Eugene Robinson’s column, President Obama’s Winning Streak,  in The Washington Post starts this way:

This is a radical break from journalistic convention, I realize, but today I’d like to give credit where it’s due — specifically, to President Obama. Quiet as it’s kept, he’s on a genuine winning streak.

and ends this way:

He still hasn’t walked on water, though. What’s wrong with the man?

I am going to post Vice President Joe Biden’s speech to the Democratic National Committee as soon as I can find the video on YouTube. This speech rises to the level of the best speeches that the President himself has given. Until then, Eugene Robinson’s column will have to do.

The trickle down economics of Reagan/Bush/Bush actually works, but not in the way they would want to explicitly explain.

During the years of economic boom, the RBB team kept cutting taxes and running huge deficits.  The theory was that all this money given to rich people would eventually trickle down to the poor and everyone would benefit.

During that time the labor unions were attacked and government actions kept weakening them.

Of course outsourcing jobs to developing countries also dampened the demand for increased salaries in this country.

The result of this program of attack was that the people who depended on a salary for their income did not get raises to match the cost of living.  Instead they got the right to borrow money at sometimes easy terms and sometimes not so easy (think credit cards).

Since the economy was already going at full speed ahead when the RBB economic stimulus of tax cuts was enacted, there was not much in the way of additional physical goods that could be produced to sop up this additional spending.  The rich couldn’t spend their money fast enough buying luxury goods like mansions, yachts, cars, to use up all the money they were getting.

Rather than park this excess money under their mattresses, they “invested” their money in the invention that Wall Street came up with to satisfy the need for doing something with the excess money. One of the inventions was the financial derivative.  These could be made with relative ease in almost unlimited supply.

This Wall Street Ponzi scheme only needed home loans as a thin veil to cover the fact that these were phony investments.  So they made it easy for the salary earners to get loans.  They encouraged the borrowers to make up any justification that was needed to qualify for a loan so that Wall Street could package up the phony loan and sell it to investors.

As long as this Ponzi scheme could keep going, the borrowers took their borrowed money and spent it like it was a second income.  It did not dawn on them that they weren’t actually getting added income, they were only borrowing the income.  They didn’t really own the house, they were just borrowing it.

Everybody was happy.  The housing industry boomed.  Tax collections by the government even went up due to all this phony economic activity.  It didn’t go up fast enough to pay the government’s bills, but who cared?  Reagan/Bush/Bush appeared to be geniuses.

The first little glitch in the rosy scenario finally woke up some people who stopped supplying money to the Ponzi scheme.  A few people stopped giving money to Wall Street to invest in their phony derivatives.  The whole house of cards came tumbling down.

The salaried earners got the rude awakening that borrowed money is not as permanent as earned and saved money.  The wealthy even learned that all that money they got from the government in the form of tax cuts and they got from the workers as interest on the money they lent them was only on paper. Trillions of dollars of wealth disappeared over night.

The rich had to forgo a mansion or two or perhaps had one less yacht to sail on.

The workers had fewer meals to eat and no roof over their head.  They couldn’t afford the doctors and medicine so some got sick and some even died.

Now the workers yearn for the good old days of the RBB years.  What do you suppose is going to happen if they succeed in electing politicians who promise to take them back to those years?

Now for something completely different:

Moveon.org says Tell the White House:

If they appoint anyone other than Elizabeth Warren to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they will be letting down the millions of Americans who joined them in fighting for real Wall Street reform.

Whoever thought that there would be an article like New York Mosque Debate Splits GOP.

Below is a collection of selected paragraphs from the article.  This selection is not entirely representative of the whole thrust of the article.

Norquist, whose wife is Muslim, has emerged as the most outspoken foe of politicizing the mosque issue.

In New Jersey, GOP Gov. Chris Christie warned Tuesday against politicizing the mosque dispute and tarnishing “all of Islam” with fears of terrorism.

“In the long term, there are reputational issues for the Republicans that could make it very tough to compete, particularly at the national level, given the changing demographics of the country,” said Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush.

Gerson backed Obama’s initial remarks on the topic, saying that a president had no other choice but to take a stand.

“I have spent time in the West Wing and know what it is like for a president who has Muslim citizens, has armed forces at his command and has Muslim soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq who are fighting at our side against Islamic radicalism” to oppose construction of a mosque, Gerson said. “A president cannot say that a holy building serving people of this faith somehow desecrates Manhattan.”

A group of prominent Arab American and Muslim Republicans circulated a letter Tuesday to top party officials, expressing concern over the language Gingrich and other notables were using in the debate.

The signers included Norquist’s wife, Samah, who served as an advisor in the George W. Bush administration; former Bush White House aide Suhail Khan; and Sherine El-Abd, president of the New Jersey Federation of Republican Women.

“While we share the desire of all in our party to be successful in the November elections, we cannot support victory at the expense of the U.S. Constitution or the Arab and Muslim community in America,” they wrote.

I can’t say it any better than what Eugene Robinson reports in his column Jefferson Would be Ashamed of Republican Mosque Panderers.

Most important, organizers have made clear that the whole point of the project is to provide a high-profile platform for mainstream, moderate Islam—and to stridently reject the warped, radical, jihadist worldview that produced the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.

“It will have a real community feel, to celebrate the pluralism in the United States, as well as in the Islamic religion,” Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said in May as she argued for permission to build the center. “It will also serve as a major platform for amplifying the silent voice of the majority of Muslims who have nothing to do with extremist ideologies. It will counter the extremist momentum.”

Actually, it will take much more than one community center to stop radical jihad in its tracks. But it’s hard to think of a better way to give extremist ideology a major boost than to demonstrate what far too many of the world’s 1 billion Muslims already believe is true: that the West rejects not just extremism but Islam itself.

“Three hundred of the victims (of the Sept. 11 attacks) were Muslim,” Khan told CNN. “We are Americans too. The 9/11 tragedy hurt everybody, including the Muslim community. We are all in this together, and together we have to fight against extremism and terrorism.”

The Commentary: 14th Amendment And Birthright Citizenship by Fannie Flono  The Charlotte Observer gives a lot of perspective on this amendment.  My thinking on the subject will be much improved now that I am aware of what has gone into making and keeping this amendment.

Still, there is a history in this country of attempts to exclude people born in this country from birthright citizenship. In that sense, the current hoopla, spawned this time by illegal immigration and unacknowledged xenophobia, has tentacles that go back almost as far as the 14th Amendment itself.

As indicated in the above quote, her explanation of the history of why it was passed and the various efforts to overturn all or parts of it are very relevant to the current situation.

When I write about this controversy over the Muslim Cultural Center containing a prayer room to be built near the Ground Zero area, eventually someone asks the question about whether or not it would be OK to build a Japanese related building at Pearl Harbor.

This brings to mind my uncle, Samuel Goldblith.  I have a number of links about him on my Famous Relatives web page.  One of the links is to his biography on Wikipedia.

Here are a few key paragraphs:

While at the Philippines, Goldblith would be part of the US Army contingent involved in the Battle of the Philippines and captured by the Japanese following the Battle of Corregidor. Having been surrendered on Corregidor, Goldblith avoided the Bataan Death March and Camp O’Donnell, being sent instead to one of the Cabanatuan POW camps. In November 1942 he endured a trip aboard the “hell ship“, Nagato Maru, to Japan.

Oops, far from avoiding the death march, he survived it. See his book, Appetite for life: an autobiography. Chapter 4 is titled, “The Bataan Death March and Early Days of Captivity (April 9 – April 22, 1942)”

Upon his discharge from the US Army, Goldblith would return to MIT where he would earn his S.M. in 1947 and his Ph.D. in 1949, both in food technology. He would join the food technology faculty at MIT in 1949, rising to the rank of professor in 1959. Goldblith would serve as acting department chair following Bernard E. Proctor’s death in 1959 and remained in that position until Nevin Scrimshaw took over as department chair in 1961. Goldblith would remain as professor until 1974 when he became MIT’s director of the Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), a position he would hold until 1978. After that, Goldblith would be promoted to MIT’s vice president of resource development until 1986, then promoted again to Senior advisor to the President of MIT, where he would retire in 1992.

During his service at MIT, Goldblith led the development of food irradiation, of freeze-drying and microwave technology, all of which would prove important for the Space Race. This included Project Mercury, Project Gemini, and Project Apollo, but would later stretch to Skylab, the Space Shuttle, and even to the International Space Station.

The first graduate student that Goldblith worked with was Yiachi Aikawa from Japan. Goldblith’s work with Aikawa would both develop a lifelong friendship and allow Goldblith to heal from the emotional wounds he suffered as a POW from World War II. Aikawa would later create TechnoVenture Co., Ltd., the first venture capital firm in Japan. He was also the son of Yoshisuke Aikawa, the founder of Nissan Motors. Their relationship would lead to the opening of the MIT Japan office in 1976 as well. It would also earn Goldblith the Second Grade of the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1984 for his efforts in strengthening Japanese-American relationships, only the second non-Japanese to do so at that time.

If my uncle could do this, the least I can do is to act rationally in a situation that is much less personally threatening than the ones he faced.

This week, my Guru opined that he was unaware of any dominant society that lasted very long that was not willing to adopt and adapt ideas from many other societies with which they came in contact. Not only did the dominant societies with staying power adapt ideas, they were also officially very welcoming of the people who brought these ideas to the country.  The country made the immigrants feel like the immigrants wanted to adopt the dominant country as their home.  (Of course everything is comparative.  No place is completely one way or the other. Not all people in a country exude the official policy of the country.)

I come to the following ideas in contemplating what my Guru said to me.

The power of intolerant societies does not last long.  If our enemies are doomed by their intolerance, why would we want to join them in their doom by being intolerant back?

The ultimate payback for their unwillingness to be able to accept ideas from everyone is our continued ascendancy because we are willing to consider and adopt ideas from anyone.

In some historic periods Islam was more tolerant than European societies.  The Islamic based countries dominated at that time.  It is not clear what is cause and what is effect, but over time the Islamic societies lost both their dominance and their tolerance.

As we become more fundamentalist and less tolerant we risk following in the path of decline that the Muslim countries have followed in the last few centuries.  Is this something we should be proud of letting the intolerant push us into?

If China, India, and other up and coming societies learn the lessons that this country did in our early days, and if we forget those lessons, it should be pretty obvious who might be the dominant force in the upcoming years.

In case you don’t get my sense of humor, let me explain.  When I thought about writing this piece about what Shankerappa (known to many as Hank) said, I thought the term Guru might be an appropriate term given that Hank comes from India. He told me that several of his friends suggested he give up engineering for the more lucrative field of Guru. I am glad he stuck to engineering as a profession and only chose Guru as an avocation. Otherwise, I might not have met him.