Half Changed World

I was working in the kitchen and listening to the convention coverage on the radio, but when it  was time for Clinton’s speech, I went to watch it on TV.  D popped out of his room (I had put him to bed an hour earlier) and asked if he could watch it with me.  I had already promised he could stay up tomorrow to watch Obama’s speech, and he doesn’t need to be up early tomorrow morning, so I said ok.

So we sat down to watch and after a few minutes the questions start:

• Where are the soldiers again?
• Why did you say that "we’re in Iraq"? (I meant the U.S.; he interpreted it as him and me.)
• Is Iraq in America?
• Why are American soldiers in Iraq? [I try to answer in a way that gives my opinion, but acknowledges that there’s disagreement about this.]
• Why can’t we just leave?
• Someone said that the reason we can’t leave is that they might follow us.  Daddy said that our army is too strong and they can’t do that.  Is that right? [I say yes, our army is the strongest in the world.  But then I try to explain about terrorism, and September 11…  He’s seen The Sphere and knew that buildings fell down, but I believe this is the first time he’s understood that it was intentional.]
• Did the people who flew the airplanes die as well?
• Good.  I think they deserved to die.  Do you think so?
• [Looking at the cat…]  How do they move their tails?
• But where do the tails come from?
• What’s "evolve"?
• Do you know about the birds that sit on top of sand iguanas?
• [I unpause the TiVo and try to watch some more of the speech.]
• Why do the parents have to die so their children can be ok?  [I explain that "starve" doesn’t really mean that the parents died.]
• Why do needs have to depend on money?

Today’s the day that the Census Bureau issued the annual report on poverty, income, and health insurance.  The year-over-year changes from 2006 to 2007 were pretty modest — a slight growth in median family income, no statistical change in the overall poverty rate.

But the big story is how little most people benefited from the economic growth of the Bush years — as my colleagues at EPI point out,  median income is still not back up to where it was in 2000.  And I don’t think there’s anyone who doubts that the income and poverty numbers are going to look significantly worse in 2008.

Moreover, as Cheryl at DemoMemo notes, the only reason that median family income rose from 2006 to 2007 is because of the increased income of household heads aged 55 or older.  And that’s because they were more likely to be working.  That’s a good thing if it’s because they’re in better health and able to keep working, not such a good thing if it’s because they can’t afford to retire.

It’s also worth noting that the only reason the number of uninsured fell is because of the increase in coverage under public programs — Medicaid, SCHIP, and Medicare.  And that’s in spite of the Bush Administration’s attempts to prevent states from expanding coverage.

I’m watching the convention with half an ear.  For some reason, I can’t get my local PBS station at the moment, and the CNN coverage is driving me nuts — I’d rather listen to the speakers than to James Carville.  They’re saying that there’s not much happening that’s of interest to the television audience, but there’s no way to tell from their coverage, since they’re not actually letting anyone hear the speakers.

I’m enjoying reading the twitters from Bitch PhD, but am not sure they’re really adding to my understanding of the convention.

Ted Kennedy looks damn good under the circumstances.  He’s far less jowly than my image of him — don’t know if he’s lost weight or what.

I read the draft Democratic Party platform earlier today. In some ways platforms are always fairly meaningless documents — they’re written by committee, and include something for everyone, so they don’t tell you anything about what the real priorities will be when the rubber hits the road.  But, as laundry lists go, it’s a fine one.

I don’t have much to say about the choice of Biden as VP.  I don’t think he changes the dynamics of the race much.  He’s got good foreign policy credentials.  NPR this evening had a long piece about whether his support for the awful bankruptcy bill was because the credit card companies are major constituents or because they’re major donors.  I’m not sure the distinction is meaningful.  It’s the same problem as Schumer’s support of tax loopholes for hedge funds.  Fred at Stone Court says that Biden was particularly disrespectful to Elizabeth Warren during the debate.

The Republican candidate for Congress in this district just ran an ad that says he’s the one to support for "real change" in Washington.  Choke.

Michelle did a good job.    T. walked in during the "ice cream" part of the speech and we both went "awww…"  If you’ve already read Dreams from my Father, there’s not that much new in her description of Barack, though.

Gaak.  CNN has been going on about Carville’s complaints that there wasn’t enough "red meat" in the evening, but they just admitted that they didn’t cover Pelosi’s speech which did get people in the convention hall rared up.  Why?  Because they were talking with Carville!!

From the interviews with Rick Warren last weekend:

Obama:

Q. Okay. Taxes. This is a real simple
question. Define rich. I mean, give me a
number. Is it 50,000, 100,000,
200,000? Everybody keeps talking about
well, here we’re going to tax. How do
you define that?

A. You know, if you’ve got book sales of 25
million and you qualify —

Q. Okay. All right. I’m not asking about
me.

A. Look, here is how I think of it. Here is how I think of it and this is
reflected in my tax plan. If you are
making $150,000 a year or less as a family, then are you middle class or you
may be poor. But $150[000] down, you are
basically middle class. Obviously it
depends on region where you are living.

McCain:

Q Define rich. Everybody talks
about, you know, taxing the rich and — but not the poor, the middle class. At what point — give me a number, give me a
specific number, where do you move from middle class to rich? Is it 100,000, is it 50,000, 200,000? How does anybody know if we don’t know what
the standards are?

A Some of the richest people I’ve ever known
in my life are the most unhappy. I think
that rich is — should be defined by a home, a good job and education and the
ability to hand to our children a more prosperous and safer world than the one
that we inherited. I don’t want to take
any money from the rich. I want
everybody to get rich. I don’t believe
in class warfare or redistribution of the wealth. But I can tell you for example there are
small businessmen and women who are working 16 hours a day, seven days a week
that some people would classify as, quote, rich, my friends, who want to raise
their taxes and raise their payroll taxes…

So
I think if you’re just talking about income, how about five million. So — but seriously, I don’t think you can —
I don’t think, seriously that — the point is that I’m trying to make here
seriously — and I’m sure that comment will be distorted, but the point is —
the point is — the point is that we want to keep people’s taxes low and
increase revenues.

From a recent Pew survey:

2 percent described themselves as "upper class"

19 percent described themselves as "upper-middle class"

53 percent described themselves as "middle class"

19 percent described themselves as "lower-middle class"

6 percent described themselves as "lower class"

1 percent didn’t know or refused to answer.

Back from vacation.  Had a good time, but could use a vacation from my vacation.  For a week, I was on my own with the kids.  The program I was at had children’s activities during the day, and evening babysitting, but that still left me with maybe 6 hours a day with the boys. 

The main issue is that there were a lot of kids who were a few years older than D, whose parents gave them a lot more freedom than I was willing to give D, so he was testing the limits every few minutes.  And whenever I let him do something, N wanted to do it as well, so if D wasn’t arguing with me, N was.  And neither of them quite got the concept that I’d want to have a conversation with other adults over meals.

D also desperately wanted to play with the older kids, especially when they broke out pokemon cards and a portable game machine, but mostly they saw him as a "little kid" and weren’t interested.  It did help a little when I borrowed Munchkin Fu from someone who was attending, and he was able to demonstrate his ability to play complicated games.

It made me realize that D has a lot more experience playing with younger kids than with older ones.  I had D when I was 29, so few of my friends have older children, and mothers groups tend to attract parents of younger children more than school-age kids.

In the end, the answer that he comes to is imperfect, and yeah
maybe something of a gimmick.  You can hear a lot of back and forth
about it on fansites if you go looking.  But you won’t hear it here:
The writers asked a question that, in the abstract, has no good
answer.  Heroic violence vs. respect for life … if they had an answer
that fit the bill in all times and all places, without resort to
gimmicks … well, that’d be great, but surprising.  As it is, I’m glad
just to have seen the question so well addressed. 

I’m busy getting ready to go on vacation, and the computer’s going into the shop, so don’t expect to hear from me for a couple of weeks.

I’ve got a stack of books that need to go back to the library before I head out of town, but what I’ve actually been reading is Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow.  It’s propaganda (the long lectures from the main character’s history teacher wear thin), but fun propaganda, and unfortunately only slightly beyond what’s believable.

I’ve got several long thoughtful posts that I’d like to write, but I’ve just been crashing before I get to my blogging time.  So go read the first article in the Washington Post’s series on low-wage workers, and then we can discuss.

The tomatoes I planted this year did even worse than last year.  A few of the plants just got drowned in the torrential rains shortly after I transplanted them, and the one plant that got big and healthy hasn’t produced much in the way of fruit.  I don’t really get enough sun here for tomatoes, but I can’t help myself. 

Today, we finally had a ripe tomato, and I let N pick it.  He came in with it and asked "Can we make First Tomato soup?"  This was, of course, a reference to one of the Voyage to the Bunny Planet books* by Rosemary Wells** where in the day that should have been, Claire gets to pick the first ripe tomato and her mother makes her First Tomato soup. 

I couldn’t resist a request like that, but I also didn’t want to waste one of my few homegrown tomatoes on something that could just as well be made out of store-bought tomatoes.  And I strongly suspected that neither of the boys would actually eat whatever I made.  So after a few minutes of googling, I made the simplest soup possible — tomato, olive oil, and salt, pureed together without cooking.   D refused to taste it and N had just a few bites, but T and I enjoyed it.

*In each of these books, a young bunny has a terrible day, and then the Bunny Queen takes them to the Bunny Planet, where they get to experience the day that should have been.  Each of the days gives the child what they were really missing — quiet and solitude, parental attention, warmth and affection.  The link is to a book that contains all three stories, but if you can find the out-of-print box set in a used bookstore or yard sale for less than the unreal prices being asked by Amazon sellers, I’d vote for that.  The books are larger than the classic Sendak Nutshell Library but only about half the size of a standard paperback and there’s something about the small books fitting into their own little case that is absolutely irresistible for preschoolers.

**Yes, Rosemary Wells, better known as the creator of Max and Ruby.

I gave blood this afternoon and am feeling logy, so you get another bulleted post.

Landismom posted recently about giving up cable.  It made me realize that I haven’t watched TV in months, not since the end of The Amazing Race and Heroes.  Here’s some of what I am watching, etc:

• Right now, we’ve got Spiderman 3 playing.  Boy is it lousy.

• This weekend, I finally got a chance to see 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days.   It’s painful, austere, brilliant, horrifying.  Watching it wasn’t exactly enjoyable, but it’s worth watching. 

• I’ve been listening to the podcasts of This American Life.  This week’s episode, Switched at Birth, is truly haunting.  The women in question didn’t find out about the switch until they were in their 40s.  But what makes the story absolutely bizarre is that one of the mothers realized the switch right away, but didn’t do anything about it.  This could have been just a freakshow, but the interviewer has such empathy for everyone involved that it works.

• Dr Horrible’s Sing a Long Blog is pretty funny.  Except when it’s not.  Don’t try to watch when your kids are anywhere in earshot.

• I just read The Miracle at Speedy Motors.  Fun, nothing profound.

• I started reading Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, and got about 200 pages into it (it’s 600 pages long) when it needed to go back to the library.  One of the problems is that’s just too heavy to haul back and forth on the metro every day.  So I bought it in eReader format — I figure this will be a good test of whether reading books on the Touch is really something I’d do.

Updated: Meant to ask — what am I missing by not watching TV?  Anything I should be adding to the TiVO?  (I assume I’ll watch at least some of the Olympics.)