Just an interesting note – no comment required

As of today, Bob Byrd is the longest serving member of Congress in the history of the United States (he just beat Carl Hayden whose tenure combined 15 years in the House and over 40 years in the Senate).  Anyway, Byrd, who will turn 92 on Friday, made a floor speech today celebrating the milestone.  According to Politico, only one Republican (Orrin Hatch) was in the chamber to hear Byrd’s speech.

Quote of the Day

Doris Kearns Goodwin on Morning Joe:

What happened to [political] parties in this country? I mean, I think it’s a deadly thing – parties used to be part of peoples’ identity. There used to be parades, they used to go running around feeling like ‘I’m a Catholic, I’m a Democrat, I’m a Protestant, I’m a Republican. People don’t feel that way anymore. No wonder we can’t govern, there’s no loyalty left. Those independents have every control, they can float any way they want to.

Later in the show…

Joe Scarborough: “Doris, are we entering the age of the independent?”

Doris Kearns Goodwin: “I think it’s a worrisome age, if so. You know it really was true in the old days that parties would choose the nominee, maybe it wasn’t as open as you would hope it would be today – primaries are a good thing. But in the old days, once you got in, you owed your loyalty to a group, a collective group and you tried to get things done together. And that’s gone right now. And I think with the internet, with money, which is what Morty was saying…”

Mort Zuckerman: “… education too, by the way. There’s a much higher level of education, college education, and those people tend to be more independent, and less tied to an individual party. That’s an inevitable flow in American society.”

Vote Republicrat!

Two things are undeniable:

1) Electoral politics are changing in ways that hurt the two-party system. Online fundraising and alternative media outlets have robbed both the Democratic and Republican parties of their most basic functions. An independent candidate could easily mount a competitive campaign – even for President – in the very near future.

2) Pretty much everyone I know celebrates Undeniable Fact #1 as a victory. Set that aside as anecdotal. Support for a “third party alternative” registered 46% according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released today. [Dig a little deeper and you also find evidence in the same poll for the obvious: most ideological momentum is with libertarians, whether on gun rights or gay marriage.]

Part of that is nothing more than basic institutional skepticism – no different than the distrust of mainstream media, organized religion, or government itself* (our culture has over-internalized the “Question Everything” mantra). Part of it is that an increasing number of people refuse to compromise their special perspective to become part of some “big tent.”

But while it’s easy to attack the two-party system, it’s also important to remember why strong parties are good for the country.

Ken Burns gets a seat on the good boat

Yup… just as there’s a boat for the wicked, there’s also a boat for the good.

Coming up with the list for the “good boat” just isn’t as much fun in general, but if I ever do set up such a boat, I will have to remember to save a seat for Ken Burns.

Just watched him on Rachel Maddow and was really impressed. He took a passing shot at Ayn Rand, praised FDR, skewered libertarianism, AND pointed out the good of Bedford Falls triumphing over Pottersville.

That I would like Ken Burns isn’t exactly a revelation… I own “The War,” have always wanted (but somehow never managed) to see “Baseball,” and I’ve always appreciated that his films blend a sort of Rockwell (Capra?) sense of Americanism with New Deal liberalism. That shouldn’t be nearly as rare as it is.

Ideology and sentiment aside, what history buff wouldn’t like Ken Burns? But seats on these hypothetical boats are hard to come by. Takes a lot to earn one – like, maybe a 5-minute interview that condemns both Ayn Rand and Mr. Potter.

The coming extinction of protests

Tens of thousands of conservative activists, assembled loonies, birthers, deathers, tenthers, conspiracy theorists, Confederates, libertarians, militia members, haters, and opportunistic Right-wing politicians gathered on the National Mall and around the country for Saturday’s “tea party” protests, and – aside from the freak-show quality of the whole thing – one fact stood out: they were so OLD.

Fox News interviewed a 73-year old and her husband, who traveled from Oklahoma I wanna say, and they seemed to be a pretty representative demographic sample of the crowd. Sure, not everyone in the crowd was Medicare-eligible, but I’d peg the median age at 66, 67 years old.

The 86th Congress Project

I watched most of the coverage surrounding the death of Ted Kennedy over the past couple of weeks, and was really taken with one particular point that was repeated several times by many commentators and reporters – Are there any “giants” left in the Senate?

Politico even ran a top story contemplating which sitting Senators could qualify as having both the Kennedy-level of allegiance from the Party base, coupled with the necessary respect among colleagues to pass legislation (John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold, Tom Harkin, and Dick Durbin were their finalists). Willie Brown, on MSNBC, declared Michael Bennett of Colorado, who has yet to win a Senate term*, as the “next Ted Kennedy.” Someone – I can’t remember who – listed Sherrod Brown as the one to watch (actually, he’d make my short list as well), and a couple of people, including Lawrence O’Donnell, weirdly picked Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican, but still… a Republican.

The Empowerment – Disillusionment Cycle

The Civil Rights movement, as it is generally defined, began with Rosa Parks in 1955 and ended a decade later with the signing of the Voting Rights Act. (This is not to say that advancements and/or setbacks to the cause of civil rights were contained entirely in that decade, any more than it would be fair to claim that the Era of Good Feelings – 1817 – 1825 – marked the beginning and end of all “good feelings.” That would be untrue, and very sad.) But the sit-ins, the marches, the Freedom Riders, the stuff of countless songs and movie plots pretty much climaxes with the Selma to Montgomery march, and concludes with LBJ’s “We Shall Overcome” speech and subsequent signing of the VRA.

Generations, choices, and duties

For a bunch of reasons I won’t go into here, I’ve been thinking lately about a book review I read several years ago (technically a book review… barely mentions the book). The review was by Christopher Caldwell, of all people, and it responded to the book The Paradox of Choice. The book itself argued that an abundance of choices in the marketplace lead to consumer anxiety and depression.* Anyway, Caldwell spends about 2/3 of his review offering anecdotes to support the book’s thesis, and the last third dismissing the thesis as a relic:

All the abstract arguments against choice become harder to make when they are translated into concrete terms. When Schwartz notes that young Americans are unduly troubled by their choice of career, because they are ‘remarkably unconstrained by what their parents did before them,’ he sounds kindhearted and sincerely concerned. But he also sounds a bit like an English nob defending the class system while he sits in a leather armchair in Boodle’s in about 1926. And if Schwartz’s book is really about the anguish of choice in general—and not merely about choice as a facet of shopping—there is no reason for any such argument to stop before it reaches, say, ‘a woman’s right to choose.’ Once you stop taking people’s expressed preferences at face value, pretty much every single contentious political, economic, sexual, familial, social, and labor issue can be opened up to unpredictable renegotiation.

Always a neat little slippery slope argument with the libertarians: take away one choice, take away all choices. But setting that aside, I don’t see concern over young Americans being “unconstrained by what their parents did before them” as a defense of the class system.

Rowhouse land

I live in rowhouse land. A city block in an old part of an old city – mostly gentrified and made hip in the early part of the decade, but with enough longtime residents, shops, and local customs to have kept some measure of authenticity. I’m part of the gentrification boom. I’m under 30, from the suburbs, and I bought a freshly rehabbed one-bedroom alley-house three years ago.

There’s an elderly woman who lives about half a block up from me, and in the warm months, she sits on her stoop almost every day and makes polite conversation with passersby. Always a smile, always a nice comment, and I always return the nicety and go on my way.

Picturing…

… the people walking around the harbor today with the “Green Monstah” T-shirts leaving the stadium quickly and quietly.

… people watching the game at the Tam in Boston paying their tab, walking to the T and whining about Masterson, Saito, Papelbon…

… being at the game tonight surrounded by obnoxious Red Sox fans at “Fenway South” at the moment Jason Bay swung through strike 3.

Wish I’d been there.