'The real tin thing'

View of Boston from Winthrop's Point Shirley in 2003. Sylvia Plath lived in Winthrop for a few years in her childhood. She later wrote about the town, a peninsula north of Boston.

"I can taste the tin of the sky —- the real tin thing.
Winter dawn is the color of metal,
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.
All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations —-
An assembly-line of cut throats, and you and I
Inching off in the gray Chevrolet, drinking the green
Poison of stilled lawns, the little clapboard gravestones,
Noiseless, on rubber wheels, on the way to the sea resort.''

-- From 'Waking in Winter,'' by Sylvia Plath

'Woodcut revolution'

"Lyell'' (woodcut), by David Whitbeck, in the show  "BIG INK: Large-Scale Prints From the Woodcut Revolution,'' at the Brickbottom Gallery, Somerville, Mass., Dec. 7-Jan. 13.

David Warsh: 50 years of the WSJ's supply-side quackery on taxes

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks triggered its ill-starred invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States finds itself engaged in a three-way contest for global influence with its old rival Russia and a surging China. Climate change is a growing threat around the world.  In response, the Republican Party is seeking a tax cut.

The heart of the undertaking is a reduction of relatively high U.S. corporate-tax rates.  That much is a measure on whose desirability experts right and left can agree. 

{Editor's note: Many large companies pay much less than the 35 percent top corporate-tax rate because of loopholes, etc. Indeed, some don't pay any taxes.}

But to compensate for revenue losses arising from various accompanying provisions in the 440-page bill (including inheritance-tax abolition, personal-income tax cuts), versions in both the House and Senate rely on an array of tax hikes and implicit spending cuts aimed squarely at the middle class.

The measure would add an estimated $1.5 trillion, or around 5 percent of its current level, to the national debt, over the course of the next decade, and, possibly, a good deal more. By the end of that time, either most tax cuts will expire, or further spending cuts will be required on virtually every government program but defense – especially Social Security and health care. The beneficiaries of the tax cut? Mainly the rich.

Martin Wolf, the respected economics columnist of the Financial Times, wrote the other day, “How, one must ask, has a party with such objectives successfully gained power?” Wolf identifies three main channels. Give disproportionate power to the wealthy. Foment animosity toward and among the less fortunate. And, first, and perhaps most important, tell a story:

"[F]ind intellectuals who argue that everybody will benefit from policies ostensibly benefiting so few. Supply-side economics, with its narrow focus on tax cuts, has been the main theory employed, because it directly justifies tax cuts for the very wealthy.''

As it happens, I have been reading George Melloan’s Free Markets Free Minds: How the Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages Shaped America (Encounter, 2017) the better to remember where the tax cut obsession came from, long ago.

Melloan, 90, retired in 2006, after 54 years at the WSJ, first as a reporter, then as a foreign correspondent, and, for well over half of that time, an editorial writer. He joined the editorial board of the paper in 1970, under the beloved Vermont Royster, and, practically alone among then-current members, survived the transition to Robert Bartley, Royster’s successor, in 1972. (Interim editor Joseph Evans had died suddenly.)

For 30 years, Melloan served as Bartley’s deputy. He was 10 years older than his boss, an in-house “anchor” to counterbalance the effects of the “sail” of the younger man’s more extravagant enthusiasms. In 1987, after Daniel Henninger was named Bartley’s official understudy, Melloan and his wife lived in Brussels, while he edited the editorial pages of the European and Asian editions of the paper.

Victors write our history – at least they try to.  Melloan relates the official version. The way he tells it, supply-side dogma devised by Robert Mundell, of Columbia University, and elaborated on by University of Chicago Graduate School of Business assistant professor Arthur Laffer, supplanted Keynesian demand-side fiscalism, at least in the minds of Bartley and editorial writer Jude Wanniski.

Mundell and Laffer may have been academics, public intellectuals, but they had ceased to be economists, inasmuch as they no longer sought to persuade other professionals of the validity of their views. They appealed directly to the public instead. (Many years later, Mundell was recognized by a Nobel Prize for work he had done in the 1950s on currencies.)

In the beginning, in the 1970s, Bartley, Wanniski, Laffer, Mundell and their confederates in the Congress – quarterback-turned-congressman candidate Jack Kemp in particular – exhibited a raffish charm in an age that otherwise took itself too seriously, an appeal whose spirit I sought to evoke last week by reprinting a piece written long ago.  Bartley related the origin story himself, in 1992, in The Seven Fat Years: and How to Do It Again, a book whose message was blunted by seven even fatter years under President Bill Clinton, who began his term by persuading Congress to raise taxes.

Bartley responded with his crusade against “Arkansas mores,” a campaign not entirely misplaced, but memorable chiefly for its no-hold-barred bitterness and perverse effects.  Bartley died in 2003, at 66, months after the invasion of Iraq, an adventure he had strongly supported.

Melloan’s plain-spoken account of a hundred years of Wall Street Journal history is a pleasing exercise in nostalgia, displaying precisely the eyes-wide-open sophistication that the corps of Midwesterners of which he was a member brought to what had been a parochial Manhattan financial daily before World War II.  His version of the foundational story of how General Motors pulled its advertising after the Detroit bureau scooped the company’s annual-model pageant, only to later meekly return to the fold, is especially good.

Omitted from Melloan’s account is most of the story of how editorial writer Lindley Clark, a monetary economist who had been among Milton Friedman’s first students at the University of Chicago, was squeezed out of the editorial page by the choice of Bartley.  Clark returned to the news pages as a columnist for several years, and, with colleagues Alfred Malabre, Jr. and Paul Blustein, conducted guerilla campaign against the editorial pages’ extravagant claims.

Nor does Friedman himself come up, except in passing.  Friedman’s record as an economic forecaster wasn’t perfect, but he was a far better guide to the action than gold-standard enthusiast Mundell.  Nor is mentioned the role of Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein in straightening out Reaganomics.  Economist Bruce Bartlett’s early advocacy is cited approvingly—but not his long-running and trenchant apostasy.

The fact is that WSJ economics has been dominated by quacks in the nearly 50 years since Bartley turned its editorial page into the nation’s principal voice of economic reform. (Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The two parties which divide the State, the Party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world since it was made…. Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities….. Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.”)

For the most part the strategy worked, though mostly not for the reasons given.  Monetary stringency, deregulation, tax simplification, trade legislation, and budgetary discipline all had far greater influence. Tax-cutting itself apparently contributed relatively little to economic growth.

Thirty-five years after the “supply-side revolution,” the WSJ has little to show for it except books by its staffers and columnists. As far as I can tell, the GOP tax bill has no significant allies, no outside endorsers, besides the Republican congressional leadership and those who will benefit from (and repay) their largesse.

Those who write the editorials seldom display signs of having gotten wise to themselves.  I’ve read those pages every day for nearly 50 years, and, with the exception of regular forays into the microeconomics of particular situations, on which they (and Holman Jenkins, in particular) remain sharp,  today the editorials seem so cautious and hamstrung by their inconsistencies as to be interesting mainly when they contradict themselves.

No amount of back-channel complaints by professional economists, much less carping by the likes of me, is going to change things.  There is, however, a solution. When Old Man Rupert Murdoch finally loosens his grip on the newspaper he bought, in 2007, to serve as his flagship, his sons should hire back Bret Stephens, 44, to replace editorial page editor Paul Gigot, 62.

Stephens quit the WSJ last spring to become a columnist for The New York Times.  For months he had become ever more critical of Donald Trump’s candidacy – and of the surprising tolerance of it shown by his fellow editorialists.  Melloan judges Stephens to have been “no longer comfortable with the Journal’s traditions.”

In fact, the WSJ’s post-Royster traditions of innovative reform have deteriorated from their peak to the point of self-parody. Stephens at one point defined conservatism as “a principled commitment to limited government, free markets, constitutional rights, equal opportunity, personal responsibility, e pluribus unum and Pax Americana.” But Stephens, at least as I read him, is no originalist.  My guess is that he would renew the newspaper’s commitment to intelligent true conservativism – that is, defending the state of things as they are.

David Warsh, an economic historian, is a longtime economics and political columnist and proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first appeared. He is also a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

A matter of latitude?

"My mind matches this understated land.
Outdoors the pencilled tree, the wind-carved drift,
Indoors the constant fire, the careful thrift
Are facts that I accept and understand....


"My outer world and inner make a pair.
But would the two be always of a kind?
Another latitude, another mind?
Or would I be New England anywhere? ''

From "New England Mind,'' by Robert Francis

His own Florida

"{A} Connecticut River Valley farmer ... was told that his farm was really in New Hampshire, instead of in Vermont as he'd always thought.  'Thank God,'' he said. 'I didn't think I could stand another of those Vermont winters.''

-- From The Connecticut River, by Evan Hill

Musical art

"Tanglewood'' (reference to famed music venue in the Berkshires), by Sorin Bica, at Fountain Street Gallery, Boston, through Dec. 17.

So how would you pay to fix damage to roads done by trucks?

Fare-collection gantry over the Massachusetts Turnpike in Newton.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

hope that Rhode Island House Republican leader and gubernatorial candidate Patricia Morgan will spell out very precisely how she would pay to fix the state’s worst-in-the-nation highway and bridge infrastructure if not through Gov. Gina Raimondo’s truck tolls. (Trucks do most of the damage to roads and bridges.)

Ms. Morgan might drive down the Northeast Corridor and note that every state has a highway toll system except Rhode Island and Connecticut,  and the Nutmeg State may well soon restore tolls on Route 95 there (what used to be called the Connecticut Turnpike). The Ocean State now levies tolls only on the Newport/Pell Bridge.

Not coincidentally all these states have better transportation infrastructures than Rhode Island.

There’s a magical-thinking wing of the GOP  that calls for lower taxes  and better infrastructure. (And don’t cut my Medicare!)

Bob Lord: The $170 billion lie in the GOP tax plan

Via OtherWords.org

House Republicans and Donald Trump are ballyhooing the wonders of their new tax plan. It’s called the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” which we’re told will mean “More Jobs, Fairer Taxes, and Bigger Paychecks.”

Hallelujah! We can see the Promised Land!

But before we pop the champagne corks, let’s double-check the sticker price: $1.5 trillion over the next decade. That’s just shy of $5,000 for every man, woman and child in America. For a nation over $20 trillion in debt, that seems pricey.

But that’s only the beginning. The deeper costs of their tax plan are so large and so obvious that the failure of Republican leaders to disclose them is, for all practical purposes, a lie.

The premise of the House plan is, in fact, a $170 billion lie.

The vast majority of these proposed cuts — some 80 percent — go to the top of the income ladder. But to sell the plan as beneficial to the middle class, Republican House leaders included a tax credit of $300 for each family member, plus a larger credit of $1,600 for kids under 17.

Without that “Family Flexibility Credit,” the House plan would be a net benefit to far fewer families. Remarkably, however, the House Republicans crafted the Family Flexibility Credit to expire after only five years — after which middle-class families with college-aged kids will see a big tax hike.

So will the break be extended? Republican leaders promise it will be. But the $170 billion cost of extending the Family Flexibility Credit through 2027 isn’t included in the stated cost of their plan.

It’s worse than just that. The repeal of the federal estate tax, which is exclusively paid by a handful of multimillionaire families, will indirectly allow ultra-wealthy Americans and their heirs to avoid tens of billions in income tax. That lost income tax revenue isn’t reflected in the stated cost of the House plan either.

Nor are the tens, perhaps hundreds, of billions in revenue that will be lost when tax lawyers develop structures to squeeze tax savings out of the new 25 percent tax rate for so-called “business income” — a big discount from the otherwise applicable top rate of nearly 40 percent.

Amendments to address the concerns of powerful interest groups will likely raise the cost further. One example: A concern raised by multinational corporations regarding an excise tax provision was addressed by the House Ways and Means Committee, increasing the cost of the plan by $60 billion.

Even regular people will make adjustments that drive up the cost of the plan.

To minimize the impact of rules reducing the tax benefits they get from charitable contributions, some will bunch several years’ worth of gifts into a single year. If they no longer get a tax benefit from paying mortgage interest, some will forgo other investments that generate taxable income to pay their mortgages down at a faster rate.

None of this is news to Republican House tax writers.

But if their plan becomes law, you can count on those same Republicans to tell us how Social Security and Medicare benefits are driving the national debt too high and must be cut. In reality, they caused the problem themselves, by lying about the costs of their huge giveaway to the rich.

And that stinks.

Bob Lord is a veteran tax lawyer who practices and blogs in Phoenix.  He’s an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Llewellyn King: Notebook --The new publishing giants; failing upwards; U.S. gastronomic capital?

When A.J. Liebling said that freedom of the press meant freedom for those who owned the presses, he spoke in a time when there were nearly 2,000 daily newspapers in the United States. Today there are fewer, and they depend on more than presses to stay in business. They depend on the indulgence of Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Freedom of the press now depends on those few companies that own the algorithms on which all publishers depend to get a wider range of readers, even while making no money off them.

The newsboys and newsgirls of yesterday delivered the papers. That is all. The news deliverers of today control the whole publishing world. They can determine success or failure and, as we are seeing, have the power to censor.

William Horsley, a retired BBC correspondent who is involved with media studies at the University of Sheffield and is vice president of the Association of European Journalists, says that the newsboys are now the publishers.

In the billions of words that have been spouted about freedom of the press here and around the globe, Horsley has identified a new and terrible reality about the freedom of the press and along with it, the freedom of ideas.

Quite simply, we now live in an era in which an algorithm buried somewhere in the secret depths of Google can do more to change what we know, think and say than any dictator has been able to achieve.

While the creators of Google, Facebook and Twitter probably did not dream of such power, such control, such hegemony, it has come to them.

The mind reels with possibilities, each more disturbing than the previous, of what would happen if any of the Internet giants fell into the hands of malicious owners or a dictator. Think of the damage if Steve Bannon, who presides over Breitbart, or some like ideologue, were at the helm of Google, Facebook or Twitter.

George Orwell, at his most pessimistic, could not have imagined the existential evil that could await us, courtesy of technology, plus a sociopath.

Dumb Luck, Sir. Dumb Luck.

A professor at Brown University congratulates me on my life choices. He implies that my peripatetic journey through the world, clutching a press card, has been because of sound choices. To which I have to respond, “My life has been one of dumb luck and failure.”

Luck, I say, because it is what determines your being at the right place at the right time. Failure, I say, because it is possible to fail upwards: I have, often.

Had my career been on an even keel, I would have finished high school, maybe gone to university and then gotten stuck in one of the early jobs, making it my “career.” As it is, I dropped out of high school, went into journalism and failed a lot.

If I had kept any of those jobs I failed at, I might have had a duller life: a jobbing writer in Africa, a news writer at ITN in London, the creator of America's first women's liberation magazine (which failed to liberate any women, but liberated all my money) in New York, an assistant editor at The Washington Post, and a trade journal reporter at McGraw-Hill.

So, Mr. Professor, I recommend that you prepare students for the success of failing upwards. Sometimes that goes for relationships and marriages. Do not bivouac too early on life’s open road.

The Gastronomic Capital of the U.S.: Is it Rhode Island?

In France, it is pretty well agreed, the area around Lyon is the gastronomic capital.

In the United States, New Orleans is mentioned. Well I have eaten many a meal in New Orleans, especially during a time when I was making a lot of speeches at conventions in New Orleans. But I have to say that good food rolls in Rhode Island. So much so that smart visitors come to Li'l Rhody on gastronomic tours, including friends of mine, who, like myself, have eaten the world over.

Now there are a few quibbles, to be sure. One big one is that there are woefully few French restaurants in the state, and the Italian influence in the restaurants is pervasive. Also I think that there could be more top-of-the line and regional Chinese restaurants, although a Uighur restaurant has just opened in Providence. Other Asian cuisines -- Korean, Indian, Thai and Japanese -- are well represented.

Still, the eating in the Ocean State leaves New Orleans with a way to go in my book.

{Editor’s Note: Rhode Island does have a few good French restaurants,  such as Chez Pascal, on Hope Street in Providence.}

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

An accounting of tribal art

From the show "Picturing History: Ledger Drawings of the Plains Indians, '' through Dec. 20, at the Fairfield {Conn.} University Art Museum, featuring the artwork of Plains Indians from the late 19th Century.

The  museum explains that the works are called ''ledger drawings" because they were drawn on accounting ledgers; no two are the same, with some drawn with graphite, others painted with watercolors.

The museum says that the drawings are practically unknown to most scholars. When they have been studied, it's usually as   historical documents, not as art. 

Going with the grain

"Up Around the Sun'' (diptych) (acrylic on wood), by Rose Olson. in her show "BRIGHT COOL and HOT,'' at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Nov. 29-Dec. 30. She paints on wooden panels patterned with natural grain, as the gallery says, "each specific to their character as a once-living tree. These patterns are as unique as fingerprints and as important to Olson as the colors she uses.''

Llewellyn King: Putin regime uses vast lie machine to try to undermine European democracies

 Putin's Kremlin -- a cesspool of corruption and brutality.

VILNIUS, Lithuania

"Fake news" in Europe is a clear-and-present danger from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

That was the message loud and clear at the annual congress of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ) in the country’s capital last week. The rubric of “fake news” covers a parcel of Russian subversion, from phony news to staged events with surrogate players and stunts, such as sending in Russians posing as skinheads to imply the presence of fascists when none are there.

To Europe – especially to those countries near or bordering Russia — the threat is most keenly felt. At the AEJ congress, speaker after speaker spoke of it not in abstract terms, but as part of a continuing struggle.

Russia is waging its war with Europe, using new tools, such as social media, but with old KGB tactics, according to Marius Laurinavicius, senior expert at the Vilnius Institute of Policy Analysis. “We are at war with Russia. It’s a different war: There are no tanks or fighters. It’s their perception, not mine,” he said.

The three Baltic nations — Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia — are under relentless attack by Russian disinformation and dirty tricks.

Whereas much of the world is indifferent to Russia’s seizing of Crimea, the insurgency in eastern Ukraine, and Russian troops in Georgia, to the Baltics, those acts are a scenario for their re-occupation.

When the Baltics were part of the Soviet Union, they suffered in ways not fully comprehended elsewhere. In Vilnius, for example, the former KGB headquarters is a museum of horror, open to the public. Here are the torture chambers and the execution cell. Those who were not killed in this building, right in the center of town, were shipped to Siberia — an incredible 300,000 Lithuanians out of a population of just under 3 million.

Putin has said that Russia is entitled to come to the aid of any Russian-speaking minority which is (he asserts) being maltreated: his rationale for invading Crimea. All three Baltic states have Russian-speaking minority populations listening to and watching Russian radio and television broadcasting ceaselessly fake news to stir them up and denigrate their host countries.

At the AEJ congress there were tales of Russian subversion across Europe, from the French and German elections to the attempted Catalonian secession from Spain. Russia has a huge apparatus for fomenting trouble in the democracies, according to Brian Whitmore of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Thousands of people working on fake news in dozens of languages, factories of lies.

Why does Russia do it? One reason is that Russia is deeply unhappy at having NATO on its borders, fanning an old Russian paranoia about the countries to its west. Another, according to Whitmore, is that “Russia is doing to the West what it believes the West is doing to it: It believes the West is trying to undermine it.”

At the AEJ congress a year ago, in Kilkenny, Ireland, the buzz was all about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and his likely impact in Europe. This year in Vilnius, less so. The big issue is Russia and how the media can deal with the Russian propaganda onslaught, sorting out the real from the fake. It is a daily challenge for Europe’s journalists: Is it a scoop or a state-sponsored lie?

Delegates heard from Laurinavicius that the Putin administration in Moscow is a kind of C-suite of corruption, built around the old KGB (where Putin was No. 2 in East Germany), mixed with the Russian Mafia and collaborating oligarchs. Taken together a potency of evil, seeking to make mischief and possibly to conquer weak and unprepared democracies by lies and fakery.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host ofWhite House Chronicle, on PBS.

Order in chaos

Mixed media work by Brenda Cirioni in her joint show with Leslie Zelamsky, "Common Sensibilities, '' at Fountain Street Gallery, Boston, through Dec. 17. The gallery says she uses "the house icon as a counterpoint to her energetic, chaotic surroundings. Cirioni's selection of materials reflects her interest in the environment, using repurposed house paint, fabric and wallpaper remnants and other debris.

Riding the rails to the slopes

Poster that can be seen in the station of the Conway Scenic Railroad. For more information about this fun organization, please hit this link.

"Despite the proximity of the hills for the Yankee rural population, it was the city people who first embraced skiing in a big way. In the winter of 1931-1932, the Boston & Maine Railroad began running a 'snow train' out of North Station in Boston up to Conway, New Hampshire, and back each Sunday.  The first run filled three cars with 197 people. By 1940 {with the Great Depression ending} the Boston Snow Train carried some 3,000 skiers. Trains then ran every Sunday out of New York, and frequently from Albany, Hartford, and Springfield, Massachusetts.''

From Mountain New England: Life Past and Present, by William F. Robinson

Tax your enemies!

View of the Bowdoin College campus, in Brunswick, Maine, from Coles Tower. Bowdoin is one of the rich  institutions that would be hit by the GOP endowment tax plan.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

The Trump regime  and its allies in Congress are trying to use the powers of the federal government to attack groups that they see as political enemies. There are numerous examples in the House and Senate tax bills, both of which measures are excessively aimed at further expanding the wealth of the very rich and their families and descendants as the current Gilded Age rolls on.Fr

One of particular interest to New Englanders is a plan by congressional Republicans to impose a 1.4 percent tax on the annual income spun off by the endowments of the about 60 schools whose endowments exceed $250,000 per student. This has put pressure on some of our region’s famous private institutions – as The Boston Globe has noted, “including Harvard, Dartmouth and a dozen other New England schools.’’

Now, I have long complained that some of these “not-for-profit’’ schools have long been run in ways that raise eyebrows, especially with  the astronomical salaries and perks  that they pay too many of their administrators.  And one wonders why so much money is spent for luxury frills such as climbing walls, gourmet food and spas.

Still, most of their endowment income is spent to pay for such traditional college functions as teaching, research, financial aid and building maintenance. And many of these institutions have international reputations that draw the brightest students, teachers and researchers, who help strengthen the U.S. economy and wider society, especially through innovation. New England, with its renowned collection of celebrated colleges and universities, has especially benefited from this sector. It bears noting that the bigger the endowment, the more money for scholarships and other forms of financial aid.

The Trump regime and some Republicans in Congress are trying to use the byzantine tax code to weaken institutions associated with the highly educated voters who often oppose the current demagogic version of the Republican Party and who believe in  such things as science.

Meanwhile, Harvard Business School Prof. Clayon Christensen predicts: "50 percent of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. will be bankrupt in 10 to 15 years." Please hit this link to read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/15/hbs-professor-half-of-us-colleges-will-be-bankrupt-in-10-to-15-years.html?__source=twitter%7Cmain

He’s right. There are too many colleges

Chris Powell: Students lose a chance to learn about a huge religion

This is the Peaceable Oak, on Route 69 in Bristol,  where Indians met to barter goods and colonists held town meetings when the nearby tavern proved too stuffy in summer. 

Last week's hostility in Bristol, Conn., to a middle school teacher's plan to have a Muslim woman visit a world history class to discuss her religion and experiences, evoked the bigoted ignorance satirized in Woody Allen's movie Love and Death.


Child: What's a Jew?

Russian Orthodox priest: You never saw a Jew? Here -- I have some sketches. There are Jews.

Child: No kidding? They all have these horns?

Priest: No, this is the Russian Jew. The German Jew has these stripes.


The school superintendent canceled the Muslim woman's visit out of concern about security, since some of the hostility was threatening. Now there is talk about calling a townwide assembly on religious diversity. But as some Islamic leaders protested, the cancellation rewarded the threats. Surely Bristol's police could have stood by during the presentation -- and the need for security would have been a good lesson in itself.

Some people in Bristol said the public schools are not the proper place for religion. But religion is a huge part of history, and no one was to have been indoctrinated by the Muslim woman's presentation. For many students her visit might have been the first time they saw a Muslim in person rather than one on television being described as a terrorist. That too would have been a good lesson.

Yes, people are committing terrorism in the name of Islam, just as people have committed terrorism in the name of most other religions. Kids need to be shown the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. 

Unfortunately many adults need to be shown too.

xxx

First Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy and the General Assembly's Democratic majority approved a new contract with the state employee unions that prevents state government from economizing with labor costs as much as it should.

Then a bipartisan majority of the legislature passed a state budget that, while not increasing taxes as much as Democrats wanted, directed the governor to find hundreds of millions of dollars in spending cuts that the legislature failed to specify.

So last week the governor did the specifying, and his cuts included social services and town aid, whereupon Democratic and Republican legislative leaders alike exploded in indignation.

A spokesman for the governor, Kelly Donnelly, shot back at the Senate Republican leader, Len Fasano, with criticism that could have been aimed at the Democratic leaders too.

"If the senator wanted to direct where these savings should come from," Donnelly said, "he could have passed statutory language with those details. He didn't do that. Rather, he took the much easier -- and much more politically safe -- route of accounting for the savings but leaving it to the governor to allocate them. ... He can still work with his colleagues to amend the budget, making specific cuts or perhaps raise taxes to avoid making these tough decisions. Until then he's just trying to have his cake and eat it too."

In fact, everybody at the Capitol is trying to have it both ways. The Democrats took care of the unions at the expense of everyone else, and then Republican and Democratic legislators alike posed as the friends of the taxpayer without taking responsibility for the cuts they required the governor to make.

Since the governor isn't seeking re-election next year, all the blame is being assigned to him when he deserves only half of it.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

 

'Palsy to the land'

"It is a universal network

Written across the sky,

Cut in swaths through the woods,

Amplified in cages

Marked 'High Voltage'. Its agitation

Planted from pole to pole

Gives palsy to the land.''

-- From "High Tension Wires,'' by the late Allan Block, of Francestown, N.H.

Does the GOP donor class care at all about America?

“The Worship of Mammon,’’ by Evelyn De Morgan.

"And for four decades, the Republican Party has shown itself to be the party of reckless budgets, runaway deficits and exploding entitlement spending. Just because the GOP donor class is willing to overlook those glaring failures in exchange for a corporate tax cut doesn’t mean other voters will be so blind. This is another Republican tax plan that helps the rich, hurts the poor, increases inequality and blows a hole in the debt. It will also lead to more GOP losses at the polls next year. To the big-money donors driving this bill, all I can say is good luck with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.''

-- From former Republican Congressman and now TV host Joe Scarborough

Not afraid of a challenge

This is Robert S. Mueller as a Marine lieutenant in 1968,  in Vietnam, at the height of the war there. Now, of course, he's the special prosecutor in the probe of the Trump circle's collusion with  the regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. He at least used to be a Republican.

Charles Pinning: On Thanksgiving, a bloody early lesson in gratitude

There I was, an eight-year-old wunderkind jumping from one round bale of barbed wire to another. They were laid on their flat end, sitting like hassocks, and as each jump landed me successfully atop the next, I triumphantly spouted, “Jolly good!”

It was Thanksgiving Day and my parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles were inside my grandparent’s farmhouse that overlooked Green End Pond in Middletown, R.I., gabbing away and enjoying drinks and savories before dinner.

About to perform yet another feat of heroic leaping I slipped and pitched forward, my open palms mashing down on the next spool and then my knees. I was stuck and disengaged myself by rolling slowly off. Blood poured from my hands and my pants bloomed red at the knees.

Fearful and crying, I staggered out of the storage building and towards the farmhouse. My older brother appeared from behind the big green tractor where he’d been sneaking a cigarette. “What happened to you?” he said, rushing up to me.

“Fell on barbed wire.”

He ran inside the house and came out with my mother, followed by my father.

Hysteria! Towels! And here we go again: rushing me up to Newport Hospital.

My father was really ticked. He’d been settled into a well-deserved highball, enjoying animated conversation with my uncles and now this.

“Why in God’s name were you jumping on barbed wire?”

My mother had a towel wrapped over my knees and I gripped another in my hands as we sped down the lane alongside the calm pond with the delicately arching branches of the weeping willow trees dipping into it. The cows lifted their heads at the sound of our bounding car.

They were gnarly gashes and Dr. Houston, Newport’s most prominent surgeon, who was having his own Thanksgiving dinner, was called in. The shine on his eyeglasses made me think of the pond and he was just as calm. My father was really putting on a show, perhaps to distance his DNA from mine, and my mother was going through her usual hypochondria hysteria. “Was the barbed wire rusty? Could he get lockjaw?” My brother told my parents: “Why don’t you go back to the farm. I’ll stay with him.”

My parents looked at Dr. Houston, who reassured them that I would be fine, and they left, with instructions for my brother to call as soon as I was ready to be picked up.

I could see that Dr. Houston was relieved they were gone and he went about his business with a relaxed precision.

He laid in stitches on my hands and my knees. It took almost an hour for the uneven flaps of skin to be sewn together, and then I was bandaged so that I couldn’t open or close my hand fully. My knees also were taped so that I couldn’t bend them. I was put in a wheelchair.

“You look tough,” said my brother, with a kind of admiration.

A nurse brought us into a lounge area and we were served Thanksgiving dinner on aqua fiberglass trays. There was turkey and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. I thought it was good. My brother had to feed me. While we were eating, we heard sirens.

Afterwards, my brother pushed me around the hallways. Back then, Newport Hospital wasn’t very large, and we soon found ourselves coming upon the emergency department. There was crying and looking inside a room, we saw a little boy on a table. He lay very still and crooked. A nurse noticed us and shut the door.

“Is he dead?” I asked my brother.

Ashen-faced he replied, “Yes.”

Back at the farm, everyone made a big fuss over me.

“We’re so grateful you’re OK,” I heard over and over. “You must be grateful too.”

“I am,” I said, thinking about the boy in the hospital. That night I told my parents about the little boy and cried. They comforted me as best they could, but what can anyone say? Inasmuch as you can, avoid hurting yourself and anyone else. Try to be helpful and enjoy it while it lasts. Amen.

Charles Pinning is a Providence-based essayist, novelist and photographer.