This morning, Jonathan Chait published an article, Obama’s Refusal to Deal Paving Way for a Deal. It starts, “Most of the news coverage of the ‘fiscal cliff’ has come from the perspective of soothing bipartisan centrism, a point of view dramatized most explicitly by CNBC’s hysterical countdown to January, festooned with slogans urging the two parties to ‘Rise Above.'” Chait is ridiculing this and noting that it is exactly because Obama is being firm in these negotiations that we are likely to see a reasonable deal. This, of course, is what we liberals have known all along; it took the centrist Obama 3 years to figure it out. Of well. Better Nate than lever.[1]

Chait’s article is quite worth reading because he explains how things are likely to go from here. But I’m more interested in this chorus of calls for bipartisanship. And you know what I think of that: bipartisan consensus can bite me. Bipartisanship is what is always called for by two kinds of people: those who know nothing and those in the middle. Let’s look at each.

Those who know nothing think that the two sides are fighting like football teams: it’s all a game. But as much as I may despise Republican policy ideas, I don’t doubt that these people really do believe that the world would be oh so much better off if only we kept piling money and gifts on the rich and powerful. (That is the idea behind tinkle down economics.) The two sides are the two sides because they disagree. They don’t disagree for sport.

Now we come to those in the middle. I really hate these arrogant bastards.[2] Their claim is that they’re open minded and are just being objective. This is the basis for all mainstream political coverage. But even when coverage is truly centrist (it is usually just socially liberal and economically conservative), it is no less ideological. So when centrists say the two sides should just compromise, what they are really saying is exactly what the extremists on each side are saying: I want it all my own way!

Making reasonable compromises is a good thing. Giving up something you can live without in order to get something you can’t live without is a good idea. Minimizing your losses when you are in a bad negotiating position is a smart move. And giving a weak opponent a way to save face is noble. But compromising for its own sake is madness.

Afterword

I can’t help but notice that the mainstream media are much more hysterical in their calls for compromise when the liberals are in a strong position. I don’t recall anyone telling Boehner that he should be more reasonable when he claimed he got 98% of what he wanted. And for the hundredth time: 98% wasn’t good enough. What’s more, Boehner didn’t not follow the noble course. But now that things are reversed, Obama is supposed to.

[1] This is from a joke. It is an example of what Wikipedia calls anti-humor. In this case, it tells a very long story leading up to a spoonerism of “better late than never”: “better Nate than lever.” Feel free to make up your own story!

[2] Arrogant Bastard Ale is excellent. Highly recommended!

I don’t mean to scare you, but I found out some stuff this morning. Man! I don’t even want to tell you guys. It’s just so horrible. Ezra Klein writes, 11 Shocking, True Facts About Simpson-Bowles.

See your home interest deduction vanish!
Feel capital gains cuts taxed as income!
Scream at defense budget cuts!
See Night of the Simpson-Bowles if you dare!

Yes kiddos, the Simpson-Bowles plan is more liberal than you probably know. But that’s not because it is liberal. (There is a proposal that I will write about later, but it ain’t Simpson-Bowles.) It is just that with the conservative bias of debt discussion even on liberal MSNBC, their proposal doesn’t look that bad.

Klein lists 11 items that are supposed to shock us. In fact, most of them are not even surprising. But a few are:

1. Simpson-Bowles ends the the Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000 (I know)
2. There are a lot of tax increases in Simpson-Bowles (I know)
3. There are so many tax increases that the plan is nearly 1:1 (hmm)
4. Simpson-Bowles taxes capital gains and dividends as normal income (great)
5. Charities, homes, health care and states (needlessly complicated)
6. Simpson-Bowles raises the gas tax by 15 cents (good)
7. Congress has already passed 70 percent of the discretionary cuts (not surprising)
8. Simpson-Bowles cuts security spending by $1.4 trillion, not including drawing down the wars (yep)
9. The Social Security changes (I know; the cap raise is great)
10. Paul Ryan voted against Simpson-Bowles (I know)
11. Simpson-Bowles went down in the House, 382-38 (not surprising)

So there is really nothing shocking in this list. It is nice to see that the Simpson-Bowles proposal is not quite as bad as I’d thought. But mostly, it was fun to do the poster.

Joseph Stiglitz’s new book The Price of Inequality is a great book. Unlike the books of Paul Krugman, which are also very good, Stiglitz goes into much depth. In fact, the book is kind of like taking a short course on what has been going on in our economy. It is as good as Winner-Take-All Politics, but from an economic standpoint.

One of the high points of the book is Chapter 2: Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal Society. In it, he goes after one of the most aggravating aspects of the free market religion. Companies may get big by innovating, but they don’t stay big that way. Stiglitz notes that Microsoft, “Did not develop the first widely used word processor, the first spreadsheet, the first browser, the first media player, or the first dominant search engine.” Microsoft has used its lucky original contract with IBM to establish a monopoly, which it then used to stifle competition and steal others’ innovations.

Another example of this is the ethanol industry:

There are so many things to discuss in the book, let me just mention two other things. First, he tackles sociological aspects of market behavior that tend to get ignored in economic models. In particular, he talks about how many economists claimed that racial discrimination couldn’t exist in a free market. Wrong again, Bob! He also shows how people actually do care about each other beyond their simple economic interests. One striking case had to do with an after school program. In order to stop parents from picking their kids up late, the program started charging them extra. It did not work. The parents we’re already doing their best to get their kids on time (these were not rich parents). When the program turned it into a simple economic transaction, many parents just made the calculation that rushing to pick the kids up was not worth the extra money they would have to pay. When it was just caring about others’ time, the parents did better.

Stiglitz’s academic work looks at the effects of imperfect information in a market. Traditionally, economic models assume that everyone knows the value of a product or service. In a sense, this is why people claim that markets are perfect: they assume them to be perfect. Stiglitz showed that the effects of information asymmetries were large. Late in the book, he relates the story of conversations he had with free market fundamentalist Milton Friedman:

Stiglitz ends the book with a series of recommendations for what we can do to fix our economy. They are solid and I don’t see how any reasonable person can question them. However, because of our corrupt political system, there is little hope that more than a little around the edges will be done. So I fear we must first fix our politics before moving on to our economic problems.

This sign that has been posted all over New York City, reads “NYPD Drones: Protection When You Least Expect It.”

It is an excellent example of urban art which makes a difference. And thus, it has to be stopped!

The NYPD held a weeks long manhunt for the artist. They finally arrested Essam Attia and charged him with 56 trumped-up charges, including a weapons charge for an unloaded 22 rifle he kept under his bed.

Explain to me again how we don’t live in a police state.

I try not to read David Brooks, but last night, Matt Yglesias tricked me into reading him with this tweet:

So I went ahead and read The Truly Grand Bargain. What Brooks is doing is a bit of a mystery. Normally, I would think he was just admitting that some Republican demands are hopeless. For example, the top marginal tax rate will go up to 39.6% automatically on 1 January. But he isn’t calling for that. Instead, he claims that the Republicans should be, “Willing to see top tax rates go up to 36 percent or 37 percent.” What?!

But it gets worse. He wants major cuts to Medicare and Social Security in exchange for this one or two percentage point increase in the top tax bracket and a one year ceasefire in the Republican war on the United States credit rating, know as the debt ceiling. Dean Baker did some calculations on this offer. He finds that Brooks is asking for a 6% cut to poor retirees’ incomes and in exchange, Brooks is offering a 1.5% cut in the incomes of the rich through tax increases.

Baker notes, “It’s interesting to think about what he would suggest putting on the table if the Republicans had won the election.”

Afterword

I don’t understand everyone who is claiming that the Republicans should do what Obama wants because the Democrats won the election in a big way. Elections don’t have consequences because anyone has a mandate; they have consequences because someone has power. Obama is not in a better bargaining position because he won the election—at least that isn’t the critical element. He is in this position because the Republicans gave him the power when they assumed he would lose. Now two things are going to happen that the Republicans don’t want: tax increases and military cuts. If these were not coming regardless, Obama’s win would not mean anything in this negotiation.

Matt Yglesias sent us to a YouGov BrandIndex article by Ted Marzilli, Anti-Obamacare rhetoric and restaurant Buzz. It provides data for what I’ve always said: it is a big mistake to bring your politics into your business—especially when your business isn’t a necessity, like dining out at low quality restaurants. (That’s not an insult; I’m rather fond of Denny’s.)

Marzilli presented the graph below. It shows the Buzz score, “Which asks respondents, ‘If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word of mouth, was it positive or negative?'” Basically, it measures how a brand is doing. I think it is is fascinating.

The data for Denny’s is very telling. My take on it is that all John Metz’s bitching about Obamacare caused the Denny’s reputation (that was never that high) to plummet—all the way down to zero. And Metz is just a franchise owner. But as it became widely know that Denny’s CEO John Miller slapped down Metz and set about cleaning up the mess, people felt better about the chain. I think the main thing is that people learned that Metz didn’t speak for the company.

I think this final bit is critical, because of what’s happened to Papa John’s. On 20 November, John Schnatter announced that he wasn’t going to screw his employees or increase prices and that it was all a big misunderstanding. His words were “twisted.” That statement is at best questionable. Regardless, the people didn’t buy it. In fact, when Schnatter made his twisted comment, it seemed only to have reminded people of what an asshole he is, because their Buzz score went down even further.

All of these places will eventually recover from this. Soon most people will forget it ever happened—not that long term damage hasn’t been done. But this shows very clearly that business owners should shut up and run their businesses. But I think these people are as sheltered as anyone else in the right wing bubble. I’m always reminded of Bill O’Reilly’s comments about “far left wing extremists.” That’s his way of saying “the other.” And for people like John Metz and John Schnatter, they probably think that Democrats are strange people far away and not what they really are: well over half of their customers.

There aren’t a lot of openly gay Republicans, but there are some. This is not as surprising as it may seem. David Brock in his book Blinded By the Right talks about what it is to be gay inside movement conservatism: they accept it silently. At least they do until you stray from the fold and then they attack you with every vile insult they’d been stifling all those years. So I feel sorry for gay conservatives because their political allies hate them and I fear they secretly hate themselves.

The thing is that sex is one of the most basic things about us. I can’t imagine joining a group that denies one of the core aspects of my being. And what is this done for? Economic libertarianism that the movement only pretends to follow? A fanatical belief in a religion that claims you ought to be stoned to death?

The situation is even more intense when the politician comes out only after he has been in office. In that case, I think that he is likely to change his outlook over time. Clearly, coming out is a liberalizing act. Who knows what the future holds?

Pennsylvania state Representative Mike Fleck is such a man. He is in his fourth term, but he just came out as gay. And he has an interesting story: he is a graduate from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. I wonder what that experience did to him.

I suspect there may be some gamesmanship going on with Fleck’s announcement, however. Brian Sims was just elected to the Pennsylvania state legislature and he would have been been the first openly gay member. And a Democrat. Also note that Fleck came out after the election. That should tell you everything you need to know about the Republican Party generally when it comes to gay rights.

But I’m with Sims, “The truth of the matter is, I’m excited any time anybody feels that they can come out of the closet… [and] that they can be honest with themselves and people around them.” Good policy is secondary. At least for now.

Prachi Gupta reports today in Salon, Scottish farmer trumps Trump. It tells the story of Michael Forbes, a salmon fisherman in Scotland who stood up to Donald Trump and his project to build the “world’s greatest golf course” and amenities costing more than a billion dollars on over a thousand acres of environmentally fragile land in Aberdeen, Scotland. Of course Forbes isn’t the only local residence who Trump has gotten into conflicts with. But he was named “Scotsman of the Year” by a contest held by Glenfiddich and the newspaper The Scotsman.

Clyde Haberman of the New York Times notes that this award normally goes to stars like J.K. Rowling and Susan Boyle. And this year, it seemed most likely to go to the number 3 ranked tennis professional Andy Murray. But no:

Yes, Mr. Forbes; we’ve known for a long time.

Afterword

Here is the trailer for You’ve Been Trumped. I’ll let you know if I find it online.

Here’s a question for you. What’s worse: killing innocent civilians or reporting on it? If you ask the fascists at Apple, the answer is reporting on it, of course. Apple has turned down the app Drones+ because it is “objectionable and crude.”

Let’s be clear here: there is nothing objectionable or crude in this app, except that it highlights an objectionable and crude United States government policy. All the application does is search the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism database for reports of drone attacks. It then creates an incident on a map. Pretty simple, right? But this is a big deal to some people. You might really care if you want to hide the reality of our drone war from the public.

You might also really care if you have received “$9 million in Pentagon contracts in recent years” as has Apple.

Charles Cooper at CNet explains that Apple’s app guideline policy is not public (like so much else about the company). But it was once leaked to the public. And it basically says that they will reject apps that are “over the line.” But they can’t say what that line is. They just know it when they see it.

Apple’s fascistic tendencies have long bothered me, but now this is political. This is important. Come on people: Android is better anyway. Get off the fucking Apple IV drip. It’s worse than heroin!

And sign the petition now: Roots Action

Robert Reich has made another of his ticking clock videos where he explains something complicated in a short period of time. This time it is the fiscal cliff in two minutes 30 seconds:

If you want to understand theater, you should watch the Italian film Habemus Papam or (more or less), “We Have a Pope.” I picked it because the box said that it was hilarious. And generally, I find that other countries do a better job with comedy. In America, they tend to be over-produced and over-complicated. A good example is Le Dîner de Cons (The Dinner Game). The American remake Dinner for Schmucks was reasonably funny, but it gets awfully sidetracked on unnecessary subplots and smooths away too many of the character’s rough edges. (Admittedly, I loved Barry’s mouse taxidermy.)

Habemus Papam is very amusing at times, but I would hardly call it a comedy. If Shakespeare had written it, we would call it a “problem film.” It tells the story of the election of a new pope. At the beginning of the film, all the cardinals are casting ballots and the camera shows a number of them in close-up with the voice-over, “No me, Lord, not me.” As I understand it, this is very accurate. Most Cardinals have no interest in being pope. As a cardinal, they have prestige, a good job, and they get invited to all the best parties. They’re Catholics, not protestants! Being Pope means a lot of work.

They finally pick Cardinal Melville to be the next Pope. He is definitely not up to the task. In fact, he looks shell shocked throughout the rest of the film. But not much happens for the rest of the film. The new pope runs away and wanders around Rome anonymously. The cardinals, all stuck at the Vatican until the pope goes out on the balcony to greet the people, sit around playing cards and volleyball. Throughout, Melville seems to be reflecting on his life. He had wanted to be an actor, but failed and so succeeded rather brilliantly in the church.

My take on the film is that religion is above all theater. Cardinal Melville has not lost his faith—it is probably stronger than ever. Just as he continues to love the theater while being no actor, he loves God while unable to play the part of a spiritual leader. The denouement of the film is at the very end, and it shows very clearly how much everyone in the church depends upon everyone else playing their role. The film asks an important question, “If you truly loved God, would you ever take part in a formal religion?”

Despite these important issues, the film is filled with joy. I think it does an especially good job of showing that church leaders are regular people with all their quirks. A good example is when the Oceania volleyball team—which only has three players—scores a point. It is the climax of the volleyball sequence. If the three-man Oceania team can manage to score a point, then maybe God really can do anything.

Afterword

The film is also beautiful. Kudos to Alessandro Pesci (cinematography) and Paola Bizzarri (production design).