Roberts Rule of Disorder: The Supreme Court Decides the Obamacare Subsidies Case

In King v Burwell, the Obamacare subsidies case whose decision was released today, John Roberts and five other Supreme Court justices now say that the law is not the clear and plain meaning of its text but rather is whatever the Supreme Court says it is in order to accomplish its political goal at the moment.  Everyone now truly knows that the law was written precisely as intended, to induce states to set up their own Obamacare exchanges via a big financial carrot – federal subsidies for its poorer citizens available only through a state-established exchange, not one run by the federal government.  The Obamacare law’s drafters and the Democrats who voted for it did not foresee that some states would refuse to establish exchanges.  Thus to now uphold the law as clearly written and intended would cripple the law, and so Roberts and five other justices introduce a new concept – the Roberts Rule of Disorder:  if parts of a law will cripple that law if interpreted as clearly and purposefully written, then we as Supreme Court justices can simply rewrite the law to strike out those clearly-written and clearly-intended troublesome words if that allows us to accomplish a political goal we support.

Quin Hillyer writes (link):  "With today’s Obamacare decision, John Roberts confirms that he has completely jettisoned all pretense of textualism.  He is a results-oriented judge, period, ruling on big cases based on what he thinks the policy result should be or what the political stakes are for the court itself.  He is a disgrace. That is all."

R. Balsamo

Illinois Whistles Past the Fiscal Graveyard

The state of Illinois is functionally bankrupt from humongous annual pension payments to retired former employees, most of them Democrats.  A recent Illinois Supreme Court decision has just invalidated the Illinois pension reform law, weak as it was, that helped address the financial crisis.  The basis of the court’s decision was a provision in the state constitution, inserted when the document was revised in 1970, that purportedly explicitly protects every state employee’s pension plan as of the day that employee was hired.  Note to self:  vigorously oppose any future effort to rewrite any constitution because of this issue or that, because while everyone is concentrating on the headline issues somewhere in the background insiders will be inserting language that benefits them and shafts the public overall.

Illinois is broke.  Democrats of course want to raise taxes to cover the financial hole, but that’s just been tried and didn’t work.  Illinois just had a portion of a temporary income tax hike expire.  Illinois has a flat income tax, and the increase was from 3% to 5% for individuals, a 66% hike, that ran for three or four years.  Despite bringing in a ton of additional cash, and despite the bulk of that cash going to state pension funds (I have read as much as 90%), at the end of the period of the tax hike I have read that the pension shortfall is greater than it was before the tax hike, meaning that the pension deficit is increasing faster than the additional money raised via the tax hike.  The temporary hike was supposed to make things much better, but it did not. 

The tax rate for individuals has now dropped to 3.75%, which is still higher than the 3% it was a few years ago.  The state is in, as the saying goes, deep doo doo, and of course some local units of government like the City of Chicago and the Chicago Public School System may be in even worse shape. 

Some argue that the problem started with a "rich" and ultimately unaffordable formula for determining the amount of pension, aggravated by a fair amount of Illinois-style corruption such as double and triple dipping, pension spiking, and adding many non-governmental union employees to the pension system.  The unaffordability was hidden for years by financial legerdemain, while some of the money that should have been put to the pension fund was spent elsewhere to make the politicians look better at the moment to their constituencies.  Here's one old clipping I have related to the mess:  "From 1998 through 2008, despite revenue that has gone up by many billions, [Illinois] spending has skyrocketed: per capita state expenditures after inflation have climbed almost 47% while the state population has grown only 4%."  At some point the financial chicanery could not be hidden anymore, even from the accounting firms.

Most state politicians have resisted real reform such as moving government employees off a defined benefit plan to a defined contribution plan, the kind almost all private businesses have today.  For them, "Illinois ain't ready for reform," to borrow a phrase. 

The total state and local tax burden in Illinois is on the high side as states go, and I have read the highest among the surrounding (and competing) states.  Although the income tax may be relatively low (although some states have none), local property taxes and sales taxes are relatively high.

The process some high-tax and functionally-bankrupt states are beginning to experience is conceptually similar to the downward death spiral of an old health insurance plan when, through bad underwriting and pricing, its prices become too high to attract healthy customers and at the same time drive away healthy current enrollees, leaving behind the costly sick ones as an ever increasing percentage of covered lives.  Of course, the implications, intermediate- to long-term, for the municipal bond market are the dark clouds on the horizon.  In some places like Detroit, they have already blown in.

Truly and honestly fixing this problem without changing spending would require a massive tax hike, one that would substantially harm the competitiveness of the state, whose economic growth may already be behind such neighbors as Wisconsin and Indiana, and one that would cause I think most tax-paying retirees and many businesses to flee the state.  One tough alternative so crazy it just might work:  truly and substantially cutting state spending.  But that would mean cutting spending to the core base of the Democrat Party – government workers and welfare recipients, which is not likely to happen. 

So the state slowly slouches toward bankruptcy, while tax-paying retirees and business owners set their sights on Indiana, Tennessee, or Florida.  Many have already left, and many more are sure to follow.  Illinois' financial death spiral may have already begun.

Yeats comes easily to mind:

       Turning and turning in the widening gyre

       The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
       Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
       Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
       [….]
       And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
       Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Liberal Mob Attacks Christians in Indiana While Ignoring the Real Abuse Elsewhere

The opponents of religious freedom are attacking Republican politicians in the state of Indiana for their recent passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  The attack mob is not discussing if and how this new law is any different from a federal law of the same name or such laws that exist in 19 other states.  The mob says this law permits discrimination against gays and lesbians, but its proponents say that it, like the federal law and other state laws, does not.

Ed Whelan at National Review reminds us:

H.L. Mencken famously defined puritanism as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”  Progressivism, it seems, should be defined as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be making a decision you disapprove of—and the fervent use of government power to prevent and punish such a decision.”

This attack is a tactic from the playbook of communist agitator Saul Alinsky, the spiritual mentor of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  Pick the target, freeze it, swarm it, smear it; avoid calm and reasoned discussion.  The ultimate goal is to break the will to resist the liberal political agenda.  Just as “women’s rights” activists condemn conservatives for every imagined slight while staying silent on the profound violence against and degradation of women in much of the world, “gay rights” proponents attack American conservatives relentlessly while also ignoring that same violence and degradation elsewhere.    

The electronics company Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook, a gay man, has blasted the new Indiana law.  Yet Cook’s Apple does lots of business, willingly and happily, with Muslim countries that commit violence against homosexuals.  So for Cook, is this dust up really about fair treatment of gays, real or imagined?

What’s going on here, when supposed “advocates” of rights for women and homosexuals ignore the real violence against them in the world, sometimes right here in American Muslim families (e.g., “honor killings”), and only attack American Christian conservatives?  What’s going on is yet another effort to marginalize and suppress political opponents of American liberals, generally and specifically. 

The general part is obvious.  The specific part is to attack Indiana governor Mike Pence, a smart, likeable, and accomplished Republican politician.  This over-the-top attack on Indiana tells us that Pence is seen as a significant national political threat by Democrats and so needs to be Palinized however possible.  Democrats play a long game.

R Balsamo

Peggy Noonan Strikes at Ted Cruz, But Wounds Herself; Again

The dreamily erratic, mellifluous, and oft-duped Peggy Noonan is at it again.  In 2008, she utterly destroyed whatever credibility and reputation she had with her notoriously delusional and pathetic school-girl crush on Barack Obama (how’d that work out Peggy?), that at an age when people should know better.   

In 2008 she became infatuated with a rookie senator with an almost negligible resume as an Alinskyite (i.e., radical socialist) community organizer, a part-time Illinois state politician famous for setting a world record in voting “present”, and part-time lecturer (nota bene: not professor) of one course on the 14^thAmendment and blacks at the UChicago Law School.  Obama was president (nota bene: not editor) of the Harvard Law Review, apparently a ceremonial post often used to promote diversity; he wrote nary a single word for it.  Looking at this man, she said this:  “His victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief....  He rose with guts and gifts.  He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make.”  While sensible, grounded people saw Obama for what he was based on his past actions and words, a man who never held a real job before the presidency, fake conservatives like Noonan and David Brooks (who infamously swooned over the “crease” of Obama’s pant leg) saw what they wanted to see.     

Now Noonan, not having learned to distrust her instincts, delivers a hit piece on Ted Cruz.  Noonan is the George Costanza contrary indicator here.  Cruz scares the beejessus out of liberals, socialists, fake conservatives, and go-along, get-along Republicans because he is smart, charismatic, and committed to principles of liberty rather than authoritarian big government.  She now says of Cruz in the Wall Street Journal in a post titled “The Too Smooth Cruz”:  “He is 44 and a first-term senator. He entered the national stage less than three years ago, though it seems like longer because he made himself so famous so fast.  He talks about Reagan, but Reagan in 1980 had been a union president, two-term governor of a huge state, candidate for the GOP nomination in 1976, and longtime leader of modern conservatism. He had been an executive; he had run things; his accomplishments could be measured.”

Though Noonan was enthralled with Obama in 2008 despite a wafer-thin resume, now the following apparently doesn’t count for Cruz, who actually has done lots of stuff at ages when Obama was smoking dope with his choom gang, working as a “community organizer” for a socialist organization, and flitting around the Illinois statehouse avoiding a voting record: 

·        Editor – a working, productive editor – of the Harvard Law Review, unlike Obama’s ceremonial affirmative-action post of “president”.

·        Clerk to the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

·        Solicitor General of the State of Texas, where he argued and won cases before the US Supreme Court.

·        Associate Deputy Attorney General in the U.S. Justice Department.

·        Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

·        Real-world experience in the private practice of law.

I’d say Cruz stacks up a world better than Barack Obama did then, and does now.

R Balsamo

Barack Obama on Religious Identification

I say that I am a Christian, so everyone must accept that and proclaim agreement with that if asked (this especially goes for Republicans): Barack Obama.

Despite the fact that thousands of men, women, and imams of the murderous, terrorist Islamic State movement say they are good Muslims, and claim to be acting in accordance with the directives of the Muslim faith, I, Barack Obama, a Christian, proclaim that in no way are these people Muslim, regardless of what they say they are: Barack Obama.

Ted Cruz Running

 

Senator Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz, the first Hispanic to serve as a U.S. senator from Texas, announced today that he is running for the Republican nomination for the 2016 Presidential election.  Cruz’s father is Cuban and his mother is of mixed Irish and Italian ancestry, despite which, Cruz jokes, he “somehow ended up Southern Baptist."

Per Wikipedia, Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.  At Harvard he was a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review and a named Fellow in Law and Economics.  After law school, Cruz served as a law clerk to a judge of the Fourth Circuit US Court of Appeals and then for Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court William Rehnquist.  Cruz was the first Hispanic to clerk for a Chief Justice of the United States.

Besides some years as an attorney in private practice, Cruz served as the Solicitor General of Texas for five years, the youngest and longest-serving in the history of that office.  In the Senate, Cruz has been a tireless advocate for individual liberty, Constitutionalism, and the impartial rule of law.  He also has been a fierce critic of the depredations of Barack Obama and his lieutenants on the integrity of the American system of government.   

Cruz is a strong and articulate advocate for his principles, and so is feared politically by liberals (and some Republicans-in-Name-Only) who thus smear him endlessly in ways large and small.  One example of the latter: just today National Public Radio, the ultra-liberal radio network largely funded by the American taxpayers, referred to Cruz as a “white Hispanic”, a term recently coined by the extremely-liberal New York Times to mean, in liberal dog-whistle terms, that somehow he’s not an authentic Hispanic.  Liberals have yet to refer to Barack Obama as a white African-American.  Unlike the milquetoast Mitt Romney, a good man but timid politically, and the feckless John McCain, who suffers from Stockholm Syndrome, Cruz will be a strong candidate.  I’m looking forward to his race.   

R Balsamo

Obama: Mission Unaccomplished Against Muslim Terror

“Thanks to sacrifice and service of our brave men and women in uniform, the war in Iraq is over, the war in Afghanistan is winding down, al Qaeda has been decimated, Osama bin Laden is dead.” –President Obama, November 1, 2012

“This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.” –President Obama, September 10, 2014

“The United States has evacuated its remaining personnel, including about 100 special operations forces, from Yemen because of the deteriorating security situation there, U.S. officials said on Saturday. The U.S. pullout…  marked a further setback in U.S. counterterrorism efforts against a powerful al Qaeda branch in the country.” –Reuters, March 21, 2015

Thanks to Max Boot at Commentary

Reflections on Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway at age 24

A trip late last summer into Northern Michigan’s Hemingway country rekindled an old interest of mine in his life story.  I grew up not far from his hometown of Oak Park in suburban Chicago, and his boyhood there was of course well-known in the area.  As a boy, Hemingway fished and hunted in the “prairie” west of the Des Plaines River near his home; years later houses were built on that land and I grew up in one of them.  My interest has been not so much in his fiction but rather in his person, why he wrote and how he wrote about his life's adventures.  It has always struck me that his public persona of the great adventurer, full of vim and at times reckless vigor, was at odds with the themes of death and violence that he so often employed.  I wanted to know more about him, to see whether this was true.  And that terse writing style – perhaps I might find some insight as to why I have trouble stopping a sentence while he strained to keep one going.  Since his fiction was semi-autobiographical anyway, why not read the real stuff. 

Hemingway’s life is remarkably well documented.  He was a prodigious letter writer and many memoirs have been written by family, friends, and associates.  He saved a wealth of papers, some involving the most mundane aspects of his life.  His literary importance and the amount of personal material have led to numerous biographies.  I have been reading a bunch of material: memoirs, biographies, letters, stories.  I’ve moved through many of them simultaneously, taking each phase of his life in turn, and it has been a valuable comparative exercise.  It’s been quite interesting to see what each biographer feels is important, what he covers, and the things omitted by one that another dwells on. 

Some observations:

·       He had a most remarkable, oversized personality.  Men and women were drawn to him like flies around a bright night light.  I’ve jotted down lots of adjectives as I moved through the story of his life:  passionate, adventuresome, narcissistic, mean, kind, energetic, envious, competitive, thoughtful, bombastic, self-absorbed.  He had a commanding personality, who, as his friend the poet Archibald MacLeish once said, would suck all the oxygen out of the room when he walked in.  Friends would flock to be around him – to Northern Michigan, Chicago, Paris, Spain, Key West, Bimini, Wyoming/Idaho, Cuba – wherever he was, wherever he was going, they wanted to be there with him.  It is truly remarkable how many people, over so many years, traveled long distances to spend time with him, once there often in the company of other friends of his they had never met, forming a sort of gang in orbit around him, and typically doing something they may never have done by themselves and didn’t always particularly like – fishing and hunting.         

·       When Hemingway was in his late teens and early twenties, beginning to make his place in the world, it is remarkable how many of his close friends and associates were much older than he.  His two most important Michigan friends, the siblings Bill and Kate Smith, were four and seven years older.  As an aside, there’s reasonably suggestive evidence that he had a romantic relationship of some kind with Kate, who years later would marry the author John Dos Passos, another friend of Hemingway’s whom she met when they were both visiting him in Key West.  His first great love, the Red Cross nurse Agnes in Italy, was seven years his senior.  His first wife Hadley was eight years older, and his second wife Pauline four.  His best friend from his Red Cross ambulance experience in Italy, and with whom he roomed for a while in Chicago, was Bill Horne, a Princeton graduate eight years older.  In Paris, he socialized and corresponded with writers and artists sometimes decades older.  He was mature for his age, exciting, interesting, and interested.        

·       So how was it then that this man so full of boundless energy and adventure could be so focused on death?  When Hemingway was a teenager, his mother told him “everything you write is morbid.”  He had that strange fascination with death, suicide, and killing animals (particularly big ones) for sport.  It’s there in his writing from the beginning.  In Indian Camp, one of his earliest published stories, his alter-ego Nick Adams as a boy witnesses the terrible suffering of a woman undergoing an emergency cesarean section without anesthesia and the suicide of her nearby husband who, unable to bear her screams, slits his own throat.  The personality of the man seems so inconsistent with the themes of his writing.  Being around him in person, I imagine one would think that he was the writer of grand adventure stories. 

·       The startling number of suicides in his immediate family is well known:  besides himself, his father, his one brother, and one and possibly a second of his four sisters; and, many years later, a granddaughter.  But the number of suicides among his extended circle is also remarkable:  his third wife the writer Martha Gelhorn; his young Venetian love Adriana Ivancich; the father of his first wife Hadley; and his long-time Havana housekeeper.    

·       As an adult, Hemingway became progressively estranged from most of his family, save his sister Ursula.  When his mother died, he hadn’t seen her in 20 years, and he didn’t attend her funeral.  He had few real life-long friends.  And as with people, when he was done with a place, he moved on.  The Northern Michigan about which he wrote so passionately in his early years, which was so formative of his character, he visited just once after leaving at age 22.  From about that age as well until his death he returned to his hometown of Oak Park/Chicago only a handful of times.  When he left Key West after living there for about 10 years, he rarely returned.  His youngest son once said that Hemingway would swallow and use up places, then be done with them.  He was like that with a lot of people as well.

·        Yet he could be remarkable kind and thoughtful, sometimes to people he hardly knew.  One poignant example stands out to me:  the two touching, well-crafted letters he wrote to old Paris friends Gerald and Sara Murphy on the deaths of their two teenaged sons, one from meningitis and one from tuberculosis just a few years apart, reveal an extraordinary kindness.  The boy with TB was sick for some years, and Hemingway went out of his way to visit him, and he wrote the boy letters as well.  For recondite reasons that will be grist for generations of psychologists to come, by the tender age of 32 Hemingway was calling women not much younger than himself  “daughter,” and not long after that chose for himself the nickname “Papa.”  Imagine, say, being 40 years old and calling your 35 year-old friend Ernest Hemingway “Papa.”

·       He was a disciplined writer (and a voracious reader).  Hemingway could write anywhere; in hotel rooms, on trains, on boats.  He had to, for he was often away from his home base for many months at a time.  In 1929-1930 at one stretch he was away from Key West for 10 months, staying from days to months at a variety of locations in Europe and the States.  He was very focused on word counts – he continually mentions them in letters, often also noting how many pages he threw away.  His well-documented writing experience reveals that for him as for many great writers it was as much perspiration as inspiration. 

·       To say Hemingway was accident-prone would be an understatement.  Throughout his life, a progression of serious injuries caused by alcohol, recklessness, and just plain bad luck (such as the two airplane crashes in Africa in the early 1950s), including a staggering number of concussions, left him physically and mentally compromised by his mid-50s.  That he was a prodigious drinker and amateur boxer surely didn’t help his health any.  The courses of experimental electroshock treatments he received at the Mayo Clinic seem especially misguided and likely contributed to his mental deterioration in the months before his suicide.

Hemingway was an exciting man, a magnetic man, with great virtues and great faults.  Even if he had never written a word, it would not have been surprising if stories were written about him, he was that kind of man. 

R Balsamo

The Guess That Political Party Game – Daily Mail Edition

The ever-popular Guess That Political Party Game is back, where contestants try to name the political party of a disgraced, embarrassed, or convicted politician when his or her political party is not named in a media headline or article.  So far, everyone guessing "Democrat" has been right 99.9999% of the time!

Below is a screen shot of a part of the Daily Mail's web home page right now, where three stories about politicians are juxtaposed.  First, a "Republican congressman" is caught in a minor kerfuffle about excessive spending to decorate his office.  A problem, yes, but a minor one, and what about all the money the Clintons have spent decorating?  Not a word.  Then there's a story about "GOP" politicians "rushing to condemn."  All that intemperate rushing to judgment hotheadedness.  In both headlines, the political party is the first thing mentioned.

But then comes the really big story about the man who just resigned as the governor of Oregon after being caught up in a corruption scandal with an FBI criminal investigation heating up.  Looks like he's destroying evidence!  He's "disgraced."  Now here's something meaty!  But hmmmm, of just what political party is he a member?   No mention in the large headline, or in the caption to the photo.  One clicks through to the article.  No mention in the five point summary of the report.  One reads through the article, down past all the photos and ads.  Finally, there at the very end the "disgraced" ex-governor's political party is mentioned at last – though in an oblique way at that. 

OK now – Guess That Political Party!

It's obvious the lie that's going on here.  The Daily Mail knows that by placing the big story of the corrupt unnamed Democrat just below two negative headlines about named Republicans, it creates the impression for inattentive readers that the third story is about a Republican as well.  The Daily Mail also knows that few people will click through to start reading the article, and that even fewer will read all the way to the end where the corrupt politician's political party is finally mentioned.  By mentioning the Democrat party only at the very end, the Daily Mail can try to deflect accusations of political bias by stating that it did indeed mention the Democrat party of the politician, but by placing the mention at the very end it ensures few readers of the original headline will ever know the truth.

R Balsamo

What a Week That Was

Coming across the transom recently:

Where’s that heat just when we need it?  The fiddling with temperature data to make today look warm is the biggest science scandal ever (link; link).  More on the global warming religious movement (link).

Now just what was so bad again?  Ed Driscoll on the liberal media coming to the defense of the Brian Williams's lying at NBC News (link).

As Mark Steyn says, the future belongs to those who show up:  Italian birth rate lowest in 150 years (link).

Don’t let facts get in the way of a good hit piece:  the New York Times publishes a hit piece on Wisconsin governor Scott Walker saying he's responsible for budget cuts that occurred before he was governor (link).

So what else is new?:  Some British-hating Brits condemn their own country for the bombing of the German city of Dresden in WWII, one saying Brits were worse than the Nazis, while ignoring the massive and lengthy German bombing of Britain, to say nothing of the death camps where many millions were killed (link).

Irony Alert:  a painter of "Coexist" signs in public places was beaten by some Muslims, who apparently do not wish to coexist (link). 

Obama chokes on saying “Muslim terrorist”:  Even though the Muslim terrorists who attacked the Jewish deli in Paris said they did so because it was Jewish, Obama and his people refuse to admit that Jews were specifically targeted in the attack (link).

She chose her friends ...... poorly:  Omitted from almost all news reports is the inconvenient truth that the American girl kidnapped by the Islamic state, who was then sold as a sex slave and who later died in captivity, was a pro-Hamas-terrorist, anti-Jewish, pro-Palestinian activist whose boyfriend was Palestinian (link).   

Not a moment to lose:  David Goldman argues that Europe needs to address the Islamic terrorist swamp by making Muslims fear the state more than they fear the radicals among them (link):

Update from the Dark Ages:  The Islamic State beheads 21 Egyptian Christians specifically because they were Christian (link), yet the American President Obama of the Democrats, once a Muslim himself, calls the victims “innocents” but doesn’t mention they were killed for being Christian.  He probably thinks of it as "workplace violence," which is what he called the Ft Hood mass killing by a Muslim who had a long history of radical Islamic hate and who shouted “God is Great” in Arabic as he was shooting.

Can’t We Still Pretend It Doesn't Exist?:  A post (link) from the great Mark Steyn on the Muslim jihad in Denmark and the usual weak European response.

You can't say that!:  Roger Kimball (link) on how Swedes deny the Muslim rape culture in their country by legally suppressing any acknowledgment of it.  “George Orwell once observed that the only way to challenge totalitarianism was by having the courage to call things by their real names.  Political correctness is so dangerous because it is based on a lie and it promulgates itself by enforcing a lie on the rest of us.”  

Tosca at the Lyric Opera

Original Poster

The Lyric Opera of Chicago is now running a new production of Puccini’s Tosca, and I was fortunate to take it in the other day.  This opera has some beautiful melodies, and its first act is wonderful.  But as the story moves on the gruesomeness of its plot is revealed.  Torture, extortion for sexual favors, murder, a hanging corpse, an execution, and a suicide are all brought starkly before us.  Talk about verismo opera.  And this production’s austere set adds to the gloominess and to boot uses costumes from much later in time than the original – extra touches from a director thinking he’s improved on Puccini.

As opera plots go, this one is simple.  All the action takes place in a 24 hour period in Rome in the year 1800.  The painter Cavaradossi stumbles upon an old revolutionary comrade on the run from a jailbreak and helps him with food and a good hiding place.  But the ruthless police chief Scarpia appears and finds reason to suspect Cavaradossi of just that.  Although the painter denies all, Scarpia proceeds to torture him to see if he’s lying, and forces his inamorata Tosca, a singer, to listen.  Scarpia is clearly obsessed with Tosca – he proclaims in the Te Deum scene of the first act “Tosca, you make me forget God” – and uses her relationship with Cavaradossi to attempt a two-fer – get the information he wants and possess her as well.  When Tosca can no longer stand her lover’s screams, she reveals the truth to Scarpia.  Since she confirms that Cavaradossi has in fact aided a political enemy of the state, it is not at all clear what Tosca thinks the happy ending could be for her lover (and herself as well).  Well, it is usually a capital error to expect much logic from opera characters, so strike that thought.  Nevertheless, Tosca seems to work out a solution, and through double double-crosses the opera moves on to its dramatic conclusion.     

In program notes, the director writes that “the central message of Tosca [is] the clash between corrupt authority and the freedom of the artist....  A painter and a singer have dedicated themselves to the creation of beauty and art, but they find themselves fighting for their moral survival because of a political situation over which they have no control....”  Well, I think I understand the conceit to see artists as suffering for their art, but actually the painter is tortured because he is suspected, correctly, of hiding an escaped prisoner seen as revolutionary by the current regime (technically the Kingdom of Sicily, and soon to be, when joined by the actual island, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies).  Cavaradossi could have been a shoemaker and he would have been treated all the same.  One does not endorse his behavior in recognizing that Scarpia is not an art critic. 

Cover of the Original 1899 Libretto

It is Tosca’s music that is worth the price of admission.  Notably, there are three wonderful arias, a marvelous, emotionally fluctuating first act duet between the doomed lovers, and the powerful Te Deum first act finale.  The three lead characters are most of the show, and the performers I saw were a pleasure.  Music critic Jay Nordlinger once wrote that “the role of Tosca requires a soprano to be coquettish and tender, imperious and scalding.”  Russian soprano Tatiana Serjan was all that – a great actress with a great voice.  And she can play a scene for a comedic effect as when she commands Cavaradossi to change the eye color of the woman in his unfinished portrait from “azzurra” to the brown of her own.  The Russian baritone Evgeny Nikitin as Baron Scarpia and particularly the American tenor Brian Jagde as Mario Cavaradossi were solid in their roles. 

In the Lyric Opera Companion, Stephanie von Buchau writes that "the most memorable slur cast on opera ... is Professor Joseph Kerman's celebrated dismissal: Tosca, that shabby little shocker."  But, she writes, "Tosca, like all of Puccini's mature operas, consists of more than just a series of caloric tunes draped over a lurid story line in dubious taste.  Puccini was an artisan, and however you rate his inspiration, you have to rate his craftsmanship very near the top of the list." No argument here, but in Tosca we the audience do not develop quite the same emotional attachment to Tosca as we do, for example, with Mimi in Boheme or Cho-Cho-San in Butterfly. 

Filled with beautiful music however brutal the plot, Tosca is one of the most performed operas in the world.  Just among Puccini operas, it is more often performed than Butterfly, Turandot, and all the others save Boheme.  In the index to Opera – the Extravagant Art, Herbert Lindenberger's wide-ranging treatise on opera, there are about as many citations to Tosca as there are to all other Puccini operas combined.  Perhaps it is as simple as opera being mostly about the music.

Tosca has been a favorite at Lyric Opera.  It was featured in the company’s first season in 1954, although it may have been performed in the city earlier as there had been previous opera companies.  That first production featured Eleanor Steber as Tosca, Giuseppe Di Stefano as Cavaradossi, and Tito Gobbi as Scarpia.  Two years later Tosca was back, this time with Renata Tebaldi, Jussi Bjoerling, and Gobbi again.  In the Lyric’s first 25 seasons, Tosca was featured in 10 of them with Gobbi as Scarpia in eight.  In 1976 there was a newcomer to the role of Cavaradossi at the Lyric – Luciano Pavarotti, whose "favorite tenor and idol," according to his Wikipedia entry, was the Lyric's very first in that role, Giuseppe Di Stefano.  

 R Balsamo

Some related posts:
Il Trovatore at the Lyric Opera
The Lyric Opera at Millennium Park, 2014
La Boheme at the Lyric
Aida at the Lyric
Show Boat at the Lyric Opera

NBC News Comes Clean About 10-Year Lie. Oops.

Brian Williams, the long-time lead news anchor at the liberal NBC News and the face of its news operation, today admitted that since 2003 he has been telling an untruth about being shot down in a helicopter during the American invasion of Iraq.  Instead of being shot down, his helicopter landed safely one hour after the fighting was over.  Williams has been under pressure from army veterans who were there and have known the truth all along.

Williams was not the only NBC employee on that assignment, so many more have been involved in perpetrating this lie.  This "false story," as the liberal site Politico describes it, has been touted for over 10 years by NBC and Williams as evidence of the network's heroic news people who will go anywhere for a story.  Politico reports:  'Williams has told the story several times, including during a 2013 appearance on "The Late Show" with David Letterman.  "Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire including the one I was in, RPG and AK-47... we were only at 100 feet doing 100 forward knots," he told Letterman. "We landed very quickly and hard, and we were stuck, four birds in the middle of the desert. And we were north out ahead of the other Americans." '

Williams claims to be puzzled about how he could have mixed up landing safely and quietly with being shot down by gunfire, but vows to get to the bottom of the mystery.  In addition, Williams, who for decades has also been claiming he is an objective journalist, insists that this story is the only thing he has made up, ever, honest.  Double honest. 

R Balsamo

Descent Into Farce – Obama Sends the French a Song and a Hug To Help Fight Muslim Terrorism

John Kerry

When I saw the headline and read the first paragraph I was sure it was a spoof.  How ridiculously funny!  What clever satire!  Then that sinking feeling set in.  It was real. 

After being blasted by even ultraliberals for not sending a senior American official to the recent Paris anti-Islamic terror rally, Obama sent his buffoonish Secretary of State John Kerry to help bolster the French morale.  France needs a new backbone and a division of Marines.  So what were brought to Paris by Kerry of the Democrats, who made a name for himself during the Vietnam War by sonorously accusing American soldiers of widespread war crimes just before jetting off to Europe to meet surreptitiously with the enemy?

Well, we’ve heard about strong power, and during the Obama years about soft power, and now there’s song power.  Kerry offered a song and then gave a hug to the socialist French President Hollande.  A song and a hug.  They’re sure to help defeat Muslim fanaticism.

Osama bin Laden is said to have remarked that when people see a strong horse (presumably Islam) and a weak horse (that would be Western Culture), they are naturally drawn to the former.  I agree in principle though not in reference.  Well, now Obama has introduced a third choice – the gelded horse.  Gelded horse power. 

Well, was the song at least as rousing to the spirit as the French anthem La Marseillaise?  A song that would finally buck them up for the long struggle ahead against fanatical Muslim murderers?  Nope.  He brought in the old American liberal icon of touchy-feely treacle, James Taylor, to sing “You’ve Got a Friend,” a sappy song much loved by 13 year-old girls and saccharine enough to induce a diabetic coma.  And that hug.  As a teenage girl would say – awkward!   Word is that Obama’s first choices were Barney the Purple Dinosaur and Beyonce, but they were booked, so he sent Kerry and Taylor instead.  I imagine the French muttering to themselves at this insulting display like the French police inspector in an old Inspector Clouseau movie – “I-di-ots, i-di-ots!”

A sappy song and a cringe-inducing hug.  How embarrassing and pathetic.  The Obama presidency has descended into absolute farce, not that it had far to fall. 

R Balsamo

Western Muslim Mania

My thoughts continue to drift to the problem Western civilization faces with Islam, one very much on my mind since the recent mass murders in Paris by a gang of Muslim fanatics at a magazine office and a Jewish shop.

Muslim fanatics for some time have been instigating conflict throughout this world, and Christians, Jews, and those of other faiths have been on the receiving end.  Some in the Muslim world and their apologists in the West blame the existence of Israel, but as many have said, if Israel didn’t exist as an excuse to incite their followers, Muslim rabble rousers would need to invent it.  I doubt the Muslim murdering terrorists in the Philippines or in East Timor or in India really care much about the fate of the Palestinians, whom their own Muslim neighbors seem to barely tolerate and prefer to keep segregated on Israel’s doorstep. 

Lately it seems that the more some Muslim troublemakers act up, the more some Western leaders trip over themselves to embrace and promote Islam.  Merkel, the leader of Germany, stridently marches arm and arm with the terrorist-sponsoring Muslim Brotherhood in a pro-Islam rally, and proclaims "Islam belongs to Germany."  Duke University in the United States just this week announces it will loudly broadcast across its campus the Muslim call to prayer from the tower of its, apparently former, Christian chapel.  The American politician Pelosi of the Democrats gleefully declares she will appoint a Muslim congressman, one of two now, to a Democrat party seat on the House Intelligence Committee of the United States Congress, despite his disturbing view on Islam in the West.  And the American president Obama and his disciples doggedly persist in denying the impulse to violent jihad within Islam, risibly asserting that it doesn’t exist and that any violence committed in the name of that faith is a misinterpretation of it; although they deny being Muslims themselves they assert their power to determine who is and who is not a Muslim, rather than leaving that theological point to those of the Muslim faith themselves.            

Winston Churchill said over one hundred years ago that although individual Muslims may show splendid qualities there is no stronger retrograde force in the world than Islam.  Its subjugation of women, promotion of violent jihad, killing of apostates and homosexuals, and rejection of any separation between church and state are some of its major flaws that desperately need to be changed.  As far as I can see, Western leaders are not asking Muslims to examine and reform their faith but rather are celebrating Islam the way it is now.  This simply astonishes me. 

R Balsamo

The Paris Anti-Muslim Terror Rally – Will It Be All Show and No Go? And Where’s Obama?

The big rally in Paris against Muslim terrorism was an encouraging gesture, but I have very mixed feelings about these symbolic displays, having observed from afar the many, periodic “take back the street” marches through black neighborhoods of Chicago whenever there’s a spike in the already high baseline level of murder and mayhem.  So far it’s been all for show – politicians use them to distract the public from realizing nothing is being done to address the root problems.  After 50 years, the dangerous areas are little changed.  So will European leaders actually change their appeasement of radical and violent Muslims and now take concrete steps to kill Islamic terror?  I’m skeptical.  I note that prominent in the front row among the world politicians was the head of the Muslim terrorism-supporting Palestine Liberation Organization.  And the head of the French “right wing” organization, right wing in the sense that a socialist is to the right of a communist, was pointedly banned from the rally, presumably because the group was a mite too frank about Islam’s role in terrorism. 

Stateside, the American media is abuzz as to why Obama did not appear or at least send a high-ranking US official to the rally.  It seems simple – because Obama and his team deny that Muslim terrorism exists.  His public position is that all this killing is a criminal matter, by those who misuse the Muslim label but who kill despite their religion, not because of it.  Of course deep down he doesn’t really believe this nonsense.  He knows full well the violence-drenched history of Islam since its founding, and its spread through murderous conquest.  He understands the religious directive to violent jihad.  But he will not publicly admit any of this.  His posture is to deny the connection between Islam and violence.  After all, in the face of a clear example of Muslim murderous jihad in the attack on the soldiers at Ft. Hood, Obama and his people denied Islam was a factor and called it “workplace violence.”  This charade would be hilarious if not so tragic.  So why would Obama, raised a Muslim, join a march against Muslim mass murder jihad when he has denied the existence of that very thing in the United States? 

R Balsamo 

Democrat Howard Dean Decides Who Is Muslim and Who Is Not

Many European and world leaders marched in Paris today to show solidarity against barbarism as they condemned the recent brutal mass murder of a magazine’s staff by Muslim fanatics.  The American president Barack Hussein Obama, raised a Muslim but who has professed in adulthood not to be one, was a no show, for he was reportedly occupied stateside watching an important football game, perhaps hoping to squeeze in a round of golf afterwards.

Prominent American Democrat Party politician Howard Dean weighed in on events, making the assertion, not uncommonly heard among Democrats, that the murderers were not Muslims.  This came as a surprise not only to the French police and to the surviving hostages who had to listen to the blather about avenging Muhammad and to shouts of "God is great" in Arabic, but also to Muslims everywhere, some of whom celebrated the mass murder of perceived infidels by men who were lifelong Muslims and who professed to be acting in accordance with the Muslim directive for jihad.  Dr Dean, a somewhat indifferent and nominal Protestant, recent head of the national Democrat Party, and former Democrat candidate for the Presidency of the United States, believes he is empowered to decide among all the self-professed Muslims of the world exactly who is and who is not really Muslim.  Dr Dean has insisted that all Muslims are peaceful and that anyone who commits murder or mayhem is not peaceful and is therefore not a Muslim, notwithstanding any and all evidence to the contrary.  Lest anyone think Dr Dean is timid and non-judgmental in his opinions, it should be recalled that Dr Dean once said, now famously, that he “hates Republicans and everything they stand for.” 

R Balsamo

Rampaging Islam & Barack Hussein Obama

Muslim murderers some hours ago killed at least 12 people in Paris at the office of a magazine that had published satirical material critical of the excesses of Islam.  The murderers reportedly went searching for specific individuals by name.  They were heard shouting "God is great" in Arabic, the de rigueur exclamation of Muslim murderers across the globe.  They were also heard to say they were avenging Muhammad.

Not long ago, the American president Barack Hussein Obama, raised a Muslim but later a long-time follower of a radical, hateful black-supremacist pseudo-Christian preacher, said that "the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."

In a statement released today, Obama criticized the murders but made no reference whatsoever to Islam.

R Balsamo

Slaughter of the Innocents

In many Christian denominations today is Holy Innocents' Day, commemorating the massacre of all boys two years of age and under in the City of Bethlehem on orders from King Herod, who was frightened by the prophecy told to him by the Magi some time after the birth of Jesus that one of the boys would grow up to be the King of the Jews.  The story is found only in Matthew, and like some other New Testament narratives that reference a specific historical incident, such as the census ordered by Caesar Augustus (that Luke said brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem), there is some doubt this event actually occurred.  Of the four canonical Gospel writers, Matthew was the one most concerned with Old Testament prophecies, and the massacre story is thought to be the fulfillment of one of them. 

Regardless of whether the event took place as Matthew described, it has certainly inspired many artists.  One of the most striking paintings by the Venetian Tintoretto, one of my favorites, is his treatment of this story.  Slaughter of the Innocents is just one of his many large depictions of bible stories on display at the remarkable Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice.  In fact, the large two story building is so chock full of his paintings that some are displayed on the ceiling of the second floor, where mirrors and seats are provided for viewing.

In his guide to the collection, Francesco Valcanover remarks that Tintoretto's painting displays “a tragic, violently dramatic pathos created by the unrestrained tangle of forms in the cruel scene....  All the details are of epic expressive violence and some attain high points of poetic effectiveness... The individual episodes are ... amalgamated under the unifying, continuous force of radiant lights into a whole that gives off an inspiration of dramatic greatness....”
  

R Balsamo

Good Tidings of Great Joy

....And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.  And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. 

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.  And this shall be a sign unto you; You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

 

From the Gospel of Luke

 

A postcard from the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany at Ashland Avenue and Adams Street on Chicago’s Near West Side, giving times of various 1905 Christmastime worship services and celebrations.  According to Father George Lane in Chicago Churches and Synagogues, the Church was constructed in 1885 of rusticated Lake Superior limestone in the Romanesque style reminiscent of the Trinity Church in Boston, and contains “elegant woodwork and beautiful mosaics.”

R Balsamo

Patrick O’Brian at 100 – Remembering His Remarkable Aubrey-Maturin Series of Historical Fiction

Today would have been the 100^th birthday of Patrick O'Brian, author of a remarkable feat of historical fiction – a story spanning 20 and one-half books of the particular friendship and adventures of English naval captain, expert navigator, and amateur mathematician Jack Aubrey and Irish/Catalan noted physician, spy, and naturalist Stephen Maturin.  At first drawn together by their love of music, they become fast and somewhat improbable friends and serve together in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, through battles and intrigue, loves and losses, sickness and injury, and wealth and impoverishment, all while fighting the French, their allies, and their spies across the globe on both land and sea.   

O’Brian was not only a great storyteller but was as well a meticulous researcher.  The series is a treasure for its complexity of plot, depth of characterizations, and fascinating period detail about flora, fauna, food, drink, and sailing ships.  His use of authentic language and nautical terms is impressive, though it takes some getting used to (but I now know quite a bit about the weather gauge, slipping one’s anchor, and the danger of a lee shore).  And there’s plenty of history and geography, music and mores, and of course battle strategy and tactics. 

Patrick O'Brian

Humor abounds, usually subtle and dry but sometimes broad (the dog watches being curtailed and choosing the lesser of two weevils come quickly to mind).  The writing style, the depth of slowly-drawn detail, takes no small measure of perseverance at first.  In that regard the story is like a fine tawny port – strong and an acquired taste, but once hooked, exquisite and sublime. 

Fame and fortune came late to O’Brian, when he was more than half-way through the series whose first volume, Master and Commander, was published in 1969.  Living modestly and reclusively with his beloved wife, he wrote for decades in a small house in a French Catalan village on the Mediterranean coast near the Spanish border.  When he passed away in January of 2000 he was partway through the 21^st book, which has been published as-is up to the point he left off the last time at his desk, with alternating pages of a photocopy of a single hand-written page paired with a typed transcription. 

In 2003, director Peter Weir premiered a beautiful, richly-layered film which drew on a number of story elements from different parts of the series – “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.”  And of note, the handwritten manuscripts for eighteen of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, as well some first editions and other pieces from O’Brian’s body of work, were acquired by the special collections Lilly Library at Indiana University, where I was fortunate to see them all displayed at the 2008 exhibition “Blue at the Mizzen” (which is the title of the last full volume in the series).

For well over 15 years I have been enjoying this long tale; whenever I get through the last volume I just start all over at the beginning.  I always have a book going, and I find I read it sporadically in fits and starts, daily for stretches, and then maybe not at all for a few weeks while consumed by other books; but I am never very long away from the story.  If the joy has not yet been yours, by all means get the helpful lexicon and the geography guide, start at the beginning, and stick with it in the first three volumes and let O'Brian hit his stride.  As Lucky Jack Aubrey is wont to say, there is not a moment to lose.

R Balsamo