24 is one of those television shows that has stayed on the air a year or two past its expiration date, but I decided to give the new season a shot to see if it had rediscovered how to tell a gripping story. My verdict so far: it’s pretty silly. But one scene in a recent episode caught my attention. The way cute FBI agent is interrogating a wounded terrorist in his hospital room. Mr. Bad Guy isn’t in a cooperative mood, so the way cute agent gets all Gitmo and pinches off his ventilator tube in an effort to make him talk. I wish to make two points to the show’s writers:

• Pinching off the vent tube is so amateur hour. It usually doesn’t completely cut off the air supply and it will set off alarms. Really loud alarms. Turning off the vent is much more effective. Better yet, you could have had the way cute agent simply stick her thumb over the guy’s trach stoma. It’s a method guaranteed to elicit compliance. Just ask my siblings. 
• Can I please play a terrorist in Season 8? You can make me some embittered cripple hacker who’s pissed at the government for cutting his personal assistance hours. I’ll work for scale and I’ll let you turn off my vent for real. Just as long as I get to share my interrogation scene with a way cute agent.

Ezra Klein (who, incidentally, is one of the best progressive political bloggers on the scene) points us to this terrific video of Pete Seeger and friends singing “This Land Is Your Land” at yesterday’s concert on the National Mall. Pay close attention to the lyrics. Your grade school music teacher probably would have been shocked to realize that the original song is unabashedly political.

I’ve been thinking back to Inauguration Day 2000 and how different the mood of the country was. Those of us on the left were grumpy and dour, but I think most people just didn’t care. The recount process and litigation had left both sides looking petty and small, characteristics that don’t inspire optimism or engagement. I’ve been thinking that maybe the last eight years, as awful as they were for the country and the world, provided the only possible path to this moment. I’m no believer in destiny or fate. Much of our history is shaped by accident and happenstance. If Obama had chosen a life of academia rather than politics, I might be blogging instead about the inauguration of Hillary Clinton. If Bush had been just a little more competent, Republicans might have had their enduring majority. This was one of those rare occasions when the swirl of human events created a window of opportunity. Obama just happened to be the one to open that window.

And while it’s conceivable that we could find ourselves in a continued downward spiral, I’m going to indulge in some optimism for the moment.

I stretched my geek foo muscles today and installed the Windows 7 beta on my computer. It’s surprisingly stable and polished for a beta. I like the user interface enhancements, such as being able to look at thumbnail previews of the programs on your taskbar. The eye candy (transparent windows, dissolving dialog boxes) are nice and now Windows XP feels a little kludgy in comparison. The only catch is that the word prediction function on my keyboard doesn’t work, but that’s why they call it a “beta”.

I liked it enough that I’ll probably spring for the final version once it’s released. In the meantime, I can take satisfaction that I got it to run without blowing up my system. If the economy ever robs me of my policy gig, I still might have a future in computer maintenance and repair.

Here’s a rundown of the disability-related provisions contained in the proposed stimulus bill that was unveiled today. This information comes from the summary released by the House leadership:

• IDEA Special Education: $13 billion for formula grants to increase the federal share of special education costs and prevent these mandatory costs from forcing states to cut other areas of education.
• IDEA Infants and Families: $600 million for formula grants to help states serve children with disabilities age 2 and younger.
• Vocational Rehabilitation State Grants: $500 million for state formula grants for construction and rehabilitation of facilities to help persons with disabilities prepare for gainful employment.
• Payments to Disabled and Elderly: $4.2 billion to help 7.5 million low-income disabled and elderly individuals with rising costs by providing an additional SSI payment in 2009 equal to the average monthly federal payment under the program (approximately $450 for an individual and $630 for a couple). This one-time payment will serve as an immediate economic stimulus as half of SSI recipients have no other form of income and the other half average outside income of less than $450 per month.
• Social Security Administration Disability Backlog and Claims Processing: $500 million to help the Social Security Administration process a steep rise in disability and retirement claims, getting people their benefits faster, and preventing existing backlogs from getting worse. Within this total, $40 million will help SSI upgrade health information technology.
• Centers for Independent Living: $200 million for state formula grants to help individuals with disabilities continue to live in their communities.

The disability community may also find other provisions interesting, such as the $87 billion to shore up Medicaid and the $6 billion to improve broadband access in rural and underserved areas. These details will almost certainly change in the course of subsequent negotiations, but I would be surprised if the final bill didn’t include these items in one form or another.

A lot of us who have grown up in the Midwest have probably known someone like Walt Kowalski, the gruff protagonist of Gran Torino. He was the blue-collar retiree who lived down the street; the one who was always working in his garage and had a tendency to drink too many beers at the summer block party. He was the guy your parents avoided after he told one too many racist jokes while holding court on his front porch. Eastwood plays Walt with a kind of grumpy xenophobia that, the audience is supposed to surmise, obscures Walt’s true decency and kind-heartedness.

The movie has been garnering a lot of positive buzz and it is by no means terrible. But after the credits began to roll, I wondered what the fuss was about. The movie unfolds with all the subtlety of an after-school special. Meet old racist white guy. See white guy bitch about his Hmong neighbors. See white guy inadvertently come to the rescue of his neighbors. See white guy start to turn into an old softie who mentors the nerdy Hmong kid in the ways of home maintenance. But then the movie swings dramatically in tone without much of a set-up. Also hampering matters is the flat delivery of most of Eastwood’s co-stars. After eliciting some truly marvelous performances in Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, I’m not sure why he was content with such amateurish performances here.

I was hoping for more, especially considering that the script was written by someone who used to call Minnesota home. I’m hoping that Clint has one more great movie in him because it would be a shame if Gran Torino became his coda.