The speech itself [Transcript here. ] is about 30 minutes with about 20 minutes of Q&A. And if you can’t bring yourself to watch the entirety, I’ll recap it here.

I want to be clear here. Neither I, nor Cory Doctorow or any other responsible person advocating for sensible copyright and electronic liberty is condoning theft. What we are against are two things really. One, the idea that just because a corporation has made a profit in a certain way, with a certain business model for a number of years, the legislature or the courts are responsible for guaranteeing those profits in the future regardless of changes in the underlying economy or technologies. Two, is the making of outright stupid laws that would break the Internet.

Now, while there is certainly some amount of outright theft of intellectual property on the Internet it has been shown again and again that Big Content regularly inflates its “estimates” for losses due to piracy. More and more what we are seeing is a desperate rear-guard action by the entertainment industries to hold back the tide of change. A really good overview of how all this affects culture (and how this is just the same old story) is this TED Talk by Lawrence Lessig.

Cory Doctorow Photo: Jonathan Worth

And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can’t be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. So, SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, bans tools like DNSSec because they can be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. And it blocks tools like Tor, because they can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too!

He makes an excellent analogy for why this is just stupid. Wheels and bank robbers.

If I wanted Congress to write, or Parliament to write, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up and said “well, everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery? Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would of course be “no”. Because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys. And we can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we’d be foolish to risk them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies by changing wheels. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies, even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies, no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

So, that’s what’s wrong with things like SOPA, the crazy legislation currently making its way through Congress despite the fact that practically every business (except the content producers) involved in the Internet (Cisco, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Dell, Google…) and everyone who ever had a hand in designing the Internet is basically yelling, “Are you nuts?!”

But even if we dodge the SOPA bullet and whatever else comes down the pike from Corporate Content, we still have the problem of the fact that all of these content producers are more and more joined at the hip to the hardware and software industries. Think of the relationship between Sony (Entertainment conglomerate) and well… Sony (hardware manufacturer, producer of game systems, TV’s and PC’s).

So today we have marketing departments who say things like “we don’t need computers, we need… appliances. Make me a computer that doesn’t run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn’t run programs that I haven’t authorized that might undermine our profits”. And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea — just a program that does one specialized task — after all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don’t worry if it’s still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that’s not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We’re not making a computer that runs only the “appliance” app; we’re making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn’t want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer — it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.

And finally, this entire shitstorm about copying games, movies and music? Hacking your car’s computer? Totally penny-ante stuff. Because looming on the horizon are technologies like 3D manufacturing and genome manipulation on the desktop.

And it doesn’t take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it’s really… really… important to make sure that computers can’t execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch… literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place — “can’t you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

Taking the pulse of the GOP race this morning we find: Michelle Bachmann is now her party’s frontrunner in the race to be the next President of the United States. And while you let that thought marinade in your brain juices for a moment, consider that barring her total implosion, she will remain the leader probably until the New Hampshire primary in February next year and possibly until Super Tuesday in mid-March. It will be until then that the party’s base of zealots, cooks and cranks will control the direction of the small-state caucuses and primaries.

Tim Pawlenty is out. But then, no one really expected Mr. Excitement to go very far did they?

Mitt Romney will spend the next five and-a-half months treading water until the primary calendar starts taking into account the opinions of voters who matter: independents and non-activist Republicans. During this time he will try ever harder to somehow seem relevant to the crazy base; saying things that neither he nor anyone else will believe that he means. Which is too bad. Because whatever his manifest other faults, Mitt Romney is a smart, practical, pragmatic politician. It is his unlucky lot to be running for office in a party that values none of these things.

Knowing all of this perfectly well, riding in to save the day is Texas Governor, Rick Perry. Perry will instantly become a candidate to be reckoned with. He combines the credibility of a three-term, sitting governor with the fundraising prowess of a Texan. And the cherry on top: he is as serious about his Christianist beliefs as it is possible to get. For all that Michelle Bachmann’s religious zealotry is manifestly, creepily visible in her eyes, there is something of an aura surrounding Governor Perry. In his good looks and smooth demeanor, he is the very model of a modern televangelist-cum-politician. The man veritably oozes righteousness and charm.

But for all this will appeal to the weak-minded and religious base of the Republican party, Rick Perry has an actual track record that will send chills through the great middle of the American electorate. It takes nothing but the most cursory review of Governor Perry’s record of governor to find a litany of lunacy, hypocrisy and outright evil.

My personal favorite is his supervision and approval of the execution of at least one innocent man. Perry pushed forward the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham who was initially convicted of arson in the murder of his three children. Willingham steadfastly proclaimed his innocence and refused a plea deal that would have given him life in exchange for a guilty plea. Although new evidence was brought forward that gave strong indication that the fire was not caused by arson and several witnesses in the case proved unreliable, a new trial was never granted and he was executed in 2004. In 2oo8 the Texas Forensic Science Commission concluded that arson did not cause the fire. When the commission convened to hear more evidence in the matter, Perry quickly fired and replaced three of its members, scuppering the investigation.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Texas governor’s contempt for justice and the institutions of the United States. He has most notably been quoted multiple times calling for the secession of Texas from the United States. All this time, while decrying the tyranny of the Union, and railing against the first stimulus package, Perry has continued to rake in stimulus money and used it to top off the state’s budget. As he continued to blather meaningless rhetoric about is fiscal conservatism, as he cutt health care and child health programs in a state with both the hghest percentage of citizens without health insurance and with childhood poverty rates reaching third world levels of 27 percent, the state faces a $27 billion deficit.

None of these things as well as the very long list of other fringe behaviors are going to make Rick Perry an attractive candidate to the large and growing independent wing of the U.S. electorate who, more than anything else want an end to absolutist posturing and gridlock and a return to normality. Instead, they will be treated to many more months of the Parade of Freaks that is the GOP presidential pool as they vie with each other to establish which is the true standard bearer of the party’s new theme, the Audacity of Crazy.

And in the White House, I imagine President Obama sneaking a smoke on the portico and smiling wryly as he contemplates the pundit hand-wringing over his vulnerability in 2012.

Carthago Delenda Est

Andy Kaufman, "Mighty Mouse"

However, when the Financial Times, writes the following, it is time to sit up and take notice.

We now also understand that the US is not going to make meaningful investments in its economic future. The conservative position that all spending is evil obliterates any distinction between investment and consumption, between the long term and the short term. The US suffers with an increasingly third-world level of infrastructure, third-tier education system and enormous gaps in the preparedness of its workforce. The debate has now ended; money to upgrade those faltering systems will not be forthcoming. And by the way, the US is not going to take on any other major problems either – immigration, tax reform or climate change, for example. It is not going to do so for the same reason it has failed at sensible economic management: because the Tea Party has a veto.

For those of you not in the know, the Financial Times is the 120+ year-old, London-based newspaper of the banking world. It is to banking journalism what the bowler hat and umbrella are to the banking dress code; eternally small-c conservative. So, when the FT starts calling bullshit on the insanity of the Tea Party and the Republican Right in general, you know that we’ve gone pretty far down the rabbit hole, Alice.

Carthago Delenda Est

Yeah, so three months and no posts. I don’t have much to offer in the way of an excuse really. Work has certainly been a factor. But more than anything it has been a combination of a numb depression at the direction of things in both DC and in Des Moines. It really does seem more and more like our political system and its denizens are simply incapable of rising to the occasion of the very serious challenges our society faces.

Take the debt ceiling battle in Washington. For a month now, I’ve wanted to produce some sort of analysis and prediction for where this was going. But every time I thought I had a handle on the situation; every time it looked like cooler heads would prevail and the right thing, or even half-right thing would be done, the forces of dumbassery raised their heads and smacked reason to the floor. And now look where we are: less than 72 hours from the United States of America defaulting on its sovereign debt. Staggeringly foolish. Unthinkable even two or three years ago. And yet, there appear to be quite a large number of people in Congress who seem quite content to go down that road in pursuit of the purity of their political dogma.

There will only ever be one first time or even the only time for the US to break the trust the world puts in its economy and currency. Once that trust is gone it will be a long time, if it ever comes back.

It’s a perfect storm of both circumstance and social dysfunction really. A combination of extraordinary circumstances that have created a number very complex and threatening situation for the state, the nation and the world. I’m not just talking about the global debt crisis either, though that is the Sword of Damocles du jour. It’s everything; the crazy historical revolutions in the Middle East, our involvement in the basket case that is Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan, the two-headed snake of peak oil and global climate change, the whole ball of wax.

And what have we got to deal with it? An equally perfect storm of political dysfunction. Our population is ever more ignorant of the issues related to and the workings of their own government. And ignorant people are easily persuaded by simple-sounding black-and-white political nonsense. We have a mass media and journalism sector that had been shattered by technology and unable to do its job of telling truth to power in an effective way and cannot counterbalance that ignorance or attempts to capitalize on it. We have an electoral system that is ever more influenced by anonymous bags of money. And finally, several decades of redistricting have produced a House of Representatives where only a small fraction of seats are actually in competitive, equally partisan districts. Most House seats are “safe” Democrat or Republican, leading to the worst tendencies of both parties to be over-represented in the People’s House.

So, what happens next? Nobody knows. And that’s the problem. At this point it looks like a 50-50 shot that Congress will be unable to come up with even a half-assed measure to assure the markets. Further, it looks like President Obama will not — rightly or wrongly, and I can go either way on this as well — take the responsibility on his own shoulders by invoking the 14th Amendment to order the Fed to pay the bills and issue more bonds. If that happens we really are in Terra Incognita, and hard country it will be too.

And what are we, as a people to do when our political leadership screws up on such a monumental scale? Even if Washington pulls the fat from the fire at the last minute with a semi-useful, short-term plan, it would still amount to an epic fail. Are we to continue on the same course, setting the stage for one dysfunctional, manufactured crisis after another up to and beyond 2012? Does anyone really think that in this divided nation the next election will change anything?

What’s the alternative? I find that I am more and more entertaining as a reasonable plan the “Cairo Option.” Take to the streets, shut everything down, demand change and responsibility. In our divided nation, there would be little in the way of consensus of what, specifically that change should look like. But I’m pretty sure that a baseline demand that our politicians start acting like responsible adults would get a working majority. Yeah, this would probably turn into social unrest the likes of which have not been seen in fifty years and more. But really, what other options do we have? It sounds insane, until you realize that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. An the status quo really is insane.

Carthago Delenda Est

When finally confronted by state regulators and forced to do something about the ADA compliance matter, the company’s reaction is to pull up sticks, abandon the landmark building, move headquarters to the edge of town and spend $1.5 million on upgrading a 1960′s-era production facility to be their new headquarters, leaving the city to deal with the now abandoned, crumbling architectural landmark.

Roosevelt Administration Building. Source; Michael Kearny

Let’s just gloss over for the moment the three decades of short-sightedness that allowed the Roosevelt Building to degrade to its present state. They city and the Board of Ed. have known for a number of years that it had to do something about Roosevelt. Below, you can read the October, 2009 Iowa Department of Education Educational Equity Review and the January, 2010 cover letter that told the School District that it had 60 days to supply the Department of Ed. with a compliance plan. Therefore, after blowing off at least one deadline, the Board of Eduction announced last week their plan to abandon Roosevelt, spend $1.5 million (which is just a back-of-the-envelope estimate from the architect, actual costs are guaranteed to be much higher) on moving the Administration Building to Harding Elementary. With nothing but vague promises to, “do everything we can to save it [Roosevelt].”

The most common argument being bandied about by those supporting leaving and then (inevitably) tearing down Roosevelt is that no one wants it to become “another Post Office.” For those not in the know, the Post Office is the once-beautiful neo-classical old Post Office located in the middle of downtown that the USPS closed down in ?? to move to a new facility two blocks away. It has sat there ever since, slowly rotting. In a recent editorial in the Clinton Herald the paper gave the same rationale.

Well, just take a look at the former Clinton post office. A hulking structure on the corner of South Third Street and Fifth Avenue, it is deteriorating. Apparently the money isn’t available to preserve it. Covenants on the building because of its historic designation limit what can be done to it, we understand.
We’re not saying it isn’t noble to preserve the past, but there comes a time when a property may be past the point of no return.

We believe Roosevelt is an example of such a situation. We are urging the school board, while it has OK’d starting the process of getting paperwork in place seeking that designation, to not pursue it any further. If someone wants to save it, and has the money to invest in it for a planned outcome, that would be a different situation and we would hope the school district would take them up on that offer. But if not, we would hope the district takes it down so that it doesn’t become a liability issue.

There is no fault in having a dream, but having a plan is the responsible way of fulfilling it.

Clinton High School as it was. Source: Micheal Kearny (Clinton Historical Society)

Also by the way, in the Herald editorial they point to a recent online survey they conducted:

We asked readers of our website to answer a poll question on the issue a few months back. They specifically were asked “What should be done with the Roosevelt Administration Center building after school district offices move out of it?”

Of the 1,290 responses, 636 said that tearing it down for safety reasons is the way to go. Next were 359 responses to sell it for possible renovation and reuse. The remaining 295 said to preserve and keep it as close to historically accurate as possible.

We agree with the largest batch of responses.

Math alert: The largest batch of responses are the 654 people who want to keep the building there by either selling it for renovation or having the school district do what it should have done all along and spend the money to renovate it.

And speaking of math. Let’s look at the realistic cost of fixing up Roosevelt. There have been three historical redevelopment projects in Clinton in just the last five years, so we have lots of data to work with. They are: The Armstrong Building, the current home of the Chamber of Commerce on South 2nd Street, and the Van Allen and Howes buildings across the street from each other at 2nd Street and 5th Avenue South. All of those buildings are much, much larger than the Roosevelt building and required much more in the way of reconstruction. With the Armstrong and Van Allen buildings, they had to be converted from open floor plans to apartments and offices. In all cases they had to be completely gutted and equipped with new elevators, HVAC, electrical and sprinkler systems. Each of those projects cost less than $3 million per.

With all the historic preservation credits and grants, green renovation credits and grants it is completely reasonable to renovate the Roosevelt building for a sum that is close to the amount it would take to move to Harding. And even if it costs a little bit more, isn’t it worth it to maintain the unique character and architecture of our city? We have lost so much of it already and so much of what remains is deeply threatened. This is the least our civic leaders can do. Hell, it is ostensibly what they get paid to do. Being a member of the school board is not just about running the school district. It is about running the school district in a way that makes Clinton, IA an attractive and competitive place to live, work and do business.

Letting the city’s historical and cultural artifacts disintegrate under their feet and then walking away from the problem is a huge dereliction of that duty. The board can and must do the right thing.

Note: The part of the Educational Equity Review that pertains to Roosevelt is on Page 18. However, the entire report is enlightening reading with regards to how the district fares in educational equality and non-discrimination. Short version: pretty good but there are some areas to work on.

Clinton CSD Equity Final Jan 29

At least at an intellectual level I understand the GOP fixation with “reducing the regulatory burden on businesses,” and how that leads to wanting to slash environmental regulations. But that doesn’t explain some of what’s going on here.

A Henry County corn field inundated with flood water. Source: Flickr user boodie131. Creative commons non-commercial, attribution.

Also thumbs up to the Senate for passing 49-1 (Chelgren voting against) providing tax credits for the installation of small solar and wind production facilities for homes and businesses. The bill will provide tax credits of up to $3,000 for homeowners and $15,000 for businesses. This bill is awaiting action by the Republican-controlled House.

But the trend at the highest level both in Iowa and in the nation is one of distinct hostility by Republican governors and legislatures not just for onerous regulation but for environmental protection at large. Oh, it is always sold as a brand of fiscal prudence or streamlining of government. Those are smoke screens. The trend is to sell back to industry decades of progress on environmental protection, safe drinking water and clean air.

Witness Iowa Senate File 500, a bill that would remove responsibility for water quality regulation from the Department of Natural Resources to the Department of Agriculture. Consider that agricultural sources contribute to the great majority of Iowa water quality issues. Saying that an industry can regulate itself is about as realistic as trying to convince teenagers not to have sex. It might sound good if you live in a bubble of religious or political dogma, but out here in the real world where everyone actually lives, it is knows as a crock.

This is nothing more than a sneaky attempt to kill water quality enforcement in Iowa. Of course no one would support repealing water quality regulations. So, let’s just “transfer” the responsibility for those regulations to a department that has largely been captured by the industry which it primarily regulates.

Or how about the bill that would ban people from investigating conditions at agricultural facilities? The bill essentially suspends the First Amendment with regards to writing or reporting on the agriculture industry. HF 589 passed the House 66-27 and stands before the Senate.

Iowa is not alone in this. The New York Times outlines efforts by the GOP in many states to undo environmental protections. In Maine, Tea Party Governor, Paul LePage, announced that he wants to open up 3 million acres of north woods protected wilderness area for development and to suspend laws that protect children from toxic products in their toys. That’s an effort that is getting some pushback even from his fellow party members, by the way. ‘Cause you know, that’s just crazy on its face.

In Florida, another Tea Party favorite, Governor Rick Scott, wants to dismantle (by starving this joint state-federal effort of the state share of funding) the program to restore the Everglades. This program was negotiated by both the Clinton and Bush II administrations with industry, real estate and environmentalist support.

Taken together, all of this is just more evidence — if such were needed — of the capture of the GOP by intellectually and spiritually deluded factions that aren’t just advocating smaller government, but actively hostile to all government.

My regular job, the one that pays the bills, has had me very busy lately and I expect it to remain so for some time, so sadly, posting will remain erratic. And between work and all the crazy stuff happening in the world, it really has been kind of hard to gather one’s thoughts as it seems the globe lurches from crisis to crisis.

Last week I gave a presentation to a gathering of health care executives about the impact of social media on marketing and brand management. I started it off with this amazing video by Dan Pink and the premise, “In times of profound change you need to re-examine your assumptions about how the world works.”

Certainly the first three months of 2011 make it seem like all the subtle changes in our economies and societies that have been slowly happening underfoot have suddenly let go, just like the pressure along a fault line can release decades of pressure in a few minutes. But despite all of this, I’m feeling optimistic. I’ll get to why in a minute, but first let’s review some news.

Let’s start close by in Wisconsin. Anyone who has been involved in GOP politics for any length of time knows that one of the great goals of the party is to destroy the labor movement in America. Not only is organized labor one of the only organizational and financial counterbalances to the moneyed corporate interests that support the GOP, but labor also stands in the way of turning the clock back on worker’s rights, a cherished goal of those same corporate interests. These goals are rarely stated out loud outside of the confined of the most rarefied party leadership meetings however. If they were widely expressed it would, as they say, “scare the straights,” and make non-partisan voters understandably a bit jittery.

But last month, emboldened by huge electoral victories that installed majorities in both legislative houses and put a Tea Party favorite in the Governor’s Mansion, Republicans indulged in a little wish-fulfillment. We got to see what happens when a political party fueled with a religious-like righteous sureness of cause completely unmoors itself from reality, reason and scruples. The result is exactly as , the tyranny of the majority:

Unmoored from reality as they were, the GOP perhaps had convinced itself that these policies would be supported by the majority of the population, or at least a workable electoral majority. The counterbalance to this wild-eyed overreach by the GOP in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere was mobilization of the people to oppose this. And lurking behind that organization effort, as it is lurking behind almost every one of the major events occurring today, are networks, social media and the movement towards radical transparency.

It has been everywhere, the punking of Governor Walker and subsequent release of the tape on the Internet; the mobilization of his opposition; the central position of social networks in the revolutions in the Middle East; the use of Twitter in getting updates out of Japan; and everywhere WikiLeaks and those damned diplomatic cables.

There are the cables cables foreshadowing Egypt’s revolution, a cable outlining the dangers posed to Japan by older nuclear reactors in an eqarthquake as well as the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency’s lax attitude. And even today, the US Ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual’s has been forced to resign after his criticisms of the Mexican government’s war on drugs cause a rift with President Calderon.

Meanwhile, Bradley Manning, the US Army private who is charged — only charged mind you — continues to be held degrading and inhumane conditions in the brig months after his arrest. The State Department Chief Spokesman, P. J. Crowley was forced to resign last week after suggesting that Pvt. Manning’s treatment was wrong.

It is because of all this that I am feeling a bit optimistic in spite of all the apparent chaos. This is because what is emerging out of all of this chaos is the light of knowledge. We are now seeing exposed to the light of truth so much that used to happen in the shadows. From the shabby motivations and loyalties of a fake prairie populist to the rather astute observations of the professional foreign service employees of the United States, the previously only suspected (and even then with a sense that is might all be “just conspiracy talk”) is confirmed to be real.

But the truth does nobody any good if it remains an orphan, un-loved and un-embraced. If the arc of history is indeed, as Gandhi said, to “bend in the direction of justice,” then we need to start embracing these dirty little truths and acting on them.

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

“Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”

I put down my notebook. “Just that?”

“That’s right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail.

Pie Chart Showing Federal Spending in FY2009 Source: Congressional Budget Office

Public opinion and cognitive dissonance regarding the deficit and public spending hasn’t changed much since November, according to a new NYT/CBS poll. However, this new poll attempts to drill down more significantly and ask Americans to make some choices.

To recap, most polling on the deficit has shown a serious public disconnect. Most Americans, when asked will say that the deficit needs to be reduced. When asked to choose between cutting spending and raising taxes, a large majority will say, cut spending. However, if one then goes on to ask if Medicare or Social Security should be cut, the number flip and most American’s say we should leave them alone. Even though Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid add up to almost 40% of federal spending.

This new poll finds however that Americans are able to make some distinctions:

And if you really want to find reasons for optimism, you can do so in the public opinion data. When Americans are given a set of realistic choices, they are perfectly willing to prioritize.

The poll’s respondents, for example, said they would rather cut military spending than Medicare or Social Security (and several bipartisan groups have made specific suggestions for doing so). If Medicare and Social Security must be changed, people prefer increasing payroll taxes on high-income households or raising the Medicare eligibility age – not cutting back on Social Security paychecks or Medicare treatments. Within the tax code, a reduced tax break for mortgage interest looks more palatable than a reduced tax break for health insurance.

As David Leonhardt at the NYT Econimix Blog says,

The crucial question today is, simply: Would you rather have your taxes increased or your Medicare and Social Security benefits reduced? “All of the above” is a reasonable answer. “None of the above” is not.

President Obama has the Republican Party right where he wants them: They have done the hard work of moving the issue of the deficit to the front burner of the political agenda, but their actual deficit-cutting plans would, a) not really do much to cut the deficit, and b) probably end up pissing off all but the most rabid libertarians.

Americans it seems have a more nuanced concept of how to balance the budget than the GOP. The President tonight has the opportunity to be the adult in the room and propose actual, workable solutions (Yet still painful. It seems if the cuts don’t “hurt” then they are not “serious.”) to put the country’s financial house in order.

Carthago Delenda Est

I’m in complete agreement with Andrew Sullivan,

To rate this address on any political meter would be to demean it. The president wrested free of politics tonight and spoke of greater things. I pledge myself to try and follow his advice and debate with vigor and spirit and candor and bluntness, but with more civility, more empathy, and, yes, more love.