I think that liberals are being a bit optimistic about the future. It is still very likely that the Republicans will kick our asses in 2014. They will keep the House and take over the Senate. To me, the most important thing for us to do is work on increasing voter registration and getting all registered voters to the polls. If all registered voters voted, we would have a permanent Democratic majority. But regardless of this, we tend to do all right on presidential election years because Democrats show up and then lose big during off-year elections because Democrats do not show up. And the last time this happened was on a census year so that the Republicans basically have us fucked regarding the House and state legislatures for the next 8 years.

And note: if 1.5 million Obama votes had gone to Romney, he would have won the popular vote. If they were the right votes, he would be the next president. And if that happened, all the commentators would now be talking about the death of liberalism. They’d be talking about how Democrats really need to rethink their communist ways and turn even more to the right.

So remember this, because I do not feel that this election was at all reassuring. It was a surprisingly close election. The economic fundamentals were in favor of the Democrats—not against them. Don’t go thinking that we prevailed against tough odds. The election was Obama’s to win. And then, the Republicans ran an anemic candidate with a load of heavy party baggage. I’m glad we did fairly well, but it is not enough. And we need to do so much more, both inside and outside the party.

We should not be celebrating; we should be organizing.

This is a good example of a fact check from PolitiFact: “Michael Moore [s]ays during George W. Bush’s administration ‘we were losing millions of jobs per month,’ while under Barack Obama we have ‘three years of gaining hundreds of thousands of jobs per month.'”

Their verdict, “False: Tweet, later corrected, exaggerated in both directions.”

The problems I have with this are numerous. First: a tweet? Really? That’s what you’re wasting your time on? Okay. Whatever.

Second, wasn’t it clear Moore was exaggerating? Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the numbers knows we don’t lose millions of jobs per month. I took his statement to mean lots of jobs. Technically, it is wrong. Is the overall idea wrong? No really: we lost jobs under Bush, we gained them under Obama. Is this a good economic argument? No. Do you really turn to Michael Moore for serious economic analysis? Regardless, PolitiFact isn’t at all interested in whether it is fair to compare the two administrations in this way.

Third, PolitiFact takes issue with the claim that under Obama we have been gaining hundreds of thousands of jobs per month. In fact, there were only 132,000 jobs created on average. They claim that the plural “hundreds” required at least 200,000. I’m not sure about the grammar here, but even if true this is an odd nit to pick. I mean, if there had been 200,0001 jobs created, it would have been true? That’s the difference between true and false? This is entirely typical of the organization and it is not at all partisan. I often see them calling conservatives out for very minor details or odd definitions. Such behavior makes them all the more useless.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, Moore corrected the tweet 5 hours later (before being told he was wrong by PolitiFact):

So who cares? And that gets to the main problem with PolitiFact or any of the other fact checking groups: they are too afraid of being called partisan to do their jobs properly. If both sides lie equally, what is the point anyway? And their assumption is always that they do lie equally, regardless of the facts.

But given that there is a lot more misinformation on the right than the left, what are they to do? They can’t just say that! They have to find the balance that they define to be there. So they make a big deal out of nothing on the left, and make nothing out of a big deal on the right. Hence, “Michael Moore was wrong in a tweet!”

Pathetic.

Jonathan Cohn wrote an excellent, punchy article today on the conservative meme that says that Obama won re-election because he promised “free stuff” to all those lowdown no goodnicks, Stuff White People Like.

Forget all of the racism, Cohn says. The conservatives just aren’t making any sense. (Imagine that!) As we all know, retired white people are one of the biggest constituencies of the Republican Party. And they get as much free stuff as anyone—more actually. And what was Romney biggest and clearest promise to this voting block: we’re not screwing you!

What Cohn does not discuss is all the “free stuff” that is given to the very wealthy. He does mention the fact that they usually pay less in taxes than the middle classes do. But it is much bigger than that. There is direct corporate welfare, for example. Even more important I think, there are the various ways that government allows corporations to take advantage of individuals. There are regulations that hardly punish corporate wrong doers—on those occasions they are even caught. And on and on.

Cohn ends with a great distillation of the pandering wars:

FactCheck.org or PolitiFact.com should look into this. I’m sure they would say it was a toss-up.

After the election, libertarian Republican Eric Dondero got really mad. He has severed ties with all Democrats—apparently just because his party lost the election. This doesn’t make a lot of sense. If three million more people had voted for Romney, he’d be fine with the 100 million plus Democrats. But because this did not happen, he would not save a Democrat from drowning.

On one level, there is no story here: wackjob Republican says wakjob things. Dog bites man. Nothing to see here.

What I do think is interesting is that Dondero considers himself a libertarian. I think this is another example of just what a sham libertarianism is. In order to flip out because Obama rather than Romney won, you have to care about one-half of the libertarian ideology: economic libertarianism. (Note: this is not how Republicans are, but it is their claim.) You would have to think that the greatest threat to personal liberty is taxation. And how could you? I mean really: in just about every place at just about every time, governments have oppressed people with their military and their police and their secret services. Any oppression due to high taxes has been modest.

This goes right along with my argument—dating back 20 years when I actually was a libertarian—that Ron Paul doesn’t have that many libertarian ideas. Sure, he has a few. But the things that he gets the most credit for are not even particularly libertarian. All the gold standard, abolish the Fed nonsense? That’s a widely held belief system of modern libertarians, but there is nothing fundamentally libertarian about it. It’s just crazy and paranoid. All the isolationist talk? Again, that’s probably more a sign of political naivete than anything. (Not that there isn’t much to like in the idea.)

I’m not claiming that Ron Paul and Eric Dondero are not libertarians. I think they are. And that is one of the big problems with libertarians: they don’t think too seriously about their beliefs. Mostly, libertarianism is just a movement of followers. They like the gold standard because everyone else does and they’ve never heard a serious argument about it. This is why a lot of libertarians are anti-choice. (If you really think a zygote has equal civil rights to an adult woman, then something is seriously wrong with you.) And this is why libertarians almost never even discuss the “barbarian at the gates” argument. Libertarianism only works in the naive with minds that are far, far away.

Update (12 November 2012 4:11 pm)

I was just reading over Dondero’s rant. He writes, “Some may choose to push secession in their state legislatures. Others may choose to leave the U.S. for good (Costa Rica, Switzerland, Italy, Argentina, Hong Kong, Israel).” I thought it was a joke when conservatives claimed they were going to move to Canada to escape Obamacare. But apparently not. All of the countries that Dondero mentions are more liberal (“Communist!”) than the United States. Costa Rica, for example, has a kind of single payer healthcare insurance. Argentina makes more sense, but not because it is conservative; it just has a history of opening its doors to failed fascists.

Update (20 November 2012 1:19 pm)

FJM has written a hilarious take down of this idiot over at Gin and Tacos, Eric Dondero Gets the FJM Treatment But Is Probably Too Busy Hoarding Ammonium Nitrate to Care.

Over on (I don’t know) Matt Yglesias’ corner of ThinkProgress a couple years ago, Ryan McNeely wrote a really good article, Will The Debt Commission Listen to Young Americans Who Didn’t Go to Phillips Academy? It is about the group Concerned Youth of America who seem to now be called The Can Kicks Back. Everyone should care about this group because no one should care about this group.

The group claims to be concerned about all the young people of today who will be saddled with government debt in the future. But this is not what the group is really about. McNeely points out that the group was founded by seniors at Phillips Academy, a $40K per year prep school for the kids of the wealthy. And just like their parents, they are concerned about the debt—and for the same reasons. They are concerned about debt because they associate it with inflation and if there is one thing rentiers hate, it is inflation.

These young people at Phillips are not going to depend upon Social Security. (Although you can bet they will draw it when they qualify.) So the idea of entitlement cuts is a-okay with them. If they are worried about debt that their generation will have to pay, it is because they are worried that this would force the rich to pay their fair share of taxes.

What is perhaps most troubling about these young people at The Can Kicks Back is that they are just useful fools. I doubt very much that they’ve looked seriously at all sides of the issue and come to their current state as deficit hawks. In fact, I’m sure of it, because back in 2010, Executive Director Yoni Gruskin was on CNN bemoaning the lack of jobs for recent Ivy League graduates. The fact is that austerity and good new jobs are inconsistent, at least in the medium term. But that’s not the kind of thing that the Peterson Foundation teaches to its interns.

But as we know: rich kids like Yoni Gruskin are not allowed to fail. And that’s why the whole The Can Kicks Back routine is so vile. It’s just another group of rich people pushing for policies to enrich themselves. The fact that they are young does not make them any more worth while.

Afterword

Jamelle Bouie says much of what i did:

One of my favorite songs is Bruce Cockburn’s Nicaragua. In particular, I like the refrain, “In the flash of this moment / You’re the best of what we are.” I think about that a lot when I see people doing great or noble work. And I think about this most in relation to scientists. Here is a TED talk of one such endeavor: decoding the original text that was used to print a prayer book. The talk is by William Noel, Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at the Walters Art Museum.

I once had this dream about these kids who had formed a kind of cult where they set themselves on fire to prove how cool they were. The dream had a profound effect on me, resulting in years of writing and research. It ended in what I call a “theatrical essay” called Burned. Much of that time, I was obsessed with Thich Quang Duc: the first Buddhist monk to self-immolate in protest over the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem.

This came up because I spend a couple of hours this afternoon watching Seven Psychopaths. The ending of the film tells a fictional story of Thich Quang Duc’s thinking while preparing for his ritual suicide. And it bugged me for a number of reasons. They didn’t seem to be interested in getting it right. Worst of all was this repeated refrain, “This will not help our cause.” (That’s rough; I didn’t write it down.) Finally, he responds, “It might.” The truth is that Thich Quang Duc’s act had a profound effect on events. Diem was gone less than 5 months later as a direct result.[1]

In a sense, I was glad that the story included Thich Quang Duc. He is a great man and he deserves to be remembered. Here is David Halberstam’s report at the time:

But this was included in a film that played very loose with people torturing others with fire—and other things that were hard to take like sawing a live man’s head off with a hacksaw. So the tribute to Thich Quang Duc was less compelling than it could have been.

By saying this, I don’t mean to say the film is bad. It is actually quite good. And funny. I laughed a lot. And parts of the movie were kind of deep. For example, Billy Bickle (Sam Rockwell) is a clear psychopath, but all of his acts of violence are done out of his love of his friends. (I could have done without the Taxi Driver gag.) And after all the dark comedy throughout the film, the Thich Quang Duc ending was touching.

Afterword

Seven Psychopaths has a very grainy look. Watching it, I thought it had been filmed on Super-16. This appears not to be the case, because I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere. But it didn’t look processed—just bad. If anyone knows anything, let me know.

[1] There were many other problems. Some were minor: his corpse did not fall over like they showed. Others were profound: the idea that Thich Quang Duc’s suicide was an act of vengeance—and even worse: vengeance against America. Yes, I’m making too much out of this.

[2] Halberstam is wrong about this. Humans have a lot of water in them and so tend to burn poorly. However, drenched in gasoline, human beings burn surprisingly quickly.

I honor the service that individuals make to the collective. However, when Veterans Day rolls around, I have a hard time thinking of service. Instead, I think about sacrifice—even more: useless sacrifice. Almost without exception (and even those exceptions are muddled), wars are nothing but turf battles where weak men die for the sake of powerful men’s interests. When I think of war, I don’t think of heroic men in a life-and-death struggle; I think of two ant colonies destroying themselves because it is in their DNA.

Thus, I think of Veterans Day as a somber occasion. It is a time to remember those victims who have been harmed by our pathological sociology. The normal kinds of Veterans Day celebrations of hubristic nationalism are part of the problem and only lead to more victims.

On this day it seems natural to salute all those who have been harmed by our war making. It doesn’t matter to me whether they did so voluntarily or not. The truth is that I don’t think anyone really does this voluntarily. (Of course, I don’t believe in free will either.)

In honor of all these people, I offer you a poem by Wilfred Owen—himself a victim of war: World War I. He was killed just one week before the end of that war. And as you see in the poem, he understood the nature of war. (For the record, “Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori” means, “It is sweet and right to die for your country.” It is from one of Horace’s Odes, which are often lovely but from time to time nationalistic and horrible.)

Afterword

Without life, there is no chance for justice.

This morning, Paul Krugman has an article, Squirming Hawks, about a Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget report fear trolling over the upcoming fiscal cliff. The problem with people like this is that for years they’ve been claiming that the federal debt burden is going to destroy our economy, but suddenly when concrete policy comes up that will greatly slash the budget deficit, they aren’t for it. Why could that be?

Krugman has a good idea: they only want to balance the budget in such a way that it hurts the poor and enriches the wealthy. This is not an overstatement; I’ve been complaining about this for a while. In general, the fiscal austerity crowd are made up of people on the right. Calling for a balanced budget isn’t about budgetary matters at all: it is just about using budgetary fear to make the changes the right always wants. This is basically Naomi Klein’s shock treatment theory: use a disaster for political gain.

The CRFB report is revealing.

Where have I heard that before? I know: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan! Note the contradiction here. They want to “generate new revenue,” but the best thing would be to reduced that new revenue by lowering tax rates. Krugman speculates that by “low-priority spending” they mean, “Spending on the poor.” Of course they do!

Let me discuss this idea of lowering the marginal tax rates but broadening the base. By “base broadening” they mean closing loopholes. An obvious question comes to mind: if you are going to lower tax rates but offset this with fewer deductions, why do it at all? The answer given is that the current tax code creates distortions. This is undoubtedly true. But by far the biggest distortion is the earned income tax rate and the capital gains income tax rate. And these people have no interest in getting rid of that distortion. I think this is a bait and switch. If they can get lower marginal tax rates passed, it will be relatively easy to put deductions back into the tax code later. But it will be very hard to raise tax rates later as we see with the big deal it has been to raise the top rate from 35% to 39.6%.

My biggest complaint with conservatives is that they are dishonest. And this takes place at every level. What most people focus on are the arguments. When they claim that Job Creators must have their taxes slashed so they will look kindly on the peons and hire them, we know this is wrong. But it could be they are just deluding themselves. Unfortunately, the problem is much worse than this. We see this quite clearly in this idea that we must balance the budget by doing things that will not balance the budget. This is just madness and in a sane world, the mainstream media would say so. But instead it is all he said/she said coverage.

Some people claim the sky is blue while others claim it is paisley. It’s just a matter of opinion; who can say?!

Frankenweenie made it to the cheap theater last week so I went to see it. I didn’t know anything about it except for the poster, which led me to believe that it was an animated Frankenstein with a cute dog. I’m not sure what it says about me that I thought that was a great idea for a movie. I was a little concerned when I got inside the theater and it was filled with children. I thought back to when I saw Babe at the theater and the children acted pretty much the same as they did in the Bride of the Monster premiere in another Tim Burton film, Ed Wood. But there was nothing to worry about.

Frankenweenie is the best big budget film I’ve seen in years. In fact, I’ve started behaving the way I did when I first saw Ed Wood: I’ve started dragging friends to see it. I have a hard time believing that anyone wouldn’t thoroughly enjoy it. Yet strangely, it doesn’t have a 100% rating on MetaCritic. Then again, what do those idiot film ombudsmen know?

The film tells the story of young Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant young scientists who makes movies featuring his only real friend: his dog, Sparky. In return for allowing him to enter the science fair, Victor is forced by his father to play baseball. Victor manages to hit a home run, but Sparky chases after the ball and is killed by a car. Following a demonstration of the effects of electricity on a dead frog by his science teacher Mr. Rzykruski, Victor decides to dig up his dog and bring it back to life.

Spoiler: it works!

Extra spoiler: the movie has a happy ending, unlike Frankenstein.

Everything about the film is first rate. But the two things that really make it work are the animation design and the story. Unless you’ve been living under a rock that doesn’t allow you to get out much, you must be familiar with Tim Burton’s visual style. Frankenweenie is very much in keeping with another fine film, Nightmare Before Christmas. I think it works really well, but I can imagine there are those who have no taste and thus won’t like it.

The story moves along at an extremely brisk pace. It never gets bogged down. Twice in the film they seem to have cut connecting scenes. They jolted me, but I think the film is better to just get on with it. After all, its not like the whole Frankenstein formula is all that believable.

What I most liked about Frankenweenie was its many references to the great tradition of horror films. These are not limited to Frankenstein, although there are more than enough of those including the finale at the windmill. There is also the science teacher, Mr. Rzykruski who sounds an awful lot like Bela Lugosi but looks like Vincent Price. And at one point, Victor’s parents are watching one of the Christopher Lee Dracula movies.

But I realize that all of this is what my friend Kristen would call “movie fuck” stuff. Not everyone likes this. But if you don’t get all the movie nerd references, it won’t matter. The film is above all charming. I will certainly buy it when it comes out on DVD.

Update (10 November 2012 9:58 pm)

I just found this great article in the Examiner, Classic Horror References Bring ‘Frankenweenie’ to Life. It notes a number of things that I didn’t pick up in the film:

Tom Scocca over at Slate created the graph below in an article, Eighty-Eight Percent of Romney Voters Were White. It is a shocking collection of data. Of course, it goes along with my argument that the minority issue the Republicans have is much bigger than toning down the rhetoric.

Another interesting thing to note is how ridiculous is the idea that Obama didn’t get a mandate. If Romney didn’t win, you could say it depended upon a single segment of the electorate. But you just can’t say that about Obama. Those claiming that Obama doesn’t have a mandate are racists. Just saying.