The worst thing about the 2008 primaries — other than, you know, the result — was the huge amount of time wasted on what amounted to a Republican “Spartacus” re-enactment. Instead of each nominee yelling, “I’m Spartacus,” and, “No, I’m Spartacus,” we got, “I’m Ronald Reagan!” “No, I’m the real Ronald Reagan here.”

The obsession with finding another Reagan was really a veiled slap at the Republican who actually occupied the White House at the time. Nobody was running to be another George W. Bush, nobody promised to give “four more years” of what they got for the last eight.

Everyone understood that running as Bush 2.0 was a bad idea from the outset, but the proof came in the general election, when then-Sen. Barack Obama managed to paint John McCain as the reincarnation of Bush.

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Things look very different today. President Obama still tries to blame what he can — and what he can’t — on Bush, but that’s growing ever more lame. Increasingly, however, he’s also trying to claim the Reagan mantle for himself.

At first it seemed like he just wanted to steal Reagan’s re-election playbook. That was the upshot of a lot of wishful thinking masquerading as analysis a few months ago, including a Time magazine cover: “Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan.” After all, Reagan blamed a lot of the country’s problems on his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, and won re-election in a landslide.

The analogy came apart like toilet paper in a rainstorm when the Obama economy started to grind to a halt like an EPA-approved car with a dead battery and no extension cord.

Reagan’s landslide was fueled by huge economic growth, rapidly falling unemployment and growing national optimism. Obama’s zero for three on that front.

The intriguing thing is that Obama hasn’t let go of Reagan. He and his supporters now invoke the Gipper as a policy role model, not just a strategic one.

In his prime-time debt-ceiling address, he quoted Reagan’s support for a debt-reduction deal in 1982 that included increased tax increases. Afterward, Obama chided, “Those words were spoken by Ronald Reagan. But today, many Republicans in the House refuse to consider this kind of balanced approach.”

Translation: See, I’m a mainstream guy who agrees with Reagan. Meanwhile, these knuckle-dragging tea partyers are to the right of the most conservative president in our lifetimes. Come back, independents! Love me, moderates!

While Obama’s invocation of Reagan worked on a lot of liberal pundits, it was a clunker with conservatives. Of course, it’s doubtful Obama thought it would actually persuade the GOP. After all, the 1982 deal that raised taxes was one of Reagan’s greatest regrets. The Democrats promised to cut $3 in spending for every $1 in tax increases. They lied, a fact Reagan resented until he died.

And that raises an important point for Republicans and Democrats alike. I don’t want to say, “Who cares what Reagan would have done?” It’s certainly an interesting question. But the answer in most cases is, “We have no idea.” Events today are different than they were in the 1980s. The notion that we can know what Reagan’s position would be today is to assume that his views wouldn’t adapt to new circumstances. The Republican Party is full of veteran Reaganauts from back then. Their thinking has changed. Reagan’s probably would have too, and in the same direction.

Indeed, one of the reasons the tea partyers are so “outrageously” intransigent and uncompromising is that they’ve seen what compromise has gotten in the past. In other words, they’ve learned the lessons of history. It’s an insult to Reagan’s memory to suggest that he wouldn’t have as well. My own view is that Reagan would look at the doubling of the size of the federal government in the last 10 years and become awfully “stubborn” about reducing spending.

Regardless, the irony of all this is that the GOP presidential contenders aren’t playing the “I’m Reagan” game all that much anymore. The issues are clear enough, the candidates are confident enough, and the primary voters are energized enough that there’s not much to be gained with gassy nostalgia.

They still say nice things about Reagan, of course. But they understand — finally — that asking “What would Reagan Do?” doesn’t get you all that far. Whereas once it was a provocative thing to call yourself a “Reagan Republican,” it’s not anymore because Reagan has become so popular and the times have changed so much. Rather, everyone cherry-picks what they like about the guy and claims him as an ally. Even Barack Obama.

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Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

JonahsColumn@aol.com

Twitter @JonahNRO

Google+, which launched a month ago to great fanfare, is so far feeling more like Google nonplussed. Reported to have crossed the 20-million-user mark last weekend, the new social networking site is designed to correct one of Facebook’s major drawbacks: the problem of too much information being shared with too many people.

Instead of all social contacts being lumped into one huge group (meaning that your boss and your mother and your best friend from clown college all see the same posts), Google+ lets you compartmentalize people into circles: friends, family, acquaintances and a category called “following,” which appears to be for people whose updates you’re interested in but who you don’t care to have any real life interaction with. You can also create customized circles that narrow your contacts even more: knitting group, people from dog park, people from high school you vaguely remember, people from high school you have no recollection of whatsoever. The possibilities are apparently endless.

There’s a videoconferencing feature called “hang out,” a group-texting service called Huddle and plenty of other stuff guaranteed to suck even more time out of your day than you thought you had, but so far no one seems to be using much of it. My feed, or “content stream” (yes, I joined up), shows a lot of people saying, in effect, “Is this thing on?”

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Sure, there’s a sense of excitement in being an early adopter and, in this case, an air of exclusivity that comes from the fact that membership, at this point, is “by invitation only” (though invites aren’t too hard to come by). But with so many people’s Web browsers bookmarked with so many different online versions of the high school dance (if Facebook is like homecoming, Twitter is like the prom and MySpace is a freshmen ice cream social that somehow turned into a rave), it’s no surprise that the question that comes after “Is this thing on?” is often “What am I doing here?”

My first instinct is to say that what we’re doing primarily is wasting our time and worse. As my husband wisely points out, there is nothing anyone can post on Facebook that makes you like or respect them more than you did before. Your reputation can only lose luster or remain the same. (Indeed, that is why I have blocked my husband from viewing my Facebook page.)

When it comes to Twitter (which I also initially mocked but ended up joining), I’ve noticed that the more tweets I see from folks in a short period of time, the more I begin to wonder whether they’re receiving the proper psychiatric care. When I see that someone’s on MySpace, LinkedIn or Foursquare, I assume he or she is in a band, has some really boring job or is incapable of going anywhere alone, respectively.

I know these are unfair assumptions, and I know I’m doing some big-time generalizing here (though I have yet to hear a compelling argument for the GPS-driven, friend-locating service that is Foursquare, which seems useful primarily if you want to avoid running into someone). In simpler times we judged people according to the crowds they ran with; we now must form opinions based not only on people’s “friends,” but the platforms on which they choose to collect them.

Google+, on the other hand, is so far largely impervious to such judgments. It’s so new that it has no identity and therefore no stigma. I haven’t yet posted something to lower my husband’s estimation of me because, like 99 percent of people I know, he’s not on it. That will change, of course; users are believed to be increasing at a rate of 1 million a day.

For now, though, I have to admit I kind of like it. There’s mystery and potential here, a little like the allure and do-over possibilities of moving to a new town in ninth grade.

Not that I don’t still think all of these social networking sites are hijacking our lives. Surely even the most ardent Facebookers won’t lie on their deathbeds one day saying, “I should have ‘liked’ more posts.” But given the choice between the homecoming dance and this awkward new dance that is Google+, I’ll choose awkwardness.

Besides, right now all anyone’s doing is getting drunk in the parking lot. And that can be the best part.

Los Angeles Times

Meghan Daum is an essayist and novelist in Los Angeles.

mdaum@latimescolumnists.com

Google+, which launched a month ago to great fanfare, is so far feeling more like Google nonplussed. Reported to have crossed the 20-million-user mark last weekend, the new social networking site is designed to correct one of Facebook’s major drawbacks: the problem of too much information being shared with too many people.

Instead of all social contacts being lumped into one huge group (meaning that your boss and your mother and your best friend from clown college all see the same posts), Google+ lets you compartmentalize people into circles: friends, family, acquaintances and a category called “following,” which appears to be for people whose updates you’re interested in but who you don’t care to have any real life interaction with. You can also create customized circles that narrow your contacts even more: knitting group, people from dog park, people from high school you vaguely remember, people from high school you have no recollection of whatsoever. The possibilities are apparently endless.

There’s a videoconferencing feature called “hang out,” a group-texting service called Huddle and plenty of other stuff guaranteed to suck even more time out of your day than you thought you had, but so far no one seems to be using much of it. My feed, or “content stream” (yes, I joined up), shows a lot of people saying, in effect, “Is this thing on?”

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Sure, there’s a sense of excitement in being an early adopter and, in this case, an air of exclusivity that comes from the fact that membership, at this point, is “by invitation only” (though invites aren’t too hard to come by). But with so many people’s Web browsers bookmarked with so many different online versions of the high school dance (if Facebook is like homecoming, Twitter is like the prom and MySpace is a freshmen ice cream social that somehow turned into a rave), it’s no surprise that the question that comes after “Is this thing on?” is often “What am I doing here?”

My first instinct is to say that what we’re doing primarily is wasting our time and worse. As my husband wisely points out, there is nothing anyone can post on Facebook that makes you like or respect them more than you did before. Your reputation can only lose luster or remain the same. (Indeed, that is why I have blocked my husband from viewing my Facebook page.)

When it comes to Twitter (which I also initially mocked but ended up joining), I’ve noticed that the more tweets I see from folks in a short period of time, the more I begin to wonder whether they’re receiving the proper psychiatric care. When I see that someone’s on MySpace, LinkedIn or Foursquare, I assume he or she is in a band, has some really boring job or is incapable of going anywhere alone, respectively.

I know these are unfair assumptions, and I know I’m doing some big-time generalizing here (though I have yet to hear a compelling argument for the GPS-driven, friend-locating service that is Foursquare, which seems useful primarily if you want to avoid running into someone). In simpler times we judged people according to the crowds they ran with; we now must form opinions based not only on people’s “friends,” but the platforms on which they choose to collect them.

Google+, on the other hand, is so far largely impervious to such judgments. It’s so new that it has no identity and therefore no stigma. I haven’t yet posted something to lower my husband’s estimation of me because, like 99 percent of people I know, he’s not on it. That will change, of course; users are believed to be increasing at a rate of 1 million a day.

For now, though, I have to admit I kind of like it. There’s mystery and potential here, a little like the allure and do-over possibilities of moving to a new town in ninth grade.

Not that I don’t still think all of these social networking sites are hijacking our lives. Surely even the most ardent Facebookers won’t lie on their deathbeds one day saying, “I should have ‘liked’ more posts.” But given the choice between the homecoming dance and this awkward new dance that is Google+, I’ll choose awkwardness.

Besides, right now all anyone’s doing is getting drunk in the parking lot. And that can be the best part.

Los Angeles Times

Meghan Daum is an essayist and novelist in Los Angeles.

mdaum@latimescolumnists.com

A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken earlier this week found 54 percent of Americans are “very concerned” about the consequences if the U.S. fails to raise the debt ceiling, and another 29 percent are “somewhat concerned.”

Evidently the remaining 17 percent either haven’t been paying attention or have convinced themselves that talk of a serious economic crisis next week is just another overhyped, phantom scare along the lines of Y2K, “Carmageddon” and recent predictions of the Rapture.
 
My guess is that the ranks of the nonchalant are thinning by the hour. More and more voices of reason are weighing in to say that behind all this partisan bickering and ground-pawing looms a potentially catastrophic blow to the already battered economy — from a drop in the U.S. bond rating to a government’s failure to pay its bills.

And the airy confidence of Washington pundits who for months predicted Democrats and Republicans would reach an agreement to raise the debt ceiling after a few obligatory rounds of posturing has evaporated.

The threat is real.

When you have Arizona Sen. John McCain, the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2008, echoing criticism of “tea party hobbits” and trashing the “bizarre” and “worse than foolish” tactics of fringe members of his party, you know matters have become urgent.

If a pollster happens to call me in the next few days, I’ll ask him to mark me as “obsessively concerned.”

Yes, deadlines concentrate the mind. And it’s not altogether a bad thing that the Republicans have exploited the usually routine process of raising the federal debt limit to focus the nation’s attention on the problem of deficit spending. Hypocritical and opportunistic, yes, but still not altogether bad.

We need to have what everyone likes to call an “adult conversation” about spending and taxing — what do we want government to do, and how do we want to pay for it?

It’s a hard conversation for Congress because the political parties are in sharp disagreement on these questions, and because reconciling what we want with what we can afford requires making painful choices. So lawmakers tend to avoid the conversation and instead leave the mounting bills for our children and grandchildren to worry about.

It’s not an “adult conversation,” however, when one side in the debate is metaphorically threatening to pull the pin on the grenade if they don’t get their way. It’s a hostage negotiation.

To a point, this tactic has worked for the GOP hard-liners. For many months, up to and including his speech to the nation earlier this week, President Barack Obama has been arguing for a “balanced approach” that would combine spending cuts with tax increases to shrink the deficit.

Back to that Reuters poll: 56 percent of respondents back the combination idea versus 19 percent who say they want Congress to do it with program cuts only. A Pew Research Center poll taken last week found 60 percent supporting a combined approach, while a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey last week found 64 percent behind using a mix of cuts and taxes to begin digging our way out of the hole. (More poll results here)

Yet Republicans are determined to ram a cuts-only approach down the throats of the American people, if I may borrow some tea party rhetoric from the health care reform debate. And the Democrats are going along. Neither their plan in the Senate nor the Republicans’ plan in the House contains what are euphemistically called “revenue enhancements.”

Not bad for a party that controls only one house of Congress!

But rather than bask in their victory in shaping and advancing the necessary conversation, GOP leaders are holding out for a deal that will inevitably force the same fraught and frightening debate to take place again during the 2012 campaign season — ramping up the concern levels of everyone who’s following the news and, incidentally, attracting the scorn and disgust of the American people.

That CNN survey last week found 63 percent of respondents saying Republicans in Congress have not acted responsibly during the debt-ceiling negotiations; 46 percent said President Obama hasn’t acted responsibly. If everything goes sideways next week, 51 percent of respondents said they’ll blame Republicans, and only 30 percent said they’ll blame President Obama.

We don’t need another destabilizing game of chicken with our nation’s economy to keep the conversation going.

Voters will have their chance next year to choose between contrasting visions of taxation, spending and debt management when they participate in the only poll that matters.

My old man suspected something.

Standing over my bunk on the screened porch, he pointed at my tackle box on the floor and asked what was in it. My lures, hooks, weights and what-not, I told him.

I figured my mother put him up to it. As a salesman consumed with earning the monthly mortgage payment and groceries for a family of 10, my father was not the one I worried about when I locked myself in the garage and emptied all 20 Newport menthols out of the flip-top box and repacked them in a Sucrets tin that I tucked into the bottom tray of the tackle box.

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Sitting on the edge of the bed, he lifted and opened the tackle box and fingered through a couple of bobbers and a spool of line — my heart pounding — and then snapped shut the box and headed back to the kitchen where my mother was making sandwiches at the counter.

Unlike her husband who was preoccupied with the electric bill, or the latest proclamation of Nikita Khrushchev, my mother seldom missed anything going on with us kids. Somehow she knew if we were sick, even before we did. And don’t even try to lie while looking her straight in the eye. Think of a slimmer Aunt Bee, only with eight Opies to hover over.

I made a mental note to shove the Sucrets tin under my mattress till the next morning.

We had just arrived at Silver Lake near South Haven, Mich., for our annual family vacation. Far from being rich, my parents still managed to rent a housekeeping cabin on a different lake in Michigan, Wisconsin or Minnesota for one week each summer. Forty years later, those vacations are archived in my brain like ESPN highlights, each one evoking a story in which I surprise myself with the detail I can recount about fishing for pike in the mornings with my brothers, cannonballing off the end of the dock into the fresh, chilly water and picnicking with the entire family on an island.

The cabins were small, so we lived communally without the compartmentalization and privacy afforded at home. The oldest boys bunked on the enclosed front porch, separated from the woods and sky by mosquito screening. Evenings were brisk, but we were cozy under quilts, and there’s no sleep as deep as under the stars.

Ensconced for the night, I would listen to my mother and father talking in the kitchen on the other side of the wall, every now and then one clanking something on the stove, or opening the refrigerator for ice or a bottle of Hamms.

No TV, and certainly no WiFi, but my father always brought along a radio. Daytimes it bubbled beeps and static, but at night, it locked onto an AM station hundreds of miles away, broadcasting a White Sox game, the low-key play-by-play of Bob Elson, a sonorous lullaby.

My father and mother stayed up late, conversing in tones too low for me to make out the context through the sealed windows. But even without hearing their words, a young boy can interpret his parents’ rhythms: My mother seesawing in the maple rocker, her voice pitch up and down in earnest description of some event from the day, and the rapt silence of my father. Suddenly his deep voice rises in a question, and my mother chuckles softly and replies.

A lull in their conversation, when it’s just Elson and intermittent clatter of the Comiskey Park crowd.

Then the rocker stops. Both their footsteps trail to the same spot in the room. A pause; an embrace.

Some of the most important parenting occurs unintended, such as in these imperfectly overheard conversations I recall like favorite old songs, with their lessons of caring, diplomacy and love.

The next morning, Pat, Kenneth and I are wakened by birds singing inches outside the porch screens. Mist lingers on the lake as we shove the heavy wooden rowboat through the sand and weeds, and then pile in like bobsledders, as it glides into deeper water.

Nothing quite like the adventure of three city boys hunting for fish of unknown size and ferocity, or nothing as delicious as their conspiratorial solidarity in fooling the old man and lighting up the smuggled cigarettes with Clint Eastwood-cool.

Sure, we got away with one, as boys are wont to do, but we were no rebels. We counted on our parents for the lush summers they gave us from what little they had; for the fallible good cop/bad cop strategy meant to keep us safe and true.

But what made us blissful and fearless children, was not so much what they gave to us, but what they gave to each other.

At 91, the author’s mother, Gertrude, is still as alert and as nurturing as Aunt Bee ever was. David McGrath is a College of DuPage emeritus professor of English.

In the Old Testament version, Joshua’s Israelites marched around and around Jericho, blew their ram’s horns, and shouted their battle cry. The walls of the city crumbled, and Joshua’s army destroyed it.

Something like that has been unfolding in Washington. Decade after decade, lawmakers and presidents of both major parties pushed entitlement, defense and other spending programs beyond what federal tax revenues justified. To defend their profligacy, they surrounded the capital city with walls made of myths:

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Don’t worry — tomorrow’s expanding economy will pay for all the promises we make today. So long as we’re paying our bills, the enormity of our debt doesn’t really matter. We can just keep borrowing at low rates: Everyone knows that no nation is more creditworthy than the United States of America.

And now the myths are crumbling, including one of the phoniest: the Capitol Hill excuse that — no matter how much it promises, borrows and spends — the U.S. is guaranteed a top-tier credit rating and all the benefits that come with it.

Whatever the debt ceiling when this episode ends, Americans have learned that they face the same threat to their public finances that they do in their families: If you’ve spent yourself into penury, wary lenders aren’t eager to hand you still more money. That’s sobering reality for a nation whose government now survives only by borrowing another $4 billion every day.

On Wednesday, a Bloomberg News interview with a Standard Poor’s official emphasized that while the risk of technical default may be the most immediate issue facing Washington, ultimately it’s not the most important. David Beers, the London-based director of SP’s sovereign credit ratings, said it’s not enough for lawmakers to agree to lift the ceiling; Congress and the White House also must agree to a serious deficit-reduction package if they’re to avoid a downgrade in the government’s AAA rating: “For us it’s not the debt limit — it’s the underlying fiscal dynamics,” Beers told Bloomberg.

Translation: If Americans think they can settle this little spat and go back to spending as usual, they’re dead wrong. Elected officials no longer can pretend that deficits have no dangerous consequences. Here’s one:

A lower credit rating will raise the government’s borrowing costs by perhaps $100 billion a year. That would essentially be a mountain of money wasted on bigger interest payouts — just to keep current with a national debt that continues to grow. Remember, the trillions that lawmakers say this or that plan will “save” are merely reductions in future deficits. The $14.3 trillion that Americans owe today? No matter how this debt-ceiling fight ends, that number will only get bigger until spending and revenue align.

We won’t hazard a guess on whether passage this week of the Republican plan advanced by House Speaker John Boehner, or the rival Democratic plan from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, would trim deficits enough to protect the government’s creditworthiness. We do, though, expect to hear plenty more in coming months and years about the need for a more austere future if we’re to unwind the costly excesses of our nation’s spendthrift past. We argued here Wednesday that Boehner’s plan, by keeping the pressure on the pols into the 2012 election year, stands the better chance of forcing that relative austerity.

Above all, curtailing deficits means limiting the big entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. SP and the other major rating agencies accept as fact what millions of stubborn Americans will not: Either the boundless generosity of these programs must constrict, or the tax rates that support them must rapidly accelerate.

The ratings agencies, because they’re forcing a discussion about runaway spending, are unpopular among many in Congress. But the raters aren’t thinking any differently than all the individuals and governments that routinely lend money to the U.S.: With Washington so crazily growing its debt load, the loans we make aren’t as risk-free as we’ve always thought. The day is coming when the Americans can’t meet all these spending obligations.

That awakening among lenders should frighten members of both major parties who have spent long careers in Congress. Most never have given much thought to the ripple effects, possibly including higher costs of home mortgages and car loans, of something so arcane as a busted federal credit rating. Of course, they had an easy — and, unfortunately, easy to resist — way of making sure no downgrade happened on their watch. Instead, they kept spending money they didn’t have — and surrounding themselves with walls made of myths.

They created this, America’s Jericho moment. And some of them, as they continue to oppose tough spending cuts in any debt-ceiling deal, seem not to hear the ram’s horns.

In the Old Testament version, Joshua’s Israelites marched around and around Jericho, blew their ram’s horns, and shouted their battle cry. The walls of the city crumbled, and Joshua’s army destroyed it.

Something like that has been unfolding in Washington. Decade after decade, lawmakers and presidents of both major parties pushed entitlement, defense and other spending programs beyond what federal tax revenues justified. To defend their profligacy, they surrounded the capital city with walls made of myths:

• Related

• 

  Story: Keeping the pressure on

• Topics
• 
  Credit Ratings
  
• 
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• 
  Credit and Debt
  
• See more topics »

Don’t worry — tomorrow’s expanding economy will pay for all the promises we make today. So long as we’re paying our bills, the enormity of our debt doesn’t really matter. We can just keep borrowing at low rates: Everyone knows that no nation is more creditworthy than the United States of America.

And now the myths are crumbling, including one of the phoniest: the Capitol Hill excuse that — no matter how much it promises, borrows and spends — the U.S. is guaranteed a top-tier credit rating and all the benefits that come with it.

Whatever the debt ceiling when this episode ends, Americans have learned that they face the same threat to their public finances that they do in their families: If you’ve spent yourself into penury, wary lenders aren’t eager to hand you still more money. That’s sobering reality for a nation whose government now survives only by borrowing another $4 billion every day.

On Wednesday, a Bloomberg News interview with a Standard Poor’s official emphasized that while the risk of technical default may be the most immediate issue facing Washington, ultimately it’s not the most important. David Beers, the London-based director of SP’s sovereign credit ratings, said it’s not enough for lawmakers to agree to lift the ceiling; Congress and the White House also must agree to a serious deficit-reduction package if they’re to avoid a downgrade in the government’s AAA rating: “For us it’s not the debt limit — it’s the underlying fiscal dynamics,” Beers told Bloomberg.

Translation: If Americans think they can settle this little spat and go back to spending as usual, they’re dead wrong. Elected officials no longer can pretend that deficits have no dangerous consequences. Here’s one:

A lower credit rating will raise the government’s borrowing costs by perhaps $100 billion a year. That would essentially be a mountain of money wasted on bigger interest payouts — just to keep current with a national debt that continues to grow. Remember, the trillions that lawmakers say this or that plan will “save” are merely reductions in future deficits. The $14.3 trillion that Americans owe today? No matter how this debt-ceiling fight ends, that number will only get bigger until spending and revenue align.

We won’t hazard a guess on whether passage this week of the Republican plan advanced by House Speaker John Boehner, or the rival Democratic plan from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, would trim deficits enough to protect the government’s creditworthiness. We do, though, expect to hear plenty more in coming months and years about the need for a more austere future if we’re to unwind the costly excesses of our nation’s spendthrift past. We argued here Wednesday that Boehner’s plan, by keeping the pressure on the pols into the 2012 election year, stands the better chance of forcing that relative austerity.

Above all, curtailing deficits means limiting the big entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. SP and the other major rating agencies accept as fact what millions of stubborn Americans will not: Either the boundless generosity of these programs must constrict, or the tax rates that support them must rapidly accelerate.

The ratings agencies, because they’re forcing a discussion about runaway spending, are unpopular among many in Congress. But the raters aren’t thinking any differently than all the individuals and governments that routinely lend money to the U.S.: With Washington so crazily growing its debt load, the loans we make aren’t as risk-free as we’ve always thought. The day is coming when the Americans can’t meet all these spending obligations.

That awakening among lenders should frighten members of both major parties who have spent long careers in Congress. Most never have given much thought to the ripple effects, possibly including higher costs of home mortgages and car loans, of something so arcane as a busted federal credit rating. Of course, they had an easy — and, unfortunately, easy to resist — way of making sure no downgrade happened on their watch. Instead, they kept spending money they didn’t have — and surrounding themselves with walls made of myths.

They created this, America’s Jericho moment. And some of them, as they continue to oppose tough spending cuts in any debt-ceiling deal, seem not to hear the ram’s horns.

Ifti Nasim, who died of a heart attack Friday night at 64, was one of the most famous Chicagoans most Chicagoans have never heard of.

He was a columnist, a radio show host and a poet who earned followers around the world for his poems about life as a gay Pakistani.

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He was a luxury-car salesman at Loeber Motors for a while, too, and once, the story goes, sold a Mercedes to Oprah Winfrey. She asked how big the engine was. He replied, “Are you going to sleep with it?”

Since last weekend, Nasim has been mourned by friends and fans from India to France, from Facebook to the shops of Chicago’s Devon Avenue. On Saturday, 1,000 or so crowded into the Muslim Community Center on Elston Avenue to pray over his body.

“According to every convention, my friend Ifti was all wrong,” blogged Azra Raza, a prominent oncologist. “He was born in the wrong country. He should have been born in Hollywood. … He was born in the wrong body. He should have been Marilyn Monroe.”

Being born “wrong” was what made Nasim the remarkable person he was, though. The son of a newspaper owner in Faisalabad, an industrial city built on cotton, he was the fifth of seven kids of his father’s first marriage. His mother died when he was young.

“As one of a large family,” he once said, “I was the invisible child.”

He moved to the United States in 1971 because he’d read in Life magazine that gay people were less likely than in Pakistan to be persecuted. He came alone, then helped two sisters and a brother follow. His life here was as visible as his furs and bling.

Another story he liked to tell: TV personality Mary Ann Childers was buying a car. She asked him to open the trunk.

“Honey,” he said, “do it yourself. I just got my nails done.”

That was the intentionally cartoonish Nasim. A different man emerged in his poems.

“He had this blustery personality, flamboyant,” said Raza, a friend so close that he accompanied her to Lamaze classes, “and yet it all rested on a bedrock of profound human gravity.”

In 1996, he was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, partly for founding an organization that helped other South Asian gays and partly for “Naram,” his collection of Urdu poetry.

The award citation said the book was “the first direct statement of ‘gay’ longings and desires to ever appear in that language. Its courageous publication met with revilement but critical acclaim and inspired other Pakistan poets.”

Nasim traveled the world reading his poems. And yet, apparently, he rarely discussed gay matters with his family. Nor did he write about gay issues in his regular column in the Weekly Pakistan News.

“He didn’t want to fight with anybody,” said his business associate Rana Javed.

The two men ran their newspaper operation and weekly radio show out of Nasim’s apartment on the 40th floor of a lakefront high-rise crammed with several thousand books in various languages.

“He was controversial,” Javed said. “A lot of people have problems with him. But we accept him because he was a very open man. He helped the community, unbelievable, unbelievable.”

He raised money for disaster relief, helped stage a peace rally after 9/11 and sent money to relatives in Pakistan.

Last week’s heart attack wasn’t Nasim’s first. He drove himself to the hospital after the first one, in 2003. As he told the story, when he arrived in his gold Mercedes, wearing a plush mink, a nurse came on to him. “Not now, please,” he said.

After that heart attack, he changed. He started writing even more relentlessly and broadened his themes. His 2005 poetry collection, “Abdoz,” contains these lines:

I feel my life was spent in a submarine

The journey has ended; I saw nothing.

He took to dressing less ostentatiously, preferring a tux or jeans to more conspicuous attire; whether that was a desire to look normal or, like Madonna, to play with his image, varies according to who’s telling it. He still liked the occasional turban.

For all his drama, Nasim was a private person. He had a relationship with the same partner for many years. He kept a recent trip to the ER secret. His brother-in-law, Khalid Mahmud, found the paperwork on his desk after he died.

Nasim did tell Mahmud, via his will, that he wanted a simple burial.

On Saturday, Mahmud and a few others went to the mosque to wash Nasim’s body. They wrapped it in two white sheets, laid it in the coffin. Hindus, Muslims and Christians came, gay people and straight, taxi drivers and the brother of a former Pakistani president.

It was not a moment for religious argument, just a time to mark the rare life of a man who searched for harmony.

mschmich@tribune.com

Ifti Nasim, who died of a heart attack Friday night at 64, was one of the most famous Chicagoans most Chicagoans have never heard of.

He was a columnist, a radio show host and a poet who earned followers around the world for his poems about life as a gay Pakistani.

• Mary Schmich

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He was a luxury-car salesman at Loeber Motors for a while, too, and once, the story goes, sold a Mercedes to Oprah Winfrey. She asked how big the engine was. He replied, “Are you going to sleep with it?”

Since last weekend, Nasim has been mourned by friends and fans from India to France, from Facebook to the shops of Chicago’s Devon Avenue. On Saturday, 1,000 or so crowded into the Muslim Community Center on Elston Avenue to pray over his body.

“According to every convention, my friend Ifti was all wrong,” blogged Azra Raza, a prominent oncologist. “He was born in the wrong country. He should have been born in Hollywood. … He was born in the wrong body. He should have been Marilyn Monroe.”

Being born “wrong” was what made Nasim the remarkable person he was, though. The son of a newspaper owner in Faisalabad, an industrial city built on cotton, he was the fifth of seven kids of his father’s first marriage. His mother died when he was young.

“As one of a large family,” he once said, “I was the invisible child.”

He moved to the United States in 1971 because he’d read in Life magazine that gay people were less likely than in Pakistan to be persecuted. He came alone, then helped two sisters and a brother follow. His life here was as visible as his furs and bling.

Another story he liked to tell: TV personality Mary Ann Childers was buying a car. She asked him to open the trunk.

“Honey,” he said, “do it yourself. I just got my nails done.”

That was the intentionally cartoonish Nasim. A different man emerged in his poems.

“He had this blustery personality, flamboyant,” said Raza, a friend so close that he accompanied her to Lamaze classes, “and yet it all rested on a bedrock of profound human gravity.”

In 1996, he was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, partly for founding an organization that helped other South Asian gays and partly for “Naram,” his collection of Urdu poetry.

The award citation said the book was “the first direct statement of ‘gay’ longings and desires to ever appear in that language. Its courageous publication met with revilement but critical acclaim and inspired other Pakistan poets.”

Nasim traveled the world reading his poems. And yet, apparently, he rarely discussed gay matters with his family. Nor did he write about gay issues in his regular column in the Weekly Pakistan News.

“He didn’t want to fight with anybody,” said his business associate Rana Javed.

The two men ran their newspaper operation and weekly radio show out of Nasim’s apartment on the 40th floor of a lakefront high-rise crammed with several thousand books in various languages.

“He was controversial,” Javed said. “A lot of people have problems with him. But we accept him because he was a very open man. He helped the community, unbelievable, unbelievable.”

He raised money for disaster relief, helped stage a peace rally after 9/11 and sent money to relatives in Pakistan.

Last week’s heart attack wasn’t Nasim’s first. He drove himself to the hospital after the first one, in 2003. As he told the story, when he arrived in his gold Mercedes, wearing a plush mink, a nurse came on to him. “Not now, please,” he said.

After that heart attack, he changed. He started writing even more relentlessly and broadened his themes. His 2005 poetry collection, “Abdoz,” contains these lines:

I feel my life was spent in a submarine

The journey has ended; I saw nothing.

He took to dressing less ostentatiously, preferring a tux or jeans to more conspicuous attire; whether that was a desire to look normal or, like Madonna, to play with his image, varies according to who’s telling it. He still liked the occasional turban.

For all his drama, Nasim was a private person. He had a relationship with the same partner for many years. He kept a recent trip to the ER secret. His brother-in-law, Khalid Mahmud, found the paperwork on his desk after he died.

Nasim did tell Mahmud, via his will, that he wanted a simple burial.

On Saturday, Mahmud and a few others went to the mosque to wash Nasim’s body. They wrapped it in two white sheets, laid it in the coffin. Hindus, Muslims and Christians came, gay people and straight, taxi drivers and the brother of a former Pakistani president.

It was not a moment for religious argument, just a time to mark the rare life of a man who searched for harmony.

mschmich@tribune.com

Inactivity advocates, rejoice!

After several perilous months when it seemed the National Football League season might be canceled — opening up opportunities for people like myself to actually “do stuff” on Sundays — tragedy has been averted. The lockout is over, the season is on and, once again, football watchers can embrace their sloth.

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After news of the NFL labor agreement broke Monday, I and millions of other davenport enthusiasts across the country called off the things we had reluctantly considered doing in the absence of football.

Home repairs can wait (we’ll now stimulate the economy by hiring it done), that novel need not be written (it likely would have only been a mild best-seller) and there will be no “spending time with family” (which we all know is a dangerous gateway to “attending church functions”).

Instead, there are fantasy football drafts to prepare for, large foam “We’re No. 1″ fingers to unpack and interesting new uses of chili to consider.

But amid the prep for a season reborn, each fan should sit back and reflect on what might have happened had we actually faced GRIDIRONAGEDDON.

James Cochran, an associate professor of quantitative analysis and an expert on sports economics at Louisiana Tech University, said a lost NFL season would have truly harmed people with “limited discretionary money.” That’s polite Southern professor talk for waitresses and bartenders, hotel workers and others who make in one year what your average linebacker makes in less than half a football game.

These are people who rely on tips and crowded restaurants and high demand for pizza delivery.

“They would have lost an awful lot of that income if football season would’ve been canceled,” Cochran said. “And these are the people who are most ill-equipped to afford losing the money. These are people who, because they have little discretionary money of their own, every dollar that comes in to them is likely to get spent.”

So beyond the millionaire players and owners being able to make a living, the football season provides an economic boon to folks earning far less, while also pumping cash into the country’s economy.

“It’s all about the speed that money moves about,” Cochran said. “We’re talking about people who tend to spend in places where other people with low discretionary money work. So the money cycles through the economy many more times.”

I’ll just distill that all down to: “Football season saves American economy.”

It’s also important to consider the political ramifications of football. In a summer without free agency or pre-training-camp training camps, the nation has been fixated on the partisan debt ceiling negotiations in Washington.

It’s boring, it’s intractable and yet it’s been the only game in town. (No offense, baseball.)

But now a weary nation turns its gaze away from Boehners (John) and toward Bradys (Tom), allowing our political leaders to get down to business without having us looking over their shoulders and hating them all. They’ll probably have this debt ceiling stuff wrapped up in no time.

You’re welcome, Congress.

Of course, there are always naysayers who bemoan the national preoccupation with football, fantasy football in particular, saying it distracts workers and costs companies money in lost work time.

Not so, according to a survey of human resource officials conducted by Chicago-based consulting firm Challenger, Gray Christmas.

The 2010 survey found that 70 percent of respondents ranked the level of worker distraction caused by fantasy football to be 4 or lower on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being no noticeable impact. And only 20 percent of companies even bother to block sports and fantasy football websites, while about half of them say they don’t care if employees spend part of their workday on fantasy football, as long as their work gets done.

“More companies, smart companies, today are just measuring their people’s performance,” said John Challenger, the firm’s CEO. “They’re setting up high standards for what they’re expecting in terms of quality of their work. If they get it done, it doesn’t really matter how they’re getting it done.”

Challenger also said football — fantasy or regular — can boost workplace camaraderie.

“It really gives people something to rally around at a company,” he said.

I concur. Spending an hour or so around a co-worker’s cubicle talking about the twerpishness of Bears quarterback Jay Cutler only inspires me to work harder, right after I decide which running back I’m going to start and check the latest ESPN.com headlines and post something to my fan blog.

Clearly, the return of professional football is a net positive for the country.

And as for all those lofty things we pondered accomplishing if the football season was canceled? Well, as it says somewhere in the Bible, one of the books I was planning to read if the lockout continued, it’s time to “put away childish things.”

Like the notion that anything of consequence will happen between the Sunday hours of noon and whenever the night’s last SportsCenter ends.

Welcome back, football.

Goodbye, and good riddance, other stuff.

rhuppke@tribune.com

Inactivity advocates, rejoice!

After several perilous months when it seemed the National Football League season might be canceled — opening up opportunities for people like myself to actually “do stuff” on Sundays — tragedy has been averted. The lockout is over, the season is on and, once again, football watchers can embrace their sloth.

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After news of the NFL labor agreement broke Monday, I and millions of other davenport enthusiasts across the country called off the things we had reluctantly considered doing in the absence of football.

Home repairs can wait (we’ll now stimulate the economy by hiring it done), that novel need not be written (it likely would have only been a mild best-seller) and there will be no “spending time with family” (which we all know is a dangerous gateway to “attending church functions”).

Instead, there are fantasy football drafts to prepare for, large foam “We’re No. 1″ fingers to unpack and interesting new uses of chili to consider.

But amid the prep for a season reborn, each fan should sit back and reflect on what might have happened had we actually faced GRIDIRONAGEDDON.

James Cochran, an associate professor of quantitative analysis and an expert on sports economics at Louisiana Tech University, said a lost NFL season would have truly harmed people with “limited discretionary money.” That’s polite Southern professor talk for waitresses and bartenders, hotel workers and others who make in one year what your average linebacker makes in less than half a football game.

These are people who rely on tips and crowded restaurants and high demand for pizza delivery.

“They would have lost an awful lot of that income if football season would’ve been canceled,” Cochran said. “And these are the people who are most ill-equipped to afford losing the money. These are people who, because they have little discretionary money of their own, every dollar that comes in to them is likely to get spent.”

So beyond the millionaire players and owners being able to make a living, the football season provides an economic boon to folks earning far less, while also pumping cash into the country’s economy.

“It’s all about the speed that money moves about,” Cochran said. “We’re talking about people who tend to spend in places where other people with low discretionary money work. So the money cycles through the economy many more times.”

I’ll just distill that all down to: “Football season saves American economy.”

It’s also important to consider the political ramifications of football. In a summer without free agency or pre-training-camp training camps, the nation has been fixated on the partisan debt ceiling negotiations in Washington.

It’s boring, it’s intractable and yet it’s been the only game in town. (No offense, baseball.)

But now a weary nation turns its gaze away from Boehners (John) and toward Bradys (Tom), allowing our political leaders to get down to business without having us looking over their shoulders and hating them all. They’ll probably have this debt ceiling stuff wrapped up in no time.

You’re welcome, Congress.

Of course, there are always naysayers who bemoan the national preoccupation with football, fantasy football in particular, saying it distracts workers and costs companies money in lost work time.

Not so, according to a survey of human resource officials conducted by Chicago-based consulting firm Challenger, Gray Christmas.

The 2010 survey found that 70 percent of respondents ranked the level of worker distraction caused by fantasy football to be 4 or lower on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being no noticeable impact. And only 20 percent of companies even bother to block sports and fantasy football websites, while about half of them say they don’t care if employees spend part of their workday on fantasy football, as long as their work gets done.

“More companies, smart companies, today are just measuring their people’s performance,” said John Challenger, the firm’s CEO. “They’re setting up high standards for what they’re expecting in terms of quality of their work. If they get it done, it doesn’t really matter how they’re getting it done.”

Challenger also said football — fantasy or regular — can boost workplace camaraderie.

“It really gives people something to rally around at a company,” he said.

I concur. Spending an hour or so around a co-worker’s cubicle talking about the twerpishness of Bears quarterback Jay Cutler only inspires me to work harder, right after I decide which running back I’m going to start and check the latest ESPN.com headlines and post something to my fan blog.

Clearly, the return of professional football is a net positive for the country.

And as for all those lofty things we pondered accomplishing if the football season was canceled? Well, as it says somewhere in the Bible, one of the books I was planning to read if the lockout continued, it’s time to “put away childish things.”

Like the notion that anything of consequence will happen between the Sunday hours of noon and whenever the night’s last SportsCenter ends.

Welcome back, football.

Goodbye, and good riddance, other stuff.

rhuppke@tribune.com

Subject only to the stroke of Gov. Pat Quinn’s pen, Illinois is on the brink of the greatest gambling expansion in its history. Under the proposed law, gaming positions, that is, slot machines, poker and blackjack tables, etc., will more than triple — to 39,000 from 12,000. In addition, the law would speed the arrival of tens of thousands of legal video poker machines in bars, restaurants, truck stops and other locations.

Illinois’ gaming regulation must keep pace with this radical expansion. The Illinois Gaming Board is charged with ensuring “public confidence and trust in the credibility and integrity of gambling operations and the regulatory process.” But it can do that only if it has the staffing, legal authority and political independence to thoroughly investigate those who seek to participate in Illinois’ gaming industry. Unfortunately, that part of the bill does not hold up. While the bill adds thousands of blackjack tables, slot machines and video poker machines, it adds nothing to the Gaming Board’s regulatory abilities; indeed, it even limits them in some ways.

Gaming Board Chairman Aaron Jaffe has been openly critical of the bill. Who can blame him? Imagine tripling Chicago’s population without adding new police officers. Who would want to be superintendent of that department? Jaffe’s job, and the Gaming Board’s, is hard enough to do at current levels, but it becomes impossible if gaming explodes without increases in the size and powers of Illinois’ gaming regulator. Jaffe’s record demonstrates that he is neither an opponent of nor a cheerleader for the gaming industry. His concerns should be taken seriously.

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We should not delude ourselves that regulation isn’t needed. Even though publicly traded gaming companies are heavily regulated and employ security, accounting and other professionals to screen for disreputable associates, bad actors continue to look for ways to get in on the action.

During my two years as administrator of the Gaming Board, we caught organized crime trying to infiltrate Illinois’ gambling industry on several occasions. Two investors in the ill-fated Emerald Casino used others to front for them in an effort to elude detection. A company associated with notorious organized crime figures was hired to do work at the proposed casino site in Rosemont, and another Outfit-connected company obtained a no-bid contract from the Grand Victoria Casino in Elgin, leading to the lifetime banishment from Illinois gaming of the casino’s then-general manager and chief security officer. These instances were discovered only after thorough investigations by Gaming Board staff. Without the manpower, they would have gone undetected.

The Gaming Board also needs to maintain its authority over the license process. The new bill undercuts the board by allowing provisional licensing of video gaming. Under the bill, the board will have only 60 days to investigate and act on a video license application. If it doesn’t (or, more likely, can’t), the applicant gets the license. So what will happen when the board, by then stretched beyond thin, gets buried in provisional license applications? Thousands of applicants are already lining up, and hundreds could get licenses without even the most basic background check. Could some of these licenses fall into the wrong hands? And what’s the rush anyway? Indeed, setting an artificial time limit without letting the board keep up is so absurd that, if I were a cynic, I might wonder whether the General Assembly meant to rig this game.

Efforts by politically connected individuals to influence regulatory decisions make the Gaming Board’s independence critical. In 2000, the board’s chairman had to resign after it was learned that he had rammed through approval of Jack Binion’s acquisition of the Empress Joliet from its politically connected owners despite serious concerns about Binion’s background. Similarly, publicly aired complaints by politicians that the Emerald investigation was taking too long smacked of interference and intimidation and undercut public confidence in the Gaming Board. Those critics, like some of those who today wish Jaffe would be quiet, had no appreciation for the complexity of licensing investigations and the resources needed to ensure the integrity of the process and the outcome.

Understaffed regulators forced to work on unrealistic deadlines while fighting off political interference will diminish public confidence and create fertile ground for crime and corruption. But we should not have to rely on the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office as our front-line gaming regulators. They have enough to do already. Gaming expansion in Illinois will work only if the Gaming Board gets the resources, authority and independence to do its job responsibly and effectively. These concerns need to be a part of any expansion bill.

Sergio E. Acosta, a Chicago attorney, was administrator of the Illinois Gaming Board from 1999 to 2001. He is a former assistant U.S. attorney.

I felt like Dorothy in the Emerald City as I waited for Rupert Murdoch to testify last week, and I expected the select committee members of Parliament to be like her companions — the tin man, the scarecrow, and the cowardly lion—all crouching in exaltation. After all, they were to be meeting a wizard who had created prime ministers, crushed politicians, cashiered Scotland Yard, and mugged the monarchy.

Surely such a phantasmagoric figure would enter the chamber with lightning bolts, crashing cymbals and a drum roll of thunder, befitting a behemoth who seemed so powerful he could reach through the television screen 4,000 miles away and crush me, clicker in hand. Instead a stammering 80 year-old man doddered in and started mewing about how humbled he felt. Humbled… humbled… humbled. The Wizard of Oz had morphed into Uriah Heap.

What an ignoble end for a man whose life dream was so grandiose. After clawing his way up the ladder, bloodying enemies and blackening adversaries on every rung, he finally reached the top, only to implode in a free-fall that has been accompanied by cries of contempt, derision and outrage, all at once delicious and disgusting to watch.

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Only a god of vengeance could conjure a crueler punishment than prison for Rupert Murdoch, who might be happier in stripes and behind bars, where he would not have to read newspapers and watch television every day. Thus, he would be spared from seeing his humbled elf, his jumped-up scion and his warrior wife vulture-pecked by the press. With his reputation shredded beyond repair, his craven minions reduced to road kill and his victims lining up with ravenous lawyers seeking just compensation for his dastardly deeds, the News Corp. wizard faces a dark future of lawsuits and countersuits, rulings by Parliament, a criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and worst of all — global opprobrium.

His estimated fortune of $9 billion will be reduced but, rest assured, he’ll never have to fly commercial. His heirs will not be forced on the county and his pie-thwarting spouse can hold on to her $5 million necklace of diamonds and emeralds. But all have been deprived of whatever status they once derived from the name of Murdoch. An appropriate end for this media mogul, you might say, especially if you believe that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. After all, it was a crusading British journalist (Nick Davies) and his white knight newspaper (the Guardian) who exposed the putrid swamp and all its monsters.

Watching Rupert Murdoch talk about his 102 year-old mother, who had advised him in 1999 not to buy the News of the World tabloid, reminded me a bit of Richard Nixon, bidding farewell to his White House staff. He, too, was busted for illegal tapes and telephone taps, and he also bleated about his mother. “She was a saint,” said the Watergate-soaked president, forced to resign the highest office in the land.

Perhaps in the end all men who scale the summit only to find a noose awaits them will cry for mama. Even the most amoral among us who no longer steer true north will scramble to find refuge in a mother’s unconditional love.

Now the former News of the World wizard will have to pay his $2,000-an-hour lawyers for the kind of solid advice his mother once offered for free. But will they be able to help him find what Dorothy was looking for: a tin man’s heart, a scarecrow’s brain and courage for a cowardly lion?

Kitty Kelley is a journalist and author, who has written several unauthorized biographies of celebrities and politicians.

Anders Behring Breivik, the far-far-right-wing monster charged in Norway with the biggest mass murder by a single gunman in modern memory, reminds me of how often delusional minds hate others for what they really see in themselves.

“The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman,” wrote historian Richard Hofstadter in his often-quoted 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” “(T)his enemy is, on many counts, the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.”

Thus the Ku Klux Klan, for example, imitated Catholicism to the point of priestly robes, elaborate rituals and elaborate hierarchy, Hofstadter wrote. The John Birch Society, the leading anti-communist zealots at the time, organized its own version of Communist Party cells and quasi-secret “front” groups.

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Today we see a similarly sly envy revealed in Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto against Muslims, immigrants, “multiculturalists” and “cultural Marxists,” according to news reports. Breivik wrote and released the manifesto on the Internet before he went on his truck-bombing, gun-wielding rampage.

By his warped reasoning, he had to protest the dangers of al-Qaida-style Muslim terrorists by committing al-Qaida-style terror against his fellow Norwegians.

He joined a Knights Templar organization and, judging by his document, thinks he still is engaged in the Christian crusades against Muslims.

His document offers detailed accounts of the crusades, according to reports, and a pronounced sense of historical grievance, plus calls for apocalyptic warfare to defeat the religious and cultural enemy.

Deep down, Breivik’s root problem appears to be a mirror-kissing narcissism so fierce and fanatical that it would drive a man to his fellow citizens in order to “save” them, in this case, from immigrants.

In the end, he has achieved quite the opposite of his stated goals. He reveals his delusional anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-multiculturalism hatreds to be no less of a menace than the Islamic extremists he claims to oppose.

For example, in his truck bomb in Oslo and machine-gun massacre of a nearby youth camp, he single-handedly killed more people than the four Islamist suicide bombers in the July 7, 2005, London attacks did — and for no better purpose.

It should bring us no comfort here in the United States that he found so much of his venom in the blogs of Americans known for their anti-Islam rhetoric and writings. Yet his case also brings attention to what Europeans could learn from America’s experiences in navigating their own debates about immigration and multiculturalism.

In fact, both the political left and right have mischaracterized Europe’s version of multiculturalism. For one thing, America’s version of multiculturalism tends to be geared toward cultural sharing, but on the way to assimilating into our great legendary American “melting pot,” which many prefer to call a “salad bowl” or “mulligan stew,” depending on how much melting they want to do.

Europe, by contrast, tends to view multiculturalism as the recognition of different enclaves of “foreign” cultures within their own cities and borders. The result is a lot less assimilation and more isolation, resentments and suspicions of racism and “reverse racism.”

Much has been said and written about Europe’s “failed experiment.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron have each declared that multiculturalism has failed. But multiculturalism in Europe has been less of an ideology than a weak patchwork of policy initiatives and hopeful-sounding rhetoric aimed at filling labor shortages with as few culture clashes as possible.

Worse, Europe’s hate-speech laws criminalize the freewheeling discussions of immigration problems, discussions that we in the U.S. consider to be rather routine, even when infuriating. Such censorship pushes people to more extreme ways to express their thoughts, just as it does in Islamic countries. We can’t blame Breivik on hate-speech laws, but such censorship only helps build tensions, not ease them.

Cultural conservatives often fret about the rise of multicultural studies here crowding out the classic work of Dead White Males and other classics of Euro-American history. But compared with our European cousins who find Enlightenment freedoms easier to praise than to practice, I think we’re doing things about right.

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune’s editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/pagespage.

cpage@tribune.com

Twitter @cptime

Now this is the kind of labor-management dispute we love.

This month, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel sent out layoff notices to as many as 625 city workers and gave labor leaders a choice: Agree to common-sense changes in work rules that would save millions of dollars or kiss those jobs goodbye.

Now city unions have fired back with a budget-cutting plan of their own, and they have delivered several solid ideas.

Chicago could be in for a race to responsibility. We’re delighted that it’s happening.

The city has a huge budget hole to fill in 2012 — more than $600 million. Filling it will require job cuts, reduced services, sacrifices all around. That will be much easier to accomplish if there is cooperation between organized labor and the Emanuel administration.

So kudos to the Coalition of Unionized Public Employees for whipping out an insightful 31-page report on how to wring efficiencies from the city budget.

The report outlines spending reforms and management job cuts with a potential savings of $242 million a year. Some of that could be wishful thinking — the labor leaders acknowledge this research was done in hurried fashion. What really matters is that this could signal a new mindset. Public-employee unions, often seen as resistant to change, have put forward a serious agenda to save taxpayers money. And they say that, given time, they can come up with more ideas.

Bring ‘em on.

The union-funded report targets much of its savings from the ranks of management. It says that, proportionally, more supervisors than front-line workers have retained their jobs in recent years. That raises the question: If there are fewer workers to supervise, why does the city need so many supervisors?

Exhibit A: The report says Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services has 203 people managing 334 people. That’s a ratio of one supervisor for 1.6 employees. That’s a far cry from the 1-in-10 ratio considered optimal. The department does important work, and the report excludes several hundred part-timers. Still: 14 deputy commissioners, four assistant commissioners, six assistants to commissioners and 17 directors sounds awfully top-heavy. In many cases, those jobs pay six-figure salaries. Cut, cut, cut.

The mayor responded Tuesday with a letter to the labor leaders that says he has eliminated 100 middle and senior management jobs and put a hiring freeze on another 175 management jobs. No doubt there are more management cuts to come. The letter to labor promises cooperation. Both sides talked eagerly Tuesday about the savings available through health care/wellness reforms.

The union report also recommends allowing city workers to bid against private vendors for public service contracts. Sometimes city workers could do the job for less, Jorge Ramirez, the Chicago Federation of Labor president, said in a meeting Tuesday with the editorial board. We strongly favor competition for these service contracts. The private sector should be allowed to bid against public employees for garbage pickup — and the unions should have the chance to wrest work away from private contractors if it can be done at less expense.

One big question is unresolved. The labor leaders haven’t conceded on the work-rule changes sought by Emanuel to close the 2011 budget gap and avoid those 625 layoffs. The work-rule changes have to happen. Every efficiency has to be in play, for this year and beyond.

The deficit is real. Closing it this year and next will take all the cuts Emanuel has proposed and all the cuts the unions have proposed — and then some. The proposals to date cover only part of the problem. The mayor and the unions are coming up with good ideas. Keep them coming.

Neither of them wants to admit that he’s at the whim of forces he can’t control. But the two congressional leaders pushing rival plans to resolve Washington’s debt-ceiling-and-deficits donnybrook surely view what happens Wednesday as a make-or-break moment for their respective strategies. By day’s end, either House Speaker John Boehner or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will walk taller — that is, unless both of them walk smaller.

How so? Republicans and Democrats generally agreed Tuesday that Wednesday will bring one of three scenarios:

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•Can Boehner persuade enough fellow Republicans and centrist Democrats to vote for his plan to cut $3 trillion in spending over 10 years, and to raise the federal debt ceiling in two phases, now and again before the 2012 election? If so, that plan just might survive a Senate vote — over Democrat Reid’s opposition — and go to President Barack Obama’s desk.

•If Boehner’s plan flops in the House, can Reid then convince a handful of Senate Republicans that he has the only still-viable plan for preventing a potential default? If so, Reid’s caucus and those few Republicans could pass his plan to cut a squishier $2.7 trillion in spending and raise the debt ceiling. His one-phase plan would get everyone — the president included — past the 2012 election without another debt-ceiling fight.

•Door Number 3: If neither Boehner nor Reid can pass his plan in his own chamber, both leaders look weak. And, far more important, the nation is no closer to whatever eventual accord will hike the debt ceiling and begin to curb future deficits.

Given the options, we prefer Boehner’s plan for two reasons:

First, its two-phase approach keeps the pressure on all the players into 2012. With voters mulling their choices of election candidates, lawmakers wouldn’t be able to hide from these issues. They would have to seriously engage entitlement program reforms, and uncomfortably explain the continuing growth of the national debt.

In his speech to the nation Monday night, Obama said Americans shouldn’t be subjected to a replay of the debt-ceiling debate next year. Why not? In the last half-century — specifically, since 1962, says the Congressional Research Service — Congress has raised the debt ceiling 74 times. On average, that’s roughly once every eight months, with no evidence of lethal fatigue to the republic. And the question of whether to raise it has never been more controversial and crucial than it is today. Bring it on. If Congress can’t achieve significant spending reductions this year, we need to go at it again next year.

Second, Boehner’s plan includes firmer spending reductions than does Reid’s. It would make cuts of $1.2 trillion over 10 years now, and immediately raise the debt limit by about $1 trillion. A bipartisan committee of Congress then would identify another $1.8 trillion in cuts. Only when lawmakers approve cuts of that magnitude next year could the debt ceiling again rise, this time by $1.6 trillion. Implementing that second phase of cuts essentially would force lawmakers to scale down the growth of entitlement programs that, without reform, are doomed to fail.

Reid’s plan, by contrast, implausibly insulates Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from reductions. Instead it leans on vague, oft-promised and rarely realized reductions in fraud and abuse. It includes $1 trillion in savings from the wind-down of military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trouble is, the Pentagon already has baked a good chunk of those savings into its budgetary expectations. You can get mighty lost in the weeds on this point, but Senate Republicans aren’t wrong to say that counting this $1 trillion in a deficit reduction plan is a gimmick.

Note anything missing from both of these plans? While Obama included another pitch for tax and other revenue increases in his Monday night speech, Boehner isn’t interested — and, more significant, Reid isn’t even trying. He has 23 Democratic seats to defend next year. He risks embarrassment if he asks his incumbents to vote for tax hikes. Talk of raising taxes has all but evaporated, at least for the moment.

Anti-debt absolutists in Boehner’s caucus were complaining Tuesday that his plan isn’t as stringent as the so-called Cut, Cap and Balance proposal they voted out of the House last week. But the Senate isn’t buying.

No, only two proposals are on the table Wednesday. Of those, Boehner’s plan is the better. We hope members of the House give it a chance to win Senate approval from supportive Republicans and some of those election-wary Democrats.

Obama threatens to veto a plan that doesn’t carry everyone past next year’s election. We doubt that he would. Given a chance to pre-empt default and cut deficits, he’s likelier to claim victory and sign the bill into law.

State budget surplus in Indiana! Enough spare cash in the coffers that the governor is handing out bonuses to state workers!

But before you load up the truck to move to Beverly (Shores, that is), you might want to look at how Gov. Mitch Daniels ended up with a $1.18 billion surplus at the end of the just-ended fiscal year.

• Eric Zorn

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“Schools are laying off teachers, libraries are closing buildings and local police and fire departments are reducing their workforces because of a lack of money,” editorialized the Merrillville-based Post-Tribune in the wake of Daniels’ announcement this month that he plans to use some of the extra cash to pay one-time “efficiency dividends” of up to $1,000 to most state workers.

“Other cuts made by the state include Family and Social Services, Medicaid, Indiana State Police, adult education, economic development agencies, the Department of Natural Resources and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, to name a few,” the paper said.

Economist Morton Marcus, an Indianapolis Business Journal columnist, added, “Our unemployed must make do with less generous payments than similar people in other states. Our schools are inadequate by most measures. Our local streets and roads are in poor-to-dismal repair. Our highway program is more than a generation behind. Ancient sewerage systems all over the state are in need of modernization. Public transit is on life support where it still exists.”

Marcus bemoaned the “slow, cancerous disfiguration of Indiana” as “the quality of our communities crumbles under the fiscal burden of a tea party mentality.”

As you might expect, Daniels’ political foes also say there’s a lot of Oz and not much Wizard in his alleged budget magic.

“In part, he used federal stimulus money and accounting tricks to come up with this surplus,” said Indiana House minority leader Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend, in a phone interview Tuesday. “Then he took money from programs for the poor, children, veterans and the unemployed while cutting corporate taxes 25 percent.”

Bauer’s office provided me a long list of particular budget trims enacted by Indiana Republicans that included a $326 million reduction in K-12 education, a $37 million reduction in higher education, a $321 million cut to social service programs, a $62 million cut to the corrections and public safety budget, $44 million from economic development and roughly $15 million from environmental protection.

This should come as no surprise. Black ink didn’t just come bubbling up through the ground in Indiana, where times have been tough, like all over. The New York Times recently reported that Indiana ranks fifth in personal bankruptcies (Illinois is 11th), state median family income is just 86 percent of that of the rest of the country, and property tax caps are walloping local governmental bodies as they try to compensate for reductions in money from Indianapolis.

Nor is each cut necessarily an outrage. The role and size of government is the front-and-center debate in the entire country right now. Some critics made a fuss over Indiana State Auditor Tim Berry’s chipper assessment that “the surplus was built on the backs of state employees,” but curbing the size of the state workforce (it hasn’t been this small since the mid-1970s) and the payroll (state workers, from whom Daniels removed the right to collectively bargain, have had only one small raise in three years) had to be part of the plan.

When I asked Gov. Daniels’ office for a response to Rep. Bauer’s accusations, a spokesman sent back a recording from a recent news conference in which a reporter asked Daniels about the criticisms.

“I’ve been trying to educate the poor fella for a long time now, and I just give up,” Daniels quipped. He then pointed to an Indianapolis Star editorial that called the spending cuts “the right choices in the face of a still-anemic economy” and charged that Bauer proved “unwilling to make tough choices on the budget” when he was speaker of the Indiana House.

John Ketzenberger, president of the non-partisan Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute, said he sees the truth lying somewhere in the middle.

“The governor is happy to talk about the Indiana miracle, and Bauer is happy to say the miracle isn’t real,” he said. “I’m here to tell you that it’s a little of both. The surplus is real. But it didn’t come without a lot of pain.”

It’s still too early to tell whether that pain will subside or grow under Indiana’s new austerity. But rather than move there, if I were you, I’d sit a spell and watch it play out.

Discuss this column at chicagotribune.com/zorn

The wait time before a sick child can see a medical specialist these days is, on average, three to six weeks, according to a study last month in the New England Journal of Medicine. For a child with diabetes symptoms, the wait is more than twice as long. This is in Cook County, home to five major academic medical centers and many teaching hospitals.

Now U.S. lawmakers suggest we save money by training fewer doctors. Proposals on the table to trim the national deficit would increase wait times by reducing the number of physicians we can train and potentially reduce access to critical but costly services, such as burn units or trauma centers. In a worst-case scenario, Illinois’ teaching hospitals stand to lose $255 million a year in graduate medical education funding, according to the Illinois Hospital Association. As many as 3,500 jobs would be lost throughout Illinois.

As dean of a major teaching hospital responsible for training the next generation of physicians, I believe the proposed budget cuts would reduce access to doctors, multiply waiting times and do lasting harm to patients in Illinois and nationwide.

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Illinois is fortunate to have 58 teaching hospitals, including five academic medical centers in or near Chicago that attract talented physicians, remarkable medical students and residents, and patients from around the world. They provide lifesaving health care. The proposed cuts would disproportionately affect teaching hospitals — which make up just 6 percent of all hospitals — slowing the production of well-trained physicians at a time when our population is aging.

Each year, more than 1,700 residents complete their training in Illinois. Half of them stay in the state to practice medicine. That’s not enough. The state’s rural communities suffer from a chronic lack of physicians. The mounting shortage of physicians nationwide is expected to grow to 90,000 by 2020. More than one-third of active physicians are over age 55 and likely to retire in the next decade. The result: Patients will wait longer to see a doctor, whether a regular visit for an annual physical or something far more urgent.

No one questions the need to rein in spending on health care or the obligation of hospitals to do their part. But we need to maintain a high level of patient care, and to make certain that our country has enough physicians in the future. Policymakers in Washington mustmaintain their support for graduate medical education and find more equitable ways to distribute the budget-cut burden.

One proposal: Spread the cuts across all providers that take care of Medicare patients — not just teaching hospitals. This would help to train a high-quality physician workforce, advance innovation and allow health care providers to continue to deliver the very best in prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease.

Dr. Kenneth S. Polonsky is dean of Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago.

There are plenty of reasons why Lenny Abramov, protagonist of Gary Shteyngart’s dystopian novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” is a loser. He’s out of shape. He dresses atrociously. His äppärät, the novel’s version of a juiced-up smartphone, is way behind the fashion curve.

But what truly marks him as a bozo is his love for books — or, as the novel calls them, “bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifacts.”

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“Duder, that thing smells like wet socks,” a hip youngster snorts when Abramov opens a volume of Chekhov stories on a trans-Atlantic flight.

I thought of poor Lenny the other day when I heard that Borders, that onetime colossus of bookselling, was going out of business. It was no surprise: The ailing chain closed about 200 stores a few months ago, and the surviving locations I visited grew rather threadbare, as if readying themselves for oblivion.

The cause of death, many experts said, was the Internet. Borders simply couldn’t hang in a digital age where paper and ink is starting to seem as popular as wet socks. Bookstores appear fated to become rarefied boutiques, the equivalent of vinyl record stores or foreign film houses, as the real action moves to the cloud.

But if that’s it for bookstores, what about the book itself? Is it also going to be supplanted by its virtual cousin, and if so, should anyone care?

My guess is that printed books are here to stay, and the reason goes beyond simple nostalgia. It’s because reading on paper is fundamentally different — and, I think, superior — to reading in an electronic format.

I realized this after I got a Kindle a few months ago. It’s a good device — love that built-in dictionary — but it imposes a tyrannical inflexibility on the act of reading.

If you want to go backward to refresh your memory about a character or jump ahead to consult the endnotes, you either endure an annoying bout of button-mashing or give up. That can make reading anything more complicated than an airport thriller a frustrating experience.

Alex Thayer, a University of Washington doctoral student in human-centered design and engineering, has studied Kindle use among academics. He found that it was great for “receptive reading” (going from start to finish in a straight and superficial line), but not so hot for “responsive reading” (interacting more deeply with the text to build or modify knowledge).

The Kindle also appeared to inhibit a process called “cognitive mapping,” where the brain relies on cues such as dog-eared pages or a passage’s actual location in a book — say, roughly a third of the way through — to help store and recall information. When a book is nothing but scrolling lines of text, he said, those cues disappear.

Thayer said some people in his study became so frustrated with their Kindles that they spent their own money on paper copies of texts they had received for free electronically.

“E-readers right now are not designed to support the work that academic people do as they read,” he said.

For those of us who read for pleasure and self-improvement, other research suggests that the imperfections of paper and ink might make reading a more contemplative act.

Jonah Lehrer, a blogger for Wired.com, summarizes it this way: Literate adults do most of our reading almost automatically, without much thought. But experiments have shown that the brain’s dorsal pathway, which forces us to pay attention to the words before us, activates when we encounter something unusual, such as an inky smear.

“I worry that, before long, we’ll become so used to the mindless clarity of e-ink — to these screens that keep on getting better — that the technology will feed back onto the content, making us less willing to endure harder texts,” he writes. “We’ll forget what it’s like to flex those dorsal muscles, to consciously decipher a literate clause. And that would be a shame, because not every sentence should be easy to read.”

Even if technology addresses these concerns, dedicated e-readers seem likely to give way to tablet computers like the iPad, which can do a lot more than display text (even Amazon, which has stoutly defended the Kindle’s book-centric design, is reportedly developing a tablet). How many of us will hang in there with “War and Peace” when, with the swipe of a finger, we can be hurling Angry Birds instead?

No, we’ll always have a use for bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifacts. Their two covers impose order on a chaotic universe of information, and that’s something that will grow only more valuable in our data-soaked future.

The Internet might have killed Borders. But it won’t kill books.

jkeilman@tribune.comTwitter @jkeilman