Unlike Atrios, who is correct when he says he is a lazy blogger, I work very hard in my 24/7 ranting. But there are some things that I will not do. One of them is to find out any more than necessary about the various reality shows on the TV machine. I am long on record about my hatred of these shows. The biggest problem is that there is very little reality in the “reality” shows. As I wrote back in January, “Another complaint is that all reality shows depend upon producers working behind the scenes to enhance the reality.”

I based this observation on the little reality TV I’ve watched and a decent knowledge of how TV shows are actually produced. But now, we have evidence. There is a show called Storage Wars. Apparently, it is about people who bid on the contents of storage containers left by people who abandoned them. One of the former stars of this show, Dave Hester, is claiming that the show is not so real. He says that producers spiked random containers with valuable objects to heighten the drama of the show.

What is surprising about this is that anyone is surprised about this. There is a reason that people watch TV: real life is boring. Buying stuff low and selling high isn’t that interesting in itself. Shows need to have some gimmick. Many make a contest out of something that everyone would normally find boring. For example, who really likes ballroom dancing enough to watch it out of context? Even with the competition, Dancing with the Stars is slipping in the ratings. Many reality shows depend upon watching horrible people to make the audience feel better about themselves. (I guess.) So you get shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Cops. But mostly, people watch reality TV to see the money: how much is it worth? How much will they make? Thus Deadliest Catch and Pawn Stars and Storage Wars.

I’ve never seen Storage Wars, but I know a bit about Pawn Stars. One thing I hate about the show is how they imply great knowledge in the greedy bottom-feeding family. But I have often wondered how much of the show is a setup. There was a recent one where the main guy bought something expensive without checking on it and it turned out it was fake. He lost a whole bunch of money, blah, blah, blah. But I felt certain a producer was there who said, “Go ahead and risk it; if it turns out to be fake, we’ll reimburse you.” Drama!

By now, I thought that reality TV would be winding down. Its various cliches are too easy to figure out and there is an unrelenting sameness to them. But the combination of viewer apathy and low production costs keep the system going strong. Hester’s claims against Storage Wars may be very bad for that show. But I doubt it will affect the industry as a whole, even though it ought to.

File this one under, “What southern racism?” Rhonda A. Lee is a meteorologist at KTBS-TV, in Shreveport, LA. She’s pictured on the left and I think you can see the problem: that hair! Can you say “colored dyke”? Maybe you can’t, but keen viewer Emmitt Vascocu could. He wrote on Facebook, “The black lady that does the news is a very nice lady.the only thing is she needs to wear a wig or grow some more hair.” But it’s not that he’s a racist or a homophobe. He just hates cancer and he fears that Lee may have it. I’m serious: I don’t think that Vascocu is a racist so much as a complete idiot. I’m not writing this article about him.

The story continues. Lee responded to Vascocu the way one ought to: like he was a confused child. First she explained that she was very healthy. Then she noted that she was an African American and that her hair doesn’t grow down—it grows up. Implicit in this is the question, “Do you want me to look like Link from The Mod Sqaud?” She sums up by explaining that people are made in all kinds of ways, “Conforming to one standard isn’t what being American is about and I hope you can embrace that.” And finally ends with, “Thank you for your comment and have a great weekend and thank for watching.”

This is very nice and intelligent and restrained. Let me only add that it in no way resembles how I would have responded, which would begin, “You you fucktard…” So good for Rhonda A. Lee: she was tested by the idiocy of the world and she came through with flying colors! Except: she was fired.

The issue at hand is that she violated a KTBS-TV policy. Not a written policy, mind you. A verbal policy that they’ve had for a long time. A month and a half. It was announced at a meeting. That she was not present for. It isn’t even clear what this policy is. I’m thinking something vague like, “Coloreds have to know their place!”

Bravo KTBS-TV! You’ve made me want to move to Shreveport, just so I can boycott you!

Sarah Kliff at WonkBlog reported yesterday, White House to States: on Medicaid Expansion, It’s All or Nothing. This hasn’t been well reported, even though it is kind of interesting. But I suspect this is because it is yet more data showing that Republicans are all basically dicks.

As you probably have heard, many governors have decided that they are not going to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. Currently, all the states support everyone under a certain level of income. To get the states to do this the federal government pays about 65% of the cost. Now, the federal government is offering to pay 100% of the cost of covering everyone making up to 133% of the poverty line—for at least 3 years. There are two ways to look at why these governors are passing up this incredible deal. Maybe they really do worry about long term liabilities. But this seems unlikely. The governors could always pull out latter if the program becomes too onerous. I’m inclined to think that they are just being spiteful.

But that doesn’t mean that these governors aren’t salivating at the money Obama is dangling in front of them. So quietly they were asking if the government might be willing to meet them halfway: pay 100% of their Medicaid coverage while they only cover the people they’re already covering. It is surprising that anyone thought that the Obama administration would go for that deal. For one thing, going forward, this would put much less pressure on the states to join the Obamacare program in full. But much more important: this would simply be giving the states money for not doing what the federal government wants. It would also be a horrible signal to the states that are embracing the program. Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services came back with an answer: hell no!

The political posturing of the Republicans on this issue is evil. They are making their constituents suffer for the sake of making a political statement. What’s more: no one cares. Everyone knows that in five or ten or twenty years, every state will be fully vested in Obamacare. So all these Republican governors are doing is showing that they are small minded. I wonder if they plan to look back on their careers and think, “I really sent a message to that bastard Obama, and all I had to do was shit all over the little people!”

Shame! Shame! Shame!

John Nichols over at The Nation explains, John Boehner Has No Mandate. This comes from the fact that Boehner is on his whining tour, complaining to Fox News that the White House, “must have forgotten Republicans continue to hold a majority in the House.” I’m very sympathetic to that line of argument. Boehner shouldn’t roll over just because Obama won re-election by a large margin. Instead, he should roll over because he has no leverage.

But Nichols point is that Boehner is only Speaker of the House because of the ridiculous level of gerrymandering done when the the Republicans were allowed to take over legislatures in so many states. The numbers are striking. When the Democrats took back the House in 2006 with a smaller seat advantage than the Republicans now have (233-202), they won the popular vote by 6.4 million. This was a win of 7.9 percentage points. This year, the Republicans kept a 234-201 seat advantage in the House. But they lost the popular vote by 1.2 million. This is 1.0 percentage points.

Thus, Boehner doesn’t have a mandate. Instead, the United States has a broken system of government.

Afterword

Want to know all about gerrymandering in a most enjoyable way? The great CGP Grey:

I like that weasel!

Noam Scheiber over at The New Republic makes the case, To Save His Second Term, Obama Must Go Over the Fiscal Cliff. He counters the standard thinking that while it may be tactically smart to go over the Fiscal Cliff, it is bad strategy. He quotes a number of people who argue that if Obama wins this fight, he will so anger the Republicans that he won’t be able to get anything done for the next two years. Scheiber calls this for the nonsense that it is.

Anyone who reads me with any regularity know that I don’t buy any of this talk about honor among politicians. In fact, I’ve been defending the Republicans for their intransigence. Politics is about getting power to enact the policies that you favor. That’s why there are two political parties: because they disagree. That’s why we work to win elections. Bipartisanship doesn’t make any sense as an end in itself. It only works when each side thinks the trade offs are worth while. We could have a deal where the top tax rate goes up to 99% and we end Medicare and Social Security. That would be bipartisan: both parties would hate it. But both sides would be giving up something that’s important to them! So it must be good, right?

Scheiber says there are currently two kinds of Republicans in Congress: “moderately delusional and the utterly, irreconcilably delusional.” The moderately delusional are those who understand that the tax fight cannot be won. The irreconcilably delusional are the ones who think that with a stiff upper lib and a song in your heart, all things are possible. They aren’t. But as Scheiber notes, even the moderately delusional crowd is wrong: why would Obama take a 37% top tax bracket when he automatically gets a 39.6% top tax bracket by doing nothing at all?

This isn’t the argument that Scheiber is making, however. He just brings this up to show who Obama is dealing with. He notes that as during the debt limit negotiations, the Republicans really believe that America is on there side in this fight. (The polls? Why would Republicans listen to polls are this point?) They need an object lesson. On 1 January they will get that lesson. During the first day or two of the new year, Republicans all over the nation will have an epiphany, “Now that the top tax rate is 39.6%, I see why I couldn’t stop it!” Some people are slow. Right now, they are the little party that couldn’t. Next year, they’ll be the little party that finally sees that it couldn’t.

Scheiber puts it more prosaically, but doubtlessly more clearly:

As I’ve written before, this is what comes from the Republican winner-take-all approach to governance. In 2011, they chose not to take Obama’s generous (sell-out) deal to the Republicans, and bet on his defeat in 2012. They lost that bet. And when the top margin tax rate is back up to 39.6%, this will all come suddenly into focus.

Those Very Serious white guy business reporters Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen over at Politico report on the breaking news that CEOs are whining about the lack of certainty in the market. I discovered the article through Jonathan Chait where he attacked the insularity that allows reporters to think that what is good for GM (“the CEO class”) is good for America. But I found I was even more annoyed with Chait than I was with VandeHei and Allen.

Chait seems to have a problem with the way these reporters and CEOs talk about policy, not the policy itself. For example, his whole article sounds very much like this:

Moynihan claims that more free trade is good, and I am in total agreement. But we should remember that these things might be disruptive to workers. And he claims that we need to reform entitlements. No argument here: gut those mother fuckers! But let’s not forget that many people don’t see the wisdom of doing this. And all these great men agree that the best way to help the poor is to allow them to sell their babies as food for the rich—human baby is a nice sweet meat! And I think this a fairly sensible as policy.

Luckily, Matt Yglesias saves us in a short article, Dear CEOs: Please Stop Whining About Uncertainty. He says what should be obvious to everyone, especially CEOs: life is uncertainty. If business wasn’t uncertain, it would be easy to make money. And if it were easy to make money, why the hell are corporations paying these fucktards so much?

I would disagree on only one thing: selling babies for food. That’s a fucking slam dunk!

Update (11 December 2012 4:12 pm)

Charles Pierce at Esquire has a very good—and funny—take down of the original article. He particularly has a problem with the people who are quoted by VandeHei and Allen, “Brian Moynihan? The modern poster child for Deposition Alzheimer’s? Put a Bible under his hand and Moynihan won’t remember his own name, but put a couple of credulous fools in front of him and he’s suddenly got all the answers.” But he ends the article very seriously:

And that is the big problem. That is always the big problem. The poor are never consulted. The middle class is rarely consulted. But you can bet your ass that Obama is hanging on every word that fucktards like Brian Moyniham and Jamie Dimon spout.

On The Last Word today, Lawrence O’Donnell asked, “Quien es mas macho?” between presidents Reagan, Bush Sr, and Clinton and Speaker Gingrich. I have many problems with O’Donnell, but he is at his best when doing this kind of thing. And in this case, he’s right. Basically Newt Gingrich destroyed Washington. He is the man who truly invented the Republican Party’s core philosophy, “Power for power’s sake.”

Tonight, on my way back from the garbage, I looked up into the sky. It was very clear and I could see a lot of stars. It made me think of my ancestor over tens of thousands of years who did the same thing. At first, they were just pretty lights in the sky. But over time, we noticed that they moved across the sky during the night. And then we noticed that these positions changed over the course of the year. And there were things like planets that misbehaved completely; they’re always a few bad apples.

Now when I look at the stars, I think of distant solar systems with planets, x-ray binary pulsars, galaxies, and quasars. But I don’t think these things because I’m smart or observant. In fact, I only this year began noticing the migration of birds. I know what I know by the accretion of knowledge of my ancestors. Without them and the language which allowed that knowledge to move from person to person and grow, these stars would only be pretty lights in the sky. Instead, they are pretty lights in the sky… And everything else.

This makes me think of some lyrics from Syd Barrett’s song Terrapin. Because without all the blessings of our species, we would still be just fish in a bowl:

‘Cause we’re the fishes and all we do
Are move about is all we do
Well oh baby, my hair’s on end about you.