The Spencerian

See You Around

2013-03-21T21:18:11-04:00

by Benjamin J. Kirby

Two-plus weeks later, I'm still enjoying the time away from the blog, though I admit it has been strange. It's been strange not to write about politics every day (most days), it's been strange not to log in to Typepad every day and check out the stats.

It's also been nice. Nice to have some time to think about things in a new, different way. I digest political news in different way, too. If you don't have to blog about it, you'll consume it differently.

Mostly I miss you. This blog has been my conversation with you.

I am fascinated and awed by the multitude of ways in which I can begin that conversation again... soon.

Until then: I'll keep all of this up for a couple more months at least, just in case anyone wants to come by and re-live the magic.

Stay safe and well, friends and neighbors.

It's Such a Very Serious Thing to be a Funny Man

2013-03-07T06:00:00-05:00

by Benjamin J. Kirby

My dear young friend, whose shining wit
Sets the whole room ablaze,
Don't think yourself a "happy dog,"
For all your merry ways;
But learn to wear a sober phiz,
Be stupid if you can:
It's such a very serious thing
To be a funny man!

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

The world was easier when I was younger. Or it seemed easier. Maybe I was just naive.

There was never any in between with me. I could dislike something -- or someone -- absolutely, with a purity I took for granted. I could love something or someone in the same way. It's been a long, hard lesson, but here's the punchline: the world doesn't work that way. The things we despise aren't always exclusively wicked, and the people we love can do things we don't like.

I am starting to understand, finally, what it means to get older. It means nothing is black and white. There are no absolutes, and there are such things as mixed emotions. Children teach this valuable lesson as well. I may be furious with Emeline for something, yell at her to go to time-out, but every time I see her, my heart overflows with love.

And so it is with genuinely mixed emotions that I write the blog post that has needed writing for some time.

I am sending The Spencerian on an extended hiatus. I am not sure when it will be back, if at all.

# # # #

Before I get into why, I want to thank you -- you, and a few other people, specifically.

Without your readership this would have not been any fun at all. Over the last eight years I heard from a number of readers, and so many of you had so many nice things to say. Getting a compliment, well, it was better than money, and it truly meant everything to me.

Those emails, or re-tweets, or Facebook shares -- or whatever -- were always my second-favorite part of blogging (I'll get to my favorite part in a minute).

I managed to get more official recognition over these last eight years as well. A sincere thank you to Progress Florida, an organization doing great things, who has seen fit to bestow many, many weekly Best of the Blogs designations on my efforts.

I was listed on the Washington Post's The Fix blog as one of the nine best in Florida. Being recognized not just by this major national news organization, but by what amounted to my adopted home-town paper was one of the best moments of this blog, and I'll never forget it. By the way, they just updated their list of best state blogs, and The Spencerian didn't make the cut. I'm not particularly pleased with their Florida list, but I don't want you to think this is about being bitter. I said when nominations opened that I wouldn't be nominating myself, and I didn't. I nominated other, better blogs, and I'm sorry to see they didn't make it. They should have.

It was a big deal when Newstex syndicated this blog as well. Make no mistake: in the year-and-a-half-plus it has been syndicated, I've made something like fifteen bucks off of it. There was a bit of activity around election time last year, and that was it. Being able to say I was syndicated was a lot more valuable than the syndication itself.

I've had a couple of guest posts over the years. Anyone who cared to write words for this blog is pretty incredible, in my book. I am grateful to those folks -- like Kevin King, who wrote a post here on Mitt Romney and foreign policy, cross-posted in many other places, that went viral.

I was lucky enough to have Matt Spence contribute, and participate in our election year experiment, Into the Echo Chamber. Matt is as talented a writer, policy thinker and political mind as you're likely to find, and having him contribute was something special. I thank him for his time and his efforts, and more important, his friendship and loyalty.

Laura Jane Cohen is a close friend, and she and her family are so dear to me and my family. But Laura Jane is more than just a fantastic writer, a wonderful mother, a treasure of genuine wit and wisdom, and a great cheerleader to me and my efforts here. She has a top-shelf political mind. She is sharp, and she knows how things work, and she gets politics.

More important -- more important by a lot -- is the fact that she is my friend. I am so glad that she could write for this blog.

There are all of those wonderful people, and there are more.

But what has endured through the years is your readership. Thank you.

# # # #

Yes, I am doing this to spend more time with my family.

Now, please excuse me while I exile myself to a Tibetan monastery, never to show my face in the Western world ever again.

I hate that phrase, I truly do, but... mixed emotions, right? I hate the phrase, but that doesn't mean that it cannot, in some capacity, be true.

My problem with that particular wording is that it seems to put the burden, the onus on my family, as though they have some sort of fault to bear. They do not.

I do. I'm not quiting this to spend more time with my family. I'm setting this blog aside to try and be a better father and husband. I'm not quitting because my family needs tending -- I'm quitting beause I want us all to tend together the business of being a family.

They deserve it. I mean, inasmuch as anyone "deserves" to spend more time with me.

I would be remiss not to thank my mother, too. I sort of co-opted the name The Spencerian from something she gave me some time ago. I talked about it in the very first post I did back in January of 2005.

The truth is, I took the name because I liked it, I thought it was different, and I liked the personal connection. I never asked my mother if that was cool, I just did it, which probably wasn't cool -- so thanks, Mom.

My mother did more than lend her history to the name of this thing, which I am confident has been a family embarrassment on more than one occasion. She was the closest thing I ever had to an editor... that is to say, a much needed editor.

It pains me more than you know to go back into the archives and find an old story with some sort of glaring error. For all the bush-league errors caught and fixed -- in other words, for helping me look just a little less like an ass than I already did, thank you, Mom. For that, and more.

# # # #

I was listening to NPR the other morning, driving up 66th Street. The subject was something like transitional power in Afghanistan, followed by the impact of sequester, followed by more political news.

After about a mile and a half, I slammed my palm onto the steering wheel and screamed as loud as I could, "Fuck!" Because for as important as all of those stories really are, I could not bring myself to care. Even a little bit.

And that's awful, because there's been fighting and death in Afghanistan for a few generations now. What made it more frustrating was the fact that my email in-boxes were clogged with political solicitations from national organizations, none of which I would read or respond to. None of which I cared about, either.

What made my reaction inexcusable is the fact that I now have a son -- and a daughter -- and even the hint of the idea that they may someday be called upon to go to some far-off place like Afghanistan...

I can't do it. I cannot think of it. I will not.

And that deliberate shutting down, the shunning, really, of a whole entire piece of global and national security policy just won't do. My thought process doesn't do well with locked rooms, if you will.

There are pieces applicable locally, too. I won't bore you with the details, but increasingly it is difficult to write about local politics.

What's left? John Boehner and Barack Obama can't agree while Harry Reid dithers? I liked it better the first time when it was Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton and Tom Daschle. Sort of.

My favorite part, by the way, is the politics.

Or at least it used to be.

# ## #

I've alluded to this before, and many of you already know: writing about politics is not all that I do, or have done. I've got a blog of fiction and anecdotes that I haven't updated for some time, which is a shame, because I increasingly find that writing fiction is the stuff I really enjoy writing.

That writing takes a back seat when I have to do a blog post here. I am a believer in equal time, and I am a believer that trying different things is what keeps you going. I'd like to dedicate what little free time I do have to that kind of writing.

# # # #

That being said, I'd like to quote Jack Colton, circa 1984: "Now I ain't cheap, but I can be had."

You got a blog? Maybe it's political?

You like what you see here?

Make me an offer. Who knows, maybe we can work something out.

I cannot guarantee my mother's availability for editing services.

# # # #

I'll be out there, don't worry. I am not totally disappearing from the face of the earth. I'm on Facebook, I am on Twitter.

And I like to think I'll be back in blog form at some point. It'll probably be different -- probably won't be focused on politics, or at least not solely focused on politics.

# # # #

I don't know why Forrest chose that particular quote from Holmes to use with his class picture. The whole poem -- linked at the top -- is really pretty, well, funny. The poem is about being misunderstood, funny, but not always in the way people think, and a recognition that humor is incredibly hard.

I haven't been funny enough on this blog. I wish I could have done so many posts with a lighter heart.

I do think in a lot of ways, it was misunderstood, too -- but that's not your fault. It's mine. I took a lot of different roads and paths with this blog, lots of dead-ends. And this blog really came of age in a time when lists of LOL cats, GIFs, and 140-character tweets now dominate the conversation. Lord, who wants to read too many words?

For whatever the drawbacks, I bear sole responsibility, and I am sorry. Even when I wasn't funny enough or cutting edge enough, I hope I was right enough of the time. And even more important, I hope you had as much fun reading as I had writing.

Thank you for your kind attention.

The Obligatory Contemplative Post

2013-03-05T22:01:17-05:00

by Benjamin J. Kirby

Tonight I walked outside and looked up at the stars. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. It's cool, but not cold -- not by a far sight.

Up in Washington, they're bracing for a snowstorm. I don't know why, but whenever they get a snowstorm there, I always get nostalgic for D.C. Which is not to say I'm not frequently nostalgic for my old city, anyway -- I am.

It's true. I guess my case of Potomac Fever is incurable. And I'm mostly okay with that.

I don't think we'll get back to Washington, at least not in the foreseeable future. And that's okay, too.

I'm more and more okay with it every day. The Washington, D.C. I grew up in professionally in the 1990s is not the same place it is today. You can tell when all the restaurants change, it's true.

But you can also tell by the way they get the business of the people done... or not done, I guess. Sure, when I was there, we had the infamous government shutdowns. It was awful, and I remember being really freaked out not being able to go to work. How long would it last? What did it all mean?

Those were, more or less, anomolies, and Speaker Gingrich paid a steep political price for his antics.

Today, this is more like business as usual. The conversation used to be about the size and efficiency of government. Now it's about whether we should even have government at all.

Worse, the machinery of our government has never been more disonnected from the mechanisms of driving our economy. As the first sequester furlough notices going out -- which will hurt real Americans with real jobs -- the Dow Jones celebrates a record high.

Who are we? What does all this mean?

Who have we become?

I still have hope, but the truth is, my interest in national issues has begun to wane. Maybe it's just the depressing nature of the national conversation, such as it is. Or maybe I just have a lot going on at home. Who knows.

I am still hopeful. I hope my friends who'll get snowed in tonight can dig themselves out and get around safely tomorrow.

I hope my government can dig itself out of political stalemate, too. I'll be watching from under the stars, here in Florida.

Finally Friday Sequest-Mageddon Edition

2013-03-01T18:47:00-05:00

by Benjamin J. Kirby

Yeah, Julie? What would you suggest he do?

Welcome to Seqeuster Nation, everybody. We're all screwed, blued and tattooed, as my old bosses at the Drug Czar's office who served in the Army used to say. I've done the links a few times, now. These cuts are bad. They are draconian, and indeed they are the opposite of what we need coming out of a recession.

And yet here we are.

For whatever it's worth, I think a lot of the President's anger is well-placed. What I don't get is how a vocal minority of tea party economic and fiscal dead-enders can drive so much of the conversation. We should be having a conversation about smart -- and yes, increasing -- spending in the federal sector. We should be talking about stimulus, goosing this slow recovery along.

Instead, the crazies have everyone singing from the crazy-wild-debt sheet music. And it's nonsense, of course, as has been shown again, and again, and again.

Look, whether you like President Obama or not -- and I recognize that plenty of people on both sides of the political aisle don't -- you have to at least agree that the election of 2012 was decisive. Tea party types lost. Democrats -- mostly -- won. Shouldn't President Obama, and the Republicans in Congress who actually want to, you know, govern, be able to drive this conversation along?

# # # #

There's a lot of debate about the, well, debate on this sequester deal -- and the philosophy of spending versus a running a deficit or the national debt. I disagree with John Harwood in the New York Times:

Republicans don’t seek to grind government to a halt. But they do aim to shrink its size by an amount currently beyond their institutional power in Washington, or popular support in the country, to achieve.

That's not true. It is the sacred covenant of the modern-day Republican to "grind government to a halt." It's anti-tax lunatic Grover "Drown-government-in-the-bathtub" Norquist who wrote that gospel.

I'm not sure why Harwood is so scared to talk about what happens when there is not enough resources in government to grow the economy. The story about the fiscal collapse of Detroit -- just taken over by the State of Michigan -- is reported on right next to his piece in the Times.

If you're a mainstream journalist, why can't you just say it? The tea party crazies want no spending. None. They say so on (one of) their own websites: "Fiscal responsibility means not overspending, and not burdening our children and grandchildren with our bills." In other words, stop spending just when we need it most.

# ###

As a follow-up to yesterday's post: my prediction is no, I don't think it's going to snow here in the Tampa Bay area tomorrow.

# # # #

It's finally Friday.

Almost Friday Bold Predictions Edition

2013-02-28T21:50:36-05:00

by Benjamin J. Kirby

I've been home for two days, now. Emmy has been sick -- fever, stuffy nose. I think she's probably on the road to feeling better, but let me tell you: it's hard with Finn -- who is not sick, knock on wood -- and with her when she is sick. You don't like seeing your kids sick, sure. But it's just hard, because she doesn't want to do much, which is not like her, but she still needs attention.

Finn is at an age -- ten months, day after tomorrow -- where he needs a lot of attention himself.

So don't get me wrong: there are a lot of folks out there who have it a lot harder than I do. Single moms, single dads. Grandmothers and grandfathers who've already gone to that rodeo once before and are at it again for whatever reasons. I'm under no illusions that I have it tough, being with my kids for two days at home.

But what it means is I'm going to have stuff piled up at the office when I go in. It means a lot of catch-up.

And I won't care one little bit if Emmy is feeling better.

# # # #

So a sequester prediction, based on absolutely nothing whatsoever.

It'll happen. Tomorrow will come and go, and I'm pretty sure someone will say the sky is falling. They'll only be a little bit wrong.

These cuts are bad news, folks, and it won't take long at all for them to be felt. I've already done my post on what'll get cut if it happens. It really is bad news, gang.

The good news is, I think it'll end up a bit like the debt ceiling deal. The cuts go through and stuff starts getting shut down. Federal employees get furloughed and people start raising hell in their Congressional districts.

You'll end up with something eerily similar to the debt ceiling fight, where Speaker Boehner will need to cobble together a coalition with the reasonable Republicans in the House, and let the tea party freaks, well, freak out. Some of them have already called for his head if he allows a revenue increase and more spending (which is, of course, what is actually required as we ease out of this recession).

I suspect the worst of the cuts will get fixed legislatively, maybe through a series of bills that restore the cuts and alternately cut even deeper in other places to make up the difference or -- God help John Boehner -- raise taxes.

In the end, the political fight will be uglier than the actual band-aid(s) covering the self-inflicted sequester idiocy.

# # # #

I'm burying this prediction, because it'll probably embarrass me later (or sooner). And no, I haven't been drinking.

Charlie Crist will not run for Governor of the State of Florida.

Boom, there. I said it. God, I feel a whole lot better.

I know what you're thinking: Man, that Kirby's an idiot. Sure, maybe. That prediction is based on nothing more than a gut feeling.

My case, in short, is that I think Charlie is going to wimp out. Look, hospital grifter Governor Rick Scott may be the most unpopular governor in the country, but that doesn't mean he can't access a mountain of money to fend off his opponents.

Charlie is a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them. He knows that it'll be a huge fight -- and an ugly, protracted one at that -- if he runs against the guy who succeeded him in the Governor's Mansion. I'm not saying Charlie always goes for the easy win, but...

Well. Yes, I am.

He's not going to do it, folks. Watch and see.

And while I'm driving straight over the cliff, let me say that I don't think Alex Sink will run, either. I think she is smart enough to come to a similar conclusion as Charlie, but I also think she lost her best political advisor when Mr. McBride, her husband, died. I just don't think she has the fight.

Go ahead and pre-heat the oven for whatever it takes to cook crow. I like mine with lots of Carolina barbecue sauce.

# # # #

Alright, now for a much safer prediction: The Pinellas County Commission seat currently occupied by Commissioner Susan Latvala will not go to former Republican State Representative Peter Nehr, who had filed to run against her. Ruh-roh:

Days after he lost his bid for re-election last fall, former Rep. Peter Nehr of Palm Harbor used leftover campaign money to pay his live-in girlfriend $22,000 for "consulting," records show.

Nehr made three post-election payments to girlfriend Kim Marie, a 47-year-old acupuncturist, listing them as "consulting, editing and fundraising" expenses on his final campaign expenditure report.

Who knew that taking half-naked selfies wouldn't be the dumbest thing Peter Nehr did?

The worst part here isn't that he paid her -- paying off his live-in girlfriend is not actually illegal, wouldn't you know it, and if you're only just now realizing that lax campaign financing is a problem, you really haven't been paying attention -- it is that he apparently made up a fictitious address in the financial disclosure report. I'm no lawyer, but isn't it a crime to file false reports to the state?

Anyway, if this guy gets elected to anything else, ever, we all get what we deserve.

# # # #

It's almost Friday.

Emmy was rockin' out to this earlier. For three, she is a very good dancer. And has great taste in music.

Get To Work: The Yahoo Work From Work Debate

2013-02-27T22:35:57-05:00

by Benjamin J. Kirby

This week, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer ordered all the Yahoo employees back to the office. No more working from home.

A memo explaining the policy change, from the company’s human resources department, says face-to-face interaction among employees fosters a more collaborative culture — a hallmark of Google’s approach to its business.

In trying to get back on track, Yahoo is taking on one of the country’s biggest workplace issues: whether the ability to work from home, and other flexible arrangements, leads to greater productivity or inhibits innovation and collaboration. Across the country, companies like Aetna, Booz Allen Hamilton and Zappos.com are confronting these trade-offs as they compete to attract and retain the best employees.

I know what you're about to say: what in the hell does any of that have to do with politics and government?

Great question, actually. And the answer is: not much.

I've worked in politics and government for a long time. One thing I know for sure: with respect to workplace, government is more or less the opposite just about any technology company you could name.

I have high hopes that will change some day. What if Congress operated more like, say, Oracle. How about if the Department of Commerce was more like, say, Google. What if the Department of Health and Human Services was run like Apple. What if the Executive Office of the President worked more like Facebook.

I'm not saying how government uses technology: I mean the way government works. In many respects, it remains a very old fashioned work environment. To be fair, I was briefly at the USDA during the last year they allowed smoking in the offices. Ashtrays in offices were for more than just holding paperclips. In my very short tenure, they cut back to smoking in the hallways only.

And I know that government -- federal as well as local -- does something entirely different than what tech companies do. That is fine. But technology firms have mastered something, and every sector -- not just government -- would do wise to (finally) take a page from what you might call the Google handbook (there's a reason it's the best place in the world to work).

But back to Yahoo. I admit: I saw some value in Marissa Mayer's strict new policy. I've just finished reading Imagine, by Jonah Lehrer -- the shamed author who plagiarized bits of the book, and totally made up others.

Then there was a pretty good argument by Slate's Farhad Manjoo on the value of working from home.

The larger problem with the ban is its apparent cluelessness about how creative work occurs. Marissa Mayer is said to be a devoted office worker. Both her admirers and critics call her a workaholic, a woman who’s gotten ahead not just through talent but also by working longer hours than most other people. Yahoo is a Web and media company, a firm teeming with engineers, designers, writers, and editors—people whose work not only can be accomplished remotely, but also people who may find working at home to be a better way to get things done. This decision suggests that Mayer doesn’t understand one of the most basic ideas about managing workers—that different people work in different ways, and that some kinds of pursuits are inhibited, rather than improved, by time in the office.

Look, I take Manjoo's point -- Mayer is essentially punishing people in highly intellectual jobs that mostly can be done from home because she is trying to generate that creativity Lehrer talks about in his book (the originating New Yorker article of which Manjoo references).

What Manjoo -- and his Slate counterpart, Katie Roiphe, who more or less takes the Mayer side -- fail to mention is that Team Yahoo is pretty much getting its ass kicked by the likes of Google and Facebook and Apple and others.

Name the last big innovative, cool, new thing to come out of Yahoo.

Look, I've had my Yahoo email account for years and years, now. Almost ten years. It has done better than my Hotmail account, and though I love my Gmail account, the Yahoo account is still the one everyone knows and uses.

But there's been nothing new with it -- except the creepy avatar I created that I can't get rid of, now -- for a long, long time. It simply is what it is.

I don't wonder if there's not a happy medium, here. Maybe there can be certain days you're in the office, or better yet, certain meetings assigned a designation: red meetings mean you have to show up in person. Yellow meetings, it's your call. Green meetings, stay at home and send your robot.

Part of the problem is everyone in Silicon Valley and in the technology universe generally are all too busy trying to out-innovate one another to give this any real thought.

Now, if only there were some gigantic industry infrastructure that could take a whole concept, slow it down, and execute it with as little speed and efficiency as possible. Build it from not the highest common denominator, but the least -- ground up.

Is it me, or does this sound like a job for the Federal Government of the United States of America?