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I’m not one of life’s naysayers. This is funny, because I have a very negative attitude – or at least I often have a negative attitude – but something about the word “no” is difficult for me. This was pointed out   to me in a recent discussion about Adam’s anarchic urge to suck on electric chords and put his mouth up to electric outlets. It is I understand not uncommon in babies. Also, I have a vague memory of how, at one point when I was a small kid, I liked to bite down on a penny because I sort of liked/didn’t like the coppery taste in my mouth – it was the way liking would go to disliking and back, it was an unbalanced taste – and I also liked the way it carried a sort of electric charge to the teeth that made me cringe a bit. However, I don’t think Adam is at that point yet. Still, here he is, our eleven month old, charging at electrical outlets, and what I do is I catch him and say, oh, you thought you were going to pull a fast one. And things like that. Instead of saying no

I read the review of This Town, the supposed expose of D.C.’s indealing establishment, by Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books, and I had to laugh. Like Ezra Klein, Tomasky, a “liberal”, is offended that the book ignores, as he puts it in his last graf: “… a city where everything isn’t a game, where everyone isn’t just in it for the money and the parties, and where many thousands of people do interesting work but don’t come within a whisper of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. They shape this town, too. ” In other words, what about the crew of neoliberal policymakers and think tankers and aides who work so hard. I have to laugh. Granted some of them might not be in it just for the money – but what one really has to ask is why they are such abysmal failures. For the majority of   people in the U.S., life in 2013, in Obama’s second term, is worse on every quality of life category that counts than life was in 2000, or 2005. And life wasn’t so good th