Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Steak, Booze and a Sense of Dull Dread: What Really Happens at the NFL Combine
An NFL general manager stands in his suite at Lucas Oil Stadium watching the combine workouts. I'm not using his name; even though he's merely admitting what everyone privately acknowledges, he worries about saying it aloud because the combine is such a growth industry for the NFL. After years of coming to Indianapolis, he now understands that his presence here -- everyone's presence -- is simply to play a small part in a televised show, even if real futures are at stake. The players are running on the field down below, and they are running on the screens playing all around him, broadcast by the NFL Network. From his suite, this GM can barely read the names and numbers on their jerseys, so he watches on TV. Like most guys, he has an iPad where the stats and scores and results automatically update in his draft software. Except the results are always posted faster on the live television broadcast than in his own system. That's what cues his sense of dull dread: If I can just watch this on television, and if I don't even really care about the results anyway, then why exactly am I here?
Day One, Part I
Wednesday night, my first at the combine, first stop, first drink: a Guinness at the J.W. Marriott hotel bar, the front porch of the NFL combine. I nursed the beer and watched the football world stalk the room, looking for someone who might have information or want information. An agent named Kyle Strongin pulled up a chair. A long time ago, he worked at Ole Miss, which is in the town where I live, so we swapped Coach O stories and caught up on life. This year, he had three clients at the combine: Wisconsin running back Alec Ingold, South Carolina lineman Zack Bailey and Clemson cult hero receiver Hunter Renfrow.
He liked his guys, and he pulled out his phone to show me a picture that kind of sums up the singular question hovering over the combine: What can a team tell about a player by looking at him run, lift weights and flex? Kyle's photo showed the now-viral image of Ole Miss' D.K. Metcalf standing with his shirt off, his chest swollen and rippled. D.K. sent me two crying-laughing emojis when I texted him after it first hit Twitter, when his 1.9 percent body fat melted the internet. In Kyle's photoshopped version, next to him was Renfrow, short and skinny, looking exactly like the kind of player a teammate might mistake for a manager, or maybe a waterboy -- which actually happened his freshman year at Clemson.
Then Kyle's photo listed both their stats against Alabama.
Renfrow put up better numbers.
All Renfrow has ever done is catch big passes in big games and help his team win. The most recent Super Bowl MVP, Julian Edelman, is a player like him. And still, Renfrow's agent spent the week of the combine working to convince people to trust themselves and not a series of athletic tests that don't actually reveal much about a football player's future. That's the funny thing. The combine is a place where you can watch the battle between facts and narrative play out: Even though the smart football minds said they didn't learn much from the results, the drills being broadcast created an image that a player would have to struggle to shed. Hunter was in town fighting group-think about his size and speed. One scouting guy told Renfrow's agent, "I wouldn't draft him but he'd start for us."
So Renfrow needed to do well enough to let his career define him instead of these times and reps. Strongin told me that Hunter would run his 40-yard dash on Saturday. If he could score in the low 4.5s, then a team will draft him in the third or fourth round as a starting slot receiver.
If he ran much slower than that, he might not get drafted at all.
Day One, Part II
This year's combine was my first, which made me not quite prepared for the daily marathon: from morning coffee at the J.W. Starbucks, where the new Browns head coach would ask for his coffee cool enough to chug -- "kids' temperature," one barista said to another; to the convention center where nearly a thousand reporters look for state secrets about hamstrings and muscle cramps; to one of several wood-paneled, masculine steakhouses like St. Elmo, with its horseradish-spiked shrimp cocktail; to a restaurant bar named Prime 47, where nearly every night ends up in a haze of passed business cards, whispered gossip and behavior some coaches would rather not hit the internet. A lot of secrets get told, news broken. Alcohol numbs everyone's deeply hardwired urge to lie.
The NFL is famously secretive and paranoid, so these bars in Indianapolis are among the few places in the world where you can actually ask a straight question and get a true answer. The curtain gets yanked back and, like in the movie, the guy pulling the levers always seems smaller up close. There's John Elway eating at P.F. Chang's. There's Dan Marino drinking chardonnay. There's Sean Payton dining with two reporters in a dark steakhouse. There's every agent and scout and general manager moving in a carefully defined orbit around downtown Indianapolis. Prime awaits at the end of the night. It's a verb. Let's Prime.
Women react strongly to the predatory energy at Prime -- "Soooo many men," a female reporter said, standing next to me in a corner -- and most of the women I work with have stories, some of which make you roll your eyes and some of which make you ball up your fists. Around 2 a.m., I sat at the bar and watched someone grab the waitress' ass. When I pulled the waitress aside to ask if she was OK, she smiled thinly and said, "Welcome to the combine." (...)
For reporters and coaches and scouts, the combine is part work and part play, like a legal convention in Las Vegas or something. Yes, there's combine stuff to do, but that all feels secondary on the ground to drinking expensive wine and eating big steaks at places like St. Elmo's -- the emotional center of Indy during the combine, with its great light and high ceilings.
Normally their most popular steak is the filet. The week of the combine it was the dry-aged Tomahawk ribeye. Big cabernets flew out of the cellar, Jerry Jones buying his large formats of Silver Oak -- jeroboams and methuselahs, son -- while smaller fish pop for 750s of Caymus. A St. Elmo's staff member said the combine crowds don't buy the really great wine, just wine that normal people will recognize as expensive. The strut is more important than the taste. Drinks flowed. Shrimp cocktails arrived, and huge steaks, too: bone-in, medium rare. A reporter sent a round of tequila shots to a table of Patriots PR people. They'd had quite the week, after the Orchids of Asia. Outside, some NFL guys walked down the street joking about needing to find a massage parlor to get a "Krafty." (...)
The scouts know this week doesn't matter, but the league knows that fans will watch on television and that talk radio and popular culture will turn this into an essential event on the annual sporting calendar. That's the tension that everyone can feel even if they can't articulate it. The whole thing has the whiff of reality television, with a twist: As these kinds of drills become less and less relevant to the best minds in the game, they become more and more important in the culture. Imagine if getting kicked off "The Bachelor" meant you had to stay single forever.
Day One, Part I
Wednesday night, my first at the combine, first stop, first drink: a Guinness at the J.W. Marriott hotel bar, the front porch of the NFL combine. I nursed the beer and watched the football world stalk the room, looking for someone who might have information or want information. An agent named Kyle Strongin pulled up a chair. A long time ago, he worked at Ole Miss, which is in the town where I live, so we swapped Coach O stories and caught up on life. This year, he had three clients at the combine: Wisconsin running back Alec Ingold, South Carolina lineman Zack Bailey and Clemson cult hero receiver Hunter Renfrow.
He liked his guys, and he pulled out his phone to show me a picture that kind of sums up the singular question hovering over the combine: What can a team tell about a player by looking at him run, lift weights and flex? Kyle's photo showed the now-viral image of Ole Miss' D.K. Metcalf standing with his shirt off, his chest swollen and rippled. D.K. sent me two crying-laughing emojis when I texted him after it first hit Twitter, when his 1.9 percent body fat melted the internet. In Kyle's photoshopped version, next to him was Renfrow, short and skinny, looking exactly like the kind of player a teammate might mistake for a manager, or maybe a waterboy -- which actually happened his freshman year at Clemson.Then Kyle's photo listed both their stats against Alabama.
Renfrow put up better numbers.
All Renfrow has ever done is catch big passes in big games and help his team win. The most recent Super Bowl MVP, Julian Edelman, is a player like him. And still, Renfrow's agent spent the week of the combine working to convince people to trust themselves and not a series of athletic tests that don't actually reveal much about a football player's future. That's the funny thing. The combine is a place where you can watch the battle between facts and narrative play out: Even though the smart football minds said they didn't learn much from the results, the drills being broadcast created an image that a player would have to struggle to shed. Hunter was in town fighting group-think about his size and speed. One scouting guy told Renfrow's agent, "I wouldn't draft him but he'd start for us."
So Renfrow needed to do well enough to let his career define him instead of these times and reps. Strongin told me that Hunter would run his 40-yard dash on Saturday. If he could score in the low 4.5s, then a team will draft him in the third or fourth round as a starting slot receiver.
If he ran much slower than that, he might not get drafted at all.
Day One, Part II
This year's combine was my first, which made me not quite prepared for the daily marathon: from morning coffee at the J.W. Starbucks, where the new Browns head coach would ask for his coffee cool enough to chug -- "kids' temperature," one barista said to another; to the convention center where nearly a thousand reporters look for state secrets about hamstrings and muscle cramps; to one of several wood-paneled, masculine steakhouses like St. Elmo, with its horseradish-spiked shrimp cocktail; to a restaurant bar named Prime 47, where nearly every night ends up in a haze of passed business cards, whispered gossip and behavior some coaches would rather not hit the internet. A lot of secrets get told, news broken. Alcohol numbs everyone's deeply hardwired urge to lie.
The NFL is famously secretive and paranoid, so these bars in Indianapolis are among the few places in the world where you can actually ask a straight question and get a true answer. The curtain gets yanked back and, like in the movie, the guy pulling the levers always seems smaller up close. There's John Elway eating at P.F. Chang's. There's Dan Marino drinking chardonnay. There's Sean Payton dining with two reporters in a dark steakhouse. There's every agent and scout and general manager moving in a carefully defined orbit around downtown Indianapolis. Prime awaits at the end of the night. It's a verb. Let's Prime.
Women react strongly to the predatory energy at Prime -- "Soooo many men," a female reporter said, standing next to me in a corner -- and most of the women I work with have stories, some of which make you roll your eyes and some of which make you ball up your fists. Around 2 a.m., I sat at the bar and watched someone grab the waitress' ass. When I pulled the waitress aside to ask if she was OK, she smiled thinly and said, "Welcome to the combine." (...)
For reporters and coaches and scouts, the combine is part work and part play, like a legal convention in Las Vegas or something. Yes, there's combine stuff to do, but that all feels secondary on the ground to drinking expensive wine and eating big steaks at places like St. Elmo's -- the emotional center of Indy during the combine, with its great light and high ceilings.
Normally their most popular steak is the filet. The week of the combine it was the dry-aged Tomahawk ribeye. Big cabernets flew out of the cellar, Jerry Jones buying his large formats of Silver Oak -- jeroboams and methuselahs, son -- while smaller fish pop for 750s of Caymus. A St. Elmo's staff member said the combine crowds don't buy the really great wine, just wine that normal people will recognize as expensive. The strut is more important than the taste. Drinks flowed. Shrimp cocktails arrived, and huge steaks, too: bone-in, medium rare. A reporter sent a round of tequila shots to a table of Patriots PR people. They'd had quite the week, after the Orchids of Asia. Outside, some NFL guys walked down the street joking about needing to find a massage parlor to get a "Krafty." (...)
The scouts know this week doesn't matter, but the league knows that fans will watch on television and that talk radio and popular culture will turn this into an essential event on the annual sporting calendar. That's the tension that everyone can feel even if they can't articulate it. The whole thing has the whiff of reality television, with a twist: As these kinds of drills become less and less relevant to the best minds in the game, they become more and more important in the culture. Imagine if getting kicked off "The Bachelor" meant you had to stay single forever.
by Wright Thompson, ESPN | Read more:
Image: Joe Robbins/Getty Images
To Brits, Trump Makes Dubya Look Smart
Sometimes even those of us who take great pride in our writings come across pieces that inspire us to be more elegant, more precise, just more literate. I have a fondness for the King’s English and once had an editor, a woman in her late 70’s and very, very English ask me why I wrote as though I were writing in the 19th century? I, of course, not missing a beat replied that I thought that was the ultimate compliment. She vehemently disagreed. Oh well, to each their own.
But just a while ago I came across the accompanying article that I found to be so profoundly poignant yet humorous that it led me to one of those moments where my only reaction was the proverbial “I wish I had said that.” So I would like to share it with those who may not have been introduced to such witty repartee as they perused their daily dose of Facebook.
So with no further suspense I would like to offer the following, which appeared on February 11, 2019, on the internet site Quora.com, for your reading pleasure.
Someone on Quora asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:
Image: uncredited
But just a while ago I came across the accompanying article that I found to be so profoundly poignant yet humorous that it led me to one of those moments where my only reaction was the proverbial “I wish I had said that.” So I would like to share it with those who may not have been introduced to such witty repartee as they perused their daily dose of Facebook.So with no further suspense I would like to offer the following, which appeared on February 11, 2019, on the internet site Quora.com, for your reading pleasure.
Someone on Quora asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:
A few things spring to mind.
Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.
For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.
I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.
Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. (...)
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.
That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.
There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.
After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.by Lance Simmens, LA Progressive | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Here’s to Naps and Snoozes
A few months ago, two Americans arrived for a meeting at a sprawling, corporate campus in Sichuan Province in China. (They asked not to be named because their work is confidential.) To get to the conference room, they crossed a vast span of cubicles where hundreds of young engineers were busy at their desks, a scene replicated on every floor of the 10-storey building. The meeting was to discuss a dense, text-heavy document, and it began with the client reviewing the day’s agenda: they’d talk until 11am, break for lunch, have nap time, and then start again at 2pm.
Lunch was in a cafeteria the size of a football field where women with hair nets and soup ladles regulated the movement of a column of people. The visitors lost sight of their hosts, so they got into line, bolted down their meal, and retraced their way to the building where they’d had their meeting. When the elevator door opened, the window blinds were drawn, the computer screens were off, and the whole floor lay in grey shadow. The workday could have been over but for the fact that people lay about everywhere, as switched off as the ceiling lights.
The Americans hadn’t seen anything like it since morning-after scenes at their college fraternities. They had to step over some bodies. Other people were tilted forward in their seats with their faces on their desks, like they’d been knocked out from behind, while others still had cleared their desks and lay on them face-up.
The Americans hoped that their hosts, upper-tier executives, would be awake in the meeting room, but they were just as dead to the world as everyone else. One of the Americans coughed into his fist. No one stirred. There were still 45 minutes to go till the 2pm meeting. So he took a seat and pretended to join the mass nap. He didn’t feel like sleeping and would have felt too vulnerable even if he did, but it was a tight space, the woman facing him, a lawyer, was snoring away, and he was afraid that, if she woke up, she’d think he was staring at her. ‘I figured it was safer if I just closed my eyes,’ he told me.
The ordeal ended, finally, with a gong. The lights came back on, music (a military march) played, and people just opened their eyes and resumed their working posture. Nap time was done.
That the incident seemed strange illustrates how people raised in the United States (or who identify with its values) often think about sleep: we can be dominated and bullied by early risers, and tend to look down upon other customs such as siestas.
These are some of our conventions: a person should not sleep too long – as a matter of personal virtue and social capital, the less the better. The average American sleeps for 6 hours 31 minutes during the working week, the least of any country but Japan (6 hours, 22 minutes). The higher limit of what you can admit to is eight hours. Sleep is a waste of time, robbing you of the finite resource of conscious, productive time. Collective nap times or public sleeping bring to mind nurseries and nursing homes. You don’t sleep with co-workers, ever, in any sense of the term. If you really have to sleep, you slink off somewhere out of view and, if anyone asks, you manufacture an alibi, or say something like: ‘I just wanted to close my eyes,’ as if to plead a felony charge down to a misdemeanour. Or you call it a ‘power nap’, as if it was really a strength-training session at the gym.
‘Every society is judgmental about its core issues of value,’ said Carol Worthman, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta. But when it comes to sleep, the need for safety – versus value judgment – seems to have prevailed in cultures beyond our own. Indeed, in Worthman’s research around the world, sleep has emerged as both more flexible and more social than one would think from the perspective of the West. ‘Human sleep evolved in risky settings that fostered complex sleep architecture and regulation of vigilance in sleep to suit local circumstances,’ she writes in Frontiers Reviews; and those circumstances varied from place to place.
Lunch was in a cafeteria the size of a football field where women with hair nets and soup ladles regulated the movement of a column of people. The visitors lost sight of their hosts, so they got into line, bolted down their meal, and retraced their way to the building where they’d had their meeting. When the elevator door opened, the window blinds were drawn, the computer screens were off, and the whole floor lay in grey shadow. The workday could have been over but for the fact that people lay about everywhere, as switched off as the ceiling lights.
The Americans hadn’t seen anything like it since morning-after scenes at their college fraternities. They had to step over some bodies. Other people were tilted forward in their seats with their faces on their desks, like they’d been knocked out from behind, while others still had cleared their desks and lay on them face-up.
The Americans hoped that their hosts, upper-tier executives, would be awake in the meeting room, but they were just as dead to the world as everyone else. One of the Americans coughed into his fist. No one stirred. There were still 45 minutes to go till the 2pm meeting. So he took a seat and pretended to join the mass nap. He didn’t feel like sleeping and would have felt too vulnerable even if he did, but it was a tight space, the woman facing him, a lawyer, was snoring away, and he was afraid that, if she woke up, she’d think he was staring at her. ‘I figured it was safer if I just closed my eyes,’ he told me.The ordeal ended, finally, with a gong. The lights came back on, music (a military march) played, and people just opened their eyes and resumed their working posture. Nap time was done.
That the incident seemed strange illustrates how people raised in the United States (or who identify with its values) often think about sleep: we can be dominated and bullied by early risers, and tend to look down upon other customs such as siestas.
These are some of our conventions: a person should not sleep too long – as a matter of personal virtue and social capital, the less the better. The average American sleeps for 6 hours 31 minutes during the working week, the least of any country but Japan (6 hours, 22 minutes). The higher limit of what you can admit to is eight hours. Sleep is a waste of time, robbing you of the finite resource of conscious, productive time. Collective nap times or public sleeping bring to mind nurseries and nursing homes. You don’t sleep with co-workers, ever, in any sense of the term. If you really have to sleep, you slink off somewhere out of view and, if anyone asks, you manufacture an alibi, or say something like: ‘I just wanted to close my eyes,’ as if to plead a felony charge down to a misdemeanour. Or you call it a ‘power nap’, as if it was really a strength-training session at the gym.
‘Every society is judgmental about its core issues of value,’ said Carol Worthman, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta. But when it comes to sleep, the need for safety – versus value judgment – seems to have prevailed in cultures beyond our own. Indeed, in Worthman’s research around the world, sleep has emerged as both more flexible and more social than one would think from the perspective of the West. ‘Human sleep evolved in risky settings that fostered complex sleep architecture and regulation of vigilance in sleep to suit local circumstances,’ she writes in Frontiers Reviews; and those circumstances varied from place to place.
by Todd Pitock, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Jason Lee/Reuters
Ghost, Come Back Again
A boarding school in the British Isles. Reverent children huddle in a gloomy chamber, watching as one of their fellow students assays a devilishly difficult trick. The boy’s hand trembles. And then — success! A jet of fire, a “cold and beautiful purple-blue enchantment,” fills the ancient tower with an indescribable illumination.
Is this Hogwarts? Are these boys practicing spells that might one day protect the world from evil? No, it’s Seabrook College, the Dublin boys’ school of Paul Murray’s heartfelt and profane new novel, “Skippy Dies” — and that “magnificent plume of flame” isn’t coming from a wand. Boys in close quarters will always, always find a way to make their own miracles.
The extravagantly entertaining “Skippy Dies” chronicles a single catastrophic autumn at Seabrook from a good 20 different perspectives: students, teachers, administrators, priests, girlfriends, doughnut shop managers. At the center of it all is Daniel Juster, known as Skippy, whose death — on the floor of Ed’s Doughnut House, just after writing his beloved’s name on the floor in raspberry filling — opens the novel. “Skippy Dies” then flashes back to the months preceding, months in which the gloomy, doomed 14-year-old falls in love, wins a fight, keeps a secret and attracts the attention of members of the faculty who do not have his best interests at heart.
Along the way we get to know Skippy’s friends and tormentors, each drawn with great affection: Ruprecht, Skippy’s doughy genius roommate, who pursues experiments in string theory despite spending much of his time head-down in the toilet; Dennis, “an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic”; Carl, Skippy’s romantic rival and a budding psychopath; Lori, the possibly unworthy object of Skippy’s affections, who’s obsessed with a Britney-like pop tart and who keeps her diet pills hidden in her teddy bear’s tummy. (...)
Our guide to Seabrook’s staff room, meanwhile, is “Howard the Coward” Fallon, Seabrook ’93, once a Skippyish nerd but now a history teacher at his alma mater. (The book is set in the early part of this decade, in the midst of the Celtic Tiger economic boom.) “I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc,” Howard, working on an early midlife crisis, confides to a colleague, even though his life has in fact been a perfectly structured disappointment — beginning with that persistent schoolboy nickname, through his failure as a futures trader, up to his current position trying to get snoozing nitwits to care about World War I.
In a reflective moment, Howard thinks that his classes themselves resemble trench warfare, “a huge amount of labor and bloodshed for a dismally small area of terrain.” So uninterested in the past are his students that they indiscriminately refer to any time before today as “days of Yore.” But when he attempts to jump-start the boys’ enthusiasm with an impromptu excursion to a war memorial, he’s berated by Seabrook’s efficiency-obsessed acting principal: “Do you think this is some kind of a ‘Dead Poets Society’ situation we’re in here, is that it?”
Living with a nice American writer whom he can’t bring himself to marry, Howard is as adrift romantically as he is professionally. He’s ripe for an awakening, and it comes courtesy of Aurelie McIntyre, a fetching substitute geography teacher whose presence has turned the entire student body into dazed geography buffs. She empties Howard’s mind just as effectively, for the adults of Seabrook are as in thrall to their whims and appetites as their spotty, shame-faced students are.
That’s not always a source of comedy, of course, especially to readers for whom the book’s religious-school setting will call to mind a decade of news about the sexual abuse of children by priests. “Skippy Dies” doesn’t shy away from this issue. In fact, Seabrook’s students come to suspect a priest of abuse, although it’s to Murray’s credit that the man is neither exactly as guilty as you think, nor quite as blameless as you might hope.
In fact, the ambitious length of “Skippy Dies” allows Murray to take on any number of fascinating themes. One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently he addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography — as well as the sad story of the all-Irish D Company of the Seventh Royal Dublin Fusiliers, sent to their doom at Gallipoli in 1915. There’s even room for an indecent close reading of Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken” that’s so weirdly convincing I’ll never again be able to read that poem without sniggering.
Murray confidently brings these strands together, knitting them into an energetic plot that concerns Skippy’s death — and his roommates’ attempts to contact him afterward — but also expands into an elegy for lost youth. For Murray remembers, better than most writers, the “grim de-dreamification” of growing up. You won’t be a pop singer or a ninja superspy in the future. You won’t be exceptional at all, despite the promises of TV, video games and your parents. “Santa Claus,” Murray notes, “was just the tip of the iceberg.”
[ed. Highly recommended. See also: Paul Murray and ‘Skippy Dies’ (Paris Review).]
Is this Hogwarts? Are these boys practicing spells that might one day protect the world from evil? No, it’s Seabrook College, the Dublin boys’ school of Paul Murray’s heartfelt and profane new novel, “Skippy Dies” — and that “magnificent plume of flame” isn’t coming from a wand. Boys in close quarters will always, always find a way to make their own miracles.
The extravagantly entertaining “Skippy Dies” chronicles a single catastrophic autumn at Seabrook from a good 20 different perspectives: students, teachers, administrators, priests, girlfriends, doughnut shop managers. At the center of it all is Daniel Juster, known as Skippy, whose death — on the floor of Ed’s Doughnut House, just after writing his beloved’s name on the floor in raspberry filling — opens the novel. “Skippy Dies” then flashes back to the months preceding, months in which the gloomy, doomed 14-year-old falls in love, wins a fight, keeps a secret and attracts the attention of members of the faculty who do not have his best interests at heart.
Along the way we get to know Skippy’s friends and tormentors, each drawn with great affection: Ruprecht, Skippy’s doughy genius roommate, who pursues experiments in string theory despite spending much of his time head-down in the toilet; Dennis, “an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic”; Carl, Skippy’s romantic rival and a budding psychopath; Lori, the possibly unworthy object of Skippy’s affections, who’s obsessed with a Britney-like pop tart and who keeps her diet pills hidden in her teddy bear’s tummy. (...)Our guide to Seabrook’s staff room, meanwhile, is “Howard the Coward” Fallon, Seabrook ’93, once a Skippyish nerd but now a history teacher at his alma mater. (The book is set in the early part of this decade, in the midst of the Celtic Tiger economic boom.) “I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc,” Howard, working on an early midlife crisis, confides to a colleague, even though his life has in fact been a perfectly structured disappointment — beginning with that persistent schoolboy nickname, through his failure as a futures trader, up to his current position trying to get snoozing nitwits to care about World War I.
In a reflective moment, Howard thinks that his classes themselves resemble trench warfare, “a huge amount of labor and bloodshed for a dismally small area of terrain.” So uninterested in the past are his students that they indiscriminately refer to any time before today as “days of Yore.” But when he attempts to jump-start the boys’ enthusiasm with an impromptu excursion to a war memorial, he’s berated by Seabrook’s efficiency-obsessed acting principal: “Do you think this is some kind of a ‘Dead Poets Society’ situation we’re in here, is that it?”
Living with a nice American writer whom he can’t bring himself to marry, Howard is as adrift romantically as he is professionally. He’s ripe for an awakening, and it comes courtesy of Aurelie McIntyre, a fetching substitute geography teacher whose presence has turned the entire student body into dazed geography buffs. She empties Howard’s mind just as effectively, for the adults of Seabrook are as in thrall to their whims and appetites as their spotty, shame-faced students are.
That’s not always a source of comedy, of course, especially to readers for whom the book’s religious-school setting will call to mind a decade of news about the sexual abuse of children by priests. “Skippy Dies” doesn’t shy away from this issue. In fact, Seabrook’s students come to suspect a priest of abuse, although it’s to Murray’s credit that the man is neither exactly as guilty as you think, nor quite as blameless as you might hope.
In fact, the ambitious length of “Skippy Dies” allows Murray to take on any number of fascinating themes. One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently he addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography — as well as the sad story of the all-Irish D Company of the Seventh Royal Dublin Fusiliers, sent to their doom at Gallipoli in 1915. There’s even room for an indecent close reading of Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken” that’s so weirdly convincing I’ll never again be able to read that poem without sniggering.
Murray confidently brings these strands together, knitting them into an energetic plot that concerns Skippy’s death — and his roommates’ attempts to contact him afterward — but also expands into an elegy for lost youth. For Murray remembers, better than most writers, the “grim de-dreamification” of growing up. You won’t be a pop singer or a ninja superspy in the future. You won’t be exceptional at all, despite the promises of TV, video games and your parents. “Santa Claus,” Murray notes, “was just the tip of the iceberg.”
by Dan Kois, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Rutu Modan[ed. Highly recommended. See also: Paul Murray and ‘Skippy Dies’ (Paris Review).]
Monday, March 11, 2019
It’s Time to Stop Fighting Osama bin Laden’s War
Osama bin Laden is long dead, but his plans live on through American foreign policy.
In 2001, al Qaeda consisted of only 400 ideologues in the far corners of the world. After the recent regime change wars in Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Syria, typical estimates place their membership at around 20,000. To top it all off, the American economy is out $5.6 trillion dollars for the whole failed project. This is not the legacy of a war to spread, or even protect, liberty and prosperity. Instead it is the legacy of an evil but gifted tactician, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Contrary to the popular misunderstanding of al Qaeda’s motives and strategy, bin Laden and his partner Ayman al Zawahiri were not trying to scare America away with the September 11th attacks. They were trying to provoke an overreaction. Al Qaeda’s leaders wanted the U.S. to invade Afghanistan in order to bog our military down, “bleed us to bankruptcy,” and force a worn-out, broken empire to leave the region the hard way, and permanently, just as they had done to the Soviet Union in the 1980s with American support. Only then could they hope to launch the revolutions they sought in their home countries without interference from the American superpower.
Osama bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam warned in 1986 that the U.S. was on deck for expulsion from the region after the USSR. After observing the effectiveness of asymmetric war against a superior adversary, bin Laden, galvanized by the sanctions against Iraq and the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, took up Azzam’s mission. In an early declaration aimed at the U.S., bin Laden noted that the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan helped the mujahideen defeat one of the most powerful militaries in history, and declared that he would seek to lure America to its same fate.
After decimating al Qaeda’s old guard at Tora Bora in 2001, the U.S. military could have returned home victorious. Instead, our leaders chose to follow bin Laden’s wishes by committing to an extended occupation and impossible nation-building mission – one which has lasted for more than 17 years.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq to overthrow the man bin Laden called a “socialist infidel,” Saddam Hussein, was a massive boon to the terror organization, decimating a secular government, paving the way for the creation of the first al Qaeda franchise there in 2004, radicalizing of a generation of new fighters, and proving the limits of U.S. influence in the Middle East.
America’s further regime change wars in Yemen, Libya, and Syria have been strategic victories for the U.S.’s terrorist enemies beyond the former terrorist leader’s wildest dreams.
by Scott Horton and Robert Gaines, Brietbart | Read more:
Image: via
In 2001, al Qaeda consisted of only 400 ideologues in the far corners of the world. After the recent regime change wars in Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Syria, typical estimates place their membership at around 20,000. To top it all off, the American economy is out $5.6 trillion dollars for the whole failed project. This is not the legacy of a war to spread, or even protect, liberty and prosperity. Instead it is the legacy of an evil but gifted tactician, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Contrary to the popular misunderstanding of al Qaeda’s motives and strategy, bin Laden and his partner Ayman al Zawahiri were not trying to scare America away with the September 11th attacks. They were trying to provoke an overreaction. Al Qaeda’s leaders wanted the U.S. to invade Afghanistan in order to bog our military down, “bleed us to bankruptcy,” and force a worn-out, broken empire to leave the region the hard way, and permanently, just as they had done to the Soviet Union in the 1980s with American support. Only then could they hope to launch the revolutions they sought in their home countries without interference from the American superpower.
Osama bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam warned in 1986 that the U.S. was on deck for expulsion from the region after the USSR. After observing the effectiveness of asymmetric war against a superior adversary, bin Laden, galvanized by the sanctions against Iraq and the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, took up Azzam’s mission. In an early declaration aimed at the U.S., bin Laden noted that the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan helped the mujahideen defeat one of the most powerful militaries in history, and declared that he would seek to lure America to its same fate.After decimating al Qaeda’s old guard at Tora Bora in 2001, the U.S. military could have returned home victorious. Instead, our leaders chose to follow bin Laden’s wishes by committing to an extended occupation and impossible nation-building mission – one which has lasted for more than 17 years.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq to overthrow the man bin Laden called a “socialist infidel,” Saddam Hussein, was a massive boon to the terror organization, decimating a secular government, paving the way for the creation of the first al Qaeda franchise there in 2004, radicalizing of a generation of new fighters, and proving the limits of U.S. influence in the Middle East.
America’s further regime change wars in Yemen, Libya, and Syria have been strategic victories for the U.S.’s terrorist enemies beyond the former terrorist leader’s wildest dreams.
by Scott Horton and Robert Gaines, Brietbart | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Yes, Brietbart. Blind squirrels... etc.]
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Enduring San Francisco (NY Times)
Image: Jason Henry
[ed. One of the best weeks of my life. City Lights, North Beach, Chinatown, Rosie Flores at Bimbo's, and the annual Columbus Day and Italian Heritage Parade (with a banquet table set up adjacent to the street, full of antipasto and wine).]
[ed. One of the best weeks of my life. City Lights, North Beach, Chinatown, Rosie Flores at Bimbo's, and the annual Columbus Day and Italian Heritage Parade (with a banquet table set up adjacent to the street, full of antipasto and wine).]
The Making of the Fox News White House
In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.
But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.”
Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”
Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”
Fox’s defenders view such criticism as unfounded and politically biased. Ken LaCorte, who was in senior management at Fox News for nearly twenty years, until 2016, and recently started his own news service, told me, “The people at Fox said the same thing about the press and Obama.” Fox’s public-relations department offers numerous examples of its reporters and talk-show hosts challenging the Administration. Chris Wallace, a tough-minded and ecumenical interviewer, recently grilled Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser, on the need for a border wall, given that virtually all drugs seized at the border are discovered at checkpoints. Trump is not the first President to have a favorite media organization; James Madison and Andrew Jackson were each boosted by partisan newspapers. But many people who have watched and worked with Fox over the years, including some leading conservatives, regard Fox’s deepening Trump orthodoxy with alarm. Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.” Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”
Nothing has formalized the partnership between Fox and Trump more than the appointment, in July, 2018, of Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, as director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House. Kristol says of Shine, “When I first met him, he was producing Hannity’s show at Fox, and the two were incredibly close.” Both come from white working-class families on Long Island, and they are so close to each other’s children that they are referred to as “Uncle Bill” and “Uncle Sean.” Another former colleague says, “They spend their vacations together.” A third recalls, “I was rarely in Shine’s office when Sean didn’t call. And I was in Shine’s office a lot. They talked all the time—many times a day.”
Shine led Fox News’ programming division for a dozen years, overseeing the morning and evening opinion shows, which collectively get the biggest ratings and define the network’s conservative brand. Straight news was not within his purview. In July, 2016, Roger Ailes, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Fox, was fired in the face of numerous allegations of chronic sexual harassment, and Shine became co-president. But within a year he, too, had been forced out, amid a second wave of sexual-harassment allegations, some of them against Fox’s biggest star at the time, Bill O’Reilly. Shine wasn’t personally accused of sexual harassment, but several lawsuits named him as complicit in a workplace culture of coverups, payoffs, and victim intimidation.
Shine, who has denied any wrongdoing, has kept a low profile at the White House, and rejects interview requests, including one from this magazine. But Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”
The Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.” The feedback loop is so strong, she notes, that Trump “will even pick up an error made by Fox,” as when he promoted on Twitter a bogus Fox story claiming that South Africa was “seizing land from white farmers.” Rubin told me, “It’s funny that Bill Shine went over to the White House. He could have stayed in his old job. The only difference is payroll.” (...)
Shine is only the most recent Fox News alumnus to join the Trump Administration. Among others, Trump appointed the former Fox contributor Ben Carson to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the former Fox commentator John Bolton to be his national-security adviser, and the former Fox commentator K. T. McFarland to be his deputy national-security adviser. (McFarland resigned after four months.) Trump recently picked the former Fox News anchor Heather Nauert to be the Ambassador to the United Nations, but she soon withdrew herself from consideration, reportedly because her nanny, an immigrant, lacked a work permit. The White House door swings both ways: Hope Hicks, Shine’s predecessor in the communications job, is now slated to be the top public-relations officer at Fox Corporation. Several others who have left the Trump White House, including Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser on national security, regularly appear on Fox. Gorka recently insisted, on Fox Business, that one of Trump’s biggest setbacks—retreating from the shutdown without securing border-wall funds—was actually a “masterstroke.”
Other former Fox News celebrities have practically become part of the Trump family. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former co-host of “The Five,” left Fox in July; she is now working on Trump’s reëlection campaign and dating Donald Trump, Jr. (Guilfoyle left the network mid-contract, after a former Fox employee threatened to sue the network for harassment and accused Guilfoyle of sharing lewd images, among other misconduct; Fox and the former employee reached a multimillion-dollar settlement. A lawyer who represents Guilfoyle said that “any suggestion” that she “engaged in misconduct at Fox is patently false.”) Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host, and Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business host, have each been patched into Oval Office meetings, by speakerphone, to offer policy advice. Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 p.m. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”
But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.”Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”
Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”
Fox’s defenders view such criticism as unfounded and politically biased. Ken LaCorte, who was in senior management at Fox News for nearly twenty years, until 2016, and recently started his own news service, told me, “The people at Fox said the same thing about the press and Obama.” Fox’s public-relations department offers numerous examples of its reporters and talk-show hosts challenging the Administration. Chris Wallace, a tough-minded and ecumenical interviewer, recently grilled Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser, on the need for a border wall, given that virtually all drugs seized at the border are discovered at checkpoints. Trump is not the first President to have a favorite media organization; James Madison and Andrew Jackson were each boosted by partisan newspapers. But many people who have watched and worked with Fox over the years, including some leading conservatives, regard Fox’s deepening Trump orthodoxy with alarm. Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.” Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”
Nothing has formalized the partnership between Fox and Trump more than the appointment, in July, 2018, of Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, as director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House. Kristol says of Shine, “When I first met him, he was producing Hannity’s show at Fox, and the two were incredibly close.” Both come from white working-class families on Long Island, and they are so close to each other’s children that they are referred to as “Uncle Bill” and “Uncle Sean.” Another former colleague says, “They spend their vacations together.” A third recalls, “I was rarely in Shine’s office when Sean didn’t call. And I was in Shine’s office a lot. They talked all the time—many times a day.”
Shine led Fox News’ programming division for a dozen years, overseeing the morning and evening opinion shows, which collectively get the biggest ratings and define the network’s conservative brand. Straight news was not within his purview. In July, 2016, Roger Ailes, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Fox, was fired in the face of numerous allegations of chronic sexual harassment, and Shine became co-president. But within a year he, too, had been forced out, amid a second wave of sexual-harassment allegations, some of them against Fox’s biggest star at the time, Bill O’Reilly. Shine wasn’t personally accused of sexual harassment, but several lawsuits named him as complicit in a workplace culture of coverups, payoffs, and victim intimidation.
Shine, who has denied any wrongdoing, has kept a low profile at the White House, and rejects interview requests, including one from this magazine. But Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”
The Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.” The feedback loop is so strong, she notes, that Trump “will even pick up an error made by Fox,” as when he promoted on Twitter a bogus Fox story claiming that South Africa was “seizing land from white farmers.” Rubin told me, “It’s funny that Bill Shine went over to the White House. He could have stayed in his old job. The only difference is payroll.” (...)
Shine is only the most recent Fox News alumnus to join the Trump Administration. Among others, Trump appointed the former Fox contributor Ben Carson to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the former Fox commentator John Bolton to be his national-security adviser, and the former Fox commentator K. T. McFarland to be his deputy national-security adviser. (McFarland resigned after four months.) Trump recently picked the former Fox News anchor Heather Nauert to be the Ambassador to the United Nations, but she soon withdrew herself from consideration, reportedly because her nanny, an immigrant, lacked a work permit. The White House door swings both ways: Hope Hicks, Shine’s predecessor in the communications job, is now slated to be the top public-relations officer at Fox Corporation. Several others who have left the Trump White House, including Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser on national security, regularly appear on Fox. Gorka recently insisted, on Fox Business, that one of Trump’s biggest setbacks—retreating from the shutdown without securing border-wall funds—was actually a “masterstroke.”
Other former Fox News celebrities have practically become part of the Trump family. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former co-host of “The Five,” left Fox in July; she is now working on Trump’s reëlection campaign and dating Donald Trump, Jr. (Guilfoyle left the network mid-contract, after a former Fox employee threatened to sue the network for harassment and accused Guilfoyle of sharing lewd images, among other misconduct; Fox and the former employee reached a multimillion-dollar settlement. A lawyer who represents Guilfoyle said that “any suggestion” that she “engaged in misconduct at Fox is patently false.”) Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host, and Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business host, have each been patched into Oval Office meetings, by speakerphone, to offer policy advice. Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 p.m. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”
by Jane Mayer, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Tyler Comrie; photograph from Getty
Sunday, March 10, 2019
Pentagon Spent $4.6 Million on Lobster Tail and Crab in One Month
The federal government spends a disproportionate amount of its budget for outside contractors in the final month of the fiscal year, as agencies rush to blow through cash before it's too late. Among the more noteworthy expenditures in 2018, according to the watchdog group Open the Books, was $4.6 million for lobster tail and crab.
Such use-it-or-lose-it spending stems from the fact that each federal agency is given a certain amount of money it can spend on outside contractors for the fiscal year. If the agency comes in under budget, Congress might decide to appropriate less money the following year.
Or as The Office's Oscar Martinez explains to Michael Scott in "The Surplus": "Your mommy and daddy give you $10 to open up a lemonade stand, so you go out and you buy cups and you buy lemons and you buy sugar. And now you find out that it only cost you $9, so you have an extra dollar," he explains. "So you can give that dollar back to mommy and daddy. But guess what: Next summer, and you ask them for money, they're going to give you $9 because that's what they think it cost to run the stand. So what you want to do is spend that dollar on something now, so that your parents think that it cost $10 to run the lemonade stand."
It works the same way at the federal level. Just replace that $10 with $544.1 billion—the amount federal agencies spent on contracts in the last fiscal year.
Of that $544.1 billion, almost $97 billion was spent in September 2018, the final month of the fiscal year, including $53.3 billion in the final seven days of the month. That's compared to $47 billion spent in the entire month of August. As the fiscal year came crashing to an end, bureaucrats apparently did their best to spend as much money as quickly as possible.
The Department of Defense led the pack, spending $61.2 billion in September. The Pentagon was followed not-so-closely by the Department of Health and Human Services ($5.7 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($5.4 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($4.2 billion).
Federal agencies spent $402.2 million on food that month, with the Pentagon shelling out $2.3 million on crab and $2.3 million on lobster tail. Also, "agencies spent $2.1 million on games, toys, and wheeled goods," Open the Books notes, as well as "$412,008 on paint and artist's brushes." A whopping $490 million went to furniture, including a baffling $9,341 for a Wexford office chair. Agencies also spent $49,515 for skis and ski poles, $11,816 for a foosball table, and $258,901 on pianos.
by Joe Setyon, Reason | Read more:
Image: Olga Vasylieva/Dreamstime.com
[ed. See also: Peace Dividend vs Military Industrial Complex.]
Such use-it-or-lose-it spending stems from the fact that each federal agency is given a certain amount of money it can spend on outside contractors for the fiscal year. If the agency comes in under budget, Congress might decide to appropriate less money the following year.
Or as The Office's Oscar Martinez explains to Michael Scott in "The Surplus": "Your mommy and daddy give you $10 to open up a lemonade stand, so you go out and you buy cups and you buy lemons and you buy sugar. And now you find out that it only cost you $9, so you have an extra dollar," he explains. "So you can give that dollar back to mommy and daddy. But guess what: Next summer, and you ask them for money, they're going to give you $9 because that's what they think it cost to run the stand. So what you want to do is spend that dollar on something now, so that your parents think that it cost $10 to run the lemonade stand."It works the same way at the federal level. Just replace that $10 with $544.1 billion—the amount federal agencies spent on contracts in the last fiscal year.
Of that $544.1 billion, almost $97 billion was spent in September 2018, the final month of the fiscal year, including $53.3 billion in the final seven days of the month. That's compared to $47 billion spent in the entire month of August. As the fiscal year came crashing to an end, bureaucrats apparently did their best to spend as much money as quickly as possible.
The Department of Defense led the pack, spending $61.2 billion in September. The Pentagon was followed not-so-closely by the Department of Health and Human Services ($5.7 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($5.4 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($4.2 billion).
Federal agencies spent $402.2 million on food that month, with the Pentagon shelling out $2.3 million on crab and $2.3 million on lobster tail. Also, "agencies spent $2.1 million on games, toys, and wheeled goods," Open the Books notes, as well as "$412,008 on paint and artist's brushes." A whopping $490 million went to furniture, including a baffling $9,341 for a Wexford office chair. Agencies also spent $49,515 for skis and ski poles, $11,816 for a foosball table, and $258,901 on pianos.
by Joe Setyon, Reason | Read more:
Image: Olga Vasylieva/Dreamstime.com
[ed. See also: Peace Dividend vs Military Industrial Complex.]
Saturday, March 9, 2019
Only One Roadblock on the Road to Reform: Mitch McConnell
With the conspicuous perversion of the political system on daily display, congressional Democrats are eager to brand themselves the party of reform. They took another step in this direction on Friday, when the House voted 234-to-193 — along straight party lines — to pass the For the People Act, a sweeping package of proposals aimed at rooting out political corruption and shoring up the integrity of the electoral system.
The bill is the Democrats’ chief policy priority and covers close to 700 pages. H.R. 1, as it is officially known, seeks, among other reforms, to strengthen ethics laws for lawmakers and lobbyists, increase voting access, improve voting security, tighten campaign finance laws and create an alternative campaign-finance system geared toward small donors.
To advance the bill, Democratic leaders had to work through more than 70 proposed amendments. Some were embraced, including several aimed at spotlighting questionable behavior in the Trump administration. One, for instance, bars federal money from being spent at businesses owned or controlled by the president or other top administration officials. Others were rejected, including a plan to lower the voting age to 16.
As a sign of Democrats’ commitment to a cause that helped power its takeover of the House, the bill’s passage was an important achievement. As a practical legislative matter, it’s a bit of a hollow victory. As fired up as Democrats are to shake up the system, Republicans are perhaps even more fired up to stop them.
The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has been openly hostile to the anticorruption package since its inception. This week he made clear that he would refuse even to bring it up for a vote.
Think of H.R. 1 as the Merrick Garland of reform legislation.
Mr. McConnell called the bill the “Democrat Politician Protection Act”(and a “turkey”) and predicted that lawmakers who back it will suffer come re-election time. As political logic, this is questionable. If the Republican leader really thought the package was a loser, he would absolutely bring it to the floor to force Democratic lawmakers to own it — which is, notably, the path he has pledged to pursue with the Green New Deal, which is supported by many Democrats. The Green New Deal, an assortment of ideas for fighting climate change and remaking the economy, is even more sprawling and amorphous than the For the People Act. Mr. McConnell is panting to have members vote on it.
Asked this week why the two measures were being handled so differently, the Republican leader didn’t bother making up excuses. He said simply, “Because I get to decide what we vote on.”
This grade-school taunt masks a deep current of fear and loathing. Loathing, because Mr. McConnell is a longtime enemy of campaign finance reform. Killing such efforts can seem like his singular legislative passion.
The fear is less targeted, but even more existential. Ever the shrewd political animal, Mr. McConnell is well aware that a majority of Americans favor overhauling a system they see as broken and unfair. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from September, 77 percent of respondents said reducing corruption and the influence of special interests was either the most important or a very important issue facing the nation. Having his members blamed for derailing a major reform package could prove politically risky. Thus Mr. McConnell turns to his go-to move: stonewalling. (...)
H.R. 1 would put an end to at least some of the vile voter suppression practices that Republicans have embraced in recent years. Which goes to the heart of the party’s opposition.
Well before President Trump erupted on the scene, Republicans made the calculation that, with demographics trending against them, their best strategy was to make voting harder rather than easier, particularly for certain nonwhite segments of the electorate. Across the nation, they have pursued voter restriction tactics with vigor. Any effort to expand access to the ballot box sets off alarm bells within the party.
This leaves Republicans in the peculiar position of arguing that weeding out corruption, reducing the influence of special interests and protecting voting rights are inherently Democratic values.
The bill is the Democrats’ chief policy priority and covers close to 700 pages. H.R. 1, as it is officially known, seeks, among other reforms, to strengthen ethics laws for lawmakers and lobbyists, increase voting access, improve voting security, tighten campaign finance laws and create an alternative campaign-finance system geared toward small donors.
To advance the bill, Democratic leaders had to work through more than 70 proposed amendments. Some were embraced, including several aimed at spotlighting questionable behavior in the Trump administration. One, for instance, bars federal money from being spent at businesses owned or controlled by the president or other top administration officials. Others were rejected, including a plan to lower the voting age to 16.As a sign of Democrats’ commitment to a cause that helped power its takeover of the House, the bill’s passage was an important achievement. As a practical legislative matter, it’s a bit of a hollow victory. As fired up as Democrats are to shake up the system, Republicans are perhaps even more fired up to stop them.
The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has been openly hostile to the anticorruption package since its inception. This week he made clear that he would refuse even to bring it up for a vote.
Think of H.R. 1 as the Merrick Garland of reform legislation.
Mr. McConnell called the bill the “Democrat Politician Protection Act”(and a “turkey”) and predicted that lawmakers who back it will suffer come re-election time. As political logic, this is questionable. If the Republican leader really thought the package was a loser, he would absolutely bring it to the floor to force Democratic lawmakers to own it — which is, notably, the path he has pledged to pursue with the Green New Deal, which is supported by many Democrats. The Green New Deal, an assortment of ideas for fighting climate change and remaking the economy, is even more sprawling and amorphous than the For the People Act. Mr. McConnell is panting to have members vote on it.
Asked this week why the two measures were being handled so differently, the Republican leader didn’t bother making up excuses. He said simply, “Because I get to decide what we vote on.”
This grade-school taunt masks a deep current of fear and loathing. Loathing, because Mr. McConnell is a longtime enemy of campaign finance reform. Killing such efforts can seem like his singular legislative passion.
The fear is less targeted, but even more existential. Ever the shrewd political animal, Mr. McConnell is well aware that a majority of Americans favor overhauling a system they see as broken and unfair. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from September, 77 percent of respondents said reducing corruption and the influence of special interests was either the most important or a very important issue facing the nation. Having his members blamed for derailing a major reform package could prove politically risky. Thus Mr. McConnell turns to his go-to move: stonewalling. (...)
H.R. 1 would put an end to at least some of the vile voter suppression practices that Republicans have embraced in recent years. Which goes to the heart of the party’s opposition.
Well before President Trump erupted on the scene, Republicans made the calculation that, with demographics trending against them, their best strategy was to make voting harder rather than easier, particularly for certain nonwhite segments of the electorate. Across the nation, they have pursued voter restriction tactics with vigor. Any effort to expand access to the ballot box sets off alarm bells within the party.
This leaves Republicans in the peculiar position of arguing that weeding out corruption, reducing the influence of special interests and protecting voting rights are inherently Democratic values.
by The Editorial Board, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mark Pernice and Damon Winter/The New York Times
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