Let this be a warning to Republicans and Democrats as they ramp up their messaging wars as to who will take the blame for a potential government shutdown Friday at midnight: Things don’t always turn out as predicted.

Take the two back-to-back shutdowns of 1995-'96. Who would have known that visitors to the National Gallery of Art in Washington would raise such a ruckus? But they had flown in from all over the country and the world for an unprecedented exhibition of works by the Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer. Instead of gazing at the “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” they faced shut doors – and a blizzard. The show was out for 19 days.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) of Georgia thought Republicans had the upper hand in this battle. They had swept Congress the year before, and thought the public would be sympathetic in their fight with President Bill Clinton over a balanced budget and other issues.

But whether it’s big or small government, people expect it to be there when they need it, says former Senate historian Don Ritchie. In the end, the public blamed Mr. Gingrich and the Republicans, who lost eight seats in the House in the next election.

“I think they were really shocked when the public got so angry over the shutdown,” says Mr. Ritchie. More than 20 years later, as the country stands on the precipice of another shutdown, Ritchie warns that both parties are in danger of a public backlash – depending on the severity of the impact and who gets the blame.

“You can’t predict what the reaction will be this time around,” he cautions. “Both parties are at risk if they think the public will rally to their support.”

This explains why the parties are taking the blame game so seriously. To them, it’s not a game but a strategy of political consequence, coming early in a new presidency, and in a year that could see one if not both chambers changing hands.

Congress is at this point because it once again failed to settle on a budget and approve the spending bills that fund the federal government. Now Republicans are racing to approve Congress’s fourth short-term spending bill since the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30. Its third one runs out Friday at midnight.

For Democrats, this deadline is a point of leverage to get a bipartisan deal on undocumented young immigrants known as “Dreamers” as well as a host of other issues, such as opioid funding and rural community health centers. Although Republicans control both chambers, spending bills can’t get through the Senate without clearing the 60-vote threshold. For that, they need Democratic support.

For Republicans, this latest patch is a necessary bridge to allow more time to work out an overall bipartisan budget agreement. They want a deal on Dreamers, too, they say, but point to a later deadline of March 5, when the Trump administration had planned to end the program that allowed them to remain in the country legally – known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

Short-term governance wearing out welcome?

There’s a twist to this party-line battle though, and that’s the distaste some Republicans and Democrats are expressing about a bubble-gum-and-string approach to budgeting. They say they are tired of the patches and the unpredictability and the toll that takes, especially on the US military. Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mike Rounds of South Dakota say they will vote against the short-term funding measure, as well as deficit hawk Rand Paul of Kentucky.

In the case of a partial government shutdown, only services considered nonessential – such as national parks, zoos, and museums, as well as small business loans, gun permits, and passport services – will be shuttered. Military personnel will still need to report for duty, although they may not be paid. Other services that would continue operating include Social Security, air traffic control, and the US mail.

Long-term trend

In a larger sense, these impasses are about more than broken budgeting or cherished issues, say observers. They reflect the long-term trend of polarized politics, in which the majority party shuts out the minority, pushing the minority toward more hardball tactics.

Former Sen. Tom Harkin (D) of Iowa, reflected on this Wednesday afternoon, after he left the ceremony for former Senate majority leader and GOP presidential nominee, Robert Dole of Kansas. Senator Dole, lauded for his bipartisan dealmaking, had just been awarded the Congressional Gold Medal – Congress’s highest civilian honor – in the soaring rotunda, where he was surrounded by lawmakers, the president, and vice president.

“The obligation of the majority is to offer a system whereby the minority’s views are heard, where the minority has a voice, where the minority has a vote, where the minority can offer amendments and have them duly considered” said Senator Harkin, as he walked alone past the chamber that was once his political home. The minority’s position is to offer their amendments, “but if they lose, that doesn’t mean they take all their marbles and go home.”

But that’s what’s happened, he said, “and both sides are to blame on that.”

Parties still at loggerheads

As of this writing, it looked like the parties were still at loggerheads, with all sides sharpening their shutdown messaging.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky pinned the blame of a harmful, manufactured crisis on Democrats for refusing a short-term deal with nothing in it that they could object to – and indeed, something they have clamored for since last fall, a six-year extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.  

Democrats, meanwhile say they are working hard to avoid closing the government, but if it comes to that, the blame will “fall on Republicans’ backs, plain and simple,” Senate minority leader Charles Schumer (D) of New York, told reporters Wednesday. “They’re in charge.”

“We are seeing Republicans get [the] blame,” concurs Democratic pollster Celinda Lake in an email. Not only do they control the presidency and the Congress, but people think Democrats like government and want it to be open and doing things, she writes.

And “people think this fight is about immigration,” she adds, saying that “in general” they support the Dreamers. Tremendous pressure from the Democratic base, including Latino groups, is being applied to lawmakers, putting some Democratic senators from red states in a tough spot.

Why this time feels different

The last time the nation saw a partial government shutdown – over the Affordable Care Act in 2013 – the public blamed Republicans, says Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster. The Republican Party’s favorability rating dropped 10 points in a matter of days and it took a year to recover, he says.

“Since Republicans control all the levers of government, it will take an extraordinary act of political agility to avoid the same fate this time.”

But this time is not the same, says Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine, who helped broker an end to the 2013 shutdown. “It doesn’t have the same feel to it,” she says. Beyond the lessons of 2013 – that shutdowns hurt the economy and the American people – she points to this difference: The standoff over Obamacare was highly partisan, while the Dreamers issue is bipartisan.

Indeed, Senator Collins is one of at least seven Republican senators supporting the Dreamers deal that Senator Graham and Sen. Richard Durbin (D) of Illinois took to the White House last week – only to have the president squash it, using vulgar language that has appeared to have made a deal even harder.

Collins says the bill, if brought to the floor and opened up to amendments, would attract more than 60 votes.

“There’s an awful lot of sympathy for removing the cloud that is hanging over the heads of Dreamers and also using it as an opportunity to make some significant immigration reforms,” she says, “so it has all the ingredients for a compromise.”

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

People participate in a "MeToo" protest march in Los Angeles on November 12, 2017. A #MeTooK12 campaign was launched in January 2018 to help students in younger grades who also need support with cases of sexual harassment and assault.

Brylie was a happy seventh-grader who did well in school and ran cross-country. That all changed, she says, when she was held down and raped by a classmate at a mutual friend’s house.

The boy then harassed her relentlessly at school, she alleges in a federal civil rights complaint, making crude sexual comments and mocking her after finding out she had cut herself. He was in four of her six classes.

“It made going to school really scary. It made me really anxious and sad that something like that could happen,” she says in a phone interview with the Monitor.

Her parents noticed her withdraw and tried to help, but they didn’t find out about the rape until the fall of her 8th-grade year. Once she had counseling, they reported to the police and the school. Officials of Jefferson City Schools in Jefferson, Ga., the complaint says, failed to protect her from the ongoing harassment and to make accommodations for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Such experiences are all too common, civil rights advocates say, and can end up depriving students of their equal right to an education.

The #MeToo movement has drawn attention to workplace sexual harassment in recent months, and college activists have been pushing for years for their campuses to do better at preventing and responding to sexual assault, drawing in large part on their rights under Title IX. But little attention has been paid so far to how much sexual harassment and violence affects elementary, middle, and high-school students.

It’s time for people to connect the dots, say parents and advocates who launched the #MeTooK12 campaign Jan. 9 to raise awareness and point people toward potential solutions. They want schools to confront problematic behaviors early on and promote equality, respect, and healthy relationships.

“These entitlement behaviors [and] the normalization of sexual harassment starts in K-12, with the schools not really disciplining students and not really talking about it,” says Joel Levin, director of programs for Stop Sexual Assault in Schools (SSAIS), a nonprofit he and his wife, Esther Warkov, founded in Portland, Ore., after troubling interactions with the Seattle schools when their daughter was sexually assaulted by another student.

“We need the involvement of parents and school staff to work together on this,” he says.

Determining the scope

In the Jefferson case, the boy’s sexually explicit and violent comments to Brylie and other students continued in middle school and her first year of high school, she says. Eventually she felt like she had to leave the highly touted district she had attended since she was 5 years old. 

“He’s living the life he’s completely taken away from her….The school system allowed that to happen,” her mother Felicia says tearfully during a separate phone interview. Brylie and her mother asked to be identified only by their first names because they wanted to maintain some degree of privacy. Their lawyer provided a copy of their complaint to the Monitor.

Jefferson school officials did not respond to Monitor requests for comment. The American Association of School Administrators and the National School Boards Association also declined to comment about sexual assault in K-12 schools.

It’s not easy to measure the scope of the problem. In a national survey of girls ages 14-18, 21 percent said they had been kissed or touched without their consent and 6 percent said they had been forced into sex, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) reported last year. The survey did not narrow down who the perpetrators were. 

There were at least 17,000 official reports of sexual assault by K-12 students against their peers between 2011 and 2015, a 2017 investigation by the Associated Press (AP) found. Data was not available from all states, and many cases go unreported. About 5 percent of the reports involved 5- to 6-year-olds.

As for sexual harassment, 56 percent of girls and 40 percent of boys in grades 7 to 12 said in a national survey that they had experienced it, the American Association of University Women reported in 2011. 

“This problem is very prevalent in K-12 schools, it’s just something that a lot of people are either not aware of or are reluctant to admit,” says Sabrina Stevens, a senior manager at NWLC, which is partnering with SSAIS on the #MeTooK12 campaign.

Helping, without victim-blaming

Schools can do a lot to mitigate the impact on a student’s education, but youths who report sexual harassment and violence at school often encounter victim-blaming, Ms. Stevens adds. “That’s what this Me Too reckoning is about … People need to realign the way they think about this issue so they can respond in compassionate and effective ways.” 

Brylie’s family thought the school would stop the harassment. But school officials said they couldn’t act unless the police brought charges, Felicia says.

After several weeks of a police investigation, the family found out it would not result in charges. The reason, as Felicia can best recall, is that they didn’t have physical evidence, and the boy's father or lawyer wouldn’t allow him to be interviewed.

The police department did not respond to the Monitor’s request for comment. 

Like many parents, Brylie’s didn’t know anything about Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in educational institutions that receive any federal money. They say the school officials never brought it up.

Under Title IX, schools are supposed to promptly investigate and address reports of sexual harassment and assault and work to prevent a hostile environment – in addition to any police action that might be taken, says Neena Chaudhry, NWLC’s senior counsel and director of education.

Enforcing Title IX

Among K-12 schools, “Title IX is perhaps the least enforced of the education laws,” says Bill Howe, who oversaw Connecticut’s Title IX compliance until 2015 and is now an education consultant in Hartford, Conn.

Some of the systemic problems he has identified around the country:

• An attitude that since Title IX doesn’t come with extra federal funding, it’s a low priority to enforce it.
• A lack of training and a practice of having people who are Title IX coordinators “in name only.”
• Title IX coordinators who are also attorneys for school boards or hold other roles that create a conflict of interest, because they have incentive to protect the reputation of the district.

He hopes more schools will become proactive, instead of reacting to incidents or monetary motivations. He recalls a mayor asking for his help to improve practices in the school district when housing values were going down “because of the reputation for sexual assault at the high school.” 

Most schools undoubtedly have a lot of demands to meet on tight budgets. The #MeTooK12 campaign acknowledges that and is promoting resources, including toolkits and a video made with students and experts, to help inform schools, parents, and the public.

People should raise the issue at meetings of the school board and the Parent-Teacher Association, they suggest, and ask about Title IX policies and training.

“Once we started doing training … the complaints [accusing schools of not following Title IX] dropped dramatically,” Mr. Howe says of Connecticut. 

Eighteen states require training about peer sexual assaults for staff or students, the AP investigation found.

Communicating about rights

When Brylie started high school, her family still hadn’t heard of Title IX. They had gotten assurances that the two students would be kept apart, but on the first day, they say, he sat near her and stared her down at a school assembly, triggering a panic attack. More meetings resulted in more promises that were not enforced, they say.

She held on to hope a little longer, until the first day of her second semester, when she walked into class and saw him there despite having been told their schedules would not overlap.

“I went straight to the front office to report that to the counselor and the principal … and they were just like, ‘There’s nothing we can do. We’re sorry. We’ll move you,’ ” she says. “It was just so upsetting … the fact that it was always me moving and me having to leave and not him.” 

After school that day, she told her mom, “It takes a piece of me every time I walk in there.” She wasn’t going back. 

There are no other high schools in the district, so Brylie’s parents arranged work schedules to homeschool her temporarily, and to make sure she wasn’t alone, because she was struggling with suicidal thoughts.

They finally discovered Title IX around that time, and connected with SSAIS and later with lawyer Cari Simon, who specializes in school-violence law at the Denver, Colo., office of the Fierberg National Law Group. She helped file the family’s Title IX complaint with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in May 2016.

As of Jan. 3, OCR was investigating 156 sexual violence cases at 134 K-12 schools, including the case in Jefferson, according to a list provided to the Monitor by the Education Department.

Often in such cases, districts will enter into resolution agreements to put better practices in place. At times, OCR also requires school districts to reimburse families for related expenses such as counseling and tuition. Brylie is now a junior at a private school and her family has asked for such remedies. 

“I just want the school to be held accountable … so that they don’t do that to anybody else,” says Brylie, who is considering studying law one day and becoming an advocate for survivors. “I want … to help other people who are afraid to come out and say what happened to them,” she says. “Talking about it does help.”

*If you need confidential support or advice you can contact the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit online at www.rainn.org. 

Frank Franklin II/AP

Cars enter and exit the New York City's Queensboro Bridge. A new study by the Partnership for New York City finds that excess congestion has risen 53 percent since 2006 and costs the New York metro area $20 billion a year in lost travel time, revenue loss, and increased fuel and operating costs.

Everyone agrees the $19.5 trillion US economy needs roads, bridges, railways, communications, and other modern infrastructure to run smoothly. But when these deteriorate, safety suffers and costs rise.

But the US has been underfunding infrastructure maintenance for years. Already, 1 in 5 miles of highway is in poor condition; 2 in 5 miles of urban Interstates are congested, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Four out of 5 major US airports could soon see Thanksgiving-like peak traffic at least once a week. 

Internationally, the US ranks ninth among nations for overall infrastructure, but 26th for the quality of its electrical supply. Overall, the ASCE gives US infrastructure a ‘D-plus.’ 

Where is the problem worst?

“All of the above,” says Jacob Leibenluft, senior adviser at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. In the ASCE's report last year, only the rail system rated a "B," and that's due in part to freight railroads funding their own maintenance. Every other category rated a "C-plus" or worse. Public transit earned a "D-minus."

Part of the problem is that the US spends about 2.4 percent of gross domestic product on infrastructure, whereas 5 percent is the norm in Europe, and China spends 9 percent, the Business Roundtable points out. That “deficit” grows yearly as infrastructure ages and the backlog of unfunded projects grows.

SOURCE:

American Society of Civil Engineers

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Karen Norris/Staff

What would it cost to fix the deficit?

ASCE puts the infrastructure deficit at just over $2 trillion.

But in the long run, infrastructure spending pays for itself, according to several studies. To get that $9.31 in daily benefits per household, the US would have to spend $4.26 a day per household, ASCE calculates. According to projections in a Standard & Poor’s 2014 report, a $1.3 billion infrastructure plan would add $2 billion to GDP as well as 29,000 jobs.

That economic boost is why Democrats and Republicans have each talked up $1 trillion infrastructure plans.

If there’s bipartisan concern, will Congress act?

Many political analysts are doubtful, noting that the plan would need at least some Democratic support in Congress, and Democrats look little inclined to help the Trump administration score a legislative win heading into fall congressional elections.

“I’m hoping that there will be a path to some bipartisan support for a smart infrastructure investment plan from the federal government,” says Heidi Crebo-Rediker, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. But “finding the ‘pay for’ is a significant hurdle.”

A key provision would be to raise the 18.4-cent-per-gallon gas tax, which funds the Highway Trust Fund. It hasn’t been raised since 1993 and has lost 40 percent of its value to inflation. As a result, the fund now needs periodic infusions of money from the General Fund to keep going.

But many Republicans are leery of raising taxes, especially so soon after passing huge income tax cuts.

The Trump administration is talking about pushing more responsibility onto states and localities, which already fund roughly 75 percent of infrastructure spending. And it wants to streamline permitting so projects can get under way faster.

Are there innovative approaches to funding?

The US typically uses general taxes or user fees to fund projects – and economists generally say the latter makes more sense. If somebody uses more water or drives more on roads, he or she pays more of the cost to maintain the needed infrastructure.

Federal funds could be used to incentivize states to launch projects using best practices, says Rick Geddes, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “There’s so much value created in the private sector” on every front, says Mr. Geddes, who makes the case for carefully designed public-private partnerships.

In an infrastructure outline released last year, the administration suggested privatizing the air-traffic control system – an arrangement used in Europe but roundly criticized in the US – as well as incentivizing more private investment in infrastructure. The Obama administration also pushed for more private investment, which is necessary, says Ms. Crebo-Rediker, “but it’s not a silver bullet.”

Will the US modernize infrastructure?

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is pushing for new information-technology networks, such as internet-connected sensors in water mains, which could detect leaks and reduce the 240,000 costly water-main breaks that occur every year. Smart traffic lights, which adjust on the fly to changing traffic flows, could cut travel time in cities by a quarter, ITIF says.

“Overall, studies find that investments in IT-enabled infrastructure can have 60 percent greater productivity impacts than investments in roads alone,” reads an ITIF report.

It used to be that when a migrant here was the victim in a car accident – a fender bender or such – the local police would still end up blaming them for the collision.

But now when the staff at the Ex Canapificio social center in Caserta is called to deal with this sort of situation, the activists know it’s usually a sign migrants are implementing the lessons they’ve been taught to protect themselves. In this scenario: Record the scene with their phones.

“I’ve been teaching them to stand for their rights and told them to keep evidence when they interact with the authorities. The police think migrants are stupid. But when they’re looking after themselves, they don’t seem so stupid – that makes officers nervous,” says Malik Donkor, a Ghanaian migrant working at the center, with a triumphant grin.

For more than a decade, the Refugees and Asylum Seekers Movement in Caserta (MMRC) has been helping migrants stand up to exploitative employers and appeal effectively for documents that allow them to find legal jobs and houses. Located in southern Italy, the experimental effort is run by Italian activists and migrant workers to build migrants' awareness of their rights and their power to help each other fight for fair treatment.

Mr. Donkor has been both recipient and provider of aid. After leaving Ghana in 2008, he worked in agriculture around Italy for little money, finding himself in vulnerable situations involving drinking and fighting. He ended up in a deportation camp. Having heard about a group that helped migrants near Naples, Donkor managed to escape and sought help with the MMRC.

After obtaining his residence permit with the help of the group, Donkor started volunteering in the social center and eventually landed a staff job as a cultural mediator for the MMRC’s SPRAR project, a government-funded initiative to help asylum seekers settle in Italy.

Now Donkor is part of a structure of more than 6,000 migrants – between staffers and volunteers – fighting against labor exploitation and human rights violations in Italy, where sympathy for migrants is wearing thin. While the number of migrants arriving has dropped significantly in recent months, Italians struggle to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have entered in the past 20 years. And the far right has taken advantage of increasing frustration around migration. With the general election coming up in March, anti-migrant rhetoric has soared.

Migrants and Italians working together

Caserta, which lies in the mountainous Campania region about 100 miles southeast of Rome, is home to about 900,000 people, including one of the biggest African communities in Italy. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 undocumented migrants live there.

Some 300 Italians work and volunteer with the MMRC, which has been growing since the first protests were staged in the early 2000s. They hope, by being intermediaries, that they can win official support for migrants' legalization.

“We filed reports telling the migrants’ stories to the local authorities and we started organizing protests to show everyone how their illegal situation affected their everyday lives. We then asked the local authorities to give these people another chance, arguing case by case with loopholes in the Italian law. And then we told them, ‘If you give them documents, we can give them the tools to integrate into this country.’ They listened to us, re-opened these people’s files, and started issuing residence licenses,” says Maria Rita Cardillo, an Italian activist.

The MMRC believes their approach can also help authorities deal with a more longstanding problem: the mafia. The Camorra – the mafia network based in the Campania region – has been able to exploit migrants by offering to pay desperate job-seekers for criminal work. By empowering migrants to earn their way legally, activists say, authorities can weaken Camorra’s control in the region.

“If you’re undocumented and you want to find a way to survive, it’s very simple to follow someone that will give you money in an easy way.... Without documents, you’re invisible and an easier target. We discovered that migrants listened when we told them there were other ways of living here,” says Ms. Cardillo.

Still, not all migrants work effectively with MMRC.

“We know some people are involved in drug trafficking. I don’t call the police, but I let the migrants know that if they run into trouble we’ll stop helping them. I don’t open the door when they come, and I tell them, ‘Maybe these troubles will allow you to see the right path now,’” Donkor says.

Lead by example

Mamadou Kouassi worked many days in tobacco and tomato fields in the Campania region after leaving Ivory Coast in 2006, where he was a student with hopes of becoming a language teacher. In Italy, there was little he could do against the employers who didn’t pay him or abandoned him at the hospital after he got injured on the job.

But that feeling changed when Mr. Kouassi attended his first weekly meeting in Caserta and then decided to join a one-day strike in which migrants refused to work for less than 50 euros per day. The protest demonstrated the migrants' leverage to employers – but as important, it demonstrated that leverage to the migrants, too, Kouassi says.

“It wasn’t easy to take that step. We were very afraid, and for most of us, earning 20 euros [per day] was better than to protest. Some Italians passing by told us it wasn’t easy for them, either. We answered they were right, but that we should fight for our rights,” he says. “It was a good idea after all. That day changed something for most of us – we finally realized we were being exploited.”

Giampaolo Mosca, another Italian activist, insists even though the movement is political, there’s no political party backing it.

“We don’t ask anyone for their ideology. To be part of this movement is a way of life. Migrants come to seek help for their documents but meeting after meeting they become part of a family. They realize that their problem is also someone else's problem. And that’s how the movement grows,” Mr. Mosca says.

Like Donkor, Kouassi got his residence permit and became a mediator with the MMRC. He makes up to 1,000 euros ($1,164) a month, which allows him to rent a house by himself. And he’s partially fulfilling his dream of teaching by visiting local schools to teach Italian children French and English.

But these days, he says, he’s focusing on a larger goal.

“I want to keep fighting for equality. It’s an incremental process," he says. "When I joined the movement we used to celebrate [getting] six-month residence permits. Now we’re celebrating two-year, five-year permits. And I always use my story to inspire others like me. Five years ago I was undocumented. Now I’m making a living fighting for migrants’ rights. All we have to do in life is not to give in to despair and be patient."

Warner Bros. Pictures/AP

Paddington is voiced by Ben Wishaw in 'Paddington 2.'

It is a distinct delight to recommend "Paddington 2," a film for the whole family that, for a change, really is for the whole family. What’s more, there’s no hint of forced manipulation or condescension. I smiled all the way through it.

The Paddington Bear phenomenon began in 1958 with the first of Michael Bond’s many books about the diminutive Peruvian bear who is dispatched to London by his aunt Lucy and taken in by the solidly middle-class Brown family. Through endless iterations of books, television shows, and much else, the marmalade-loving teddy bear with the duffle coat, scrunched hat, and worn suitcase has over the years become a global folk figure to rival Winnie the Pooh, if not Mickey Mouse. 

Has the ongoing commercialization of Paddington erased the innocence of his appeal? Movie-wise at least, this has not happened, not in the 2014 film “Paddington,” nor in its even better sequel, both directed with comic snap and dexterity by Paul King, who also co-wrote the new film with Simon Farnaby. 

Set in some vaguely mid-20th-century time warp and combining live action, computer-generated imaging, and animation, “Paddington 2” is structured as a straightforward waggish thriller, but the narrative is replete with all sorts of squiggly subplots and digressions. Paddington (voiced with just the right note of prim wistfulness by Ben Whishaw) has his eyes on a rare, vintage pop-up book of London that he wants to buy as a very special 100th birthday present for his aunt Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton) back in Peru. But the book is stolen from the antique shop owned by Paddington’s good friend Mr. Gruber (Jim Broadbent), and the little bear is mistakenly charged with the crime and imprisoned. Realizing he’s been framed, the Brown family, headed by the ever-abiding Mary (Sally Hawkins), her dyspeptic husband Henry (Hugh Bonneville), and gruff housekeeper Mrs. Bird (Julie Walters) – what a dream cast! – swing into action to ferret out the real culprit. 

It’s not giving anything away to identify the thief as Phoenix Buchanan, the preening, self-infatuated actor whose spacious apartment’s walls are festooned only with paintings and photos of himself, and who is played with peerless silliness by Hugh Grant. The British love to mock high theatricality, even as they revel in it, and Grant’s portrayal, like  Bill Nighy’s in “Their Finest,” which also featured an over-the-hill matinee idol, mainlines that love. Phoenix has been reduced to being a pitchman for a dog food company, but he still preens as if he were on par with Olivier and Gielgud (“Larry and Johnny,” as he calls them). His campy, gleaming villainy stands in direct opposition to Paddington’s bedrock belief in the innate goodness in everything. That’s why these two are such marvelous foils.

You might expect that Paddington’s relentless niceness would be a bore, especially when he’s surrounded by a prisonful of meanies – none meaner than the notorious Knuckles McGinty (Brendan Gleeson), the convict-cook who scowlingly serves up gruel to the inmates. (His mantra: “I don’t do nothing for nobody for nothin’!”) But there is something so supernally sweet about Paddington that he wins just about everybody over.

Making goodness as powerfully enticing as villainy is one of the most difficult feats for any dramatist – even Charles Dickens had trouble pulling it off. “Paddington 2” succeeds because it values decency so deeply that, in its own humble way, it evokes an entire philosophy of life. Decency, or at the least the expectation of it, imbues everything that we see. There’s nothing cute or Disneyish about the anthropomorphism in this film. Paddington, with his great kindnesses, is accepted by almost all the humans in his multicultural Windsor Gardens neighborhood as if he himself were human; he is looked up to by them, and his incarceration becomes a blight that must be remedied if the world is to once again be set aright.     

In the course of righting wrongs, Paddington is caught up in some first-rate action sequences, including a prison break and a steam-engine chase. King tosses in all sorts of in-jokes, such as a quick tribute to the famous scene in “Modern Times” in which Charlie is whirlingly enmeshed in machinery, and it all works even if you don’t know the Chaplin film. The imagery all by itself is funny.

A movie that promotes the importance of family and good manners might seem like it could become the squarest of snoozes, but “Paddington 2” is so transcendentally cheerful that it carries the day – and then some. It made me want to go right out and buy a big jar of marmalade. Grade: A- (Rated PG for some action and mild rude humor.)

South Hackensack Police Department via AP/File

Police in South Hackensack, N.J., say a woman who was drunk continued driving with a mass transit sign sticking out of the roof of her car. She was charged with driving while intoxicated and careless driving.

Sobering statistics tell the story of how alcohol and driving combine in a tragic mix.

Alcohol-impaired drivers in the United States cause more than 10,000 road deaths each year – about a third of all traffic deaths. Nearly 40 percent of the victims are people other than the drunken drivers themselves.

A comprehensive federal study just released Wednesday contains sensible steps that could be taken now to reduce these tragedies. And today two prominent Americans – former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers – announced that alcohol abuse would be among the "big three" health threats that their new task force would battle.

Both efforts focus new attention on the persistent scurge of alcohol abuse.

The new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) urges states to cut the legal definition for impaired driving from 0.08 to 0.05 percent blood alcohol concentration (BAC). 

The US would join more than 100 countries that already enforce this tougher standard. An earlier study showed that within 10 years of adopting a BAC of 0.05 percent as the legal limit in Europe, for example, drunken-driving deaths were cut by more than half.

Strong evidence also suggests that higher alcohol taxes reduce binge drinking, the NASEM study reports.

The new Task Force on Fiscal Policy for Health headed by Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Summers aims to reduce the growing number of health problems worldwide attributed to the use of alcohol and tobacco, and obesity. 

In 2012, about 3.3 million deaths, or 5.9 percent of all deaths worldwide, were attributed to alcohol consumption. 

But higher tobacco taxes have contributed to a decrease of about one-third in tobacco sales in Brazil, Summers writes in an essay in The Washington Post. Higher taxes on alcohol could have a similar positive effect.

The effort will make use of research into human behavior, including an understanding of the tendency in thought to go along with what others do. This state of mind can be put to positive use. 

“I see it all the time when we go out to dinner with friends. Nobody wants to be the only person to have dessert,” Summers told The Wall Street Journal. “So if you start discouraging [overeating], there’s a multiplicative effect where other people are discouraged.”

The same approach could be used with alcohol consumption. Attitudes that seem intractable can change. “[T]he transition from inconceivable to inevitable can be very fast,” Summers says.

Higher taxes on alcohol would not only make alcohol consumption more expensive, cutting sales, it would signal a kind of public disapproval. Higher taxes on tobacco in recent decades in the US and other countries have proved effective in reducing its use.

Summers sees these as “good” taxes that both raise valuable revenue and promote behaviors that benefit all of society.

Someday, perhaps, driverless vehicles may keep those whose faculties are impaired by the use of alcohol (or drugs, or mobile devices) from sitting behind the wheel. But even that will fail to address the many other harms to individuals and families (lost jobs, broken homes, and much more) that result from the use of alcohol.

In the meantime thousands of lives could be spared by enacting stricter drunken-driving laws and raising alcohol taxes.