Little nervous about "The Nebula of Georgia" — it’s a new space for me — but I think it’s going to be pretty good. Advance sales are doing well…..
Are You Better Off Than You Were Five Years Ago?
Pew Research has been asking this polling question for over 40 years, and the recent trend line is revealing:
That rise and dip in the past year is astonishingly significant.
Observations from Kevin Drum:
First, as a baseline, you’d expect lots of yes answers to this question because a big part of the population consists of young people who are graduating from high school/college, getting jobs, getting married, having kids, getting promotions, etc. Most people in their 20s and 30s have rising economic fortunes regardless of their long-term prospects. And that’s exactly what we see up until about 2000.
Second — oddly — recessions seem to have little effect on how people respond to this question. There aren’t enough data points to say this with certainty, but I’ve overlaid recessionary periods in red and they really don’t seem to map at all to downturns in average optimism. Until 2000, that is. The 2001 recession maps to an initial drop in optimism in 2002, followed by another drop in 2005, followed by a complete collapse in 2008. As a result the percentage of people who think they’re better off now than five years ago has dropped from about 56% in the 2000 data point to 41% in the 2008 data point. This is by far its lowest point ever.
My guess is that part of this is a result of the end of the baby boom and the graying of the American population. But only a small part. Almost certainly the bulk of this downturn is due to the fact that the Republican economy of the past seven years has been aimed like a laser at improving the fortunes of the affluent, with the result that for the first time in recent memory an economic expansion — a long economic expansion — hasn’t improved the fortunes of the middle class even slightly. After seven years of this, the working and middle classes are finally starting to realize that this isn’t likely to change.
Good news, I think, for the upcoming elections.
Clinton’s Lead In PA Shrinking
Time: Clinton has a 6 point lead in PA, and adds:
One in five Pennsylvania Democrats has yet to pick a favorite candidate; and roughly one in six voters who told TIME they favor either Obama or Clinton said they could change their minds in the next two weeks. Notes Stanley Feldman, the SUNY Stonybrook political scientist who analyzed the poll for TIME, "Clinton’s six point lead over Obama at this point should not make her very comfortable. There is still plenty of opportunity for Obama to gain the voters he needs to win the Pennsylvania primary."
CNN: Clinton has a 4 point lead in PA (down from 11 points last Friday)
Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation’
Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.
The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
This is the first time sources have disclosed that a handful of the most senior advisers in the White House explicitly approved the details of the program. Then there’s this:
According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
No, it won’t. But worse than that, it raises the spector that Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powel, Tenet and Ashcroft might have committed, or approved, war crimes. Jack Balkin thinks that even if they did, nothing will happen, since it won’t be in the national interest (even under a Clinton or Obama presidency):
It is not that certain members of the Bush Administration haven’t committed war crimes. I’m pretty certain that at least some of them have. The point rather is that it is very unlikely that they will ever be brought to justice for it, at least in our own country– despite the fact that there are statutes on the books which assert that the commission of war crimes violates our laws. That is not a normative recommendation. It is rather a prediction about power politics and about the deeply unjust world that we live in.
Aside from political considerations, Balkin notes that the Gang of Six could have a defense that they relied on Ashcroft’s legal approval, thus shielding them from war crimes conviction.
Still, there are some immediate consequences from this news. Mostly, you can now forget about Condaleeza Rice as a running mate for McCain. In fact, forget about her political career, as well as Powell’s.
Liberals Are Annoying And Ignorant
According to this non-annoying and non-ignorant person.
PART I
PART II
August: Osage County Wins Pulitzer
Not a surprise to me. It was one of the best theatrical experiences (for a straght play) I’ve ever experienced, with the possible exception of Angels in America (another Pulitzer winner):
Tracy Letts’ dysfunctional-family drama August: Osage County, which opened at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre in December 2007, has won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
The Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalists were Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang and Dying City by Christopher Shinn.
The 2008 Letters, Drama and Music jurors included Peter Marks (drama critic for The Washington Post), David Lindsay-Abaire (the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner), Jeremy McCarter (drama critic for New York Magazine), Charles McNulty (drama critic for the L.A. Times) and Lisa Portes (head of MFA Directing and artistic director of Chicago Playworks for Young Audiences, the Theater School, DePaul University).
Since Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County arrived on Broadway — directly from Steppenwolf, where it also garnered rave reviews — theatre folk have talked of the triple-decker drama (three acts, three generations of one tortured family) as a classic award-getter. It’s serious-minded; it’s long; it examines the timeless American subject of family — all earmarks of those sorts of works that are frequently considered significant.
At this time last year, few would have thought Chicago-based playwright Letts a contender for the Pulitzer. He was known for two potboiler genre plays, Killer Joe and Bug, both of which did well Off-Broadway, but didn’t necessarily inspire critics to dust off a place for the writer in the theatre pantheon. His third play, Man From Nebraska was a Pulitzer contender. Still, when August: Osage County opened at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in June 2007, many remarked that it constituted a wholly unexpected step up for Letts. Reviews compared it to Albee, O’Neill, Shepard and a host of other weighty writers.
The story concerns the Weston family, a large Oklahoma clan with its share of problems. The family is handed a fresh peck of trouble and strife when patriarch Beverly up and disappears. Old wounds are torn open and new ones are unearthed, with the force of family exerting as irresistible a tidal pull on the various Westons as any ocean.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning play — directed by Anna D. Shapiro — will offer its last performance at its current home, the Imperial Theatre, April 20 at 3 PM. Beginning April 29, the Steppenwolf production will begin performances at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre.
The cast features Ian Barford, Deanna Dunagan, Kimberly Guerrero, Francis Guinan, Brian Kerwin, Madeleine Martin, Mariann Mayberry, Amy Morton, Sally Murphy, Jeff Perry, Rondi Reed and Troy West. Michael McGuire recently joined the cast as patriarch Beverly Weston. McGuire succeeded Dennis Letts, the playwright’s father, who created the role of the dissipated poet and died Feb. 22 after a battle with lung cancer.
Obama Leads Even Bigger In North Carolina
In North Carolina, Barack Obama has opened up a twenty-three percentage point lead over Hillary Clinton. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds that Obama attracts 56% of the vote while Clinton earns 33%. A month ago, Obama’s lead was just seven percentage points.
Also, according to the new Gallup:
Barack Obama has extended his lead over Hillary Clinton among Democrats nationally to 52% to 42%, the third consecutive Gallup Poll Daily tracking report in which he has held a statistically significant lead, and Obama’s largest lead of the year so far.
Jekyll & Hyde
I have to say, David Joy was every bit as good in Jekyll & Hyde as this article suggests. A real tour de force. His duet with himself as both Jekyll and Hyde was fun to watch.
Also standing out was Courtney Willis as Emma. A gorgeous voice.
The entire ensemble was sharp and crisp. Fantastic staging. But the show is all David’s. Go see it.
Quote Of The Day
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
– George Washington (1732 – 1799)
Local Theatre: Jekyll & Hyde
Despite some internal problems (which I shall not go into), it looks like the show is a success, and if the review is right, it’s due to the stagework of David Joy:
With its current production of Jekyll & Hyde, the Little Theatre of Winston-Salem is taking on quite a challenge, one that proved worthwhile during last night’s sneak-preview performance.
The show, which will open tonight at the Arts Council Theatre, proves a solid winner for lots of reasons. One of the most important is the man who plays the title role(s): David Joy.
Joy plays Dr. Henry Jekyll, a London physician who hopes to find a cure for his father who is suffering in a mental institution. He experiments on himself in an attempt to separate the evil and good, and in so doing, the evil begins to take over in the form of a new persona named Edward Hyde.
This transformation, of course, underscores the show’s exploration of good and evil warring with one another. It goes back and forth, calling on Joy to play two different characters over the course of a fairly long night (the show lasts more than 2 hours and 30 minutes).
Joy remains in command of the diverse material from beginning to end, proving particularly compelling during his transformations. He is the affable, idealist and workaholic Jekyll one moment and someone completely different in Hyde the next. And each part of the Jekyll/Hyde character is drawn to a different woman: Emma (Courtney Willis) and Lucy (Lauren Stephenson).
In musical terms, some of the soloists are not on top of every note in their parts. But they conquer enough of Frank Wildhorn’s almost-operatic music, and in convincing-enough fashion, to make us overlook the occasional deficiency here and there.
The chorus sounds powerful and, setting an example for many other groups to follow, enunciates each and every word clearly — which is so important in Jekyll, in which music dominates. Margaret Gallagher proves an adept music director.
The imaginative stage direction of Bobby Bodford and the choreography of Benji Starcher are impressive. Scenes that would otherwise look crowded and/or static come alive in visually inventive ways.
What scenic designer Bland Wade has done with the sets is noteworthy, too, proving that a lot of interesting looks can be achieved with just a few materials — which include a couple of red frames and backdrops of drawings that evoke Victorian England.
■ The Little Theatre of Winston-Salem will present Jekyll and Hyde at 8 p.m. today and Saturday, and April 10-12 and 17-19, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, and April 13 and 20. Tickets are $22, $20 for senior adults and $18 for students at the Arts Council Theatre, 610 Coliseum Drive. Call 336-725-4001.
Congrats to David and the rest of the cast.
MLK Assassination: 40 Years Ago
Here’s part of the prescient speech he gave in Memphis the night before he was killed:
He seemed to know, huh?
Wrong Track
This is a very astounding number:
Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.
In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." That’s up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.
Politically, this is very bad news for the incumbent party, which means the McCain people cannot be happy. He’s got to distance himself from Bush, something he’s shown almost no serious signs of doing.
RELATED: Robert S. McElvaine at the History News Network writes:
HNN Poll: 61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst.
In an informal survey of 109 professional historians
conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history. Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations. …
In a similar survey of historians I conducted for HNN four years ago, Mr. Bush had fared somewhat better, with 19 percent rating his presidency a success and 81 percent classifying it as a failure. More striking is the dramatic increase in the percentage of historians who rate the Bush presidency the worst ever. In 2004, only 11.6 percent of the respondents rated Bush’s presidency last. That conclusion is now reached by nearly six times as large a fraction of historians.
More On The Pre-9/11 “Safe House” Call
Dan Gilmour of the Center for Citizen Media takes journalists to task:
A truly extraordinary example of journalistic malfeasance is playing out right now. Attorney General Michael Mukasey told a San Francisco audience last week that the Bush administration was aware in the days before the 9/11 attacks that an Al Qaeda official was making calls from a “safe house in Afghanistan” to U.S. but that our government failed to act on that.
Mukasey said the U.S. lacked the legal authority, a flat falsehood as legal commentators have pointed out.
As pointed out here yesterday, if Mukasey’s account is true, it is apparently news to even the 9/11 Commission, and begs the question: if the U.S. knew about a call from an AQ person from a safe house in Afghanistan, why didn’t they follow up (as they legally could have done at the time)? (On the other hand, if Mukasey’s account is untrue, that raises other issues — namely the fact that he was lying in order to get a bill passed).
Gilmour points out that only the San Francisco Journal has raised the issue, but they haven’t followed up or asked the questions. He continues:
It’s vastly vastly worse journalism that virtually the entire media establishment has failed to pick up on a story of real significance. Why are journalists not hounding the Justice Department, White House and Congress for answers? (The failure of Congress to ask obvious questions is nothing new for that weak-kneed crowd, sadly. And it’s scary that the presidential candidates don’t care, either.)
Who’s asking, besides MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann? Bloggers, for the most part. Oh, right, blogging is just a trivial activity, unworthy of journalistic recognition.
This kind of thing is why traditional journalism is forfeiting its soul.
Greenwald meanwhile reports that House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has sent a letter to Mukasey "asking all the right questions". So that’s good.
UPDATE: Here’s the letter (pdf)