

Glenn Beck does have a point, doesn't he, from his perch (at least for the moment) atop the High Moral Ground? I like that he admits that plenty of his readers would delight in anything that helps take down NPR.

I find nothing about this story on the front page of either yesterday's Washington Post or New York Times.

Of course, quite a lot has happened since the story of the sting was plastered all over those papers' front pages.

Yesterday afternoon Andy Schmookler (of blog and Civic Soapbox fame) sent me a link to an article in the Huffington Post, which did cover the story.

The Blaze's partial unraveling of the O'Keefe undercover sting did garner considerable blog coverage -- which The Blaze has conveniently compiled on its site. There I found a reference to NYTimes Editor Patrick LaForge's tweet that "seems to hint at one of the most common reactions: bewilderment over why, out of all the sites out there, we were one of the only ones to take the time to comb through the video and ask tough questions."


The Blaze also re-posts the following:

“It’s either depressing or sort of wonderful that Glenn Beck’s The Blaze was the one to catch some really serious, dishonest lily-gilding in the NPR sting,” Politico’s Ben Smith writes on his blog from Friday, adding a mild mea culpa: “I regret having, even in what I thought was a cautious way, picked up the story.”

I do wonder why the story of The Sting That at Least Partially Wasn't didn't (as far as I can tell) make the front pages of two of the big city newspapers that spent days covering that same sting when it was.  Did NPR simply get bumped off the front page by Japan?  Did mainstream newspapers simply not know what to do with a story broken by Glenn Beck? Were they unwilling to say, as Politico's Ben Smith put it, that they regretted having gone with such a flawed story with so much gusto?

You got any thoughts?

* This site also contains the edited and raw tape of the O'Keefe sting, should you care to compare the two.

How does Glenn Beck know what he knows?

Democracy Corps describes itself as "an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people. It was founded in 1999 by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg. Democracy Corps provides free public opinion research and strategic advice to those dedicated to a more responsive Congress and Presidency."

Back in July, Democracy Corps released a truly fascinating analysis of the Tea Party movement that included their well-researched assessment of Tea Partiers' take on Glenn Beck:

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck is the most highly regarded individual among Tea Party supporters of the people we tested. He scores an extraordinarily high 75 percent warm rating, 57 percent very warm.

This affinity for Beck came through very clearly in the focus groups. The only news source that participants said they could trust was Fox.  Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity were cited as people who “are not afraid to tell it like it is” and support their arguments with solid facts.  Beck was undoubtedly the hero in these groups.  Participants consider him an “educator” (in contrast to the popular Rush Limbaugh who is an “entertainer”) who teaches people history and puts himself at risk because he exposes the truth.  In the words of a woman in Ft. Lauderdale, “I would trust my life in his hands.”

Mr. Beck has started his Beck University to disseminate his political and religious philosophy, along with his own version of American history that is often curiously at odds with most scholars'. So from whose writings does Glenn Beck draw his theories?

W. Cleon Skousen

This week's New Yorker has an article called "Confounding Fathers," in which Princeton historian Sean Wilentz asks and answers this question. Glenn Beck's favorite author, he says, is W. Cleon Skousen.

So, who's W. Cleon Skousen? According to that fine representative of the liberal media, Salon, the late Mr. Skousen was "a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised." Among many other books, Mr. Skousen published 5,000 Year Leap, which Mr. Beck often waves around at public gatherings.  Salon's Alexander Saitchik has this to say about the book:

"Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers.

Here's what Mr. Beck, himself, has to say about the book.

The first thing you could do, please, is get the 5,000 Year Leap. Over my book or anything else, get the 5,000 Year Leap. You can probably find it in the book section of GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. It is so easy to read. It's the book Ronald Reagan wanted taught in high schools and Ted Kennedy stopped it from happening. That should tell you all you need to know. It is so easy to understand. When you read these principles, your mouth will fall open. You'll read it and you'll be -- the scales will fall off your eyes on who we are. Please, number one thing: Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all about. 5,000 Year Leap is the first part of that. Because it will help you understand American free enterprise. You'll be able to defend it. You'll be able to know what makes it possible for 6% of humanity living under our free economy to produce 1/2 of the Earth's developed wealth every single year....

And here's some of what Dr. Wilenz writes about 5,000 Year Leap in his New Yorker article.

[The book is] a treatise that assembles selective quotations and groundless assertions to claim that the U.S. Constitution is rooted not in the Enlightenment but in the Bible, and that the framers believed in minimal central government. Either proposition would have astounded James Madison, often described as the guiding spirit behind the Constitution, who rejected state-established religions and, like Alexander Hamilton, proposed a central government so strong that it could veto state laws. “The 5,000 Year Leap” is not a fervid book. Instead, it is calmly, ingratiatingly misleading. Skousen quotes various eighteenth-century patriots on the evils of what Samuel Adams, in 1768, called “the Utopian schemes of leveling,” which Skousen equates with redistribution of wealth. But he does not mention the Founders’ endorsement of taxing the rich to support the general welfare. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote approvingly in 1811 of having federal taxes (then limited to tariffs) fall solely on the wealthy, which meant that “the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.”

Skousen also challenges the separation of church and state, asserting that “the Founders were not indulging in any idle gesture when they adopted the motto ‘In God We Trust.’ ” In reality, the motto that came out of the Constitutional Convention was “E Pluribus Unum”: out of many, one. “In God We Trust” came much later; its use on coins was first permitted in 1864, and only in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, did Congress mandate that it appear on all currency. The following year, President Eisenhower—who Welch [John Birch Society founder Robert Welch] charged was a Communist agent—approved “In God We Trust” as the national motto.

Mr. Skousen, a Mormon who died in 2006, had been largely repudiated by conservatives and Mormons until Beck resurrected his message. Now this message is reaching millions of people a day through Mr. Beck's outreach efforts.

And, speaking of Glenn Beck's information sources, anybody else remember the John Birch Society during its heyday? Back when they were telling us that President Eisenhower was a communist?  Mr. Beck is also quick to say that Robert Welch "makes sense." 

Yesterday, in between bouts of on-air fundraising (1-800-677-9672, call now!), I cruised around on the internet learning a bit about Cleon Skousen's positions and a bit more about Robert Welch's. What intrigues me is the broad play these formerly relatively obscure views of government and history and religion are getting from atop Mr. Beck's New Media and cable (and very bully) pulpits. I'd wager heavily that Mr. Beck reaches many more people than Salon's Alexander Saitchik or the New Yorker's Dr.Wilentz. And that the people listening and reading may not deem it necessary to research Mr. Beck's sources for his revisionist interpretation of our nation's history.

Does the fact that millions of people are hearing Mr. Skousen's and Mr. Welch's theories touted by Mr. Beck lend them more legitimacy in our national conversation than they were afforded their first time around?

And, if so, what does that mean both politically and socially? Has the New Media united the voices of those who used to mutter mostly in isolation?

Martha note:  Terry Gross had Dr. Sean Wilentz as a guest this week on Fresh Air.

The Cuccinelli subpoena ruling, balance and values . . .

 "This old buzzard, having failed to raise the mob against its 

rulers, now prepares to raise it against its teachers."

H.L. Mencken

Scopes Monkey Trial
July 16, 1925

Sadly, I didn't find the above Mencken quote on my own, but lifted it from Slate, which, on May 24th, pointed out that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli had recently filed a civil subpoena against the University of Virginia.

As Courtney Stuart first reported last week in Charlottesville's The Hook, Cuccinelli's office quietly filed a civil investigative demand (or CID, which is basically a subpoena) with the University of Virginia on April 23, giving the school 30 days to produce more than 10 years' worth of documents related to the state-funded research of a former faculty member, Michael Mann. Operating under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, the CID seeks from the university, among other things, "any correspondence, messages or emails" to or from Mann and 40 named climate scientists; any documents sent to or from Mann that reference any of those 40 scientists; and any "documents, things or data" submitted in support of any of five different grant applications that amounted, in total, to almost $500,000. The university is also expected to turn over "any and all emails or pieces of correspondence from or to Dr. Michael Mann since he left the University of Virginia." 

 The action was dismissed yesterday by retired Albemarle County Circuit Court Judge Paul M. Peatross, Jr.

[ From an article in this morning's Cavalier Daily] Peatross held that Cuccinelli does not have “unbridled discretion” to review professors and instead must found civil investigative demands on an “objective basis.”
In turn, the ruling did not directly address issues of academic freedom, Schragger said, “because [Cuccinelli] did not even meet the minimum demand of investigative requirement.”

Virginia's Attorney General's office promptly issued a press release headlined "Attorney General Cuccinelli pleased with aspects of UVA CID ruling," in which Cuccinelli claimed partial victory in the judge's ruling. 

“While this was not an outright ruling in our favor I am pleased that the judge has agreed with my office on several key legal points and has given us a framework for issuing a new civil investigative demand to get the information necessary to continue our investigation into whether or not fraud has been committed against the commonwealth.”

Attorney General Cuccinelli has long been publicly skeptical about global warming, stoutly maintaining that scientists have skewed their data in order to claim the world is heating up. If that's so, Cuccinelli has unearthed a conspiracy of unprecedented size, since the scientific evidence for global warming is broad-based and overwhelming. Does our Attorney General really think it is in the best interests of the Commonwealth of Virginia to spend our scarce dollars attacking a scientific finding that, for some reason, appears to make him personally uneasy?  The Commonwealth has many pressing needs.

Yesterday, I blogged about conservative Victor David Hanson's column in the National Review in which he outlined the 6 basic reasons for the anger that sent 100,000 Americans to Washington on Saturday to "restore honor" with Glenn Beck. One of the reasons Dr. Hanson listed was frustration with the courts striking down (on pesky legal grounds) laws advancing conservative social values. So do these people Mr. Hanson talks about want legal decisions made by majority opinion? Do Mr. Beck and his followers really think we should ignore the parts of the Constitution that establish the courts' responsibilities?

Mr. Beck and Mr. Cuccinelli both appear to demonstrate by their actions that they feel their personal values trump both science and the Constitution.

American anger, civilly expressed . . .

Long, long, ago, when I was young and easy, William F. Buckley ran for mayor of New York City. I got to hear a few of his witty, erudite speeches when they were broadcast by some NYC station big enough to reach my Massachusetts boarding school, and I have been a fan of  the late Mr. Buckley and his National Review ever since.

It's one of the sources I turn to when I need to understand the conservative's point of view.

This Saturday, close to 100,000 folks answered Glenn Beck's call to rally in Washington to hear Sarah Palin, Mr. Beck and others tell them what God wants for America. This, to me, means that Mr. Beck's message, whatever it is, resonates deeply with a lot of people in this country. And so yesterday I turned to the National Review to try to understand why this is so and came across an excellent article by Victor Davis Hanson on "The Sources of American Anger."

Mr. Hanson lists 6 issues he sees as underlying the anger of those who find inspiration in the messages of Mr. Beck, Ms. Palin, and others of similar political and religious persuasion..

Here they are, much abridged. . .

1. Two sets of rules. The public senses there are two standards in America — one for elite overseers, quite another for the supposedly not-to-be-trusted public. The anger over this hypocrisy surfaces over matters from the trivial to the profound. . .

2. The bigot card. In reductionist terms, the public now accepts that when particular groups fail to win a 51 percent majority on a particular issue, they resort to invoking racism and prejudice. . .
3. The law? What law? Americans accept that they cannot pass legislation in violation of the Constitution. But they do not believe that a single judge can nullify the electoral will of millions without good cause. Thus in Arizona and California, there is a sense that judges who favor open borders or gay marriage are willing to use the pretense of constitutional issues to enact such agendas despite their current unpopularity . . .

4. The futility of taxes. We talk of returning to the Clinton income-tax schedules. Yet in the late 1990s, those hikes ended up, along with the Republican cuts in mandates, balancing the budget — without new health-care surcharges, or talk of a VAT, or caps lifted off income subject to Social Security taxes. Not now. The public recognizes that the advocates of higher taxes are not willing to make the sort of across-the-board spending cuts that once succeeded in balancing the budget. In other words, those who will start paying much more of their income to the government in the form of taxes fret that, unlike the 1990s, this time the additional federal revenue won’t balance the budget, and will be all for naught. . .

5. Disingenuousness. There is also a growing belief that the Obama administration is advancing an agenda that it cannot be fully candid about, because that agenda does not command broad support. As a result, we are habitually asked to believe that what administration appointees or supporters say is not what they really mean, or at least was taken out of context. . . . All this dissimulation started with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose mistake was not saying the outrageous things he said — Mr. Obama and the compliant media had contextualized his corpus of hate well enough — but finally insulting the media at the National Press Club. The former was seen as a misdemeanor; the latter proved a felony. . . .Do Obama supporters, then, reveal their true beliefs only in gaffes and unguarded moments, while filling their official statements and communiqués with pretense?

6. A culpable America? Finally, the public has added up the apology tours, the bowing, and the constant emphasis on race, class, and gender crimes, and concluded that this administration sees America, past and present, as the story of a culpable majority denying noble minorities their rights — period. . . .Surely someone in the past — perhaps even white males — must have been doing something right for America to evolve into a place that our present-day critics apparently enjoy.

Do read Mr. Hanson's entire article if you have time. But, more importantly, think about what he's saying. And, if you're not a believer in all things Glenn Beck-ian, try walking around in a believer's shoes for just a moment or two and viewing this country from that angle.

Thoughts on aging, change, and the Founding Fathers. . .

Brad Jenkins, General Manager of The Breeze (JMU's fine student newspaper) tagged me this morning in a Facebook photo. There I am, participating in Breeze Camp, talking to the paper's editorial staff about interviewing and story telling.

My reaction to being confronted with an unexpected, early-morning picture of myself was two-fold: 1) Wow! Have I aged; and 2) Wow! Am I having a blast.

Both are true. And both are equally acceptable. To me, anyway. But, perhaps, not to society at large. At least, the aging part.

Sixty, I am constantly told, is the new thirty.

That statement—meant, I suppose, to cheer me and the vast herd of my fellow 50-60-ish hipsters—frankly bamboozles me: What is it supposed to mean? Which part of thirty is going to return? The smoking-like-a-chimney, dance-all-night part? The idiot part? The unstable-personal-life part?

Here’s the deal: I've been 30, and I prefer adventure to repetition.

I do still dance uncontrollably sometimes in grocery store aisles, but for the most part I've moved way beyond the person I was at 30. And I have no desire for anyone to take me as anything other than what I am: A 63-year-old woman who enjoys being a 63-year-old woman.

The inescapable, unavoidable truth is life passes and things change; I've changed, the world has changed. The only thing that seems unchanged is the relentless nature of change, itself.  We humans either periodically update our take on reality, or we are left cowering in the corner, pointlessly trying to recreate a world, a life, a philosophy that has passed into the past along with Mick Jagger's and my youth. A long-gone reality that had its own anxiety-producing problems that we avoided by dreaming of another past, further back.

It seems to me that failing to accept change as a fundamental aspect of reality is one of the things that is behind all this Founding Fathers talk in politics. It's all so angry and so vague. And, for the life of me, I can't find much point to it other than fueling people's natural fears during uncertain times.

For example, if you go to the Tea Party Patriot website, you'll find an invitation to sign the following petition:

We the undersigned have understood the true meaning of the below document. Again we find ourselves suffering at the hands of TYRANTS. This petition is to recommit ourselves to the founding values, primary of all that LIBERTIES come from our CREATOR and not men. That being so, they only govern with the consent of THE PEOPLE. We are declaring independence from tyrants, the elite and those that wish harm to our REPUBLIC. Even coming out of silence the tyrants continue to plot our demise. WE THE PEOPLE declare to be free men and women and we will be lied no more. 
GOD BLESS THE USA

What, I ask you, does this mean? What plot? What founding values? How will signing this document help confront today's confusing, complex, anxiety-producing reality?

I rooted around in the site for something akin to a political platform and instead found such offerings as Who Am I, which compares President Obama's background to Adolf Hitler's.

Oh dearie me. . .

Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally is set for this Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial. I went to his website to try to find some kind of statement relevant to today's problems and instead read:

Throughout history America has seen many great leaders and noteworthy citizens change her course. It is through their personal virtues and by their example that we can live as a free country. On August 28th, come celebrate America by honoring our heroes, our heritage and our future.

Join the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and many more for this non-political event that pays tribute to America’s service personnel and other upstanding citizens who embody our nation’s founding principles of integrity, truth and honor.

Our freedom is possible only if we remain virtuous. Help us restore the values that founded this great nation. 

Again, to which particular values is Mr. Beck referring? Whose definition of virtuous is he using? Is virtue something Glenn Beck wants to legislate?

The Founding Fathers certainly were not a particularly virtuous bunch. But then I suspect there will be some terrific pruning of history going on next Saturday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Sarah Palin and the Tea Party flexed their clout in yesterday's Republican primary in Florida and Alaska. Mostly, it seems, through helping people focus their vague fears at two specific targets: our first black President and our first woman Speaker of the House.

It all just makes me want to challenge Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck to a reality smack-down. The truth is I am irrevocably 63, and this is irrevocably 2010. None of us can go back. Go back to what, exactly? Whose idea of "back" are we talking about?

It's natural to long for times to be simpler. But our times are what they are now. And the solutions to our problems will only be found by facing them in the here and now.