The golden age of liberty is now

Jamelle Bouie writes at The American Prospect: Segregation was more than separate water fountains and terrible bus seats, and it was enforced -- frequently -- by horrible violence. Which is why I can't help but me miffed by things like Mark Steyn's essay on the gradual "erosion" of liberty into the United States. In this narrative -- held mostly, but not exclusively, by conservatives -- the United States was once a place of great freedom and choice, strangled by big government and the welfare state. Newsflash. For at least a tenth of the population, "freedom" was anything but. From the 1880s until the middle of the 20th century, African Americans lived in a virtual police state. Want to start your own farm? The county won't sell you land. Want to escape sharecropping and peonage? Good luck finding the white landowner who won't cheat you out of your earnings every year. Don't have your employer-issued work papers? The sheriff can arrest you for unlawfully leaving a job. Walking alone without permission from a white man? The sheriff can arrest you for vagrancy. Can't pay your inflated court fees? Well, this nice man from the coal mines/cotton fields/turpentine farms has offered to pay your $15 fine, provided you work 14 months of hard labor. And so on, and so on. Which is to say, if there is anything that infuriates me about conservative rhetoric, it's this refusal to acknowledge the profound illiberty that existed in the United States for most of its history. Okay, so you don't like universal health insurance and you don't want the government to give your money to the lazy or "less deserving." Fine, that's fair. But let's not pretend like today is somehow less free than the past. For blacks, and virtually everyone but white men of privilege, the golden age of freedom is now. http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=01&year=2011&base_nam...

The job-killing welfare state

US unemployment, on this measure, is in the double-digit range — significantly above the global average of 7%. Meanwhile, Germany, with a much stronger social safety net, has unemployment of less than 5%. (Remember, these aren’t official national statistics, they’re Gallup’s attempt to apply the same yardstick to all countries.)

via blogs.reuters.com

Isn't the tradeoff supposed to be that we get a more dynamic economy in exchange for the thinner safety net?

Slow blogging. But for how long?

Every now and again, I'm stunned when I start to think about how much I don't know.

It's a lot.

I enjoy writing. I really enjoy writing in a blog format. But on occasion I get the sense that I'm adding to the sum total of ignorance in the world. (Or, at least, adding to the pile of noise.) I'm not really an expert in anything. So why does my opinion on anything, really, need to be disseminated to the public?

No answer to that.

I know myself. I'll pick up the blogging pace again soon. Right now, though, I'm stopping to listen and read a little more. When I speak out, I'd like to know what I'm talking about.

Netflix Instant is one of the finest inventions of the 21st century

What I love about Netflix Instant: You can, given the right conditions, give yourself a quick education in cinema history and cinema trends. This week I've been watching the Hong Kong gangster movies of director Johnnie To. They make me happy. And Netflix is only $9 a month! What a century!

Dear Mayor Nutter: Sometimes your efforts to look 'tough' end up backfiring

Mayor Nutter just told us that the person of interest in the Kensington Strangler case in now in police custody.

"We got the mother------," said Nutter.

Nutter did not have any details about how the police caught the guy, but a police press conference is underway.

via philly.com

If this really is the guy, I'm glad. But c'mon Mayor Nutter. You don't have to play dress-up tough guy for us.

Still a bad, impossible idea

I don't like this trend:

New York arrived from google.com on "Cup O' Joel: Why Don't We Just Invade North Korea?" by searching for why dont we invade north korea.

Palu, Sulawesi Tengah arrived from google.co.id on "Cup O' Joel: Why Don't We Just Invade North Korea?" by searching for invade north korea.

Raleigh, North Carolina arrived from google.com on "Cup O' Joel: Why Don't We Just Invade North Korea?" by searching for why don't we just invade north korea.

Not sure why the searches for justifications for war with North Korea are picking up. But I don't like it.

Federalist 41-44: The limits of enumerated powers vs. the limits of the written word

Uh-oh.
 
Through the first 40 chapters or so of “The Federalist Papers,” it’s been pretty easy to read the words of Hamilton, Madison and Jay with a liberal’s eyes. In the battle between those who want an energetic government capable of acting for the common good and those who want a national government shackled into near-inefficacy, these guys seemed pretty clearly to be on the former side. The Constitution was a strengthening and centralizing of the powers of national government, after all; to the extent we’ve talked about limits so far, it’s usually been an eye-rolling bone thrown in the direction of the Antifederalists. The limits were (nearly) incidental. The power was the thing.

Until now.

It’s not so much that Federalists 41-43 are about the limits of the government’s power as they are a fairly sharp delineation of what the government can actually do. And, well, it’s not much.

James Madison opens 41 with a clear eye on the Antifederalists, and he frames the question of the next few chapters fairly succinctly: “Is the aggregate power of the general government greater than ought to have been vested in it?”

To answer that question, he considers what the general government is supposed to do, and his answer -- it least initially -- is also pretty succinct:

That we may form a correct judgment on this subject, it will be proper to review the several powers conferred on the government of the Union; and that this may be the more conveniently done they may be reduced into different classes as they relate to the following different objects: 1. Security against foreign danger; 2. Regulation of the intercourse with foreign nations; 3. Maintenance of harmony and proper intercourse among the States; 4. Certain miscellaneous objects of general utility; 5. Restraint of the States from certain injurious acts; 6. Provisions for giving due efficacy to all these powers.

Item No. 4 caught my eye -- “miscellaneous” can cover a lot of territory -- but it turned out that’s Madison’s way of providing an overview of some of Congress’ more, er, miscellaenous powers: of copyright, over treason, that kind of thing.  There’s no Social Security. No Medicare. No national parks. Not much, in fact, of the stuff that I’m really glad that modern government does. Madison doesn’t say the federal government can’t or shouldn’t do these things. He just kind of sets the parameters.

What am I to make of this? What is anybody who is looking for a firmly grounded Constitutional liberalism to make of this? Do we have to choose between the Constitution and Social Security? Because, in all honesty, one is tempted to look at those two choices and say “The hell with the Constitution.”

But wait. Maybe there’s a sliver of hope here. And it comes in Federalist 44, when Madison attempts to defend Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution—to this day, perhaps, the section that arouses the most controversy in fights between activist government liberals and limited government conservatives.  The clause in question gives Congress the power

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

This was already a controversial clause in the 18th century. Antifederalists apparently saw in it the possibility that Congress would overstep its bounds. And by their lights, it probably has been used that way.

Madison answers the charge that the clause is too vague by saying, in essence, that getting more specific -- either by listing more limits to Congress’ power or by providing a specific list of powers Congress could claim to execute the laws of the land -- would inevitably become problematic in the not-too-distant future.

But he runs out of steam, and finally reminds his readers that, ultimately, questions of what to do if the government exceeds its Constitutional power ultimately reside with the people of the United States.

In the first instance, the success of the usurpation will depend on the executive and judiciary departments, which are to expound and give effect to the legislative acts; and in the last resort a remedy must be obtained from the people who can, by the election of more faithful representatives, annul the acts of the usurpers. The truth is, that this ultimate redress may be more confided in against unconstitutional acts of the federal than of the State legislatures, for this plain reason, that as every such act of the former will be an invasion of the rights of the latter, these will be ever ready to mark the innovation, to sound the alarm to the people, and to exert their local influence in effecting a change of federal representatives.

In other words, the final arbiter of the Constitution’s meaning isn’t the president or the Supreme Court or Congress -- it’s us.

Madison frames this in negative terms: We voters will set the limits for Congress, and if Congress exceeds those limits, we’ll punish Congress by electing new representatives. But it seems to me it’s possible to frame it in positive terms, as well: If We The People want government to provide Social Security and we’re not willing to punish representatives who give it to us -- in fact, we’ll punish those who threaten to take it away -- well, who is to say we’re wrong?

This is very seductive. And maybe not so different, practically, from the way we run things now. Our politics these last few years haven’t just been about how much we want government to spend or not spend, but about what’s Constitutional or not. That’s involved a lot of push-and-pull, and it’s been very frustrating at times, but one could make the case that citizens really do push back when they feel the government has overstepped its powers. Isn’t that what the Tea Party has been about? Sure, this ends up being messy and frustrating -- but it really does make the Constitution a living document, in the best sense: a constantly renewed guide that is the product of an ongoing conversation between the governed and the government, instead of 10 Commandments handed down from slave-owning demigods who lived hundreds of years ago. (Ones who, incidentally, didn’t always adhere to strict readings of the rules they were given.) I don’t always get the outcome I want, but I feel better if our government is a product of both wise  tradition and modern norms and democratic guidance from the citizenry.

There’s also a danger here, and it gives me pause. Because while I do want the government to provide a social safety need to the poorest and most vulnerable among us, I don’t want it (say) to make torturing people legal through a reading of the Constitution that allows a president to disregard laws and treaties that are the law of the land. I want there to be limits, and those limits are hard to maintain once you start treating the written Constitution as the beginning of the conversation instead of the end. Most Americans, it seems, were fine with a president whose reading of the Constitution let him break laws in wartime. I don’t agree with that. It gets harder to make the case against him if the Constitution is a somewhat fuzzy thing.

On the other other hand: It would appear that the rules for interpreting the Constitution are already fuzzy enough that our previous president got away with his interpretation. And if that’s the case, why the heck shouldn’t I get my safety net in the bargain?

In truth, with the exception of Ron Paul and other hardline libertarians, the rest of us spend so much of our time arguing about what the Constitution allows and what it doesn’t because we have implicilty agreed to let there be a certain fuzziness to the whole project. This isn’t very satisfying, and there’s a real possibility that we end up with the Constitution being whatever I say it is today. But it isn’t. It’s what we say it is today. And that’s the way it probably always has been.

There's a whisper in my ear, though. It's telling me I'm a hack, interpreting the Constitution the way I want against the evidence of my reading. But I'm only halfway through the Federalist Papers. I need to press on before making any final conclusions.

Ummm.... no

Austin, Texas arrived from google.com on "Cup O' Joel: Dennis Prager: Liberals hate conservatives" by searching for why do liberals hate conservatives more than conservatives hate liberals?.

via live.feedjit.com

Netflix Queue: "Election/Triad Election"

Three thoughts about Johnnie To's Hong Kong gangster duology, "Election" and "Triad Election," coming up after the trailer...

* If you have ever been a lover of American ganger movies of the last 40 years — the "Godfather" movies and/or the work of Martin Scorcese — you will find much to admire here. Certainly To, a director whose work goes back to the Shaw Brothers days, is a fan of those movies. You can spot homages throughout these two flicks: A fishing trip that ends in murder, Moe Greene-style broken glasses, a "Casino"-style burial in a field, as well as lots and lots of ritual. But these movies take place in a very Hong Kong-China context, and some of the themes that To wrestles with are an ocean away from what you're used to.

* These movies are also very different from each other. Both concern the war for leadership in a Hong Kong "triad," but each is show differently. In the first, the war becomes a race to see who can first get their hands on the Dragon Head baton -- signifying leadership of the triad -- turning "Election" into a kind of "Ronin"-style chase movie. The characters don't matter so much as the action, which is muted but intense. The winner of the war, Lok, only begins to reveal his the character beneath his calm at this end of the first flick. "Triad Election" reveals how power-hungry he has become -- but like "Godfather III" concerns itself primarily with the character of Jimmy Lee, who wants to go legit, but can't.

* The key to a gangster movie, of course, is violence. What's remarkable about these movies, though, is how ugly the violence is. We're not presented with the grand opera and beautiful assassinations of American gangster movies. Death is blunt, tactile and messy in these films. One scene in "Triad Election" -- one of the most memorable in all of cinema since the woodchipper scene in "Fargo" -- features Jimmy Lee literally doing his own butchery. (Literally.) If there is a moment of beauty mixed with violence here, it comes when a doomed gangster watches his son literally flee from him and the violence he has brought into their lives: I got a bit verklempt there. 

These movies deserve to be watched back-to-back. America hasn't been graced with a truly great gangster film, probably, since "Goodfellas." Taken together, "Election" and "Triad Election" are probably the first great mob movies of the new milennium. 

I don't always get Netflix recommendations

One of these things is not like the others.

I'm done with the Tucson story

Actually, I was pretty well done after the president gave his speech. And I don't mean I'm done commenting -- though, yeah, there's nothing new for me to say at this point. I mean: I'm done reading. I guess in some months or years, when Gabrielle Giffords has (knock on wood) recovered to the point that she can give an interview, or if the shootings prompt some significant and likely-to-be-passed legislation, I'll pay attention again. But at this point the number of Tucson stories vastly outweighs any value I can draw from them; there's more reportage than there is news to report. And I can't take it anymore. Maybe this makes me a bad journalist-citizen. (And certainly the victims and their families can't quite so easily move on; I recognize that and they have my sympathy.) But at this point, the continuing magnitude of coverage has started to feel like wallowing. I'm not interested in wallowing.

Matt Yglesias on changing the tone

I don’t think people should pretend to like people they dislike or avoid saying what they mean. But I do think people should be careful to avoid a certain kind of tendentious rhetoric. Some of the participants in our political debate are quite stupid, some are corrupt, some are dishonest, and some combine multiple unattractive qualities.

What should be avoided is the tendency to dramatically overstate the ideological stakes in our political debates. The choice between Democratic candidates and Republicans ones is important and has important consequences. But in the grand scheme of things, you’re seeing what’s basically a friendly debate between two different varieties of the liberal tradition. I think efforts to elide the difference between the religiously inflected populist nationalism of George W Bush and the religiously inflected populist nationalism of Mullah Omar are really absurd, as are the efforts by Glenn Beck to elide the difference between the progressive income tax and Joseph Stalin. This stuff is mostly unserious, but I also think it’s potentially dangerous. If you really thought prominent American politicians were plotting to fundamentally subvert the American constitutional order tand supplant it with a totalitarian dictatorship, you’d be prepared to countenance some pretty extreme countermeasures.

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

The Scripps column

Glenn Beck is right.

Not about everything, mind you, or even most things. But Beck is right to lament how Americans have lost the spirit of unity that filled the nation, oh so briefly, after 9/11.

Remember those days, and remember them with some bittersweet fondness.

They may represent the final moment -- ever -- that Americans came together in the aftermath of tragedy. Nowadays, everybody retreats immediately to their ideological camps and girds for battle, no matter the facts on the ground. Despite President Obama's very nice speech Wednesday night in Tuscon, that's unlikely to change soon.

Why? Because our politics is more about denying legitimacy to the "other" side than it is about solving the problems that face the country.

It's understandable why many liberals thought the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords was the work of a right-wing terrorist: the rhetoric on the right in recent years has been alarmingly militant.

But liberal commentators were wrong to publicly cast blame before we even knew Jared Lee Loughner's identity and motives; a wait-and-see silence would've been appropriate.

It's understandable why conservatives recoiled from associating their rhetoric with any kind "climate of hate" surrounding the shooting: Loughner is clearly mentally ill; Republicans aren't responsible for the vagaries of his brain chemistry. But right-wing commentators were also wrong not to pause and reconsider the appropriateness their side's recent talk of "Second Amendment remedies" in the political realm.

Nobody pauses. Nobody reflects. The only way to start trusting each other again would be to shut up and listen to each other once in awhile. But what are the chances that will happen? Non-existent, it seems. I'm right, you're wrong, and that's all anybody needs to know.

via scrippsnews.com

And that's my take. A bit more pox-on-both-your-houses, probably, than I feel. But man, it's hard to say anything fresh or new or insightful about stuff sometimes. Some weeks, that's pretty discouraging.

Why does Karl Rove have a newspaper column?

I don't begrudge anybody who makes the move from politics and into the realm of journalism. James Fallows and Hendrik Hertzberg both did time as speechwriters for Jimmy Carter, and I'd dare say our national discourse these days would be a bit less smart if they weren't making regular contributions. (A conservative example of this phenomenon is Bill Safire, whose language column for the New York Times was beloved by nerds everywhere.)

But I still don't understand why Karl Rove has a regular newspaper column. 

Don't get me wrong: I don't object to Rove's "journalism" career here because of the quality of his analysis, or because the man can't write. The problem is that Rove is still an active participant in the political realm. And that means readers can't know if they're getting his real analysis of a situation -- something you'd normally expect on the op-ed page of a prestigious newspaper -- or his on-message analysis of a situation that might not be honest, but serves to advance the GOP's interests. 

I got to thinking about this today after the final paragraph in Rove's latest contribution to the Wall Street Journal: 

Mr. Obama's best chance of success 22 months from now rests on reclaiming his image as a reasonable, bipartisan and unifying figure. It won't be easy, given his track record as president. That can't be airbrushed from history. But the selection of Mr. Daley as chief of staff indicates that Mr. Obama is willing to give it a try. It makes sense. After all, what he was doing nearly wrecked his party and has imperiled his presidency.

Now. Rove might be right that Obama abandoned his efforts to be a bipartisan and unifying figure. He might not. All I know is that in the recent mid-term election, Rove led the American Crossroads group that raised tens of millions of dollars to defeat Democratic candidates for Congress. Rove isn't just rooting for the GOP team, in other words: He's still very much trying to advance the ball up the field. 

I guess you could make the case that most op-ed writers are trying to advance one party's fortunes at the expense of another. And that's true. But this seems different to me. Eugene Robinson (say) or Michael Gerson or most other writers you name don't still have skin in the game. The idea is that they may be biased, but they're free to be honest within the bounds of those biases. They don't always have to hew to the party line if their viewpoint takes them somewhere else.

But Rove's "other" job is to get Republicans elected. And we know that in the course of doing that job, his modus operandi has been to take an opponent's strength and turn it into a weakness. Ergo, President Obama -- the national leader who is still regarded as trying the hardest at bipartisan -- has "abandoned" that effort in office. And Rove says this not as somebody who is rooting against Obama, but whose "other" job is to actively defeat him. What are the chances that he'd ever call President Obama a unifying figure, no matter how much it could (hypothetically) be deserved?

And, incidentally, the "about Karl Rove" box on the WSJ page makes no mention of Rove's current activities. 

This stuff happens. Bill Kristol keeps finding newspapers to let him make regular commentary, and he's in pretty much the same situation. But unless you want to know what the GOP message du jour is, I can't imagine how this situation serves readers. If you want to write about politics, write about politics. If you want to play politics, play politics. Karl Rove might benefit from his current arrangement, and so might Republicans. Do readers?

Recalibrating this blog

In a few hours, Scripps Howard should release the latest column from Ben Boychuk and yours truly. We talked about the Tucson shooting, of course: It's the only thing to talk about this week. And I hope my editors at Scripps will forgive me for teasing the column with this teaser summing up my take:

Nobody pauses. Nobody reflects. The only way to start trusting each other again would be to shut up and listen to each other once in awhile.  But what are the chances that’s going to happen? Non-existent, it seems. I’m right, you’re wrong, and that’s all anybody needs to know.

I'm not really happy with my contribution to this week's column. I'm not sure there's 300 words on the topic I could've written about Tucson that would've made me happy. I didn't want to re-hash the case that every liberal has made about militant rhetoric on the right; I didn't want to do one of those false equivalency things, either, where I suggest the problem stems from both sides; and yet I don't want to let my side of the argument off the hook and suggest that liberals offer a high-minded approach to public discourse that conservatives don't -- because, well, I don't believe it. 

But I do believe that paragraph above. I'm not sure if there's actually a way anymore to do vigorous, lively politics -- and politics is how we do democracy --  without retreating into base tribalism. I'm as guilty of that as anybody, from time to time. And I guess I'd like to recalibrate my own contribution to the conversation a bit, to make it less knee-jerky and more thoughtful: To stand for some ideas instead of tearing down what other people offer. 

So I'm going to attempt to retreat from the way I've done blogging lately, and try a different approach. Instead of scattershot snarking, I want to do a few things in this space:

* Curate the most interesting commentary I read, from a variety of sources.

* Interact with longer-form journalism and books.

* Expand the the topics here beyond politics to include some of my other favorite things: Literature, movies, TV, city life, and parenting. A whole life should not be confined to one's ballot-box preferences.

These are all things I've done before. But I'm going to be a little more intentional about them. I suspect it won't do wonders for my blog traffic, but that's ok: This space is a hobby, not a job, so I don't need to worry about that. 

In practice, this means I'm going to stop reading the morning papers on a laptop with the mouse button hovering over the browser's Posterous "blog-now!" button. I'll retreat to my iPad, which allows for sharing quickly, but not blogging efficiently. I'm going to consume information without expecting to produce new information immediately in response.

The end result is that you can expect me to revive my series of blog posts about the Federalist Papers. After last week's argument about the Constitution in the House, I'm more convinced than ever that liberals can -- and should -- make a case for constitutional liberalism that's rooted in (but not at all confined to) the Founders' vision. 

And as I've previously said, 2011 is my year of reading about income inequality and the welfare state. I'm almost complete with my first book in the series, Paul Krugman's somewhat-dated "The Conscience of a Liberal." You can expect my thoughts on that in a few days.

This is what I'm going to attempt. This will still be a liberal place. I don't pretend that I have more than a microscopic influence on the national conversation, but I'd like it to be productive. And for me, that probably means going slower and deeper.

Memo to K-Lo, regarding Sarah Palin and 'blood libel'

Actually, I find it pretty easy to believe that a conservative Christian American could "love" Israel and not know (or understand) very much about the Jewish people. There are lots of conservative Christians who see a Jewish homeland as a good thing purely in terms of its value to Christian eschatology. 

About Illinois' 67 percent tax increase (Or: Math is scary)

This is always the part that gets attention:

In the final hours of its lame duck session, the Illinois legislature (barely) approved a 67 percent percent increase in the state's personal income tax.

This is not:

The hike will bump personal income taxes up from 3 percent to 5 percent.

I won't argue that a bump in the tax rate from 3 to 5 percent isn't significant. But that two-point bump certainly looks a lot less significant and alarming than a 67 percent increase, doesn't it?

For what it's worth: The median household income in Illinois in 2009 was a bit more than $53,000 a year. Assuming the earners in the household get paid every two weeks, that amount comes out to $2,076 biweekly. Right now, lllinois is collecting a bit more than $62 per paycheck. After the tax increase, it'll be $104 a paycheck -- a difference of $42, more or less. That's $84 a month out of take-home pay, and for most families that's nothing to sneeze at. But these, at least, are useful numbers in understanding the magnitude of the tax increase. The nationwide headlines shouting about a 67 percent increase! tell you the scariest-sounding but least-illuminating bit of information about the story.

Haley Barbour's civil rights museum

Perhaps Sarah Palin could take some lessons from another GOP 2012 hopeful on how to respond to a P.R. nightmare. While Palin is in a defensive crouch following Saturday's attempted assassination, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour offers a different model: when Barbour was accused of racism for his praise of segregationist groups, he issued a quick apology. Three weeks later, he's looking to make amends, calling for the construction of a $50 million civil rights museum in his home state. Barbour delivered his final "state of the state" address Tuesday. "The civil rights struggle is an important part of our history, and millions of people are interested in learning more about it," he said.

via slatest.slate.com

Including Haley Barbour!

Weird Google searches that found me

From my blog's traffic logs:

Los Angeles, California arrived from google.com on "Cup O' Joel: John Podhoretz on Sarah Palin" by searching for "philadelphia story" blood libel.

Huh. I'm pretty sure I know how that ended up landing on my blog. But for a minute I was whisked into a parallel universe where Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn were the authors of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." I don't think it would be as witty or charming as the real movie, though.

John Podhoretz on Sarah Palin

So in the sense that the words “blood” and “libel” in sequence are to be taken solely as referring to this anti-Semitic slander, Palin’s appropriation of it was vulgar and insensitive. I guess. The problem is that I doubt Sarah Palin knew this history, because most people don’t know this history, including most of the anti-Palin hysterics screaming about it on Twitter at this very moment. She used it as shorthand for “false accusation that the right bears responsibility for the blood of the innocent.” She shouldn’t have, though she certainly had no intention of giving offense to those sensitive about it, because it would be an act of lunacy to open that can of worms for no reason.

But here’s the thing. Sarah Palin has become a very important person in the United States. Important people have to speak with great care, because their words matter more than the words of other people. If they are careless, if they are sloppy, if they are lazy about finding the right tone and setting it and holding it, they will cease, after a time, to be important people, because without the discipline necessary to modulate their words, those words will lose their power to do anything but offer a momentary thrill — either pleasurable or infuriating. And then they will just pass on into the ether.

If she doesn’t serious herself up, Palin is on the direct path to irrelevancy. She won’t be the second Ronald Reagan; she’ll be the Republican incarnation of Jesse Jackson.

via commentarymagazine.com