tales of copper city

"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"

I am a temprano, an early riser, a good time to read or write. But the other morning after getting up very early, I watched "Los Tres Entierros de Melquiades Estrada" ("The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada") for the third or fourth time.  I have written briefly about the movie before. I said then that while I enjoyed "No Country For Old Men" by the Coen brothers, "The Three Burials...." is the better movie. Tommie Lee Jones directed and starred in "Three Burials.." Jones's movie is not about the wild violence that Cormac McCarthy writes about in his novels like No Country for Old Men; Jones's movie captures how the endless political and cultural warfare that some think of as a sideshow in the circus of everyday life has become the main show, dragging more and more of us into its endless center ring dramas.  

In the movie, Barry Piper plays Mike Norton, a new agent in the Van Horn, Texas Border Patrol station. Norton is frozen and closed off to everyone around him. He is far from home; he tells the mobile home salesman that Border Patrol agents are always far from home. He buys the home and in the next scene in his newly purchased manufactured home, after asking what's for supper he casually pulls his wife's panties down and takes her from behind at the kitchen counter while she watches a soap opera on the small counter television. 

This marriage is just about as joyless and temporary as the manufactured home they just bought.

Some of my best friends are economists

I have a good friend in Bisbee, Doug Dunn, who has an economics degree. Doug and I have been talking about Haiti and he called me out on my criticism of the U.S. "dumping" of cheap rice in Haiti and "ruining" local producers. 

I'm sure he was right to do so; not all trade, especially for staples like rice is "dumping."  But Haiti is an outlier in everything and I really don't have a clue as to how we ought best help them. 

I had sent him a reference to a "mea culpa" piece on Haiti by Bill Clinton.  But then I got to thinking about NAFTA and how limited my understanding of it is, and also about how economics has, in a way, shaped my whole career in public health.

When politics get personal

Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave the best speech of the night when health care reform finally passed. Her speech points the way to the future, showing the Democrats how to think about and promote what they actually voted for.

Pelosi repeated the late Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill's dictum that "all politics is local."  This means that most Americans judge national policies by how they actually affect them where they live, in their communities.

And, for most of what government does to improve health and safety, it's not so easy to tell.  People often have to be reminded, sometimes years later, that public policies have improved their community's health by cleaning up the environment, reducing smoking levels, lowering highway crashes, or reduced heart disease and cancer rates.

And even then, the media and the public tend to forget and instead focus on the latest scandal from Washington or Phoenix.

What was the crucial factor for how the Dems voted?

Nate Silver at 538 has the best quick analysis of the best predictor for how the Democrats voted---or didn't vote---for the health care reform legislation: the percentage support for President Obama in the congressional district in 2008.  This was more important than the likely competitiveness of the upcoming 2010 race as established by four different sources. 

I think this is good news for the party overall, because it showed that, apparently, many Blue Dogs grasped that they needed a strong president to help their own reelection prospects and so they supported Obama down the stretch.  The major defections came from Democrats who represent districts where Obama was a distinct liability.

I suspect this will help the party find the path to a more national party: by carefully selecting issues, like health care reform, that will bring much loud noise but that will also prove popular with the electorate over the long run. 

The big challenge for Democrats is fashioning a national party with issues that cross over the divides of race and anti-government rhetoric with clear benefits to ordinary people after the smoke and noise fades away. Last night makes me confident that the Democrats are on the right path.

The heroine of this historic moment

Sean Wilentz credits Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as the single leader who, more than the White House and the President, and more than the Senate, esurrected health care reform after Massachusetts. I agree.  Rounding up those votes and keeping all those Democrats focused on victory was very, very hard and it took someone really tough and determined and passionate about the issue.

Thank you, Madam Speaker!

It's Waterloo---for the GOP according to a leading conservative

According to David Frum, a leading conservative and former speechwriter on economic issues for George W. Bush, the GOP has it all wrong. It's Waterloo all right, but for the Republicans not the Democrats.  Read Frum's column here.

Will it pass?

Will it pass?  I am very anxious but I think it will, and maybe with a larger margin than last November in the House.  I sense that many Democrats,  liberals and conservative, recognize that a no vote will seriously damage the Obama presidency and will hurt everyone's chances in November, no matter how they vote in in a few days, perhaps as early as this Sunday. 

The Republicans are going to throw everything at the Dems from now to November, no matter how they vote.

Oh, did I forget to say that I have been wrong before?

After the war of the divides: a democracy of days?

As we wait to see what the House of Representatives does, and later the Senate does, I wonder, are we beginning to see the end of the war of the divides, or only another long, long period wrangling over how it is finally finished, in the years ahead..

Here is what I wrote some time ago, about this issue and this time in our democracy that has played such a big role in my life and in our life together as a couple.

A phone call from Washington, D.C.

Three dear Bisbee friends called us a few moments ago from Washington, D.C.: Gene, Marguerite, and Emma Conners. They were visiting Washington during spring break to show their daughter Emma the nation's capital.  Gene and Marguerite knew before they went that Carole and I had lived in Washington (twice) and that the town had wonderful memories for both of us.

Carole had worked as a young woman there before we met in 1967, working as an administrative assistant to a member of Congress from Massachusetts, Silvio Conte, (R. MA.)

At least once or twice a day during this week as our friends spend time in the Capital, I think of our life together there.  It was a magical time, from 1967 to 1972 and sometimes it was an awful time.

Charles Bowden on the war next door

Charles Bowden's essay on the border and the wars going on there is chilling, and, for a change, with no easy solutions for ending anything.  I love the subtitle: "Adam Smith meets magical realism at the border."