From Friday’s The Globe and Mail: “Workplace computers contain so much personal information nowadays that employees have a legitimate expectation of privacy in using them, the Supreme Court of Canada said in a major ruling Friday.”

Imagine the American Supreme Court finding this way! It won’t happen any time soon.

Another reason to vote for Obama. Not that it will be enough. Not nearly enough.

Adam Davidson has an interesting column over at the New York Times, Do Good C.E.O.’s Make Good Presidents? Mostly, the article is about the differences between running a state and running the federal government. The truth is that governors have very little effect on how well their economies improve. This is because they don’t have deficit spending as a tool the way that the President does.

I find it funny when Obama notes the strong economy in Ohio, conservatives always point out that Ohio has a Republican governor. But Ohio’s economic strength is due almost exclusively to President Obama and the GM bailout. John Kasich’s effect is minor if it exists at all.

Adam Davidson discusses Bobby Jindal’s tax reform in Louisiana. Louisiana is doing a lot better recently. But changing the tax code only helps the economy by convincing companies in other states to move there. This doesn’t create jobs generally. (This is a big problem and the reason that state taxes are so regressive.) And as the article points out, Louisiana is coming back largely thanks to federal stimulus following Katrina.

It is only at the end of the article that Davidson finally gets to the issue of CEOs as Presidents. Davidson writes:

And that is the key of it. Businessmen make money by laying off people. That doesn’t work for the economy as a whole. I think progressives need to talk more about this. The fact is that most people don’t understand it. And as a result, they deify businessmen, who may have skills, but they are exactly the opposite skills necessary to run the government.

In the introduction to The Great Unraveling, Paul Krugman discusses Henry Kissinger’s PhD dissertation. In it, Kissinger deconstructs revolutionary movements. One thing that defines these movements is their rejection of political norms. Krugman talks about it in relation to the Bush Administration. He notes that after scandals where earlier administrations—both Democrat and Republican—would have forced a resignation, Bush did nothing.

We see this same thing in the revitalized right. Where normally they would have been contrite about the mess their policies had made of the economy, they instead doubled down. (And tripled down. And quadrupled down. And quintupled down…)

In his new book Pity the Billionaire, Thomas Frank takes on the question of why the financial crisis causes half the political spectrum to do this. As usual with Frank, the book is insightful and funny as hell. But that doesn’t mean it is right. The thesis of the book is that after the crisis, the right organized and channeled public anger but the left did not. This is not what happened at all.

After the crash, there was right wing anger and left wing anger. The Tea Party movement did indeed organize the right. And had the left been better organized, they might have pealed off a few followers from the Tea Party. But that’s about it.

When the Occupy Wall Street movement formed, the right did not join in with the group—even though what it was saying was very much in line with what the Tea Party has always claimed to believe—even while they consistently support politicians who are primarily social conservatives.

I think there are two aspects to this. First is that as Krugman noted, the right is a revolutionary movement. As long as they still exist, they will never tack to the middle. (The Republican Party could, however, be taken over by more moderate people.) The solution to any policy failure will be ever more ideologically pure policy. You know, “The reason for the financial crisis was that we were still regulating it too much!”

The other aspect of this is how the media treat movements. When you get down to it, what is the Tea Party movement? A group of Republicans! That’s it. Why should it be treated as something different, much less new.

The reason the Republicans did so well in 2010 was not because they were well organized—much less because they changed a lot of minds. They won because liberals stayed home. Certainly, you can attribute this to a lack of organizing on the part of Democrats. But mostly it is just the apathy of power.

It’s a sad morning. First I get news that George McGovern died after only a couple of days in hospice. Then Michael Stickings over at The Reaction reports that the new PPP poll of likely voters in Ohio gives Obama only a 1% lead over Romney. It seems like liberalism has died today.

The 1972 election is the first one that I remember. And for years it seemed that he was a joke to most people. Americans love a winner and even after Nixon’s ignoble departure from the White House, few rethought McGovern. Things only got worse during the “Reagan Revolution.” But in recent years I was pleased to see McGovern going around proudly owning the label “liberal” and explaining what it meant.

I’m not quite certain what to make of the new polling out of Ohio. For one thing, Obama has polled consistently poorly with PPP in recent weeks. I know that PPP is a liberal group, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make mistakes; the whole “likely voter” calculation is difficult. What’s more, polls have been all over the board. And most encouraging, Nate Silver (taking into account the newest PPP poll) still gives Obama a 70% chance of winning the state.

There are so many terrible things that will happen if Romney becomes president. But what I’m focused on are the long term consequences to our political system. If elected, he will dismantle our social safety net and cause inequality to go up even further. But in spite of this, the economy is set for recovery. Unless Romney really screws up, we will see about 9 million new jobs created in the next four years. This will be used by the right to claim that their policies are the reason. And the low information voters who seem to determine each election will go right along as the United States’ government becomes ever more conservative while its people remain relatively liberal.

Michael Stickings is right that we need to do all we can to win this election. And I have one more reason: let’s win this one for McGovern!

Update (21 October 2012 8:45)

From the New York Times obituary:

McGovern received the Distinguished Flying Cross in World War II.

Update (27 October 2012 9:52)

Eric Alterman has the best McGovern obituary I’ve read at the Center for American Progress. Alterman’s theme is courage—real courage, not the spray on kind so popular among modern conservatives. I don’t suppose we can repeat it often enough: it takes no courage to send other people’s sons and daughters to fight a war.

Here is George McGovern’s 1972 acceptance speech that no one saw:

I just watched The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. I remember vaguely it being very successful. And when I saw it was directed by John Huston, I thought I would give it a try. I should have looked closer.

Troubling signs occurred during the credits: written by John Milius. But I stuck with it. Right off, it looked like a dumb person’s idea of combining The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Of course, it was filled with Milius’ notions of romantic violence. But even apart from this, the film really misses. I like Huston as a director, but this didn’t work. He is no Hill, much less Peckinpah. This is material that just doesn’t work to his strengths. The action is too realistic and the comedy too broad. (It doesn’t help that Milius provided an episodic script filled with awkward, predictable violence and awkward, predictable comedy.)

It is interesting that Huston and Millius couldn’t create an interesting story for the film. After all, they had some interesting characters to work with: Roy Bean, Lillie Langtry, Grizzly Adams (although Adams has no actual connection to the real life story). I think, as is often the case in movies, they were just too in love with their idea.

Overall, the film looked good. The filming and art direction worked. But other than that, pretty much everything else is weak in this film. The score by Maurice Jarre is overbearing. The editing was stilted, but I figure this was because Huston didn’t provide sufficient coverage. The make-up even seemed wrong, although the women looked beautiful. To top all of this off, the acting was surprisingly bad. It seemed like everyone was having a good time, but no one seemed to be working—except for maybe Victoria Principal. (I also liked Anthony Perkins, although I have a soft spot for him.)

Perhaps I’m being unfair. When a film doesn’t work, all of the parts stand out as bad. For example, if the movie had been more engrossing, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the music. But there is no getting away from the fact that The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is almost a completely unwatchable film.

My biggest complain about Monty Python’s Flying Circus, is that it is not that well written. It has good ideas and often takes them in bizarre and delightful directions. But most of the time, instead of ending a skit, they simply stop it. Their favorite way of doing this is to just start an orthogonal sketch. This is the basis for, “And now for something completely different.”

This approach can get brilliant. The Spanish Inquisition show is a good example of this. The first time the papal trio show up, it is the same old thing that Monty Python always gives us. But when it is repeated, it becomes something more. And when the episode ends with the mad dash of the Spanish Inquisition to the court, only to arrive late, it is brilliant. “Oh, bugger!”[1]

Here is Monty Python at their meta best. They explicitly make a joke out of their tendency not to complete a skit but rather just to move on to something else. It is the “Argument Clinic” sketch:

I suspect that they bring this up because a lot of critics at the time complained about this. I’ve never claimed to be original. This has long been my complaint about Saturday Night Live. But SNL doesn’t have the excuse of having clever transitions. (No one beats Mr. Show for that, however.)

[1] Note that the theme for this chase is Devil’s Galop, the same song used by That Mitchel and Web Look in “The Surprising Adventures of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar.”

I have long thought it curious that conservatives are drawn to the language of Republicans about small business and self-reliance. These are shown to be myths by their actual policies. But now I am more inclined to think these conservatives only believe in the Republican bellicosity. So the conservatives only use the nice words to justify their belonging to the Republican Party. Their real reason is that they too like the “kick ass, take no prisoners” tough talk of the Republicans. This does, of course, explain why women tend to be Democrats.

There is a fundamental difference in the way that Republicans and Democrats see themselves. Democrats seem themselves as caring about others. Republicans see themselves as caring about individual rights and “freedom.” Both groups fall short of their own ideals. However, the Democrats at least vote for their ideals. Republicans tend to define “individual rights” as “my individual rights.” Conservatives have a fundamental lack of empathy. For example, see Conservatives Without Conscience by John Dean.

Think for a moment about the Cheneys. They are extremely conservative—except on the issue of gay rights. If their daughter weren’t gay, they would be unable to imagine what it is like to be gay in America. Just the same: the poor are just a bunch of ne’er do wells to them, because the Cheneys have no experience with the poor and no empathy with which they can understand them.

I am constantly surprised to meet young men who are Republicans. They don’t particularly agree with Republican orthodoxy. In fact, like most Republicans, if asked about their opinions, they will give you a list that fits much better in the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. But they will maintain their allegiance to the Republican Party because it is the testosterone fueled one—the chest thumping one. The Democrats may be just as much a bunch of warriors (much to my despair), but they don’t make a party of it.

Update (20 October 2012 6:28 pm)

Howard Kurtz interviewed Tom Friedman recently, and it touches on this:

On December 5, 1982, Ronald Reagan met Guatemalan president Efraín Ríos Montt in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. “Well, I learned a lot,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.” It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him “a man of great personal integrity… totally dedicate to democracy.” He also claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting “a bum rap” from human rights organizations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, Daniel Wilkinson tells us in Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers “grabbed” babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and “smashed” their heads “against a wall.” Older children and adults were forced to “kneel at the edge of a well,” where a single “blow from a sledge hammer” sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had “saved for last,” pummeling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. “The only human remains that [later] visitors would find” were “blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.”

Ezra Klein has a really good interview with Chuck Schumer over at WonkBlog. Schumer is wrong about a lot of thing, of course; but he makes some excellent points. He is clearly a thoughtful guy. It’s too bad he is such a New Democrat. Still, his heart seems to be in the right place (in his chest as opposed to where a Republican keeps it: in a box under ground). And he’s right about a number of things.

Schumer’s main argument is that the Republicans are not being honest when they say that they want to change the tax code in a revenue neutral way. I’ve been long saying this. You just don’t start a discussion of the debt with: let’s make it worse!

He puts this into sharp relief by proposing how Democrats would act if they were similarly disingenuous:

Exactly! What’s more, I think most non-PhD economists ask a reasonable question, “If your marginal rate tax cuts will be revenue neutral, why are you doing it?” There is a reason for this, but I’ve never found it that compelling. The claim is that it will make the tax code fairer and thus increase growth. (This is an issue that involves the wealthy and the really wealthy—it has nothing to do with the middle classes.) But Schumer is certainly right when he speculates:

Even if this was a great idea—and I doubt this—a big problem is that if such a plan started with this idea, it would end with the lower tax rates with none of the deductions cut. Or at best, the deductions would be put back in the years going forward. The main thing is that Republicans only want to do this so they can cut taxes on the wealthy.

Ezra Klein makes an excellent point during the interview:

Which is the whole point! Republicans and, to a lesser but profound extent, Democrats only hear from the rich. Their campaigns are funded by the rich. People on food stamps don’t much matter. Especially when they can manipulated by TV commercials and, if all else fails, simply deprived of the right to vote.

BuzzFeed offers up 8 Mind-Boggling Pieces of Illusionary Makeup Body Art. They are all amazing, but the one below is the best. This is just my little attempt to spice up your Friday Night:

Of course, I could have just offered up Dali at the Age of Six When He Thought He Was a Girl Lifting the Skin of the Water to See the Dog Sleeping in the Shade of the Sea: