Literature R Us—Alan Vanneman’s website

The New York Times, Ethan Bronner, and Israel: Getting very, very desperate

2012-02-03T06:00:00.000-05:00

“A senior Israeli official said on Thursday that the missile testing site near Tehran that was destroyed in a huge explosion three months ago was developing missiles with a range of some 6,000 miles aimed at the United States,” according to Ethan Bronner, reporting in yesterday’s New York Times. According to Bronner, the official further said “It [the non-existent missile] was aimed at America, not at us.”

Well, I’m guessing that Moshe Yaalon, an Israeli deputy prime minister and minister for strategic affairs, the senior Israeli official quoted by Mr. Bronner, did say that. The problem is, it’s total and complete bullshit.

Iran has no missile that can reach the U.S. It has no nuclear weapons. It is uncertain whether Iran even intends to develop nuclear weapons. If Iran had a missile that could hit the U.S. with a nuclear payload, it would never launch such a weapon, because if it did the U.S. would launch 500 in return. Mr. Yaalon, Mr. Bronner, and the New York Times all must think we are dumber than they are, which is very, very dumb indeed.

Afterwords
I previously commented on another dumb article by Mr. Bronner in the Times here. A few weeks earlier, Mr. Bronner wrote a not-so-dumb article, “Israelis Facing a Seismic Rift Over Role of Women,” describing the bitter controversies that have broken out as a result of the rise of ultra-Orthodox religious views among some Israeli Jews, demanding a treatment of women that smacks of Saudi Arabia. One can wonder if Mr. Bronner and the Times are now doing penance for embarrassing Israel in such a manner.

Just when you thought it was safe to light up a joint in New York (if you were really stupid)

2012-02-02T13:18:00.000-05:00

New York City Commissioner Ray Kelly recently told Big Apple cops to stop arresting people for simple possession of marijuana. As Radley Balko has repeatedly pointed out, police in New York routinely trick “suspicious” types into violating the city’s law against “public display” of the drug as a way to boost their arrest records. In September of this year, Kelly sent out a memo saying that an individual who is emptying his pockets in response to a “stop and frisk” encounter should not be arrested for public display merely because he comes up with a handful of weed.

But despite the memo, NYC marijuana arrests set a new record in 2011—50,684 arrests, as reported by New York magazine. Maybe next year will be better.

The agonies of Bill Kristol: très amusant!

2012-02-02T08:38:00.000-05:00

Does Bill Kristol enjoy making me laugh? That’s the most likely explanation of his most recent effusion, “Why February could matter,” examining the supposed likelihood of Rich “Rich the Sweater” Santorum plucking the “Anyone but Romney” banner from the trembling, arthritic hands of Newt Gingrich and racing to victory at the Republican Convention in Tampa this summer.

As I predicted, one full day before the Florida primary on Tuesday,* Mitt Romney won very, very big, demonstrating that he, and he alone among the Republicans, had the financial and organizational muscle to run a big-league campaign in a big-league state, and not so incidentally knocking Newt “Newt the Master Debater” on his adipose ass in two straight debates. And yet Bill can write, with apparently a straight face, “Could we be heading towards a Romney-Santorum contest on February 28 in Michigan and Arizona, and then in March and beyond? Romney would certainly be a strong favorite in such a contest, given his lead in votes, delegates, money and organization. But wouldn't Santorum ultimately have a better chance than Gingrich to upset Romney, even if it's still a slim one?”

Sorry, Bill. Writing complete nonsense and then adding the wan proviso that the chance that it will come true is “slim” does not let you off the hook for having written complete nonsense. Rich Santorum is a joke. In his last campaign, he lost by 18 points as an incumbent! Romney is the candidate! Get used to it!

Afterwords
I keep feeling that there must be subtext to Kristol’s anti-Romneyism. Do Mormons hate Jews? Do Jews hate Mormons? I don’t think so. Jennifer Rubin, who generally comes across as Bill’s older, meaner, ~~uglier~~ big sister, is a devoted Romneyite. I think Bill feels sorry for me, and just wants to give me a chuckle in my gloom. Seriously. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.

*I believe I have mastered the art of satisfying political predictions. Always predict what you don’t want to happen. Then if you’re right, well, you were right. If you’re wrong, well, then you’re pleasantly surprised.

Death?

2012-02-01T13:22:00.001-05:00

What’s Next for the Stones?—Headline on the current issue of Rolling Stone, which, I guess, has to pretend that it cares.

If you work for AEI, you may be a redneck

2012-02-01T06:00:00.000-05:00

Or maybe just a racist. Charles “I’m not a racist” Murray is back at it, with a hot new book about how those damn hippies ruined everything back in the Sixties, turning us all into muesli-munching, boutique beer-swilling brats and generally sending the whole damn country straight on the road to perdition.

The white folks, at least. As for blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, well, they don’t make the cut in Chuck’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, mostly because they foul up the banal set of clichés that Chuck wants to throw at us. Chuck’s whole point is that in 1960, we were all one, and of course if you have to count blacks, we weren’t, so Chuck just tosses them out. As for Hispanics and Asians, there weren’t enough of them to matter back in ’60. Now they’re 20 percent of the population or more, and, apparently, keeping track of them all is just too much for Chuck to handle.

If you don’t feel like spending good money on Chuck’s new book, well, I don’t blame you. You can read a short version here. Chuck splits white folks into two populations, the Belmont folks (top 20%) and the Fishtown folks (bottom 30%). What happened to the middle 50%? Well, I guess Chuck couldn’t come up with enough cheap jokes about them to make it worth his time.

Chuck pretends that back in the day Belmont and Fishtown folks lived the same kind of lives—ate the same food (e.g., not muesli and yogurt for breakfast), watched the same TV shows, and drank the same kind of beers. Damn cozy back then!

But of course it wasn’t. One of my cousins, at age 10, was a far better sociologist than Chuck. Returning from her first summer camp circa 1960 (a “progressive” camp, of course), she observed “Everyone at camp is just like us. They don’t believe in God and put brown sugar on their cereal.”

Yes, Chuck, brown sugar matters. Belmont folks played golf and tennis, and Fishtown folks did not. Fishtown men got paid in cash every Friday, instead of a bi-weekly check, which they probably couldn’t have cashed, because they didn’t have bank accounts. All too frequently, they got drunk on Friday night and came home to beat up their wives. Belmont guys didn’t beat up their wives, not as much, at least, and frequently got drunk at home, drinking martinis in winter and gin and tonics in the summer, rather than boilermarkers in a bar year round.

Belmont folks today? Well, most of them don’t have lap pools in their homes, Chuck’s fervorous imagination to the contrary, nor do they take two or three trips abroad “every year for business, conferences or eco-vacations in the cloud forests of Costa Rica.”*

Back in 1960, Catholics, largely Fishtown folks, went to Catholic schools, where they were often taught by nuns with ninth-grade educations. They were not permitted to read authors like Montesquieu, or Galileo, or Darwin, or Marx, or Martin Luther. They were taught that the Jews killed Christ. Fishtown folks in the South went to segregated schools and when they went to church on Sunday they were taught that segregation reflected God’s plan for the races. The fact is, Chuck, we’re a lot more integrated now than we used to be. And that includes the blacks and the Hispanics and the Asians!

Afterwords
Chuck’s book has a 25-item questionnaire along the lines of “What is Branson?” intended to make you feel guilty for not knowing who won the Firecracker 500. I was going to make fun of it, but why bother? Don’t read the book and don’t read Chuck.

*The cloud forests of Costa Rica, Chuck? Really? The cloud forests of Costa Rica? Where the fuck did you come up with that one?

Reason No. 47,883 why Israel is really, really going to bomb Iran this time: the Iranians won’t mind!

2012-01-31T12:00:00.000-05:00

Yes, the New York Times, which enjoys running articles about why Israel is really going to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities more than I enjoy making fun of Felix Salmon’s disenchantment with Suze Orman, is at it again. Israel probably should just go ahead and bomb the shit out of Iran because “Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices.”

This breathless dispatch, penned by Ethan Bronner,* directly contradicts what Charles Krauthammer, hitherto regarded, by himself, at least, as the world’s greatest expert on what Israel might do, has been saying, since it’s the Krautman’s line that Uncle Sam has to attack Iran, because if he doesn’t, well, we will be faced with “a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices.” But, according to Bronner’s new set of experts, not so much!

According to Bronner, who is quite the mind reader, “The [Israeli intelligence] estimates, which have been largely adopted by the country’s most senior officials, conclude that the threat of Iranian retaliation is partly bluff. They are playing an important role in Israel’s calculation of whether ultimately to strike Iran, or to try to persuade the United States to do so, even as Tehran faces tough new economic sanctions from the West.”

I will go out on a limb, as I often do, and stick to my old line, that this is the same old Israeli bullshit, albeit with a new flavor, designed, as always, to pressure the U.S. to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. The problem is, as those spoilsports over at Foreign Policy recently reported, it’s a terrible idea. According to former CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) chief Gen. Michael Hayden, who is an actual person, rather than one of the endless, and nameless, experts so beloved of the Times, “When we talked about this in the government, the consensus was that [attacking Iran] would guarantee that which we are trying to prevent -- an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret.”

Hayden, who emerges as a total wetblanket in this piece, also said “The Israelis aren't going to [attack Iran] ... they can't do it, it's beyond their capacity. They only have the ability to make this [problem of Iran's nuclear program] worse. We can do a lot better. Just look at the physics, the fact that this cannot be done in a raid, this has to be done in a campaign, the fact that neither we nor they know where this stuff is. They can't do it, but we can.”

Yeah, we can do it, except that, in the long run, it would do nothing except irrevocably poison U.S. relations with the Muslim Middle East for generations to come. Which, of course, is exactly what the Likudist right in Israel,† and the U.S., would like to see.

*I’ve probably read Ethan’s stuff at some point in time, but I can’t remember having done so, so I can’t really make fun of him.

†Shockingly, a great many Israelis have no patience with the line of bull that Bronner is pushing. In fact, after telling us in his opening paragraphs that most senior officials agree with arguments that say Iran’s threats of retaliation are partlyly bluff, Bronner later tells us “Most Israeli analysts, like most officials and analysts abroad, reject these arguments.” So, according to Bronner, Israel’s government is likely to launch an attack on Iran on the assumption that Iran’s threats of retaliation are “partly bluff,” even though “most Israeli analysts” think Iran isn’t bluffing. That’s comforting.

The Virginia Governor’s School for the Arts Advanced Combo— “Monk’s Dream”

2012-01-31T06:00:00.000-05:00

Performed at the Chantilly Jazz festival at Chantilly VA. on March 26, 2011. Posted by imnotu00

Michael Novak on Joe Paterno: So what if he ignored an eyewitness report of his assistant raping a ten-year-old boy?

2012-01-30T18:01:00.000-05:00

Yes, that’s the position of Michael Novak, Catholic paleo-con windbag at the National Review, bemoaning the “injustice” done to “Great Man” Joe Paterno. “One of America’s greatest moral teachers for three generations gets a raw deal,” whines Mike, outraged by the fact that board of trustees at Penn State ousted Paterno without giving him an open hearing.

Nowhere in his lengthy and lugubrious recital of Papa Joe’s more than Job-like sufferings is there the slightest sympathy for the boys raped and abused by Paterno’s assistant, Jerry Sandusky, no criticism of Paterno for taking no action against Sandusky after receiving an eye-witness account of Sandusky anally raping a ten-year-old boy in the Penn State locker room other than to ease Sandusky out of the Penn State athletic program. Not my program, not my problem!

When confronted by Novak’s grotesque moral myopia, which tracks so perfectly the Catholic Church’s handling of the many shameful crimes committed in its name, one can only say “here hypocrisy hath made its masterpiece.” If Novak never said another stupid thing—and he surely will—this is enough to mark him forever as the shameless, spineless apologist for evil that he is.

Newt goes down: the party’s over

2012-01-30T17:35:00.000-05:00

I guess I’m not really ahead of the crowd on this one: the odds are very good that Mitt Romney will squash Newt Gingrich tomorrow like a thrice-married June bug.

It gets worse: Despite all his bravado—and, surely, despite all his anger at being outspent by a margin of more than five to one—Newt will probably give up the ghost pretty quickly, throwing in the towel and letting the Mittman win in a walk, instead of waging a months’ long guerilla war of fraternal squabbling, name-calling, and back-stabbing that unhappy liberals like me would lap up like kittens in cream. Newt will go on, I suspect, if the margin is less than 10 points, and it’s starting to look more like 20.

What’s more, the process is likely to make Mitt look like a winner, which is something he’s never resembled before. When the going got tough, Mitt got going. A big win will give him the bad-boy swagger that Republicans love. The Mitt haters, like Bill Kristol, will get on board, because they’ve got no choice. Can’t tell the difference between Obamacare and Romneycare? Who cares? You can tell the difference between winning and losing, can’t you?

Obama better hope the economy gets warm and stays there. Because otherwise he’s got no chance.

~~~The New Yorker

2012-01-30T06:00:00.000-05:00

For official humor, go here.

“Shit, Bob was a vegan! This thing’s taking no prisoners at all!”

“‘Eat your vegetables or they’ll eat you’? ‘At least he’s eating local’? ‘That’s one ugly piece of asparagus’? Is that all you can say?”

“You remember The Thing? I mean the original, the one directed by Howard Hawks, with Jim Arness as the Thing? He was supposed to be a vegetable too. It’s funny, the things that run through your mind at a time like this.”

“Yes, I do hope your precious Sierra Club has the balls to put this one on their next fucking calendar, but somehow I fucking doubt it.”

“Well, did we do too much for the environment or not enough? I hate for everything to end like this, with all the salient moral issues so unresolved.”

“Strictly speaking, I guess he’s not a vegetable. So I guess the vegetarians are off the hook on this one.”

“Well, maybe he was preserved in a glacier or something. Shit, how the hell should I know?”

“I guess we have failed as a civilization. But I still don’t see how we’ve deserved this.”

“Newt Gingrich did not predict this! Where do you get that shit?”

“Unless King Kong shows up, I think we’re definitely screwed.”

Felix Salmon: Suze Orman is a really big, really fat idiot!

2012-01-27T06:00:00.000-05:00

Okay, it’s been at least a week since I last made fun of Felix and Suze O, so let’s get with it.

Only three weeks ago, Felix wrote “I’m a big fan of Suze Orman.” Look at what he’s writing now: a post that’s headed “Suze Orman’s bad investment newsletter”!

“Suze Orman’s bad investment newsletter!” Ouch! It’s a pretty long post, with a fair amount of he said/she said, but the gist is this:

“I’m disappointed in Orman for telling her readers that they can beat the market. I’m disappointed in Orman for implying to readers that if they spend $63 per year on her newsletter, then they are likely to beat the market. And I’m extremely disappointed in Orman for getting into bed with Grimaldi in particular, who charges a management fee of 1.65% for investing in his Sector Rotation Fund, despite the fact that all he’s doing is buying ETFs.

And of course all of this rubs off onto Orman’s other products, too: the tar of the Money Navigator newsletter is going to wind up getting brushed onto the Approved Card, whether it deserves it or not. Which is yet another reason why we need a new personal-finance guru— someone who can replace Orman and judge her products impartially.”

I’m afraid I never took Suze very seriously—the sight of a chick in a pantsuit holding a microphone roaming around an empty stage and telling folks how to take charge of their lives is always a turnoff for me. But it’s nice to get confirmation from someone who knows what an ETF is.

Afterwords
Felix is off in Davos now, where, one can hope, he won’t be running into Suze. His reports make informative but depressing reading. In case you haven’t heard, Europe is about to fall apart, and it isn’t all the fault of those lazy, lying Greeks. George Soros says the same at the New York Review of Books.

“Newt’s Moon Speech: Not Actually Crazy”—Just Total Bullshit

2012-01-26T10:39:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich is getting a lot of ink, photons, & pixels with his “promise” to Cape Canaveral area folks that he’s going to establish a permanent American colony on the moon, concluding his pitch with the following Gingrichian flourish: “When they have 13,000 Americans living on the moon,they can petition to become a state.”

Over at Slate, Dave Weigel calls this “not actually crazy,” which as a political pander it isn’t, since life at the Cape has been getting awfully slow, now that the realities of manned space flight—the main realities being that it’s 1) absurdly expensive, 2) absurdly dangerous, and 3) absurdly useless—have started to sink in. It was fun, back in the day, to waste $20-$30 billion a year on a program that did nothing but spend money and endanger the lives and sanity of half a dozen astronauts, but that was then and this is now, and the now reality is that Cape Canaveral needs a bailout as much as Detroit ever did, the difference being that it isn’t going to get one.

But reality never slows a good politician down. An actual permanent colony on the moon, of twenty or thirty people, would surely cost a $100 billion a year—more if you figure in the coffins. A Newt-sized colony would surely edge north of $1 trillion, which suggests, to me, that it isn’t going to happen.

Afterwords
I do have one question for Newt: If a moon colony with 13,000 inhabitants can become a state, why can’t the District of Columbia get a Congressman? (Answers involving food stamps or toilets not acceptable.)

P.S. I apologize for the sexist language here—“manned” and “Congressman”—but neither “humaned” nor “personed” sounds right to me, and “Representative” doesn’t have the same ring as “Congressman.”

The new Stanford: Unlimited admissions, and it’s free!

2012-01-26T08:06:00.000-05:00

That’s the story Felix Salmon (yes, that Felix Salmon) tells here after hearing former Stanford Professor Sebastian Thrun talk about putting his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course online, which resulted in a total enrollment of 160,000 students all over the world(I’m linking even though the class is “over” for the time being, which means that you won’t be able to watch the lectures).

Thrun has left Stanford to create an online university called “Udacity,” which is currently offering one course, “CS 101: Building A Search Engine.” The pitch is this: “Learn programming in seven weeks. We'll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!”

Geezer that I am, I’ve never wanted to build a search engine, but, well, geezers are not the future, and maybe Udacity is. It’s certainly made Felix change his tune, because just last week he was pissing all over Mitt Romney’s suggestion that a for-profit university might work better than the existing non-profits. For whatever reason, Felix seemed only capable of thinking about universities in terms of bricks and mortar (and ivy). To his credit, he’s realized, after listening to Thrun, that there might be a better way.

Afterwords
As is fairly well known, MIT lets you audit many courses online. I was able to follow the Introduction of Biology course online without much difficulty, even though my last formal contact with the subject involved dissecting a frog.

Is that, you know, a promise?

2012-01-25T19:59:00.004-05:00

Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, proving that he will go the whole nine yards, and then some, to ensure the re-election of President Obama, makes the promise everyone’s been waiting for: If Obama wins, he’s history!

Patrick Deneen is better than you are, or at least more pompous

2012-01-25T06:00:00.000-05:00

Over at Front Porch Republic, a site that I’ve never visited before and probably won’t visit much again, Georgetown Poli Sci Professor Patrick Deneen announces that he’s leaving G-Town for Notre Dame, saying that “my family and I are looking forward to living in a community that is less hectic and less dazzled by the lights of the imperial city.” According to Patrick:

“My wife and I hail from small towns, and both view our upbringings in those places as a deeply constitutive part of our worldview. We have sorely missed a sense of community in the DC area, a place where most of our lives’ activities are fragmented, often connected only by long car rides in heavy traffic. It has been a source of great dissatisfaction that our home life is so divorced from my vocation as a teacher and scholar. While teaching at Princeton, we frequently hosted dinners and gatherings of students; it was in the midst of those kinds interactions and colloquy that I wanted to raise our children. But, the reality of the D.C. area is that it is only possible for us to maintain a home relatively far from campus. This sense of fragmentation informs much of our daily lives – we have a set of very different spheres that rarely interact and overlap – home, work, schools, church, and so on. In the waning years that remain in which our children will live under our roof, I would like to give them that experience. This experience is palpably a part of the daily rhythm at Notre Dame.”

I’ve never been to Notre Dame, but I have had lunch a couple of times at Princeton, which, to my mind, is a lot like Cape Cod without all the ocean: everyone seemed to be richer than me, and no one had a job. Coming from the Washington area, I find it amusing that the good professor sees fit to picture little DC as the glamorous, heartless, “imperial city,” where only the mega-rich (and, presumably, mega-heartless) can afford to live in town, while the little people lead sad, fragmented lives, driving endlessly through “heavy traffic” like dry leaves driven before the autumn blast.*

Afterwords
According to Deneen, he's also leaving because Georgetown doesn’t seem to care much about his ideas about the nature and importance of the “Catholic humanistic tradition,” while Notre Dame does. As a pseudo-Episcopalian secular humanist, I'll offer a hearty “no comment” on the matter.

*If you’ve never been to DC, believe me, New York it ain’t.

Mitch Daniels, Man of Steel

2012-01-24T12:00:00.000-05:00

Is there anything more pathetic than a liberal like myself, who sees “his” President, Barack Obama, as the tool of both Wall Street and the CIA? Well, apparently there is, the fate of big-city conservatives like Ross Douthat and Bill Kristol, who are wetting their collective worsteds over the prospect of either Newt or Mitt becoming the 2012 Republican nominee. Bill’s latest brainwave is that Mitch Daniels should announce, which would be about a year too late, even if we ignore the fact that Daniels was pathetically unelectable from the get go, as he himself recognized when he took himself out of the race.

Ross assesses Mitch’s chances as follows: “The scenario [Kristol’s] seeking almost certainly won’t happen. But that’s very different from saying that it couldn’t, if someone, from Daniels to Jeb [Bush] to Bobby Jindal, were willing to step into the breach that caution has created, and cowardice has sustained.”

So Mitch is a coward for not having run, huh? If you’ll remember, Ross, Mitch didn’t run, in large part, because he was afraid of being called a pussy, because his wife Cheri divorced him and ran off to California to marry her high-school sweetheart, leaving Mitch to stay home in Indiana to raise their four daughters, returning a couple of years later to remarry Mitch after having divorced hubbie number two. Cheri also refused to make any campaign appearances with him in his two gubernatorial campaigns in 2004 and 2008.

Bill? Ross? Your hero is a guy who can’t control his wife? I thought Obama was supposed to be the sissy in this election.

Another thing, Ross. “Almost certainly won’t happen” is not “very different” from “couldn’t happen.” It’s almost the same.

Afterwords
Back in the day, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on Cheri that ended with the following quote from Mitch:

“She is funnier than hell,” Mr. Daniels said. “And half the time she is ragging on me or making fun of me for something.”

She does sound funny, Mitch. Real funny. How often do you work late at the office? Every fucking day?

Late-Breaking Amusing Update
Jennifer Rubin, my fave fauve, my bête noire di tutti bêtes noires, is joining in the fun, running an open letter literally begging “sane Republican leaders”—a group that is apparently limited to Govs. Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, John Kasich, and Bobby Jindal; Sens. Jon Kyl, Marco Rubio and Jim DeMint; and Reps. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Mike Pence—to get up off their collective Republican rectums and put the kibosh on Newt Gingrich, whom she describes charmingly as “an egomaniac whose personal advancement takes precedence over any principle.” She suggests that they could either choose among themselves to be the Newt-slayer or else get behind either Mitt “Rich Man” Romney or Jim “Lost by 18 percentage points last time around” Santorum. Good luck with that, Jenny, and thanks for all the giggles.

Stan Getz, Gary Burton, and a whole lotta Roy Haynes

2012-01-24T06:00:00.000-05:00

Sometime in the early sixties. Thank you, BBC. Sorry, I can’t identify the bassist. He looks English. Posted by dliberg

Expanding Starobin, excoriating Kagan

2012-01-23T12:00:00.000-05:00

Last Friday I ran an effusive post on the fabulous articles now appearing in the New Republic! Well, that still stands, although I’d like to expand a little on what Paul Starobin wrote about the demise of Bill Daley and walk back, just a little, about what I said about the “good Kagan,” whose first name happens to be Robert.

Starobin first. His rap on the downfall of Bill is that Daley was brought in as chief of staff to bring Wall Street, miffed that Obama was kissing their ass 23/6 instead of 24/7, back on board. The idea was that with Daley in charge to reassure the Wall Street money boys, the Administration could indulge in some Clintonesque triangulation and forge a long-term deficit-reduction program that would be good for the economy and secure Wall Street’s backing for Obama in 2012.

I think all that’s accurate as far as it goes, but I think there’s a little more. I think the idea was that Bill could tell his big bucks buddies “The President and I can deliver a majority of the Democrats. You guys need to go to McConnell and Boehner and talk some sense into them, and get them to deliver a majority of the Republicans. That way, we can get a consensus.”

The problem was, McConnell and Boehner had already sold their party’s soul to the Tea Party. After two years of unrelenting opposition to everything Obama had done, after two years of drinking “Obama’s a European fairy” Kool-Aid, the Tea Party wasn’t going to sober up now that they were in power. We’ve got the power! Let’s go crazy! Which is what they did.

Daley might have kept his job if he hadn’t stupidly tried to continue triangulating when it was obvious that there was no Republican corner, blaming “both sides” in a Politico interview, when the Democrats in Congress had deeply compromised themselves with their core constituencies, only to have the Republicans laugh at them. Congressional Democrats had already suffered hugely from unilateral triangulation in 2009 when they passed ObamaCare, putting themselves in the position of raising taxes (on the uninsured) and cutting benefits (for Medicare recipients). To be pissed on again, this time from the White House, for being insufficiently “reasonable” was more than they deserved.

Daley was given what turned out to be an impossible job, and he ended up blaming his allies instead of his enemies. Not a good choice.

Okay, what about Kagan? Well, this Kagan is one of the bad Kagans, one of the intellectual architects for the entirely unnecessary and grossly unsuccessful invasion of Iraq, which he will surely claim is all not his fault, though, in fact, he is one grossly hypocritical son of a bitch on this point (which is a rather large point).

Judging from the articles listed here, Kagan has more or less reinvented himself as a “thoughtful neocon,” who takes the big picture, which is an awfully convenient way of not having to deal with all the stupid, disingenuous things you’ve said in the past. Still, I like his article, which is devoid of Krauthammerish hand-wringing over “decline,” said decline only capable of being arrested by a doubling of defense spending and an invasion of Iran, coupled with a policy of regime change for Russia and China—that is to say, a commitment to an eternal Cold War, a Cold War to be waged against invented enemies rather than real ones.

Of frogs and men

2012-01-23T06:00:00.000-05:00

Surrealistic Ben, the da-da man from Harrisburg, Pa., sends us this one. A frog the size of a cow? In central Pennsylvania, all things are possible.

“Mom! Mom! Mom! Do we have any flies? You know, some really big ones?”

Lois sighed. Jeremy and his frogs. She didn’t know where he got them.

“Mom! Mom! Mom! This one speaks English!”

“Mom! Mom! Mom! You like amphibians, don’t you?”

“Mom! Mom! Mom! The fucker ate my fingers!”

Harold sat on the window sill. He looked at Jeremy and he looked at the frog. They were a pair, all right. This was going to take some special handling. Some special handling, and some very sharp claws.

“Mom! Mom! Mom! Roger ate a guy! A pretty big guy!”

Lois stared out the window and sighed. If only Jeremy would shut the fuck up and let her get back to her Harlequin. She was only one short chapter away from literary gold. She could feel it in her bones.

“Mom! Mom! Mom! His tongue is like this big!”

“Mom! Mom! Mom! I drank this stuff! Am I like really small, or something?”

Lois stared out her window. La comédie humaine was passing before her eyes. But for some reason, she wasn’t laughing.

The New Republic: Starting to stop not making sense

2012-01-20T06:00:00.000-05:00

What is the deal with the New Republic? A couple of days ago they published an intelligent article on the Middle East by Kenneth Pollack, and today they publish a long, intelligent article on the fact that no, America is not “declining” (unless you mean, like, morally, in which case it totally is), an article written, even more amazingly, by someone named “Kagan”! There are so many “bad” Kagans that I’ve lost track of them, and now there’s a good Kagan. Confusing!

And then, also today, there’s an intelligent review by David Greenberg of Chris Matthews’ new book on JFK, mostly explaining why Matthews is so largely a jerk (Hint: it’s that phony, two-fisted, Irish working class, totally not a sissy bullshit that Tim Russert (and others) used to pull.) And then, a couple of days ago, there was this behind the scenes take on the demise of former White House chief of staff Bill Daley by Paul Starobin, which, unlike every other behind the scenes article I’ve read in TNR, was actually worth reading! Amazing stuff! Is Marty Peretz, you know, dead?

Afterwords
It’s kind of a cheap shot, picking on poor old Marty, whose grumpy old man shtick is eminently avoidable these days, but, well, why not? He’s earned it.

Felix Salmon: Suze Orman is a big, fat idiot!

2012-01-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

My god, is it Make Fun of Felix Salmon Week again already? I thought I had just gotten done trashing Felix two weeks ago! How time flies, eh? Well, enough shilly-shallying. Let’s get down to business.

Two weeks ago, Felix wrote “I’m a big fan of Suze Orman, and I’m generally very mistrustful of prepaid debt cards. So what happens when Suze Orman launches her own prepaid card? The answer, in a nutshell: it’s the best prepaid card out there.”

Fortunately, Felix’s write-up was not an unqualified rave, but even so, wiseguys like myself suggested in the comments that Felix sounded just a little bit gaga over Suze, who strikes some people, like myself, as basically a shill for herself, who, if she purports to be giving people disinterested financial advice should probably not be hawking her own debt card, nor should Felix be all pumped over Suze’s new card, and acting like maybe he thought that if he said nice things about Suze, she might have him on her show, and then, who knows, maybe he’d have his own show, and then, who knows, maybe even his own debt card!

To his credit, Felix seemed to be reading those comments, and he started walking back his enthusiasm, here, and then he walked them back a lot more, here, in a post entitled “Suze Orman’s conflicts.” At one point, in a fairly lengthy ~~diatribe~~ entry, Felix lets fly with the following burst of sarcasm: “Of course, I have my own opinions on financial matters as well. And some things are just completely laughable. Like, for instance, the idea that anybody, ever, should spend $63 per year for an investment newsletter with buy and sell portfolio recommendations which are designed to beat the market. But, that’s exactly what Orman is selling.”

Yo, Felix! Did Suze just start selling that newsletter, you know, last week? Or, maybe, was she selling it when you said you were a “big fan” of hers? Just so’s you learn from your mistakes, dude. That’s what counts.

Newt Gingrich is not a racist. He only makes grossly racist statements. All the time.

2012-01-18T07:43:00.000-05:00

Over at the Daily Beast, Peter Beinart ties himself into knots trying to explain why “non-racist” Newt Gingrich says racist things, to wit, that black people (and only black people) somehow need to be told that they should stop collecting food stamps and get jobs instead.

“Gingrich’s problem isn’t racism,” claims Pete earnestly, the sweat all but popping from his brow. “it’s ignorance. Only someone profoundly ignorant of African-American politics would suggest that black Americans have spent the past few decades seeking food stamps, not jobs.”

Sorry, dude. Newt’s not concerned with “African-American politics.” He’s concerned with cracker politics. And he knows there’s no better way to stir up the crackers than to tell them that he’s going to go to those dudes in the ghetto—you know the ones I’m talking about—and tell them to get up off their big, black asses and get a job! Right on!

No, Newt’s problem isn’t ignorance, Pete. It’s moral corruption. If only you had the balls to say so.

Afterwords
The cream of the jest.? Actually, they’re several. The first is the gross self-satisfaction with which Newt pats himself on the back for having the courage to tell the politically incorrect truths that the media don’t want you to hear. Because it’s so brave to tell a pack of southern white folks that blacks are lazy.

The second is to see Juan Williams, Fox’s Favorite Negro (for a day), learning first hand how much his new-found friends respect him. Juan was roundly booed at the Republican debate for having the temerity—which is a polite word for uppityness—to ask a white man a question he didn’t want to answer. Starting to feel a little homesick for NPR, Juan? I don’t blame you!

The third is, well, I’m going to circle back to Pete, who just doesn’t have the nerve to admit that a Republican politician of national stature would play the race card, but that’s exactly what Newt is doing. Republicans accuse President Obama of “class war” because he advocates raising taxes on the rich back to where they were under President Clinton. Newt isn’t waging class war; he’s waging race war. And the Republican Party is buying.

The Washington Post: Not entirely without honor, on occasion

2012-01-17T14:18:00.000-05:00

I’ve pretty much lost count of the mean things I’ve said about the Washington Post,* but, by publishing “10 Reasons The U.S. Is No Longer The Land Of The Free” by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, the Post has demonstrated that it still feels some obligation to present opposing views. Turley’s eponymous blog John Turley, is well worth visiting on its own. Like Glenn Greenwald, Turley makes excellent, but depressing reading.

*If you feel like counting, go here.

The Obama Wars

2012-01-17T12:25:00.000-05:00

President Obama ran for office promising “to end a war.” The artful use of the indefinite article, especially when coming from a Harvard man, should have been a tip-off that ending a war didn’t mean, you know, “peace.”

The President has ended the war in Iraq, pretty much, if you ignore our Baghdad “embassy,” a massive, high-tech redoubt defended by thousands of mercenaries, and is promising, pretty much, to end the war in Afghanistan too, the theory being, I guess, that we end wars once they get boring, and the thousands of needless deaths in Afghanistan are certainly getting repetitious, if not morally offensive, to the point that even the military is getting tired of the whole thing.*

So, does that mean “no more war”! No way! An America without war is, it seems, an America that doesn’t know what to do with itself. America needs a new war, and Iran is an obvious target. The Administration has put itself on record as saying that an Iran with nuclear weapons is unacceptable—precisely the same dodge as was used with Iraq. And so the Administration is desperately trying to pick a fight with Iran. The grotesquely false charge that Iran has been plotting with Mexican gangsters to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. makes LBJ’s lies over the Gulf of Tonkin and the Bush Administration’s endless whoppers regarding “Madman” Saddam Hussein look almost modest. And, of course, the U.S. is deeply involved in Israel’s disgusting campaign of assassination and sabotage directed against Iranian nuclear activities. Because it’s only terrorism when other people do it.

The basic goal of both the Obama Administration and Israel is provoke some sort of over-reaction on Iran’s part that will leave us “no choice” but to attack their nuclear facilities. Such attacks will be inconclusive, of course, and will simply provoke the Iranians to strengthen their resistance to our bullying. Such resistance will then be pronounced “intolerable,” justifying yet another attack, supposedly intended to “settle things” but in fact intended to keep them going.

Because we aren’t going to invade Iran. On that point, we have learned our lesson. Uncle Sam doesn’t do invasions any more. Too costly, too confusing. Invasions have made war unpopular. And we can’t have that.

Afterwords
A few liberals, like myself, have praised Ron Paul for being virtually the only politician in America to speak out against the massive corruption of the American spirit known as “the War on Terror.” Other liberals have expressed their outrage at this praise for Mr. Libertarian. Think of all the terrible things he’s said on domestic issues! At this point, I’m less concerned about what Ron Paul has said than what Barack Obama has done.

*The military’s thinking seems to be that if you spend fifteen years in a country, you’ve made your point, whatever that point was supposed to be.

Thelonious Monk’s “Bye-Ya,” performed by the Conservatoire de Nantes, at the Heure Musicale du Jeudi, November 13, 2008

2012-01-17T06:00:00.000-05:00

Pierrick Menuau, tenor sax, Simon Mary, bass, Jean Chevalier, drums, Jean-Marie Bellec, piano. Posted by jmbellec

No Way New Yorker!

2012-01-16T06:00:00.000-05:00

For the real deal, go here.

“No offense, but you girls need new outfits, and I’m the damn Isaac Mizrahi of spandex.”

“No, my name is not Clark fucking Kent, it’s Billy fucking Batson. Now give me a damn martini before I SHAZAM your damn ass.”

“They all looked like this before they had a drink, right?

Despite endless billing disputes, the Justice League of America's all-star production of The Iceman Cometh took Broadway by storm in 2012.

“Okay, okay, okay. This is not Florence Nightingale Night! When is Florence Nightingale Night?”

“You can’t miss her. She’s five eleven, with adamantine bracelets and a golden lasso. Plus, she’s got a robot plane, but that’s invisible, so don’t worry about it.”

“I thought this wasn’t arm-wrestling night. That’s why I came here.”

“No, I’m not the Accountant of Steel, I’m the Accountant of Steal! Get it? It’s a joke we have.”

“Unless I shit kryptonite I’m in trouble, huh? Well, maybe I do shit kryptonite.”

“Yeah? Well, I don’t need X-ray vision to see through your smooth line of jive!”

“As a matter of fact, I am a T-1000. A tweaked T-1000.”

“When I said the big green guy ate all the goldfish I was making an observation, not a complaint. I mean, you might want to give him some more.”

“I’m bummed too, but, you know, I think the odds are that the next asteroid the size of Manhattan to enter the Earth’s gravitational field is going to smack right into us. I mean, they can’t all fall into the Sun.”

It was a slam dunk! An upside-down slam dunk!

2012-01-13T06:00:00.000-05:00

Was the Bush Admninistration’s invasion of Iraq based on faulty intelligence? No, says Paul R. Pillar, deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center from 1997 to 1999, writing in Foreign Policy online. It was executed in the face of correct intelligence, to wit:

“Had Bush read the intelligence community's report [issued in October 2002], he would have seen his administration's case for invasion stood on its head. The intelligence officials concluded that Saddam was unlikely to use any weapons of mass destruction against the United States or give them to terrorists -- unless the United States invaded Iraq and tried to overthrow his regime. The intelligence community did not believe, as the president claimed, that the Iraqi regime was an ally of al Qaeda, and it correctly foresaw any attempt to establish democracy in a post-Saddam Iraq as a hard, messy slog.”

Hmmmm. So why, Paul, did your boss, Richard Tenet, tell President Bush that the case for the invasion of Iraq was a “slam dunk,” a statement that was, supposedly, too over the top even for George?

Regarding 9/11 itself, Pilar says it “was by definition a tactical intelligence failure. But though intelligence officials missed the attack, they didn't miss the threat.” To back this up, he supplies convincing evidence of the incoming Bush Administration’s total lack of interest in the terrorist threat. But what about Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, two known terrorists whose arrival in Los Angeles was detected by the CIA, but whose presence in the U.S. was kept secret from both the FBI and the State Department, despite the fact that both men were on the department’s “terrorist watch” list? Both of these men would be on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. If the CIA was so worried about the terrorist threat, why didn’t they supply information about terrorists to organizations who could do something about it?

In the months and years following 9/11, there were leaks galore coming out of the CIA, but it wasn’t about what the CIA or the Bush Administration had gotten wrong. It was all about Hillary Clinton: “She made us hire women!”

Pilar’s basic pitch is that the ideology invariably trumps intelligence—political wiseguys who know everything about how to hustle votes stateside but nothing about the world outside make all the decisions while innocent, far-seeing intelligence analysts can do naught but grind their teeth in silent rage. But one thing the CIA is not is innocent. The CIA is constantly ratting out others, several years, or decades, after the fact, when the “inside” information can do no good, but is not nearly so good when it comes to telling the truth about itself. It would be nice if Mr. Pilar had the moral and intellectual courage to point a finger at the agency from time to time.

So Unfair! To Arianna, I mean.

2012-01-12T10:54:00.001-05:00

“Howie” Carr, who, according to David Weigel, is “probably the most influential talker in New England,” has recently labeled Newt Gingrich “a butch Arianna Huffington.” Funny!

Funny, because I had always tabbed Arianna as a butch Newt Gingrich. What goes around comes around, I guess.

The New York Times: We can toos regurgitate Pentagon talking points without Judy Miller on board!

2012-01-12T06:00:00.000-05:00

Yes, they can! Did you know that the Pentagon has an “unmatched record in developing technologies with broad public benefits — like the Internet, jet engines and satellite navigation — and then encouraging private companies to reap the rewards.” Well, I didn’t either, but Timesman Binyamin Appelbaum pronounces it so, albeit without a shred of supporting evidence in this recent piece in the Times.

Appelbaum’s rhapsody to the idea of giving the Pentagon lots and lots of money and letting them do whatever they damn please has come in from some pretty sharp criticism on the Internet, from wiseguys like Bob Wright, Matt Yglesias, and Cliff Bob, but what, to me, is the funniest part of Binyamin’s near Jeremiad is that idea that we can’t cut Defense spending because of the impact on Northern Virginia’s well-heeled and heavily Pentagon-dependent suburbs.

As an old Falls Church boy, I’m touched to learn that the Gray Lady could give a damn about folks who don’t know from Gristedes and couldn’t tell Battery Park from Grant’s Tomb, but even if everyone in old FC has to switch from Mumm’s Cordon Rouge to two-buck chuck, I’ll welcome a cut in defense spending, the bigger the better. Deal, Binyamin?

Slate’s “Best”? Are their hemispheres, you know, communicating?

2012-01-11T14:06:00.000-05:00

I was checking out something or other on Slate, and, as has happened in the past, one of their little story-promoting boxes caught my eye. This is, apparently, their best, most popular, or (least pleasant hypothesis) most likely to appeal to Alan Vanneman:

My wife’s best friend hates me

I farted in front of my boyfriend

How are flight attendants supposed to deal with fornicating passengers?

Did you see this? Another unreleased song from before Radiohead was Radiohead

Ron Paul’s Callotomized Messaging

Is the Denim Bubble bursting again?

I apologize for not providing links (not really). If you’re that interested, look them up. “Callotomized” means having the two hemispheres of your brain separated. David Weigel (and nobody else) thinks this is funny.

Freedoms Westerners take for granted, most of the time

2012-01-11T06:00:00.000-05:00

Writing in the Washington Post, Ilan Grapel begins his story this way: “Five months in an Egyptian jail gives a person a lot of time to think. When you are not pacing or trying to catch an hour of afternoon sun through the barred window, there are thoughts of home, family, the freedoms Westerners take for granted, what exactly got you into the mess and even why you came to the country that locked you up.”

“Freedoms Westerners take for granted” is not quite the same as “freedoms guaranteed those living in the West,” because what happened to Ilan in Egypt happened to hundreds of Muslims living in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. According to an article written by Harvard Law Professor Philip Heymann, immediately after 9/11, some 762 aliens were placed in INS custody under an FBI investigation labeled “PENTTBOM.” The average period of detention was 80 days, and the maximum was 244 days. At least 48 of the detainees waited more than 25 days before learning the grounds for their detention. According to a report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General, many of the detainees were subjected to a “pattern of physical and verbal abuse.”

Heymann also notes an ACLU report that identified 70 individuals, including U.S. citizens, detained by the Bush Administration as “material witnesses,” when in fact the purpose was simply to lock them up while they were investigated in the hopes of finding something that would permit formal punishment of some sort. As in the case of the PENTTBOM detainees, incarceration and abuse of “suspicious” Muslims was pursued as an end in itself. Since we couldn’t punish the guilty (they were all dead), we punished the innocent.

I’m glad I didn’t have to spend five months in an Egyptian prison. Ilan Grapel was innocent man, and what happened to him in Egypt was a gross injustice. But if he thinks that what happened to him in Egypt hasn’t happened here, he hasn’t been paying attention.

Harvard psychologist proves that morality is an illusion, denounces mankind for being immoral

2012-01-10T11:30:00.000-05:00

That’s the message given by NYTimes book reviewer John Horgan in his take on Robert Trivers’ The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Trivers, who actually teaches at Rutgers these days, fills his book with examples of “how our genes’ relentless drive to self-replicate underpins even our most apparently magnanimous impulses,” according to Horgan, as well as cluing us in on the infinite games organisms play on one another, most of them involving someone getting eaten or otherwise eliminated.*

But after explaining why we humans are nothing but ruthless gene-replication machines, Trivers gets all Sixties on our asses for, well, for replicating our genes: “Although he indicts many nations for denying their sins, he is especially incensed by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the United States’ treatment of American Indians, blacks, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans and other groups.” But why? Is a lion wicked for eating a zebra? And if not a lion, how about something less glorious—a tapeworm, perhaps, or an AIDS virus? If there is no evil in Nature, and man is simply a part of Nature, how can man be evil? Why should we be condemned for being what we cannot help being? Or perhaps he is mad, not that we are murderers, but that we are hypocrites, clothing our naked aggression with pious protestations of morality—claiming to conquer, not in the name of ourselves, but rather in the name of humanity. If we were honest murderers, would he be satisfied?

*I’m not sure how experienced Horgan is when it comes to this popularized science thing. He seems surprised to learn that “even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune systems.” Since viruses can’t survive on their own—they need a host to live—sneaking past immune systems is basically what they do and all they do, except reproduce once they are attached to a host.

Lana and Flip, flipping “Brilliant Corners”

2012-01-10T06:00:00.000-05:00

Live at Joe Zawinul`s Birdland, Vienna in July 2006. Lana Cencic, vocal; Flip Philipp, vibes; Fabian Rucker, reeds; Thomas Stempkowski, bass; Wolfgang Rainer: drums. Posted by “mvojin”

Why Chris Christie should never, ever take his jacket off

2012-01-09T18:27:00.000-05:00

Some months ago, I suggested that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was too fat to run for President, using the shot of him speaking before the flag as evidence. Well, that was then. This is now, and Chris is starting to look like human bowling ball, as illustrated by the shot of him with Romney. Dude, it’s tummy tuck time. Do it tonight. Seriously, dude. Seriously. Seriously.

David Weigel: Newt Gingrich, totally not a racist, though I went out of my way to provoke people into calling him one. Shame on them!

2012-01-09T07:54:00.000-05:00

This is the gist of Dave’s posting, explaining, or, rather, explaining away, an earlier posting that I and others picked up on, in which a feisty Newt Gingrich told a New Hampshire crowd: “I will go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.”

Well, says, that isn’t quite what Newt said, as Dave admits. Instead, it was “So I'm prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I'll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”

Yet, as Dave also admits “The phrasing doesn't change the content.” But, having admitted all this, Dave claims that the original quotation “has been wildly misconstrued.” People actually think that, just because Newt told an all-white crowd that he was “prepared” to lecture black people, and only black people, on why “they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps,” that Newt is a racist!

Yes, why would you think that? Because, contrary to what Newt implied, more whites than blacks are on food stamps?* Because, as Newt knows, you can be working and still qualify for food stamps? Because he strongly implied that black people, and only black people, need to have it explained to them that they should want jobs instead of handouts? Because he delivered this total bullshit line before a virtually all-white audience?

Here’s Dave’s defense of his actions: “My telepathy isn't as developed as I'd like it to be, but the way I heard this was that Gingrich, who spent years being attacked as a racist—over welfare reform, over tax cuts, etc and etc—was pre-empting any arguments about his motives. He had an idea that would be good for black people; the media would call it racist; he would take it right to black voters. He was aiming for a nerve with Republicans who frequently ask why black voters, suffering from an unemployment rate that's twice the national average, like Barack Obama so much. I wanted to see what the rest of the press made out of it, assuming some sort of point-and-sputter reaction. Indeed: We got lots of stories about the quote, not much context.”

I don’t think it’s your telepathy that needs work, Dave. I think it’s your honesty.

Afterwords
“He was aiming for a nerve with Republicans who frequently ask why black voters, suffering from an unemployment rate that's twice the national average, like Barack Obama so much.” Sorry, Dave, I’ve never heard a Republican, or anyone else, say that. Your “telepathy” sounds suspiciously post hoc, kind of like Newt’s press secretary called you up and bawled you out—you know, for telling the truth. For which you have now most capaciously apologized, you ass-kissing shit.†

*The relative percentage of black recipients is much higher, but then, blacks are much likely than whites to be, you know, poor.

†Okay, this is unfair. Dave frequently tells a pretty good story. Just not this time.

Again, NTNY

2012-01-09T06:00:00.000-05:00

New Yorker-approved humor here.

“I’m sorry, Brad, but referring to me as ‘the man with the ‘stache’ in front of clients does not fall into the category of acceptable office banter.”

“No, I’ve never seen ‘The Office.’ Is that that thing that you and Harold are always giggling about? It probably is.”

“Well, you may not like the smell of Bay Rum, but the ladies do. And how.”

“No, the health of my moustache is not coextensive with the health of MultiCorp, but the two are heavily correlated. Why is that so hard for you to accept?”

“I don’t have an ego, I have a personality. There’s a difference.”

“The person who wrote ‘Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity’ on my moustache cup. That was you, wasn’t it?”

“No, I’m not the poster boy of Accounts Receivable. But I do have a pulse.”

“It doesn’t define me. It empowers me. And I’m not sure you can handle that.”

“Okay, get a tattoo if you feel that will make us ‘even.’ But I better not see it during working hours.”

“I don’t think it makes me look dangerous, but I do feel it makes me look resourceful. And I like that.”

Felix Salmon, not having much patience with fancy supply and demand curves

2012-01-06T06:00:00.000-05:00

I read Felix Salmon’s economics blog, if not religiously then frequently, and it’s one of my favorites. But, given the perversity of human nature, I only write about Felix when it seems he’s gotten it wrong. And his recent riff on Uber, a sort of chauffeured-limo version of Zipcar, it seems that poor Felix has run off the rails again.

The idea with Uber (and, I gotta ask, where is the damn umlaut? There is absolutely nothing that says “first class” like a foreign diacritical mark) is that you dial them up on a smart phone and they send a sexy black car (with a driver inside, of course) to pick you up and take you where you want to go, like you were Mr. Big in Sex and the City.

Class costs, of course, and it bugs Felix a little that Uber costs at least twice as much as a regular cab, and it bugs him a little more that they try to pretend that they aren’t a luxury item, which they pretty much are, unless you can put them on your expense account, but what really bugs him is that they go in for “fancy surge pricing,” which means that they charge more for a ride during times of peak demand, like New Year’s Eve, when some dude got charged $135 for a 12 block ride. Yeah, says Felix, they try to explain it all with “fancy supply and demand curves, but you could call it a ‘rip off drunk people’ people too.”

Well, one could possibly make fun of Felix and his yuppie amigos, who, judging from one post, don’t blench at the sight of a $295 prix fixe, but what really strikes me as that Felix’s rant suggests how foreign “markets” are to the human imagination. We have a very strong tendency to believe that a product or service has some sort of absolute value in and of itself, unrelated to demand. A 12-block cab ride can’t be worth $135! But what Uber is offering is really the availability of a car and driver whenever you want it on New Year’s Eve. How much would you have to pay to rent a car and driver on New Year’s Eve for four or six hours? A lot more than $135, right?

Besides, who needs a limo when you can have a share-a-bike program, right, Felix? You’ve written so eloquently about them here, here, and here. Or are those only for times when you aren’t on your way to a $295 prix fixe?

Newt Gingrich to black people: Don’t be so goddamn lazy!

2012-01-05T12:02:00.000-05:00

"I will go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps." Yes, that’s what Newt Gingrich told the white folks in New Hampshire he would do, but he, obviously, didn’t tell the white folks in New Hampshire that they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps, because, obviously, the unemployment rate, and the food stamp participation rate, among white folks are both zero!

Clearly, those black folks need a talking to, and the Newtmeister is just the man to give to them. Those toilets won’t clean themselves, kids! And give those mirrors a shine while you’re at it!

Newt's bathroom. [Insert burgeoning manhood joke here.]

Because you’re totally gay?

2012-01-05T08:05:00.000-05:00

Okay, that is totally unfair not only to Seth Stevenson, who, so it appears, is not even gay at all, but also to gays, who are, most of the time, no worse than the rest of us, but when Seth loudly proclaims, over at Slate, “Why do we love Lady Mary, the Dowager Countess, and Mr. Bates the valet?,” it’s impossible not to waxy just a wee bit bitchy.

The subject is Downton Abbey, a virtual remake of Upstairs, Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, and a million other bullshit BBC series, featuring “bright green lawns, fresh-cut flowers, polished dinnerware, and sparkling chandeliers”—basically, Martha Stewart without all the Martha Stewart, and servants to do the work instead of you. Put down the glue-gun, sister, and give that bell-pull a yank!

Seth is capable of some self-knowledge and self-restraint, remarking that the show sometimes reminds him of Three’s Company (not a compliment), but otherwise the piece is a non-stop rave for the sort of upper-class oatmeal that the BBC has been grinding out by the ton for the past century. Can’t we just stop eating?

Afterwords
Next to Seth’s story there’s a link to an “advertorial” presented by an outfit called “How Life Works,” which I should probably check up on, because how life works is totally a mystery to me, offering tips on “How to Exercise Your Brain and Make it Strong.” Maybe Seth should click on that.

2011—Freedom rising abroad, declining at home

2012-01-05T06:00:00.000-05:00

2011! What a terrible year! In the U.S., at least. I can’t judge the long-term results of the “Arab Spring”—but then neither can anyone else. An end to autocracy, or another version of 1848, with hope first breaking out everywhere and then disappearing just as fast? Who knows? But if the forecast for the Muslim world is “mostly sunny, with an increasing chance of possible tornadoes later in the afternoon, with winds ranging from 0–450 mph,” for this part of Christendom it’s “gloomy, with widespread cowardice, moral evasion, and outright stupidity.”

I’ve bemoaned President Obama’s war crimes often enough, but attention must be paid, continuously, to the fact that it is the publicly proclaimed policy of the United States government that the President has an unrestrained and unreviewable power to murder anyone whom he pleases, if that person is so incautious as to venture outside the United States. In old, old histories of the French Revolution, a great deal was made of the infamous “lettres de cachet”—direct orders of the King allowing, among other things, the indefinite imprisonment of undesirable persons. But now President Obama makes Louis XIV look like a petty bourgeois and himself like a Robespierre.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party works itself into increasing hysteria, wanting to smash our economic system to pieces, cutting taxes but not Medicare and increasing defense spending exponentially to fund new wars against countries that can do us no harm, treating foreign affairs as the moral equivalent of high school football in Texas, where the only alternatives are “victory” and “treason.”

So, while many people have good reason to remember 2011 with enthusiasm, I won’t miss it. I only wish I had reason to hope that 2012 will be better.

Afterwords
I’ve discussed the Jacobin tendencies of the Republican Party before: debt repudiation, xenophobia, foreign wars, hysterical puritan morality? It all fits. I wish I knew where it would end.

Ten aircraft carriers? Ten? We’re hanging by our fingernails with eleven!

2012-01-04T06:00:00.000-05:00

Over at the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker team up to deliver a story on possible cuts in defense spending that, one must say, is not entirely misleading. While picturing Defense Secretary Leo Panetta as straining every nerve and sinew to achieve the near-impossible—cutting our grossly swollen defense budget by 10 percent a year for 10 years (that is to say, cutting projected defense spending by 10 percent a year) they also quote opposing views—for example, Gordon Adams, who handled defense budget issues under President Clinton: “Even at a trillion dollars [more than twice what Panetta has proposed, and a figure he has called “ruinous”], this is a shallower build-down than any of the last three we’ve done. It would still be the world’s most dominant military. We would be in an arms race with ourselves.”

But while Liz and Thom can quote other people talking sense, they’re a bit leery of doing it themselves. “If, say, the Pentagon saves $7 billion over a decade by reducing the number of aircraft carriers to 10 from 11,” they wonder, “would there be sufficient forces in the Pacific to counter an increasingly bold China?”

First off, how is China being “increasingly bold”? They silently swallow, and then loudly regurgitate, the incessant neo-con tripe that China/Iran/Russia/Venezuela/etc. are our relentless adversaries who will fall upon us in an instant if we ever drop our guard.

Secondly, why can’t 10 aircraft carriers adequately “protect” us against a country that has no interest in attacking us, since, as all readers of this blog are aware, China has one terrible, refitted Soviet scow of an aircraft carrier, which will be used entirely for training purposes, to teach Chinese sailors how to operate a vessel that would be entirely useless in battle. One wishes that Liz and Thom were capable of asking, or perhaps even answering, this question, since they are supposed to be the “experts.”

Afterwords
What’s good about the article is that we learn the extent to which the Pentagon’s self-defined budget woes is due to the compulsive generosity of a Congress determined to prove to the voters, over and over again, how much they support our men and women in uniform.*

According to the Times, “the Pentagon spends $181 billion each year, nearly a third of its base budget, on military personnel costs: $107 billion for salaries and allowances, $50 billion for health care and $24 billion in retirement pay.”

Liz and Thom give us a snappy one-liner on this point, obtained from Pentagon consultant Arnold Punaro: ““If we allow the current trend to continue, we’re going to turn the Department of Defense into a benefits company that occasionally kills a terrorist.”

But cutting an admiral’s retirement pay? That sounds a lot tougher than sinking a damn aircraft carrier. Heavy seas ahead, dude! Heavy seas ahead!

*The smaller our armed forces become, particularly when considered as a percentage of the U.S. population, the more they become fetish objects, to be worshipped by those longing to prove their patriotism—without, you know, getting shot at.

Nobel Prize Winner Meets Capitalism, Gracelessly Succumbs

2012-01-03T15:00:00.000-05:00

I’ve been reading Sam L. Savage’s sometimes too breezy but often quite informative The Flaw of Averages, largely a paean to distributions, which are in fact quite interesting. Among other things, he tells the story of the famous Black-Scholes equation, which tells you how to minimize the risk in your stock portfolio over time.

Myron Scholes eventually won a Nobel prize for his work (co-author Fischer Black unfortunately died too soon). In his Nobel acceptance speech he noted that he once came across a Texas Instruments calculator that ran the Black-Scholes equation. Inquiring about royalties, he was told that TI considered Black-Scholes as “public domain.” When he asked about a free calculator, they told him to buy one retail.

But Scholes was hardly the naïve scholar that he pretended to be for his high-brow friends in Stockholm. Years before he won the Nobel, Scholes helped form the now notorious Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund, whose basic operating principle, according to Savage, was that people like themselves were making the financial markets more efficient, causing, among other things, the prices of differing types of debt to become equivalent—financial instruments would no longer be under or over valued for irrational reasons.

As is well-known, LTCM fell victim to the old truism “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” particularly when you’ve leveraged your ass through the ceiling. To save Wall Street if not humanity, the Federal Reserve arranged for a bailout, which Savage describes in elaborately colorful and deliberately vague terms—stuff about an 800-pound gorilla in a sailboat, which hardly goes to the root of the matter. According to Wikipedia, less colorful and more precise, when things started to go bad for LTCM, the fund engaged in “high risk” tax avoidance practices, ultimately disallowed by a federal court. Also according to Wikipedia, Scholes was intimately involved in what could be uncharitably be called a tax scam and sought to defend himself by claiming that he wasn’t an expert on tax law, despite having written a textbook on the subject, a textbook that, sneers Wikipedia, “contains chapters on both economic substance and step transactions, which are the two concepts under which the tax loss was disallowed by the IRS.”

Hey, Myron, have you got a formula for getting a camel through the eye of a needle? I hear it can be done, but it's not easy.

Marcus Roberts—“Blue Monk”

2012-01-03T06:00:00.000-05:00

The sound is a little primitive, but the music’s great. Posted by “scmm42”

HAPPY NEW YEAR—So Not the New Yorker Once More!

2012-01-02T06:00:00.000-05:00

For New Yorker-approved humor, go here.

“I know it’s not much consolation, but in a lot of ways, I’m more of a prisoner than you are.”

“I think you know why you’re here. Nobody’s going to miss a couple of dumb teenagers from Hoboken? That was not smart, Larry. That was definitely not smart.”

“It’s true. Standup has worked out very well for me. But it’s not for everyone.”

“The judge is talking three to five, Larry, and I think that will work. Put on a suit, look contrite, and make damn sure you don’t unsheathe your claws.”

“I can get you community service as a mascot with the Detroit Lions. So, you know, lay off the cheerleaders.”

“If you could learn to purr, that would be great. Just remember, you’re a great big pussy cat. Think of it this way: you’re working nine to five, free meals, and no hyenas snapping at your ass. You wouldn’t choose it, but you can do it.”

“‘One man’s manslaughter is another man’s antipasto’? You have a weakness for epigrams, Larry, and it’s cost you big time.”

“I am talking to Disney, a lot, and Glee does need a lion. They just don’t know it yet.”

“It’s not going to be my book, Larry. It’s going to be our book.”

“I can’t get you a sitdown with Conan, not now. I can get you a remote with Action News. We do the remote, you act cute, it goes viral, and then I get you a sitdown with Conan. That’s how it works. Look at the damn pandas. They wrote the book on cute. Act like a damn panda, Larry, and you’ll be on Conan.”

The dangers of writing a headline while drunk: “Mitt Romney is wild like a stallion”

2011-12-30T09:21:00.000-05:00

So you won’t have to read the article (by Roger Simon for Politico), Mitt did not beat an Iowa citizen’s face into mummy with his flint-like hooves. Too bad!

Skipping Friday, pretty much

2011-12-30T08:26:00.000-05:00

It’s Saturday in Samoa. The country, which pretended it was east* of the International Date Line to appease pushy Americans finds that its economy is now more Asian than American, and decided to skip Friday entirely this year to get in sync with the people who make the Pacific happen these days. The NYT has all the details.

Picked up from Felix Salmon’s “Counterparties,” which has lots of good links this morning.

*“East” as seen from near-by Australia, though “west” as seen from faraway California. East is west if you travel far enough, and life is death. Happy trails!

Ron Paul: I’m not a bigot, I just pretended to be one to manipulate the masses and cash in on their stupidity

2011-12-29T06:00:00.000-05:00

No, that’s not Ron talking, but, from all accounts, if he bothered to tell the truth about the Ron Paul Freedom Report, that’s what he’d say. I refer you to knowledgeable libertarian blogging heads like Shikha Dalmia, Steve Horwitz, and David Wiegel. Dalmia summarizes Horwitz as follows:

“Horwitz recounts chapter and verse demonstrating that comments calling blacks criminally inclined, among other even more vicious things, were not tossed off by some low-level, immature Paul apparatchik who didn’t know any better. Rather, they were part of a concerted and well thought out political strategy by Ron Paul’s intellectual acolytes and handlers, namely Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, to court working class white males by aligning with some of the nastiest strains in the hard-right, paleo thinking.”

I think Shikha (or Steve) said “acolytes” when s/he meant “mentors,” but you get the picture: Damn crackers are prejudiced as hell; fortunately, they’re dumber than dirt as well. If we just talk their language, their minds, their checks, their votes—and America!—will be ours.

So, obviously, it’s Murray (regarded as a libertarian legend in some circles) and Lew (never heard of him) who are the dummies, tenth-rate political strategists living in mom’s basement (figuratively, of course) while laying their plans for world domination. And these are Ron Paul’s soul mates.

Well, it all happened a long time ago, and Ron has spent all the money he made on the newsletter, so he isn’t going to give it back, and the odds are very, very good that he’s never going to tell the truth in the matter, which is kind of a shame, because Ron is the one elected politician in the U.S. who seems to be capable of thinking rationally about U.S. foreign policy. The fact that he isn’t going to tell the truth gives Newt and Mitt the perfect handle for beating Ron about the head with the issue, without having to say that it’s wrong to say that blacks are criminal by nature. That’s only true of poor people.*

I would like to see Ron remain competitive into the South Carolina and Florida primaries, in part because I simply enjoy watching Republicans fight with one another, but more because the longer a potential Republican nominee talks about the fact that Iran is not a threat to us, and wouldn’t be one even if it obtained nuclear weapons, the better.

Afterwords
What I find really unattractive about Paul is that, though not a southerner, he has thoroughly adopted the right-wing southern rap that the North “started” the Civil War, and that the South was fighting for “states’ rights” rather than the “right to enslave.” Reason’s Matt Welch rather politely says that he “disagrees” with this, and “I think his revisionist counter-proposal to have the North buy up the South’s slaves sounds more than a bit naive, but none of that sounds to me like an open preference for ‘the slaveholding cause.’”

“Open preference”? Maybe not. Squishy soft? Definitely.

I have a couple of revisionist counter-proposals of my own, and it would be interesting to get Ron’s reactions on them.

1) The slaves rise up in rebellion against their masters and kill those who enslaved them, stole their children, and raped their wives.

2) The slaves rise up in rebellion against their masters and enslave them, so that the whites pick cotton and the blacks drink mint juleps for say 240 years,† at which time the North buys the freedom of the white folks. Turn about is fair play, right?

All kidding aside, Ron, why isn’t Nat Turner a libertarian hero? And why aren’t you making excuses for John Brown instead of Jefferson Davis?

*Poor kids, according to Newt Gingrich, should be forced to clean toilets in order to teach them the value of the dollar, since, being poor, they obviously don't know it. This has not been used against him in the Republican primary, because in Republican talk, "poor" means "not us."

†African slaves were introduced into Virginia in 1619. Only 240 years later, Americans decided that, as Lincoln put it, “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Ron Paul’s response? “Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

Harvard Hush-Up: A little veritas goes a long way

2011-12-28T06:00:00.000-05:00

Over at the Nation, Charles Gross has a fascinating article on disgraced Harvard professor Marc Hauser, who was found guilty of “eight counts of scientific misconduct” by a “secret investigating committee” at Harvard and who resigned from Harvard earlier this year. Gross is a a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University and does work very similar to Hauser’s.

Hauser was involved in the study of intelligence in animals, leading up to a theory of the biological bases of human intelligence and morality. Gross discusses the pressures on scientists that would lead them to falsify data, which is what Hauser did, and how easy it can be for them to get away with it. Hauser was studying the intelligence of a South American monkey known as the “cotton-top tamarin,” which meant that it was just about impossible to catch him out unless you wanted the next couple of years of your life in a lab with a bunch of cotton-tops, not everyone’s cup of tea.

Dr. Gross sums up the state of affairs this way:

The procedures and conclusions of the investigation raise many questions. Its methods and results remain secret. Its procedures bore no relation to the due process that is the goal of our judicial system. We have no clear idea of the exact nature of the evidence, of how many studies were examined and if anyone besides the three whistleblowers and Hauser was asked to testify. I was told by one of the whistleblowers that, to this person’s surprise and relief, the committee, which included scientists, did look carefully at evidence, even going so far as to recalculate statistics.

Aside from their potential injustice to the accused and accusers, the secrecy of the investigation and the paucity of specific facts in the conclusions are deleterious to the entire field of animal cognition. Exactly what kind of irregularities existed in the “eight instances of misconduct” and what they might imply for other papers by Hauser and for the field in general remained unclear.

Although some of my knowledge of the Hauser case is based on conversations with sources who have preferred to remain unnamed, there seems to me to be little doubt that Hauser is guilty of scientific misconduct, though to what extent and severity remains to be revealed. Regardless of the final outcome of the investigation of Hauser by the federal Office of Research Integrity, irreversible damage has been done to the field of animal cognition, to Harvard University and most of all to Marc Hauser.

I’d agree with all of that except the bit about “irreversible damage has been done … to Marc Hauser.” Don’t you mean “irreversible damage has been done by Marc Hauser,” doc?

Afterwords I
This is hardly the first, and hardly the worst, Harvard hush-up. Back in 2006, Harvard paid close to $30 million to cover up the massive misdeeds of Harvard dude Andrei Shleifer, who engineered a massive investment hustle while operating a federal program intended to teach the Russians about private enterprise. (One would have to say, the Russians have learned quite a bit about private enterprise, Harvard-style.) Shleifer, who in a more just world, if such a one exists,* might have gone to jail, was protected in serious Crimson good old boy fashion by such too big to fail big shots as Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, who, of course, were only protecting Harvard itself. But, somehow, I don’t expect any of this to affect the Harvard brand that much.

Afterwords II
In addition to discussing human fraud, Dr. Gross has some interesting things to say about animal intelligence. Gross discusses several papers that Hauser wrote on the ability of chimpanzees to understand human hand gestures as indicators of the gesturer’s intent or desires. He finishes by adding to Hauser’s troubles with a gesture of one-upmanship : “Incidentally, since Hauser published the two papers, dogs have been shown to be better than chimpanzees at interpreting human gestures. Sic transit gloria, the primacy of primates in cognition.”

Funny, but since humans have been unconsciously breeding dogs for thousands of years to do what we want them to do, this doesn’t strike me as what you might call virgin data. When we humans teach animals to do things they don’t do on their own, whose intelligence are we demonstrating, theirs or ours?†

*According to current multiverse speculation, there could as many as 10²⁰⁰ universes around. Which, to my mind, suggests that a more just world doesn’t exist. Travel to the end of time, and there will just be more Larry Summerses, all the way down.

†Years ago, I was watching some performing dolphins with a friend of mine. “It’s amazing how smart they are,” he said. Clever fellow that I am, I replied “If they were really smart it would be us jumping through the hoops.”

Dude, he’s always been your grandmother!

2011-12-27T17:59:00.000-05:00

Recent blog entry by Tim Noah: When Did David Brooks Turn Into My Grandmother?

Young Russian kid plays “Dizzy Atmosphere”

2011-12-27T06:00:00.000-05:00

Not bad at all, but I didn’t really get the introductory riffs. The old guy with the violin, who plays near the end, sounds like a reincarnation of Slam Stewart.* Posted by “kzorty”. (This seems to be his only offering.)

*Not a compliment, though Slam turns up on some of the earliest bop recordings, with both Gillespie and Parker. I don’t know if he was used because he was sympathetic to the young musicians or just cheap.

SNTNY!

2011-12-26T06:00:00.000-05:00

If you can’t handle intense, one-of-a-kind humor, go here.

“Yes, we are having guests for dinner. But you won’t be dining with us.”

“You’re the ones who should be worried. I hear that, these days, they’re all gay.”

“If you won’t help me find Flossie, I know people who will. Cat people, just like me.”

“I told you not to send a check to that nasty Glenn Greenwald. Now you’re going to learn your lesson.”

“How should I know? Maybe they’re looking for that damn unicorn you’re always feeding my lilies to.”

“Well, if you hadn’t let Jerry piss on their tank treads, they probably wouldn’t be here.”

“Will you shut the fuck up? I’m so afraid Edward is going to bite Bella that I’m about to shit.”

“Are they Jewish? You know I’m tired of all your Jewish friends showing up at all hours of the day and night.”

“Well, you just stare right back at them! For God’s sake, do I have to do everything?”

“I told you! They always show up at noon, right on the dot, sing three choruses of ‘Old Black Joe’ and then disappear! It’s creepy!”

Another blemish

2011-12-23T06:00:00.000-05:00

I’m still working my way through David* MacCullough’s quasi-magisterial Christianity, the First Three Thousand Years, and I’ve gotten to the Black Death, not a good time to be alive in Europe. Christians responded to the horrors of the bubonic plague first by beating themselves (which McCullough calls the “flagellant movement,” generally more appropriate for paramecia and other one-celled critters than human beings) and then switching to Jews. According to McCullough, the Church became alarmed at the sort of anarchy the flagellants caused, even, apparently, worrying (a little) about the Jews. “Yet renewed outbreaks of the plague repeatedly broke through the Church’s supervision, brining renewed panic, renewed flouting of Pope Clement’s prohibition on flagellant public processions and renewed troubles for the Jews,” said renewed troubles including torture and herding Jews into specially constructed buildings and setting fire to them, burning the Jews alive. Oh, how I don’t miss the “Age of Faith.”

Afterwords
Today, of course, we don’t torture Muslims, very much, unless you consider locking away people whom we know are innocent in maximum security prisons to be “torture,” nor do we burn them alive, although we do blow them up from time to time. And, of course, we do occasionally invade their countries, creating havoc and tens of thousands of deaths, driven first by fantastic dreams of absolute power, not to mention domestic political gain, and then by the unwillingness to admit that we were wrong. Still sinners after all these years, eh? Still sinners after all these years.

“David”'s real first name, which I got wrong the first time around, is “Diarmaid,” waayy over my head. On top of that, he puts the “a” in “MacCullough,” which I don't (“McCullough” happens to be my middle name).

The passion, and the stupidity, of Ryan Avent

2011-12-21T19:14:00.000-05:00

Are you ready for some bullshit? Over at the Economist, Ryan Avent feels that the Apocalypse is well upon us:

The coastal, urban corridor along which I live now is horribly changed from its condition a century ago. Those of us who live along it spend the vast majority of our time indoors and only rarely glimpse anything that could honestly be called nature. The food we eat is highly processed and often unidentifiable as one plant or animal versus another. Many of us rarely see many of our close friends and family, and communicate with them only through the tinny interfaces of our electronic devices.

“Horribly changed,” huh? What Ryan means, of course, is “not natural, not enough trees and grass and birds and wild animals.” He conflates “nature” with “innocence” and “innocence” with “virtue.” In those “happy” days, human beings—if you care about them, which Ryan clearly doesn’t—lived—the vast majority of them—in what we would consider filth, bathing once a week, or once a month, living without running water, wearing unclean clothes and breathing air filled with the scents of horse and human dung and coal dust. They suffered from such charming diseases as smallpox (one of my uncles had smallpox at the age of three in 1920), whooping cough, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis, which I don’t even know how to spell. Life expectancy was several decades shorter then than now, and infant mortality—don’t ask.

As for being indoors a lot, that isn’t exactly new. I could sit outside in Dupont Circle all day if I wanted to, enjoying “nature,” but, baby, it’s cold outside. And if it isn’t, well, it’s hot. As for not being able to tell whether I’m eating a plant or an animal, Ryan, that’s total bullshit. And, by the way, I eat a hell of a lot better than practically anyone did back in the day. As for rarely seeing close friends and family, dude, it’s a hell of a lot easier now than then.

What’s truly laughable about this banal tirade is the tone of stratospherically elevated moral dudgeon with which it’s delivered. Ryan clearly thinks of himself as a saint, speaking from the very depths of his soul, delivering not a message that can save the world, but the message, the one and only message, if only we fools—we blocks, we stones, we worse than senseless things—had the saving scrap of moral worthiness to comprehend his truth. And yet to me the saint he resembles most is Saint Ollie, Ollie North running around the White House bellowing “people will die!” unless everyone drops everything and does exactly what he says. Someday, Ryan, the sheer and complete stupidity of your beliefs will be obvious, because the Apocalypse you so earnestly predict will not occur. But you, alas, will be too thick to notice. And, in all likelihood, you will be too busy to talking about another Apocalypse—Apocalypse II—even to care.

Fred Kaplan, getting scared again

2011-12-21T09:38:00.001-05:00

Unlike the rest of us, Fred Kaplan—Cap’n Fred, as we like to call him—is always on the alert for new dangers. Fred’s latest worry? North Korea! As Fred accurately (for once) notes, we know practically nothing about the new leader, Kim Jong-un, although “meet the new boss, just like the old boss,” wouldn’t be a bad bet. The old boss, Kim Jong-il, furiously rattled his nation’s cage from time to time, but in fact did nothing except make life for North Koreans a hell on earth.

So, should we ignore the dude? Nu-huh, says Cap’n Fred. “The North Koreans do have nukes,” he warns, “perhaps as many as a dozen (even though they’ve tested only two bombs, each of very small explosive yield). They are working on missiles (even if all three of their long-range missile tests have fizzled). An unstable country with these sorts of things can’t be ignored for very long.”

An atomic bomb with a “very small explosive yield” is an atomic bomb that didn’t work, that “fizzled,” as Fred so eloquently put it. The “Little Boy” bomb exploded over Hiroshima in 1945, surely the most primitive nuclear device ever detonated, produced between 13 and 18 kilotons of energy. The 2006 North Korean device produced less than one kiloton, and the 2009 test, less than four. And their missiles can’t even get off the ground. I can remember Charles “Krautman” Krauthammer caterwauling back in the nineties that if the U.S. didn’t abandon its pantywaist, sissy britches “Billary”-style foreign policy, Honolulu would be but a memory, and LA next on the list. Do you really want to go down in history as “Krautman II,” Fred? Isn’t one more than enough?

Afterwords, Part I
Despite his attempts to scare himself, and us, over nothing, Fred does have enough sense to acknowledge that we shouldn’t invade North Korea, or even blow it up. Apparently, we should just be very, very worried about it, and spend lots and lots of money on defense. You know, like it was Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, even though it totally, totally isn’t.

Afterwords, Part II
The reasonable assumption is that someday this monstrously oppressive, inefficient regime will collapse. When that happens North Korea will be a danger, to South Korea and China, who will be hit with millions of starving refugees. Until that time, North Korea will only be a danger to itself. Cap’n Fred can rest easy. Except that he doesn’t want to.

The Obama Murders—Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

2011-12-20T11:04:00.000-05:00

Thanks be to God that we have a liberal Democrat in the White House! Now gays are allowed to serve freely in the military without shame! Without shame, that is, if they don’t mind being complicit in the Obama Administration’s “Mystery Murder” campaign in Pakistan, which has resulted in the deaths of, well, Janbaz Zadran, a serious bad guy, “a top official in the Haqqani insurgent network,” as well as a couple of thousand more bad guys, whom the Administration refuses to identify at this time. Or any other. Or to explain why they were targeted. Or anything else.

The whole miserable story—a large part of it, at least—is laid out for us in my favorite whipping boy, the Washington Post. Karen DeYoung is still willing to question authority and tell it like it is, and it’s awful. You should definitely read the whole thing, but here a few passages that I found particularly noisome:

“Among other variables, according to one [CIA] source briefed on the program, those selecting targets calculate how much potential collateral damage [that is to say, innocent civilian deaths] is acceptable relative to the value of the target. An insurgent leader aware of such logic, they said, could avoid an attack simply by positioning himself in the midst of enough civilians to make the strike too costly.”

Makes sense, doesn’t it? If we’re such pussies that we won’t kill more than five innocents (or “collaterals,” in CIA talk), then the bad guys will just surround themselves with six. Those bastards!

Another concern: “Many administration lawyers strongly disapprove of opinions written under President George W. Bush that justified detainee interrogation methods now widely regarded as torture. But they worry that Obama’s 2009 decision to make them public has set a precedent for the release of normally classified opinions.”

Yes, because if we release information on the crimes, murders, and sundry “evil”* committed by other people, then other people might release information on the crimes, murders, and sundry “evil” committed by us! And if there’s anything lawyers hate, it’s being held responsible for their actions. We don’t act, damn it! We advise! Because being a lawyer means never having to go to jail.

My advice: read this article, and don’t vote for President Obama’s re-election. He doesn’t deserve it.

*Remember “evil”? It used to be a bad thing. But now, apparently, it’s a good thing. It’s certainly our thing.

Saxygurl—“In Walked Bud”

2011-12-20T06:00:00.000-05:00

Zachary, piano, Gabriel, bass, Corey, drums, Alexandria, sax. Posted by saxygurl

Continuously not the New Yorker

2011-12-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

“I don’t think I hurt his feelings. I think you hurt his feelings.”

“I know, but when he looks at me with those big brown eyes, I just melt.”

“Well, she may be a whelping bitch, but she sure doesn’t look like a whelping bitch.”

“The whole rolled-up newspaper thing made a lot of sense until the Times started downsizing.”

“Face it, Brad. Your little baby is all grown up, and she doesn’t need you any more.”

“A hippo should make a statement, you know what I’m saying? When you walk into this room, you shouldn’t be asking yourself ‘What is this hippo doing here?’ You should know what she’s doing here.”

“I think she knows what she did. I think she knows very well what she did.”

“We need to set boundaries, Brad. And fast.”

“You shouldn’t show fear, but she doesn’t appreciate apathy either. Respectfully attentive about sums it up.”

“When she flattens her ears—well, if you see that, that’s the last thing you’ll ever see. So, no sudden movements. And no fat jokes.”

“Don’t refer to her in the third person. It upsets her.”

“I know it was the collie’s fault, but you know how dog people are. They anthropomorphize shamelessly. And that means no more weekend visits to Van Cortlandt Park for another six months.”

For New Yorker-approved captions, go here.

God the Father, endowed with infinite wisdom and compassion, and who might be trying just a little bit harder

2011-12-16T06:00:00.000-05:00

If you read Andrew Sullivan’s blog, as I often do, you may find yourself reading more about gay marriage and whether old guys should be allowed to wander around the locker room in the nude more than you care to, but you will also find yourself reading a lot about “God.” Well, I’m not much of a God guy, so I usually give these items a pass, but for whatever reason I didn’t get past this one, which includes compassionate conservative and Eastern Orthodox Christian dude Rod Dreher ruminating as follows: “My view is that God may save anyone, but that if anyone is saved, it is through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and through the mercy of God the Father, who, in his infinite wisdom and compassion, may choose to extend it to those who confessed Christ imperfectly, or who didn’t confess him at all.”

Well, I think it’s sporting of God to “choose,” from time to time, to give a break to some poor schmuck who hasn’t been getting with the program, but since God is packing “infinite wisdom and compassion,” why doesn’t he cut us all a break and save us all right now, quitting this vale of wrath and tears that, after all, he created for us. I mean, heaven would be nice right now, wouldn’t it? Without all the suffering. So let’s have it!

Afterwords
Andrew takes this ball and runs with it, one-upping Rod’s ecumenical spirit by speculating that Jesus was a son of God rather than the son of God, which doesn’t seem terribly Catholic to me, but if you’re a smells and bells guy, go for it. Knock yourself out. Andy puts it this way: “Have other sons of God existed? Surely. Saints have always existed. We probably meet them now and again and have no idea. Is faith in Jesus essential to being saved now and for ever? Yes and no. Yes, because he exemplified the way and the truth and the life. No, because he wasn't the only human being to have done so. But can those who affirmatively reject Jesus' message be saved? I don't see how.” Which kind of sounds like we save ourselves through our belief. So what’s God doing? Keeping a low profile, it seems. And maybe that’s for the best.

For the children, goddamnit, for the children

2011-12-15T06:00:00.000-05:00

In a recent posting in the NYT, bible thumpin’ Ross Douthat warns the Christian right to stay the fuck away from Newt Gingrich: “It isn’t just that he’s a master of selective moral outrage whose newfound piety has been turned to consistently partisan ends. It’s that his personal history — not only the two divorces, but also the repeated affairs and the way he behaved during the dissolution of his marriages — makes him the most compromised champion imaginable for a movement that’s laboring to keep lifelong heterosexual monogamy on a legal and cultural pedestal.”

Some of us might think that Ross himself has a tendency to use his (presumably) old-found piety for partisan ends—or perhaps simply for old-fashioned self-promotion—but since I’m even more afraid of a Gingrich presidency than Ross is, I can’t help but applaud the dude’s fervor. But I also can’t help gagging on his fulminatin’ conclusion, when he calls upon the Christian right “to recognize what anointing a thrice-married adulterer as the champion of ‘family values’ would say to the skeptical, the unconverted and above all to the young.”

Yeah, that’s why Ross doesn’t want the Republicans to nominate Newt Gingrich, because of the message it would send “to the young.” The nomination of Newt Gingrich would mean the ruination of the Republican Party if he lost the presidency, and the ruination of the country if he won. Ross knows this. Why can’t he say this? Why can’t he tell the truth, instead of pretending that he’s worried about “the young”? Sometimes, Ross sounds as bad as Newt Gingrich.

Afterwords
The New Republic collects a hilarious list of “anyone but Newt” squeals from the Right here. Over at the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza does an even better job. And if you think Romney might be an improvement, check out his promise to “keep America American.”*

Meanwhile, Tom Friedman, everyone’s favorite punching bag (including mine), takes a break from wishing we all spoke Chinese and writes a withering column on the unholy union of right-wing American politicians with right-wing Israelis. Among other things, Friedman accurately sums up Romney’s take on the Middle East as follows: “America’s role is to just applaud whatever Israel does, serve as its A.T.M. and shut up. We have no interests of our own. And this guy’s running for president?” Another Friedman zinger: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

The Chinese supposedly have a saying: “May you live in interesting times.” These times are way too interesting for me. And they just keep getting more and more interesting. I so miss the nineties.

*No spear-chuckin’ Mau-Maus need apply!

Fulmine! The Italian for “Bang” is “Bang”!

2011-12-14T06:00:00.000-05:00

A visit to that seriously weakened institution known as the magazine stand taught me several new words: fumetto, which is Italian for “little puff of smoke,” and, by extension, “dialogue balloon,” that is to say, “comic book.” The fumetto I picked up was “Tex,” which it turns out is rather a legendary publication. If you can read Italian, you can join any number of discussion groups on “Tex,” and also look at pictures of Italians wearing cowboy hats, looking notably less dangerous than they do wearing black pin-striped suits.

Another Italian word is “fulmine,” which, as you might guess, means both “lightning” and “thunder,” and translates into English more or less as “tarnation!” or “blast!” and is the sort of thing you might say when some miscreant (or is it a good guy? Lacking the proper cultural orientation, I can’t tell good from evil in these strips) sticks the blade of a hunting knife in your rifle butt with a mighty “thwaaacckk!”

Some dude named “steffenanthony” is posting “Tex” adventures on the Internet. The following is a sample:

The Republican Party, getting awfully tired of black poor people

2011-12-13T09:00:00.000-05:00

Let them clean toilets?

Hey, it’s catchy. And if Diamond Newt Gingrich has anything to do with it, that’s what “really poor children” will be doing. You see, those kids, they simply have no work ethic, no respect for the value of the dollar. Now, rich kids, they know the value of the dollar. And if they don’t, well, fuck, they’re rich, right? I mean, am I right or am I right?

So far, the Newtman hasn’t explained the cutoff point for “really poor,” but I’m guessing that it’s going to translate into something like “probably not white,” because Newt, like a lot of Republicans, has just had it about up to here with those damn ~~black~~ poor people who, you know, just don’t know the value of the dollar. Like Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who’s signed legislation to force welfare recipients to undergo drug testing, and like South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who wants drug testing for unemployment insurance, because she estimates that half of the unemployed are snorting, toking, or shooting their way to paradise on the public’s dime.

Even worse than drug abuse and just plain lollygagging, of course, is voting, and the Republican Party is definitely working to put a stop to that. Ari Berman at Rolling Stone sums up most (or at least some) of the major abuses Republican eager beavers at the state level have come up with, helped immensely by a totally not results-oriented Supreme Court decision that said it was okay for Indiana to pass legislation directed against electoral fraud despite literally zero evidence of the sort of fraud the law was (supposedly) intended to defend against. Hey, you can’t be too careful! And if some ~~black~~ poor schmuck who wanted to vote is turned away, hey, that’s the price we have to pay if we want to be free! What are you, Jack, some sort of Kenyan-born anti-colonialist scum?

Russian Cats Do Monk

2011-12-13T06:00:00.000-05:00

The tune is “Little Rootie Tootie,” and the line-up is as follows:
Alexander Bril (tenor saxophone), Dmitry Bril (soprano saxophone), Vladimir Nesterenko (keyboards), Alexander Kulikov (drums), Vladimir Koltzov-Krutov (bass). Bril Brothers Jazz Art Club, September 22, 2010 (Moscow). Posted by Taberculat

If you’re dead, you’re not a non-combatant

2011-12-12T17:01:00.000-05:00

Over at Wired’s “Danger Room,” Spencer Ackerman takes a look at the results of President Obama’s drone war, causing Greg Scoblete and Andrew Sullivan to express skepticism regarding the accuracy of the Administration’s body count. Last August, the New York Times also questioned the drone program’s “perfect record.” This photo, of Syed Wali Shah Khan, was taken by Noor Behram.

~The New Yorker

2011-12-12T06:00:00.000-05:00

For approved humor, go here.

“Yeah, this is Les Sylphides. What’s it to ya?”

“She works here, but she don’t work for me, if you catch my drift.”

“Ten cents a dance? Not exactly. More like two hundred fifty, plus she likes a dozen long stems after the performance. So, no, it’s not for everyone.”

“Because you don’t look like any premier danseur I ever seen, that’s why.”

“Hey, if I had a nickel for every time I got asked that question, I’d be a millionaire.”

“No, Harry Diaghilev. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, yeah? Well, let’s see your turnout, smart ass.”

“No offense to your lady friend, Jack, but trading Jello shots for jetés just ain’t my style.”

“Yeah, The Black Swan. I seen that picture. And I seen what happened to the guy that messed with her.”

“This is Manhattan, Kansas, monsieur. I guess you’re confusing us with that other Manhattan. Tutus are a dime a dozen around here.”

Emily Nussbaum, discovering the seamy side of torture

2011-12-09T10:00:00.000-05:00

When Dexter, the tale of sensitive serial killer, first premiered, five seasons ago, the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum counted herself a fan:

Each week, Dexter, played with icy charisma by Michael C. Hall, stalked his victims. He strapped them to a table, sliced their cheeks to collect a drop of blood, then cut them up with a chainsaw. During the day, he worked as a blood-spatter expert for the Miami police, side by side with his clueless sister Deb. Once we learned his history, it all made sense. Dexter witnessed his mother’s murder when he was three. His adoptive father, a cop named Harry, trained the budding sociopath to channel his compulsions—he could kill only other murderers, and only the ones that the law couldn’t convict. He couldn’t get caught. He couldn’t have relationships. Dexter called this Harry’s Code.

Well, I have a very weak stomach, and I go very much out of my way to avoid shows about high-strung dudes cutting up folks with chain saws,* even if they “deserve” it and even if, you know, the poor kid saw Santa Claus hacking up his mom with a dull machete. Even skipping the obvious, not to say bourgeois, consideration of how Dexter can “know”† that these people are guilty of capital crimes, there’s the whole death penalty thing, not to mention the whole torture thing, the cruel and unusual punishments thing, which I thought we had gotten past a couple of hundred years ago, fool that I was.

Emily, obviously, is made of younger and sterner stuff than I am, and clearly relished the fourth season wrap-up, in which a seriously undisciplined Dexter bonded with a fellow serial killer who, naturally, murdered Dexter’s wife (you knew that “no relationships” thing would go by the boards pretty quickly, didn’t you?), “leaving Dexter’s infant son spattered in his mother’s blood.” Hey, cowboy! It’s karma time!

But the fifth season has been too much even for Emily: “Now, for the first time, Dexter’s mirror [person he identifies with] was a victim: Lumen, a young woman who had been gang-raped and tortured. It was a provocative dynamic, but by midseason all nuance dropped out. The villains were chuckling sadists with an incoherent backstory.”

Gang rape/torture with an incoherent backstory? Sorry, dudes, that is not art.

Afterwords
I thought this piece was going to be funnier (that is to say, even funnier) because I confused Emily Nussbaum with Martha Nussbaum. Martha’s a philosopher (at the University of Chicago), while Emily’s a Manhattan gadabout, writing about TV and the la Vie Pop for New York, New Yorker, et al. If Martha writes a fan letter to Dexter, I’ll definitely be on it, but I rather hope she doesn't.

*It isn’t clear from Emily’s précis if the “bad guys” are alive or dead when Dexter cranks up the Poulan. At first blush, one would think the latter, but since “transgression” is Dexter's middle name, maybe not.

†Since I’ve never seen the show, I can only guess, but my guess is that Dex “knows,” or at least the audience is assured that he does know, by the time-honored TV/Hollywood device of showing us the villain both committing the crime and giggling evilly as he does so. The law is so lame! Why can't they catch these guys, when it's so obvious that they're guilty?

Rod Blagojevich: Moptop Dickhead*

2011-12-08T06:00:00.000-05:00

So now Rod Blagojevich is going to jail for fourteen years for running his mouth. I find this utterly repulsive. Martha Stewart became a convicted felon for the crime of telling a cheesy little lie that essentially did no harm to anyone, but gave a “crusading” district attorney the chance to kick some celebrity ass.†

Poor Rod was convicted on a variety of conspiracy charges, said conspiracies consisting of Rod running his big fat Chicago mouth about all the sweet, sweet deals he was going to pull off, none of which ever emerged. He wanted a payoff for selecting a replacement for Obama’s old Senate seat. Politicians swap favors! Who knew?

I remain convinced that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald went after Blagojevich because he was afraid that if he didn’t he would catch Blagojevich on tape telling President-Elect Obama “I’ll appoint your guy if you’ll get me that $500,000 a year gig with the Teamsters,” with Obama saying “I think we can work something out.” Despite all his brazen wheeling and dealing—the guy clearly could not shut up about what a bad ass he was—Blagojevich never committed an actual crime. He only talked about it. A lot. And now he’s going to prison for fourteen years. Justice? I don’t think so.

*Curiously (at least it seems so to me) Word doesn’t recognize “moptop” as a word but does recognize “dickhead”.

†I confess that I can’t feel too sorry for Martha. In a pre-conviction profile I read of her, I learned that she had three different estates that were staffed and maintained as though Martha were there, even though the vast majority of the time she wasn’t. The thought that there was a cheery fire burning in the bedroom fireplaces of three different homes, the covers turned down, waiting for Ms Martha to arrive, well, it was comforting to her when she was hanging in her Manhattan triplex. That’s how the Tsars lived, after all, and if you’re a poor little Polish girl, apparently that’s how you want to live too. A year in the slam? Well, it’s better than being lined up against a wall and shot. USA! USA! USA!

The U.S./Israeli Pre-Preventative Anticipatory Pre-emptive Strike Program

2011-12-07T06:00:00.000-05:00

The New York Times reports that a massive explosion at an Iranian missile-testing site was a “major setback” for the country’s missile program, at least according to unnamed but surprisingly loquacious “American and Israeli intelligence officials and missile technology experts,” the kind of guys who usually don’t talk much to reporters, but who on this particular occasion seem to have popped up out of the ground like mushrooms after a rain.

The one thing these guys don’t talk about is why there was an explosion, which the Times also finds mysterious, although it does note that “Some Iranian officials have talked of sabotage, but it is unclear whether that is based on evidence or surmise after several years in which Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated on Tehran’s streets, and a highly sophisticated computer worm has attacked its main uranium production facility.” Oy, those wacky Iranians, eh? Looking for “spies,” and “saboteurs,” and “assassins” under every bed! And, sometimes, even overhead! Just because, you know, they shot down a drone or two!

On the other hand, the Times allows that if something should happen to Iran’s missile-testing program, well, that might not be altogether such a bad thing, particularly if it affected the development of solid-fueled missiles, which can be easily concealed and fired on short notice. “That would add to Iran’s ability to protect its nuclear sites from an Israeli strike — a subject of renewed debate in Israel in recent weeks — because Iran could threaten to retaliate before many of its missiles were struck.” And how unfair would that be? Shouldn’t Israel be allowed to launch pre-emptive strikes—in the name of peace, of course—without having to worry about Iran, you know, defending itself?

Afterwords
Think Israel is kidding about wanting to take out Iran’s nuclear sites? Listen to what Charles “Charlie the Kraut” Krauthammer has to say about it: “Everything is going to have a price. It is true that if we cut off Iran’s economy entirely or if we impose, as the Europeans, or some of the Europeans, are suggesting, an embargo on Iranian oil you might get an increase in the oil price. But think how the cost will pale compared to the cost of what is inevitably going to happen if nothing is done, which is an Israeli airstrike, which would cause the outbreak of a regional war, which could cause the closing of the Straits of Hormuz, which would cause a doubling of [oil] prices.”

Got that? We do it Israel’s way or they’re going to blow up the world’s economy. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan is queasy about assassination but down with sabotage. Because it’s so easy to blow up “suspected” nuclear sites, missile-testing facilities, et al. without hurting anyone. When will anyone notice that it is the U.S. (and Israel) who are addicted to the use of force against other nations, often for domestic political reasons, and not Iran? Iran’s government is often a threat to the Iranian people, but not to us. A nuclear Iran might even stabilize the Middle East, because Israel would feel less able to throw its weight around.

The Carl Levin John McCain “We Don’t Want To Be Free” Act of 2011

2011-12-06T06:30:00.000-05:00

When does it stop getting worse? The U.S. Senate—that’s the Democratically controlled U.S. Senate—has just passed a singularly gruesome package of lies and abuses to protect us from non-existent terrorists by methodically stripping us of all our freedoms. Glenn Greenwald, whose fingers must be awfully tired from typing the never-ending flow of moral and constitutional outrages the U.S. Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations have poured forth upon us, lists the major crimes:

1. All accused terrorists will be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than given civilian trials. Because if you are accused of terrorism you must be guilty. If you don’t believe me, write a letter to Justice Franz Kafka and he’ll fill you in.

2. U.S. citizens can be treated the same way, although they don’t have to be, which likely means that if you are a clean-shaven (and I mean that literally) white guy who speaks unaccented English, and particularly if you have reasonably photogenic and well-spoken relatives who are white and speak unaccented English (most particularly, a mother who is white and speaks unaccented English and who can say things like “My boy is a good boy!” like she means it), you may get a jury trial, just like they did back in those long-ago days when we had not only a Constitution but constitutional rights.

3. You can be declared a terrorist if you “substantially support” Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or “associated forces.” Who defines “substantially support” and “associated forces”? Guess what? It ain’t you.

4. If you’re in Guantanamo, your chances of getting out will fall from 1/10⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁸ to 1/10⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹. Sorry! Serves you right for getting caught on trumped up charges contrived by unscrupulous politicians bent on short-term electoral gain! You’re lucky you aren’t dead, even though you may wish you were.

Why are we so terrified? The McCarthy period really lasted from 1950-1954, and largely in response to the Korean War. Once American troops stopped dying, the fear level went down. But now, the further the bloodletting recedes in the past, the more hysterical the politicians become. It’s easy to see why the Republicans are doing this, and why they Democrats are cowering in fear: the public responds. Why is the public responding in this manner? I’m sorry, but I’m baffled.

Afterwords
The Obama Administration is saying that the President will veto this piece of crap unless it’s made slightly less shitty—saying that the bill shouldn’t apply to American citizens on American soil. But, in case you thought that meant the President is a sissy, no way: As Glenn “Achin’ Fingers” Greenwald again reports, the President has proved his manhood by having his Administration publicly endorse his unlimited right to murder anyone around the globe, with the possible exception of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. So, dude, don’t travel.

Frankly, I don’t know how Glenn can write about this stuff so much, because the more I write the more depressed I become. We are living in a synthetic firestorm of hysteria, fanned by leaders of both parties, who feel they must one-up each other in cruelty and ruthlessness. Is the public that scared, and that bloody-minded? The one politician with the nerve to call a murder a murder is Ron Paul. He didn’t go to Harvard Law, but if this be Harvard, give me Texas A&M.*

*Ron went to Gettysburg College (in Pennsylvania, which is where he’s from) and Duke Med School, but I like to end these things with a rhetorical flourish. A small pleasure, perhaps, but these days that’s all I can afford.

Laura Caviani Trio - “Epistrophy”

2011-12-06T06:00:00.000-05:00

Laura Caviani on piano, Adam Linz on bass and Phil Hey on drums doing Monk’s “Epistrophy” live at the Artists Quarter for Monk's 90 Birthday celebration on 10/10/2007. Posted by donberryman

SNTNY!

2011-12-05T06:00:00.000-05:00

If you can’t handle intense, one-of-a-kind humor, go here.

“Sorry, this is the last one. Everyone loves the symbolism, but you’re falling way, way behind.”

“Reflections on the Revolution in France? Hey, talk about your irony!”

“See, Jerry, writing a tell-all novel about the firm wasn’t so funny after all. Be at your desk on Monday at seven AM sharp wearing a suit. Or don’t be there at all.”

“This is the Crittenden account. For what I went through, I wonder if you could burn it at the stake.”

“I can’t read this. It’s a hundred fucking pages long! Why do they give me this crap when they know I’m not going to read it?”

“Boil this one down to a thousand words, tops. The chairman’s going to be at the board meeting, and I’ve got to scintillate.”

“I don’t care if it’s got staples in it! Goddamn it! Just get it done!”

“See this? It represents five years of my life. But you know what? I’m better off without it.”

“Skip the attitude, girlfriend. Get it right or you’ll be wearing a tutu.”

“You’d like a new blade? Yeah, well, I’d like a new computer. You’ll get a new blade when management thinks you need one, Jerry. In the meantime, just do your damn job.”

Blemish? Yeah, I guess you could call it that

2011-12-02T07:46:00.001-05:00

I’m reading David McCullough’s fascinating, thousand-page history of Christianity, which is simply called Christianity, with the snappy subtitle, “The First Three Thousand Years,” implying that there will be some backstory, which there is. I’ve gotten to about 1100 AD, or page 400, depending on how you want to keep track. According to McCullough, “one of the characteristics of Western Christianity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries is its identification of various groups within the Western world as distinct, marginal and a constant potential threat to good order.” Preeminent among these groups, of course, were the Jews, who would serve as scapegoats for Christian hysteria for centuries to come, whenever Christians got upset about something. The worst of the worst was the “blood libel,” the absurd and grotesque assertion that Jews kidnapped and murdered Christian children for their blood to use in Jewish rituals. According to McCullough, “Recurrences of the blood libel persisted into the twentieth century as a blemish on Christian attitudes to Jews, spreading from the West into Orthodoxy in later centuries.”

First of all, I’d call the blood libel a little more than a “blemish,” and, secondly, Christian attitudes to Jews were in themselves pretty consistently awful even without the “blemish.” How can you blemish a blemish? The real blood libel goes back to the gospel of St. Matthew, in which “the Jews” supposedly announce “Let his blood be on our head and on the heads of our descendants.” Christians, unfortunately, had a tendency to read their Bible and take it literally, and much of the New Testament is as bloody as the Old.

I’m also reading Immanuel Kant’s Religion Considered Within the Limits of Reason Alone, which, though fortunately not a thousand pages long, is probably an even better read than McCullough. Yet Kant goes very much out of his way to beat up on the Jews, claiming that Judaism really isn’t a religion, among its very many sins being that it doesn’t believe in an afterlife. Kant’s argument for immortality is that it would be “irrational” for rational beings like ourselves to submit to what we do have to submit to as mortal critters unless there were somehow an afterlife where we virtuous folk could be rewarded for our good deeds, good deeds which on this terrestrial globe are far more likely to be punished than rewarded, and which in any event ultimately are punished, by the worst of all punishments, death. Yeah, Immanuel, you do have a point. Too bad the Jews got it right, and you got it wrong.

Update“David McCullough” is actually “Diarmaid MacCullough”. Sorry, Mac!

The Washington Post, defining deviancy down, down, down, in so many, many ways

2011-12-01T08:59:00.001-05:00

I shouldn’t read the Washington Post. And I don’t. But sometimes I run across links that draw me there. And each time they do, I find the Post has gotten even worse than it was before.

The first link was provided by Glenn Greenwald, who did all my bitching for me, providing an withering, and eminently justified, takedown of Post columnist Ruth Marcus, all hot and bothered by—wait for it—an outbreak of free speech in Kansas!

You’re surely aware of the story of Emma Sullivan, the 18-year-old high school student in Kansas whose tweet re Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, “#heblowsalot,” has pretty much gone around the globe, or at least from Natchez to Mobile. Sam’s staff notoriously leaned on Miss Emma’s school to punish little miss trash mouth, but Emma wouldn’t back down, and her mother backed her up: “I raised my kids to be independent, to be strong, to be free thinkers. If she wants to tweet her opinion about Governor Brownback, I say for her to go for it and I stand totally behind her.”

Well, that kind of crazy free speech, First Amendment talk was too much for a columnist in the leading newspaper in our nation’s capital: “If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smart¬alecky, potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip.”

No, Ruthie didn’t much care for Emma, but she cared for Emma’s mom even less: “The parental role is to inculcate values of respect for authority— even those you disagree with—and the importance of civil discourse. It’s not to stand up for your little darling no matter how much she mouths off.” Ruth, you totally suck.

The Post’s next journalistic outrage totally does not involve sucking. Well, I’m pretty sure of that, though, in fact, I could be wrong. So what’s the deal, Lucille? You also may be aware that Clint Eastwood has released, to fairly restrained applause, J. Edgar, a biopic on J. Edgar Hoover, starring Mr. Titanic himself, Leo DiCaprio, dancing around the Director’s long-time infatuation with his number two man, Clyde Tolson.

J. Edgar’s been out for close to a month, and the film’s generally been criticized by its wishy-washy tone on just about everything in Hoover’s life, and, frankly, at this point, it’s pretty much old news. Well, not to the Washington Post. They’ve got plenty of room to allow some old G-men* to bitch about the portrayal of their chief in a long story by Carol Morello with the bland headline “FBI agents upset over movie alleging J. Edgar Hoover was gay.”

Well, they are, and that’s what the story is about. They bitch about the movie and say what a great guy the Director was and put flowers on his grave forty years after the guy is dead.† Morello doesn’t work very hard to provide perspective. She does say this: “John Fox, the FBI historian, said speculation about Hoover’s sexuality never got very far. ‘Hoover was single all those years,’ Fox said. ‘His closest friend and associate was another man. Periodically through the history of his tenure, there was an innuendo here, an innuendo there that he was homosexual. But that was the extent of it.’”

I think Carol could have worked a little harder than that. There was more than an innuendo here and an innuendo there. I heard “J. Edgar’s a homo” jokes when I was in high school in 1963, and my high school was not what you see on “Gossip Girl.” But now, in 2011, when gays are getting married, the Post will run an article that does nothing more than let old G-men lie about their boss.

I remember that, several years ago (and, probably, several Post staff reductions ago), the Post ran a funny (and not bitchy) article about J. Edgar and Clyde, based on a staff memo prepared for FBI personnel assigned the ball-shriveling task of caring for the two when they arrived at bureau offices in California or Florida on vacation.‡ According to the memo, everything had to be exactly the same for each man, to ward off complaints along the lines of “How come Edgar had a new bar of soap in his soap dish this morning and I didn’t?” or memos beginning “It has come to my attention that Mr. Tolson’s bed has two queen-sized pillows while the Director’s bed has one queen-sized and one standard-sized pillow.” The reporter, whose name I can’t recall, had a good chuckle at the thought of these two fussy old queens running the most powerful law enforcement agency this side of the KGB.

But that was then, when the Post used to question authority instead of worshipping it.

Afterwords
I previously alluded to this matter, before J. Edgar dropped, in a post entitled “Ronald Kessler, totally bending over forwards to be fair,” discussing Kessler’s account of l’affaire de Edgar and Clyde in his book The Bureau, The Secret History of the FBI. Kessler summed things up as follows: the two “were inseparable. They ate lunch together every day and dinner together every night. They vacationed together, staying in adjoining rooms, and they took adoring photos of one another.” Move along, folks, move along. Nothing to see here. Nothing to see.

Slate discusses the matter more intelligently here, and concludes with a heartfelt message from Edgar to Clyde: “Words are mere man-given symbols for thoughts and feelings, and they are grossly insufficient to express the thoughts in my mind and the feelings in my heart that I have for you. I hope I will always have you beside me.” Sounds like a man in love to me. And not in a bad way, either. Even tyrannical, law-breaking shitheads can have feelings.

*Old, old G-men, actually, because Hoover died in 1972.

†And how gay is that?

‡Hoover carried bureaucratic nest-feathering to a degree unimaginable today. He loved to go to the racetrack, so he created FBI offices in Florida and California near famous racetracks with special guest quarters (used, of course, only by Tolson and himself). Hoover got a new Cadillac limousine each year (the President got a new one every three years). The old ones would be rotated out to the “racetrack” field offices so that he and Clyde could travel to the track in style.

The Newtator-in-Chief Lord Spare Us

2011-11-30T07:20:00.001-05:00

Over at the New York Times, Republican truth-teller Bruce Bartlett has a column headed “Gingrich and the Destruction of Congressional Expertise,” explaining how, as Speaker, Newt “did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it,” said harebrained ideas frequently emanating from the long-eared, woolly headed skull of one Newt Gingrich.

But Gingrich’s impatience with sources of authority other than himself go far beyond his hostility to the Congressional Budget Office ( a current pet peeve). He’s also campaigning to shut off funding to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, located (naturally) in San Francisco, whose decisions have been just too damn California for Newt’s fat Georgia ass. A few years back, when Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson was being investigated for corruption by the Justice Department, Newt rather bizarrely asserted that if he were still Speaker, he would cut off funding for the Justice Department.

All of this, of course, is nothing compared to his impeachment of President Clinton. In this, Gingrich was simply part of a vast right-wing conspiracy dedicated to the destruction of Bill Clinton—the destruction of anything they could not control.* Gingrich’s junior partner in crime, Tom DeLay, trumped even the impeachment, when he connived with the Bush Administration to enact the “Let Terri Schiavo Live” Act of 2005, ordering the federal court system to assume jurisdiction over a state legal matter and decide it according to the wishes of Congress, violating the separation of powers doctrine as it applies both within the federal government and vis-à-vis the federal and state governments.†

However much the contemporary right wing may yap about the Constitution, they don’t believe in it. They represent an inchoate yearning for a plebiscitary dictatorship, centered in whatever branch of government they control. Newt, for his massive hunger for power, and his utter lack of scruples, represents the worst the Republicans have to offer. Fortunately, he has lots of enemies in the party. Unfortunately, Romney does too.

*A vast right-wing conspiracy that would have been completely helpless had Clinton not deliberately offered up his vast Arkansas ass as a target. When a man as smart as Bill Clinton gets caught cheating on his wife, it’s because he wants to get caught. Clinton was both a compulsive seducer and a compulsive betrayer. Because after you’ve seduced someone how can you exert power over them except by betraying them? You thought I needed you? Bullshit! By flaunting his infidelities, Clinton let his devoted staff (and family) know that they meant nothing to him. You think I owe you? Fuck that! I own you!

†And don’t get me started on Bush v. Gore! Don’t even get me started!

Princeton history professors and Berkeley economic professors: which is worse?

2011-11-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and he writes like this: “Although President Ronald Reagan was mocked by some as an actor in the White House who followed his script, Reagan was like Gingrich in that he spent much of his early adulthood deeply immersed in journals such as Human Events and in reading some of the prominent thinkers of the time.”

If you are saying to yourself, “gee, why aren’t I a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton too,” consider these points:

1) Human Events was not founded until 1944, at which time Ronald Reagan was already 33 years old. As late as the 1948 election, Ronnie was still a hemophiliac liberal (his term), rejoicing in the election of both Harry Truman and a Democratic Congress. “Now we’ll have national health insurance for sure!” Ronnie crowed to a friend.*

2) Reagan first subscribed to Human Events in 1961, when he was 50 and already a frothing at the mouth reactionary, laying into the TVA so vigorously that GE told him to lay off the goddamn customers.

You know, professor, there’s this new thing. It’s called the Internet. You ought to check it out!

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Brad DeLong comes up with this whopper: “The Wages of AFDC Repeal Is Children Living in Cars.”† Yes, in 1996 Clinton signs a welfare reform bill, and in 2011, only 15 years later, kids are living in cars. That’s almost as absurd as the theory that changes in federal housing policy made by Clinton in 1994 resulted in the 2008 meltdown on Wall Street. Brad, when your grasp of causality is almost as lame as the shitheads at AEI, you need a vacation.

*Note to Ronnie in heaven. We made it, big guy! Now we’re all in heaven!

†How does Brad know that kids are living in cars? Because 60 Minutes says so! And you know that hyperventilating moral poseurs in $2,000 suits never lie!

Delfeayo Marsalis & Future Focus—“Blue Monk”

2011-11-29T06:00:00.000-05:00

Delfeayo Marsalis, trombone; Marlon Jordan, trumpet; Mark Gross, alto; Vincent Gardner, trombone; Charnette Moffett, bass;, Herlin Riley, drums. I always like to hear Monk played by a good trombonist—it cuts across the grain, somehow. Posted by UptownMusicTheatre

Well, anything the brothers from the Big Easy can do, white chicks from Lakota West can do too. Haven’t you heard? Jazz is a universal language.* Posted by BandDadMan

*Still, someone needs to clue the Lakota West folks into the fact that while the tune may have been arranged by JJ Johnson (I guess), it was written by Thelonious Monk.

Cats can talk! Turtles, not so much!

2011-11-28T06:00:00.000-05:00

Another puzzler from Bicycle Ben from Harrisburg. Actually, the dude does most of the talking here, which is only right, until another species learns to draw.

“Yeah, it is a race of sorts. The first one to figure out what the hell Jerry is doing with the bull fiddle wins.”

“I know this is Friday, but we’re going to pretend that it isn’t.”

“Don’t ask me why Jerry is holding the fiddle upright. You know damn well why he’s holding the fiddle upright.”

“OK, Eddie. You’ve been saying that a turtle can do everything a dog can do. Here’s your chance to prove it.”

The dog seemed pleased, and the cat and turtle, amused. But Brad knew—how well he knew—how quickly they could turn.

Jerry grit his teeth and held onto the string for dear life. Adding a human to the mix had been a disaster. Why had he imagined that Brad would take his side? They were herd animals, all of them, and they were just pulling him down to their level.

“Well, it’s a biathlon, of sorts. You swim 500 meters and then play Bottesini’s “Capriccio di Bravura” on the bass. To make things a little more interesting, Jerry will be working the pulley. Good luck, and may the better quadruped win.”

“Stupid pet tricks? I prefer the term ‘brilliant owner tricks.’”

“Okay, kids, let’s get it right this time. Or Daddy is going to be very, very angry.”

Chait and Frum, telling the truth all the way to the water’s edge

2011-11-24T06:00:00.000-05:00

Over at NYMag, Jonathan Chait, liberal, and David Frum, conservative, take turns talking out of school and dumping on their respective parties. Chait has the easier task, because, as he tells it, it’s only the “liberals” who are out to lunch, but for Frum it’s the whole fucking party (which is totally fucking true).

Chait mostly berates his party for, well, for believing that Obama would do all things he said he would do, which is in fact a fairly reasonable criticism. Candidates invariably talk big, and then have to do some fast-stepping once they actually take office. As Chait demonstrates, every Democratic demi-god, from FDR to Clinton, has multiple stains on his record, something many Democrats simply refuse to admit, particularly in the case of FDR (generally treated as Yahweh himself) and JFK (the son, of course). Still, Obama talked an awful lot about health care, about “Canadian pricing” for drugs, and about a lot of other things. A lot of people voted for Obama expecting their health care costs to drop by 50%, something that is not happening.

For Drum, of course, his party has simply gone wild. Destruction is the name of the game. If it hurts Obama, it’s good. If it hurts the country too, too damn bad. The country shouldn’t have voted for the no-good son of a bitch. It’s payback time, America!

But in all this, neither man breathes a word about foreign policy. In Chait’s case, it’s because Obama’s foreign policy is simply the policy of Condoleezza Rice and George Bush, rather than the foreign policy of Dick Cheney and George Bush—same imperial presidency, same unlimited executive, same extra-judicial murders, but no torture—at least, not so’s you’d notice. Obama always had a hankering for secrecy—he clearly modeled his campaign on Bush’s—and now it seems he’s discovered the joy of not playing by anyone’s rules but his own. Even the “end” of the war in Iraq is pretty much a sham. Our troops are gone, but we have thousands of mercenaries, plus a near $1 billion Pentagon East installation in the form of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, a very fat excuse for not leaving, which the military will surely exploit to the hilt. And if Obama has ever said “no” to the military, he kept his voice awfully goddamn low.

For Drum, on the other hand, well, he was one of the architects of disaster. According to his wife, at least, it was Drum who invented the phrase “Axis of Evil,” perhaps the biggest “big lie” of my lifetime, linking together three nations—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—who were all evil enough, but who had almost nothing to do with one another, and, above all, had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. Drum and his Bush Administration buddies used this big lie to justify the most misbegotten war in American history, a war so bad that even Drum says it was a bad idea, claiming that he only supported it because he believed that Saddam had nuclear weapons, the grounds for said belief existing entirely in the ravings of the phalanx of hysterical right-wingers installed by Bush.

Chait and Drum, smart, smart men. They know when to keep their mouths shut.

A coupla National Review dudes, last seen thinking a whole lot about poor people

2011-11-23T09:36:00.001-05:00

And not entirely without effect, either. In “The Freeloader Myth” Ramesh Ponnuru suggests politely to Republicans that they stop pissing on the 47 percent of the population who are so poor that they don’t have any federal income tax liability, on the grounds that, basically, it’s not nice to make fun of poor people, especially since 1) they pay a lot of other taxes, 2) it was often Republican legislation that reduced the number of people paying federal income tax, and 3) when you’re accusing President Obama of “class war” because he wants to raise taxes on the rich, it’s a little, well, rich to be wanting to raise taxes on the poor. Yeah, a little evasive and soft around the edges, but, compared to Larry Kudlow, worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.

For his part, Reihan Salam has a lot to say, a whole lot to say, actually, about a “fascinating” report by the House Budget Committee and the “landscape of inequality.” Reihan learns a lot from this report, a whole lot, reading it in conjunction with the rather “controversial” [my word, not Reihan’s] Congressional Budget Office report. Among the things Reihan learns: rich people tend to work more than poor people! Yeah! But one thing Reihan doesn’t learn, and in fact doesn’t even discuss, is what to do about the fact that over the past 30 years, those in the top 1% saw their incomes increase by 275%, while those in the bottom 20% got an 18% raise. Hey, you can’t solve all the world’s problems in one column!

Both Reihan and Ramesh are, you know, foreigners, which tends to give their conservatism a less than knee-jerk quality. But give Ramesh props, of some sort (certainly not mine), for going off on Newt Gingrich for being squishy soft on federal funding of stem cell research. Of all the bad things you could say about Newt, that is surely the least likely to be said.

The Barack Obama Chinese-American Naval Full Employment Act of 2012

2011-11-22T09:24:00.001-05:00

Last week President Obama traveled to the quasi-god-forsaken site of Darwin, Australia to twist the tail of the Chinese dragon by announcing that 2,500 U.S. Marines would now be spending time in Australia. “As a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future,” the President announced, if not thundered. There are, after all, about 64,100,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean, and every damn square inch ( about 257,328,783,360,000,000 of them, to be precise) belongs to Uncle Sammy.

One rather hopes that there is more sound and fury than substance to these remarks, a surmise prompted by the fact that the U.S. won’t be building any bases in Australia (one further surmises this is because the Aussies don’t want us to). Instead, the 2,500 Marines will be stationed with Australian forces, which certainly beats getting shot at in Iraq and Afghanistan. And surely the Iraqis and Afghans are happy for us to leave.

China pronounces itself mightily offended by this action, although how 2,500 jarheads can threaten a nation of more than 1,000,000,000 has yet to be explained to my satisfaction. I can only imagine that the admirals of the Chinese navy are rubbing their hands with delight. “We’ll need at least five new aircraft carriers to handle this threat,” they’re exclaiming, while their American counterparts are likely to have submersible flattops on the boards.

Afterwords
The New York Times explains that the U.S. has quite sensibly been withdrawing troops from the Pacific ever since the end of the Cold War. Sending 2,500 Marines back is hardly a major reversal. But by traveling to Darwin, the President 1) got the hell out of the country while the “supercommittee” was committing kabuki hari-kari, 2) encouraged the U.S. Navy to believe that they’d be getting a new fleet for Christmas, 3) pissed off the Chinese, and 4) picked up some fabulous campaign footage. Who says the guy can’t count?

John Stetch trio—“Black Sea Suite” Part 1

2011-11-22T06:00:00.000-05:00

Pianist John Stetch with Nicholas Walker on Bass and Tom Killian on Drums. Live at the Carriage House in Ithaca, New York. Posted by beatdweller

So Not The New Yorker

2011-11-21T06:00:00.000-05:00

Go here for the real thing.

“It started out as a metaphor, but I lost control. I know it means something, but I don’t know what. Up to my ass in bills? Up to my tie bar in treatises? New York after the Smash? You tell me.”

“It’s called diving for paychecks, dude, and the fat ones are on the bottom.”

“I’m soakin’ here, white boy. Wait your damn turn.”

“Accounts payable ain’t draining my damn pool without filling it something. You tell them that, and I’ll wait here.”

“Yes, this is the first 2,000 pages of that tell-all novel you were always threatening to write. You know what? It sucks.”

“You know what would really make this work? One of those big disco balls.”

“Just so you know, from the waist down I’m naked.”

“No, I don’t do this every day. But I do do it whenever I damn well feel like it.”

“No, I like it when you don’t knock. You know that.”

“I just wish there were more than two of us now. I really wish that.”

What does the future hold? More of the same

2011-11-18T08:53:00.001-05:00

When I was a little boy, I liked to take baths. And when I was taking a bath, I liked to rock back and forth, causing the water to swish back and forth, my ultimate goal being to cause the water to swish back and forth so violently that at one point all of the water would be at one end of the tub, leaving the porcelain at the other end entirely exposed—a goal that, Newton might have told me, could never be achieved.

If I had been of a quantitative disposition, this childhood enthusiasm might have led to a career in hydraulics, but I’m more inclined to metaphor than calculus, and so I’m more inclined to see that bathtub as a metaphor for the American body politic than an exercise in fluid mechanics—that is to say, when you strive to drive all of the water up to one end of the tub, you guarantee that it will eventually slop all the way back to the other end of the tub. Final victory will always elude your grasp.

The Tea Party’s reckoning with this principle appears to be at hand. Its great triumph—and the Obama Administration’s great humiliation—over the increase in the debt ceiling last summer, which appeared to herald a new era in American politics, now appears to be swallowed up in politics as usual. After strapping a bomb to its chest in the form of an automatic “sequestration” of $1.2 trillion over the next ten years in the absence of a massive debt-reduction package by a special “super committee” (or “Super Committee,” or Supercommittee,” or “supercommittee”—even agreement on spacing and capitalization seems to have eluded the poor creature), Congress has suddenly realized that they can take the damn bomb off any time they damn please, which is exactly what they’re planning to do—“planning” being the conscious/unconscious decision to allow the parallelogram of political forces to carry them downstream—for politics, like water, always seeks its lowest level.

A clever person might have predicted this, because the Tea Party rose to power by 1) promising to cut spending and 2) denouncing the Democrats for cutting spending. The chattering class was so busy congratulating itself on seeing through President Obama’s plan to cut $500 billion out of Medicare that they didn’t really notice that voters were afraid that the cuts would take effect, not that they wouldn’t.

In theory, the Democrats should be sitting pretty, but of course they aren’t. If they were “smart” they would threaten to let the Bush tax cuts expire—after all, the country was more prosperous without them than with them—but Democrats have long been convinced that Republicans own the tax-cutting issue. For the past five years the Democrats have been talking about how much they want to raise taxes on rich people, but they’ve never gotten around to it, which suggests that they don’t want to raise taxes on rich people, or anyone else.

Still, the water is slopping back the Democrats’ way. When the super committee shrivels to nothing—as it will—the Republicans will decide that they can’t really let the projected sequestration of defense monies take effect. Romney, after all, is demanding that defense spending will go up, and as his rivals continue to implode, congressional Republicans will have to listen more closely to what he’s saying. Democrats, of course, don’t really want to cut defense spending either, but they will (rightly) insist on extracting a price—reduced cuts in domestic spending.

The new farm bill points the way—lots of money for food stamps and Amtrak (not previously regarded as a farm program) plus enough gimmicks to make the World Trade Organization gag. Supposedly, we’ll be whacking a whole $2.3 billion a year out of price supports (less than 10%)—not exactly a hardship, since farm income is at an all-time high—but you can bet that succeeding Congresses will find a way to sweeten that bitter bill with emergency supplementals and add-ons. There’s always a drought or a flood somewhere, if you look hard enough. And, if you wait long enough, always water running back to the other end of the tub.

Felix Salmon, swimming upstream

2011-11-17T08:31:00.001-05:00

I continue to be impressed by Felix Salmon’s column for Reuter’s “A Slice of Lime in the Soda” (well, everything but the title). I love his omnivorous appetite for economic data, his command of financial minutiae, his, well, a lot of things, but I also continue to be amazed at his intellectual flabbiness when confronted by Larry Summers. Felix recently checked out a mega-debate in Toronto between Larry and arch-rival Paul Krugman—Harvard beef against Princeton’s—and, for whatever reason, Felix only had eyes for Larry.

The Toronto facedown was actually a tag-team match, Paul seconded by Canadian economist David Rosenberg, while Larry was backed up by Ian Bremmer, a previously unknown to me dude who’s connected with the “Eurasia Group.” Krugman went through his usual rap about the Obama stimulus not being big enough, about which he has been right longer than anyone, and that, absent a new and better stimulus, we’ll be heading into a “lost decade” that could last forever, or at least until we are all dead, which is effectively the same thing.

According to Felix, both Paul and Larry agreed that the economy is broken, and needs to be fixed. But if Larry gave a fix, Felix didn’t write it down. Instead, he gave a shout out to economic inequality—“Imagine if we had thirty Steve Jobs!”—that would be cool even if it increased the share of the nation’s wealth held by the top 1%, or even the top 0.1%. Felix acknowledges that this didn’t go over so well, but ultimately, he gave the palm to Larry: “Summers really is a formidable debater. He met Krugman’s gridlock argument head-on, saying that Barack Obama’s legislative achievements in 2009-10 were greater than those in any two year period since 1965-66, or possibly even 1933-34. And in his concluding remarks, he declared that “things are never as bad as you think they are when things are bad”, adding optimistically — and accurately — that in politics, “the transition from inconceivable to inevitable can be very rapid.”

As we say in the blog world, “huh?” Just because Summers says Obama’s legislative achievements were the equivalent of Johnson’s and Roosevelt’s, that doesn’t mean they were. And even if they are the equivalent, we’ve still got 9%+ unemployment, with no relief in sight. And, as for “the transition from inconceivable to inevitable can be very rapid,” rarely have I seen a statement that strikes me as so inaccurate. Wishing for 30 more Steve Jobs, it seems to me, makes a lot more sense than waiting for the inconceivable to become the inevitable—and I’d point out that when the inevitable comes along, sometimes it’s what you don’t want rather than what you do.

I would say that there’s very wide agreement that there has to be a transfer of assets from creditors to debtors, which is an elegant way of saying that so many people owe so much money that the economy won’t grow (won’t grow nearly fast enough) because people won’t spend enough to make it grow. At least one problem is that while people like Krugman say we need a new stimulus, other “respected” people like David Rosenberg says that the government is carrying too much debt. (Poor Paul, getting stuck with a right-wing Canadian economist!) But, regardless of what Canadians say, the likelihood of getting a new stimulus package is, well, it’s inconceivable, and it won’t be changing to inevitable any time soon, unless we get a Republican president and a Democratic Congress. And how conceivable is that?

Is rape the new toilet paper?

2011-11-16T12:22:00.001-05:00

A little background. Back in the early days of the DVD era, I rented a disc with the specials that Rodney Dangerfield did for HBO back in the eighties. After sitting through three or four hours of standup, most of it not by Rodney, I could only imagine that when comedians got together for drinks, the toast would always be “to Toilet Paper!” I mean, forget mothers in law, forget the Tidy Bowl man, forget McNuggets, forget that not so fresh feeling, forget Howard Cosell imitations, forget Dolly Parton’s tits, forget everything. Toilet paper kills!

Well, that was then and this is now, and civilization has moved on, to rape, the New York Times would have us believe. Thanks to Sarah Silverman and her children, says Timesman Jason Zinoman, “coarse, sexually frank female comics” are having a ball with rape. “It’s startlingly rare to watch an evening of stand-up in New York without any mention of rape,” according to the Zinoman.

Other bad girls named in Zinoman’s article are Whitney Cummings, Phoebe Robinson (who, Zinoman points out, is from Cleveland, as if that is somehow important*), and Amy Schumer, but for some reason he omits Chelsea Handler, who must have made a rape joke or two, while riffing on vodka and masturbation.

Afterwords
The Times generously praises George Carlin for getting the ball rolling, who cited Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd as “funny rape,” although I think it would be funnier the other way around. Although I’m not bald and don’t have a speech impediment or a shotgun, I always rather identified with Elmer, and often wished he would, you know, blow Bugs’s brains out. Now that would have been funny.

*If you know your Bette Midler concert films, there’s a bit where someone in the audience yells for her to do “the taco joke,” causing Bette to exclaim “Now I know I’m in Cleveland,” the taco joke being “If God didn’t want man to eat pussy, why did he make it look like a taco?”

Ho, ho, ho, Ho, ho, ho. Gingrich got $1.6 million from Freddie Mac

2011-11-16T09:02:00.001-05:00

No wonder the dude could stand straight at Tiffany’s.

Super Committee, last seen discarding genitals

2011-11-16T07:06:00.001-05:00

When you’re a Super Committee, you can do whatever you damn please, right? Anything! And anything includes nothing, right? The null set! Which is just what the super committee set up by Congress a few months in a fit of “this time we mean business” fury seems ready to do. Over at Politico, which takes these things a bit more seriously than I do, they’re reporting it this way:

It’s one week from a drop-dead moment for the supercommittee, and the powerful panel is at risk of failing, adding yet another black mark on what is already the most unpopular Congress in modern history.

There isn’t a shred of bill language circulating publicly and no scent of a bipartisan deal before a Nov. 23 deadline to show the public how a panel granted such sweeping authority is trying to solve America’s great fiscal crisis.

The “hammer” with the super committee was/is that if they don’t come up with a deal, then “draconian” cuts affecting the entire federal budget would automatically take effect. This was the price the Tea Party crew exacted in exchange for accepting an increase in the limit on the federal debt.

But, of course, those automatic cuts won’t take place if Congress overrides them, which is exactly what Congress is getting ready to do, except that not many people are saying that out loud, which would be rather embarrassing to Tea Party types, making them look like suckers, as well as to establishment Republicans, making them look liars. Congress is bumping up against the fact that the American people, while they say they want to cut spending, when push comes to shove, actually want spending to be increased. They say one thing, and mean another! Which is why Congress so often does the same thing as well! For Congress is a far more “representative” body than people like to believe.

Afterwords
In a rather tangential but entertaining riff, big government right-winger Ramesh Ponnuru earnestly defends the Bush Administration’s domestic policy from “true conservatives,” whom he obviously regards as dilettantes and poseurs, if not actual faggots.

Take the top item on the list of conservative charges against Bush, his expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs. That idea was overwhelmingly popular, including among self-described conservatives whom pollsters contacted. It’s hard to believe that Bush would have won Floridain 2000 without promising to match the Democrats on the issue, or that he would have won Ohio in 2004 without having made good on the promise. He won both states by small margins, and through them the Electoral College.

The fact that Bush’s Medicare expansion added trillions of dollars of liability to the federal government without provision for raising a dime of revenue, hey, not Ramesh’s problem. We got elected, didn’t we? Do you like to lose?

Is there a downside for the Democrats in all this? Well, I would love to see federal spending cut by more than the “draconian” amounts to be enforced by the automatic triggers that Congress is set to disassemble. But absent a crisis, and, shockingly, we’re not really there yet, that isn’t going to happen. For the first three years of the Obama Administration, the Republican Party brilliantly papered over a giant split in governing philosophy between the establishment and Tea Party wings. Now, at last, they’re paying the price, and it’s fun to see.

Why, Oh, Why Can’t We Have A Better Press Corps? Mark Halperin just wants to be liked

2011-11-15T08:15:00.001-05:00

I really shouldn’t read Time magazine, and I especially shouldn’t read Mark Halperin, aka Captain Kiss-Ass, but I did, and I have to pay the price—I have to suffer as Mark rates Newt Gingrich an A- for saying, among other things, that he would use sabotage and assassinations, plus “absolute strategic pressure” (which is kind of like war except not so much) to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons; gave Rick Perry a B+ for saying, among other things, how much he loves torture; gave Romney a B+ for saying that President Obama was wrong to take troops out of Afghanistan, except that he would do the same thing too; gave Huntsman a B for knowing ten times as much as the guys who received higher grades than he did; gave Bachmann a B- for saying that China is getting ahead of us because they don’t have food stamps and that the ACLU is running the CIA; gave Rick Santorum a C+ for being Rick Santorum (i.e., a loser); gave Ron Paul a C- for being honest; and gave Herman Cain a C- for being a complete ignoramus.

Mark covers his ass a little bit by saying that he’s grading for both style and substance, not to mention political impact. But I’d say he’s grading this way just because he likes to kiss ass. It’s so much safer that way.

Afterwords
Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan,* who actually cares about the issues (how quaint!) and, even more quaint, will actually admit to believing that torture isn’t a good idea, is “appalled”, as we say in the biz.

*Fred actually cares so much that he thinks we ought to be in Afghanistan, even though he does notice, from time to time, that, after ten years, we’re basically stuck at square one and that ten years is an awfully long time to be there.

Monk in Oslo 1966

2011-11-15T06:00:00.000-05:00

Why not have a shot of the real thing, eh? Monk with Charlie Rouse, tenor, Larry Gales, bass, and Ben Riley, drums. “Don’t Blame Me,” “Epistrophy,” and something else. Posted by Che1959Guevara (not the real one). If you like this one, he’s got eight more.

New at Bright Lights: Chaplin at Keystone, Part 1

2011-11-14T14:00:00.000-05:00

The new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal has another of my pieces on the films of Charlie Chaplin. Flicker Alley recently released virtually all of Chaplin’s 33 odd films made in one year, 1914, at Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios in Los Angeles. I take a look at the first 18 films Chaplin made. The whole BL issue, NSFW as always, is here.

Newt and the Neo-Cons, updated

2011-11-14T11:00:00.000-05:00

Last week I noted that noted Likudist Jennifer Rubin has been industriously pissing on Newt Gingrich and every other Republican presidential candidate not addressed as “Mitt” and suggested that this was all a plot on Jennie’s part. Well, welcome Charles to the party, as in Krauthammer. Charles is a lot more subtle than Jennie. Instead of taking a baseball bat to Newt’s head, Charlie simply reminds Republicans that 2012 is going to be one tough election, and if they want to win it, “this means there is no coasting to victory, 9 percent unemployment or not. They [Republicans] need substance. They need an articulate candidate with an agenda and command of the issues who is light on slogans and lighter still on baggage.”

“Lighter still on baggage,” huh? Could that be a slap at Newt “They call me Mr. Baggage” Gingrich? Charles, are you picking on Newt just because he has three wives, two ugly divorces, and diamonds on the soles of his shoes? Are you sayin’ it’s Mormon time, Charlie? Because it sure sounds like you are.

Meanwhile, over at Salon, eternal scold Glenn Greenwald points out that if an American journalist endorsed a statement that favored feeding Jews to the sharks, s/he would soon be out of a job. But when Jennie Rubin applauds such a statement made about Palestinians, her boss gives her a hug. Kinda makes you wonder about objectivity in the media, doesn’t it? At least that ever-shrinking portion of it inhabited by the Washington Post.

Afterwords
Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan points out, with fear and trembling, that when it comes to foreign policy, the current crop of Republican presidential candidates all seem to be running for the Neanderthal center, which is probably a necessity if you’re trying to prove that you’re tougher than Sissy-Boy/Murderer Barack Obama.

Again, NTNY

2011-11-14T06:00:00.000-05:00

If you want the official New Yorker cartoon contest, go here. And stop wasting my time.

“Yes, I am a stripper. But I’m a very nice stripper.”

“How can you eat? Well, why don’t you just leave that to me.”

“Okay, this is the part where I question you intensively about your toilet training.”

“I could listen to Ferrante and Teicher all night, couldn’t you? I’m guessing the answer to that question is going to be yes.”

“‘Untamable,’ huh? It’s starting to look like that isn’t true.”

“You know, Brad, I think I’m enjoying this even more than I did with my first husband.”

“Let’s establish a few ground rules, shall we? First of all, I’m ‘Esperanza” and you’re ‘Rudolpho.’ That’s very important.”

“Okay, you feel like a hogtied varmint. But you’re a hogtied varmint who’s about to taste the best damn pinot noir of his life.”

“If I’ve done this to your body, just think what I’m going to do to your mind.”

“Let’s just skip the long face, shall we? Those ropes could be a lot tighter.”

Newt Gingrich, not really a friend of Israel, it seems

2011-11-11T08:16:00.001-05:00

Not enough to satisfy the admittedly exacting standards of Jennifer Rubin, at least, who plants one of her many long knives between the former Speaker’s shoulder blades here. While other conservatives politely averted their eyes from Newt’s whopper, delivered in last night’s debate, claiming that he charged Freddie Mac $300,000 in 2006 to tell them to stop lending to deadbeats, Jennifer lunged fiercely for the jugular—or rather the scapular, if I would preserve the metaphor—claiming that there is “evidence” that Newt was functioning as an advocate for Freddie Mac, as indeed there is.

Left-wing blogs have been pointing to a 2008 AP story to show that Gingrich was in fact hired, along with a lot of other prominent Republican log-rollers, to protect Freddie’s flank from the right wing. “Gingrich talked and wrote about what he saw as the benefits of the Freddie Mac business model,” the AP wrote.

But Jennifer doesn’t stop there. She digs out a speech that Gingrich gave in 1995 pumping for Freddie, which strikes even a confirmed Newt hater like myself as ancient history. So why is Jennie treating poor Newt so mean?

I’m guessing that Jennie and her boss, ravin’ Israeli maven Fred Hewitt, have decided they’ve got to go with Mitt. He’s no Dubya, no Dick Cheney, and that’s for sure. He might even be against torture, or at least not in favor of it, or at least not really crazy about it, which is a sad thing to say about a Republican, but facts are facts: Mitt can win. He has a chance, a decent chance, particularly if he doesn’t have to endure a long, bloody primary season, which would force Mitt to say, and repeat, and repeat, all sorts of serious, right-wing bullshit to appease the mob, said serious, right-wing bullshit all too likely to be slung back at Mitt in the general. To prevent that from happening, the dudes in Mitt’s way have to be cut down.

I say that because Jennifer hasn’t just been hittin’ on Newt. She’s also been pumping buckshot into the onery, no-good hides of the likes of Rick Perry and even Herman Cain. Sentimental right-wing babes like Ann Coulter may stand by their man when he’s being torpedoed by the lamestrean media, Jennie ain’t so weepy. For her it’s all about Israel, 24/7. Zion ain’t everything. It’s the only thing.

Afterwords
It’s only fair to point out that not all the neos are ridin’ on the Rubicon train. Bill Kristol, the neocon’s neocon, virtual founder of the Anyone But Mitt Club, is still a member, and apparently is thinking that maybe Newt is the guy, which is a sign of real desperation. Since Mitt has stocked his shadow cabinet of advisors with not only right-wing neocons, but wild-eyed right-wing neocons,† he must be wondering “how many times do I have to blow these guys?” Welcome to DC, Mitt. Welcome to DC.

*Likudist Rachel Abrams recently celebrated the release of Gilad Shait with the following blog post: “Then round up his captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.” Jennie praised this blood-thirsty tirade as “chilling, sobering, eloquent,” which Wash Post ombudsman Patrick Paxton found just a bit over the top, enraging Fred, who apparently feels it’s not Paxton’s job to criticize Post employees. Fred aggressively defended Jennie for being “an excellent journalist and a relentless reporter.” Well, if you just changed that to “an unscrupulous journalist and a relentless mouthpiece for the Likudist right wing,” you’d be accurate. For details and links regarding this latest Post fiasco, check out Alex Pareene’s excellent write-up over in Salon.

†Daniel Larison digs into the record of Walid Phares, apparently the wildest pair of eyes on Romney’s payroll. Yet, strangely, somehow, some conservatives still find it difficult to trust the guy.

Ba-da-bing! Ba-da-bing-aling-aling!

2011-11-09T17:25:00.000-05:00

NYTimesman Michael Cieply is all over the departure of Eddie Murphy from the upcoming Oscars telecast, as a result of the departure of Murphy buddy Brett Ratner, a day after Ratner was forced out, due to Ratner’s utterance of something bitchy about gays and, apparently, some jive talk about his sex life on the Howard Stern show.

“In an industry in which relationships can fracture quickly, Mr. Ratner’s connection to the show at least lasted longer than Kim Kardashian’s marriage.”

Funny, Mike, funny! You’re a funny man!

Afterwords
So what the fuck did Brett say? If you think you’re going to read it in the Times, well, you’re a goddamn homo. No, apparently Brett was asked about rehearsals and he said “rehearsals are for fags.” Yeah, that is so gay. The Howard Stern stuff, unsurprisingly, is a bit more rowdy. According to MTV Movies Blog, Brett’s rap included the following:

During a call to Howard Stern's radio show, Ratner went into rather graphic detail about his relationship with a "very young" Lindsay Lohan.

He bragged about performing oral sex on Lohan, saying, "I'm probably the best in the world," adding that he knows he's the best "because they cry." He also admitted he had Lohan tested for STDs before the two slept together in 2006 – you know, when she was 20 and he was 37.

"Before I have sex with a girl, I do do one weird thing,” Ratner told Stern. “I do take ‘em to the doctor and check ‘em out. I’m like a cootie freak. I’m a germaphobe. I’m a hypochondriac. Before I go all the way, I send the girl to the doctor and check them for everything. My doctor has a test to tell if you’re going to catch something in the future even.”

For the record, Lohan came back clean. Aren't you glad you know that? He went on to recount how Lohan later found him in bed with a Victoria's Secret model and the two got into a fight over him.

But, apparently, no pictures. Too bad!

Tim Geithner, Idiot Servant

2011-11-09T08:12:00.000-05:00

Yet another entry pissing on poor old Tim? Pissing on poor old Tim isn’t going to reduce the unemployment rate, so maybe I should just shut up and fly to Vegas first class and run up some serious credit-card debt, which would, you know, actually stimulate the economy. But Vegas isn’t really my kind of town, and if Tim is in the habit of obsessively googling himself—well, the odds are against me, but that’s true in Vegas too.

Anyway, a week or two ago, Tim let fly with this one: “The central paradox of financial crises is that what feels just and fair is the opposite of what’s required for a just and fair outcome.”

Really, Tim? Is that how it works? When there’s a financial crisis, you just find out what the common folk think should be done and do the opposite?

Felix Salmon did a rather testy unpacking of this apothegm, not at all to Tim’s advantage, focusing on TARP and insisting that Tim and the other folks at the Fed and at the Treasury should have made the banks pay us big time for saving their asses. Brad DeLong did a nice unpacking of Felix’s unpacking, and came up with this:

“If you would ask me to guess at what Geithner's position was, I think it is the following:
• The economy cannot withstand a finance strike.
• High finance knows that the economy cannot withstand a finance strike, and thus believes it has immense bargaining power.
• Moreover, financiers are not sharp-eyed cold-hearted calculators: if they believe that the Treasury is no treating them well--that the Treasury seeks an outcome that they would call ‘socialistic’—they may call a finance strike anyway.”

I would say that that is basically the experience that Geithner had with Lehman. Geithner and Treasury Secretary Paulson warned Lehman CEO Richard Fuld that they would let Lehman fail. Fuld, whose whole career on Wall Street was based on forcing the other guy to back down, was sure that the government had no option but to save Lehman, on Fuld’s terms. It wasn’t “like a game of chicken,” as some have said. It was a game of chicken. Geithner and Paulson called Fuld’s bluff, wanting to believe “the Market” had anticipated this event. As it turned out, the Market hadn’t.

I don’t really understand DeLong’s last bullet. Financiers don’t really “call a finance strike.” Rather, they’ve honed their jungle fighter instincts to the point that they can’t shut them off. When a guy is begging you to be reasonable, that’s when you really unload on him.

What’s seriously depressing about Geithner is that, having gone through all this, his only “remedy” is to make it easier for us to “save” the banks the next time around. Trying to control these mud-daubed, spear-chucking thugs who juggle trillions for their personal profit, that would be wrong. They’re the stars, we’re the little people. It’s our job to make them feel good about themselves, so they can deliver the kind of performances that make them the stars they are. If they want a stainless-steel, $10,000 refrigerator in their dressing room stocked with Cristal, set at 37.5° F, and a second stainless-steel, $10,000 refrigerator stocked with Gray Goose set at 25° F, well, goddamn it, that’s what they get! Because they’re stars!

Tim, he’s not a star. He’s a servant to the stars. But he does get to live in the palace. Well, not in the palace, but on the palace grounds. He’s inside the gates, and that’s what counts. He’s not one of the great unwashed. And when the great unwashed jeer and sneer at him, well, that just proves that he’s right, and they’re wrong. Which is a great comfort to him.

The Even-Handed Plague, Part MMMMMMMCCCLXVIII

2011-11-08T14:03:00.000-05:00

If I had any sense, any sense at all, I’d be sitting back with a large Irish coffee and perhaps a generous slice of bread pudding, topped with brandied cherries and almond-flavored whipped cream, watching, I don’t know, a 1957 BBC production of Lady Windemere’s Fan. Instead, I’m falling for boob-bait of the most embarrassing kind—yet another patented pabulum* bullshit column from Robert Samuelson. You know why we can’t solve our budget problems? It’s both the liberals and the conservatives who are at fault! Bob plays no favorites! He speaks out, let the chips fall where they may!

Yeah. So what’s wrong with the conservatives? They say “We can reduce deficits and cut taxes by eliminating ‘wasteful spending.’” This means, according to Bob, that they want to eliminate discretionary programs like farm subsidies, Amtrak, public broadcasting, and community development block grants. As Bob points out, eliminating such programs wouldn’t even scratch the surface of our budget problems.

But wait a minute, dude. First of all, which of those programs is different? Amtrak’s budget for 2010 was about $1.5 billion. Public broadcasting and other sissybritches cultural activities, another billion. CDBGs, about $4 billion. Farm subsidies, about $20 billion.† $20 billion! And where, Bob, where is the “conservative” who wants to eliminate farm subsidies? I haven’t heard of one. Rep. Bob Ryan has boldly proposed cutting farm subsidies by $3 billion a year, and the odds of Republicans voting for that are, I would say, less than slim.

Now for those damn liberals. They want to balance the budget by cutting defense. That’s crazy! “As for the Pentagon, the military was cut sharply after the Cold War. Combat forces are half to two-thirds of 1990 levels. Defense spending as a share of national income is headed toward its lowest level since 1940.”

In 1990, Bob, we were still functioning in full Cold War mode. Today, we don’t have an enemy! We don’t have an enemy! No one is going to attack us! We don’t have an enemy!

Conservatives love to pretend that the U.S. alone is preserving the world from chaos. Those damn Frenchies! We’re saving their asses for them! If it wasn’t for us, they’d be speaking ~~German~~, ~~Russian~~, ~~Chinese~~, Farsi! In fact, the last world leader dumb enough to think he could benefit his country by starting a major war was Saddam Hussein. The last world leader dumb enough to think he could benefit his country by starting a minor war was George Bush. ‡

Okay, enough about George. Back to Bob. One idiot at a time. I love the part about “Defense spending as a share of national income is headed toward its lowest level since 1940.” Yeah, it’s headed there, since Obama ended idiot George’s idiot war in Iraq and is stumbling towards ending his own idiot war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in 2009, we spent around $493 billion on defense, exclusive of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared to $428 billion (inflation-adjusted) in 1987, Ronald Reagan’s Cold War peak (or pique).§ We’re practically down to zero!

Okay, I definitely need an Irish at this point, and some bread pudding too. But you get the point: Bob Samuelson is a dishonest man!

*”Pabulum” has two “u’s”! Who knew!

†According to Wikipedia, a Canadian report claims that total U.S. farm subsidies, at all levels of government (special tax rates, subsidized loans, etc.) runs about $180 billion a year. That’s a fair chunk o’ change.

‡I make an exception for Israel, whose leaders often seem to think they have to start wars to survive. This is a very dangerous notion for a nation to have. U.S. neocons, of course, want the U.S. to believe the same thing. The difference is, no matter how obnoxiously the U.S. behaves, the likelihood that it will have to pay the price for its misbehavior is small.

§ 2010 budget, including both wars, appears to have been around $700 billion.

Joe Lovano—Charlie Parker’s “Barbados”

2011-11-08T06:00:00.000-05:00

The band is introduced as “Joe Lovano and Us Five,” except there are only four guys, that I see, and none of them is Esperanza Spalding, who plays bass for the band. Well, it’s still good jazz. Posted by KPLU885

Attack of the crazed italics-loving captionist

2011-11-07T06:00:00.000-05:00

Are italics funny? I seem to be addicted to them. Fasten your comedy seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy flight. Actual, New Yorker-approved captions here.

“I am not getting all Fay Wray on your ass. I’m just afraid of heights.”

“Hey, I would love a Jaguar for my birthday. But did you see that woman? She was terrified.”

“All right! You do not look like you just walked out of Klein’s Basement. Excuse my attempt at a facetious, Manhattan-centric anachronism!”

“You are not ‘too old’ for that dress because it is not a dress. It is a bathing suit.”

“Because I’m gay and because my boyfriend would kill me. Otherwise, you know, sure, I’d love to.”

“Okay, you’re right. The freeway is quicker. You win again. Now please put me down.”

“Well, if you weren’t crushing my ass, maybe I could sustain an erection.”

“Hey, I totally agree. A guy who honks at women, he deserves a fiery death. Totally.”

“You could probably catch them more easily if you used both hands. I mean, that’s just a theory.”

“I’m sorry I raised my voice. I’m the agent, you’re the star. You have every reason to be angry. But killing me isn’t going to help your career. Well, not as much as letting me live. And if I’m wrong, well, you know, you still have the option.”

You’re an expert on Russia, huh? Well, where is it?

2011-11-04T07:57:00.000-04:00

“You know, I have had some great foreign policy conversations with Liz Cheney and with John Bolton, I mean, people who actually understand intimately where these countries are, why they think like they think.”—Rick Perry, on Sean Hannity.

DOJ: “Lying” is not lying: Misspeak = Meesespeak

2011-11-04T06:00:00.000-04:00

UPDATED BELOW
“If you’re innocent, you’re not a suspect,” Ed Meese once explained. So if you’re a suspect, you’re not innocent?

Damn straight, according to Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, in a recent letter “explaining” the department’s clearly reluctant decision to not to issue regulations that would allow federal government agencies to deny Freedom of Information Act requests on the grounds that the records requested don’t exist when in fact they do exist. As the DOJ tells it, saying that records don’t exist when they do exist is not “lying.” Uncle Ed, Ronald Regan’s attorney general and favorite errand boy, came up with the solution to awkward FOIA requests way back in 1987. When someone asks for something you don’t want to give them, just say “there exist no records responsive to your FOIA request.” The idea is that “no records responsive to your FOIA request” means not “no records,” but rather “no records that we feel like giving you.”

It’s necessary, DOJ explains, in cases when someone “seeks information relating to an ongoing criminal investigation, of which the target is unaware, and when even acknowledging the existence of responsive documents would tip off the criminal to the ongoing investigation.” Got that? If the government is investigating you, you’re already a criminal. Because why would the government investigate an innocent person? Eric Holder, you’re looking more and more like Ed Meese every day. What is it about being Attorney General that seems to turn a man into a career criminal?

Via Josh Gerstein in Politico, who unsportingly calls the DOJ letter “defensive in tone” and also refers, without providing much information, to a federal district court judge’s angry criticism of the FBI for providing “blatantly false” statements in response to a FOIA request filed by the ACLU on behalf of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California. You can read Judge Cormac Carney’s impatient take on the FBI’s Meesespeak here. (In a classic split the difference—or perhaps “split the baby”—ruling, the judge said the FBI was wrong to lie about not having the documents but right in refusing to provide copies to the Council.)

UpdatedOver at Reason, Jacob Sullum, who's been following this issue, gives more detail. The Sunlight Foundation explains why the Justice Department's new proposals "will be a huge step back for transparency."

The New York Times: calls ‘em as they see ‘em, as long as the only see ‘em in Japan

2011-11-03T21:52:00.001-04:00

As I’ve noted before, the New York Times isn’t afraid to tell the harsh truth about official government lies, as long as those lies aren’t coming from the mouth of the U.S. government. Back in March, the Times ran a story, not an editorial, on its front page regarding the Japanese government’s response to the massive earthquake/tsunami that nearly led to nuclear disaster in that country that included the following acid summation: ““Never has Japan’s weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed or mattered so much.”

Well, the Times is at it again, with a withering take on Japanese plans to reconstruct a breakwater that failed to withstand the tsunami that hit Japan last March: “As the story of Kamaishi’s breakwater suggests, the kind of cozy ties between government and industry that contributed to the Fukushima nuclear disaster are driving much of the reconstruction and the fight for a share of the $120 billion budget expected to be approved in a few weeks.”

You may remember that the Times refused to describe as “torture” the waterboarding and other enhanced forms of interrogation the CIA and its minions were wont to inflict on suspicious or at least quasi-suspicious characters back when Bush was king, because the administration refused to admit that torture is torture. Well, does the Japanese government describe its ties with industry as “cozy”? Does it refer to the Fukushima “incident” as a “nuclear disaster”? And, speaking of "cozy," what about the ties in the U.S. between government and industry, not to mention Wall Street? Aren’t they pretty damn cozy as well? Why don’t you speak up about what’s happening in your own damn country, New York Times?