The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Or rather the Obama administration, which is out this morning with their new entitlement cutting budget. Greg Sargent reported this morning, “The administration officials insisted yesterday that Obama does not view Chained CPI as good policy.” The thing is, I read a lot, and the only person saying that the Obama administration wants Chained-CPI and other entitlement cuts is me. I don’t know, maybe Digby is making the same point. But no one that the administration pays attention to is making that argument. Thus: they doth protest too much![1]

But it gets worse. Sargent also wrote, “Senior administration officials who briefed a number of us late yesterday repeatedly insisted that the White House will not move any further in the GOP’s direction if Republicans try to pocket the entitlement cuts while refusing to make any concessions.” I guess that is kind of reassuring, but he adds, “The officials say that without new revenues, no deal is possible.” That makes it sound like this budget is a starting position. It looks like they are offering an equal amount of spending cuts to revenue increases. But that second sentence (and the last part of the first) makes it sound like, “As long as we get something, it is okay.”

Ezra Klein had much the same thing to say this morning. He noted that there are two outcomes of this budget gambit: it leads to a deal on the Sequester or it does not. Sadly, our best hope is that it does not. The deal the president is offering might not be that bad as it stands, given that the Sequester is really bad for the economy and a lot of poor people. But it simply doesn’t work to offer up a proposal and say, “I’m meeting you half way; this is as far as I’ll go.” The proposal itself shows that the president is way more interested in a deal than the Republicans. If it does lead to a deal, the White House would have to give on the revenues to allow the Republicans to save face.

The other side of the deal is just ridiculous. Does Obama really think he can move public opinion on this issue? And if he did, would it matter? Universal background checks on gun purchases have a 90% approval rating and yet almost no Republican is for them. The word is that Obama wants to convince the Very Serious Pundits that he is reasonable and the Republicans aren’t. First, if they aren’t convinced by now, they never will be. Second, this is silly. It smacks of a child wanting to get the approval of a distracted parent. Bqhatevwr!

Paul Krugman put it much in this way, calling those the president is courting, Imaginary Grownups. He quite rightly notes that Very Serious Centrists are not grownups, “Calls for centrism and bipartisanship aren’t actual demands for specific policies—they’re an act, a posture these people take to make themselves seem noble and superior.”

So here we go. Best case scenario: Obama is trying to appeal to the supposed grownups on the Washington Post editorial page. Worse case scenario (and what I believe): Obama himself likes these policies; they make him feel “noble and superior.”

[1] In Hamlet, this phrase is not used the way we use it today. The word “protest” is more along the lines of “proclaim.” In Hamlet’s little play designed to catch Claudius (which is extremely lame, although it works in the play), the king asks the queen to stay true to him after his death. She does so. Hamlet asks his mother what she thinks and she responds, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” This is a good example of how our shared knowledge of Shakespeare improves him. This is not a memorable line at all as intended. But as reworked, it is a clever bit of psychologizing.

I’ve seen scenes from Barbara Kopple’s documentary about the Brookside Miners’ Strike, Harlan County, USA. But I’d never sat down and watched it—until tonight. I’m very fond of documentaries generally, but this one is certainly one of the best I have ever seen. It was so good, in fact, that as soon as it was over, I put it back on and watched it again. Cinema verite can be annoying to me, but here it provides a real and completely unsentimental look at people involved in an epic struggle.

What’s perhaps most amazing is how this young New Yorker with an elite background manages to tell this story without error. This was particularly clear at the end. I thought the film was over 15 minutes before it was. That was the point in the film where the mine workers finally got the contract that they had been striking for. That would have made a very nice, dramatic ending. But she keeps telling the story. Once the Brookside miners are finally part of the United Mine Workers of America, they are soon faced with a union-wide strike. The union negotiates a new contract, which the mine workers agree to without much enthusiasm. Yet they struggle on, because there is no choice.

There are three players in a struggle like that documented in Harlan County, USA: strikers, scabs, and owners. I understand the scabs: going on strike takes great courage that I don’t think I’ve ever had. And they make the noble sacrifice of the strikers that much more compelling. The owners, of course, I have no sympathy for. They are people who hold marginal profits higher than they do the lives of their employees. There’s one point at which a company spokesman says that of course they want to make sure their workers are healthy but that there just isn’t any evidence that Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis (Black Lung Disease) is actually harmful. That’s the owners.

But I found a review of the film by Dennis Schwartz. Overall, it is a good review (although the B+ rating alone shows that Schwartz is some kind of idiot). But he starts the review with, “One of the better and more rousing labor strike films that calls attention to class war in America, though it doesn’t offer enough analysis or balance on the issues.” [Emphasis mine.] There is so much wrong with that sentence that I could write a book. Two things though. First, the movie isn’t about the owners or the coal industry generally. This is entirely typical of film “critics”: his only complaint about Harlan County, USA is that it wasn’t a different movie.

Far more aggravating (book length aggravating) is his call for balance on the issues. Just what kind of balance is he calling for? A little he said and she said? “The coal miners are calling for greater safety because a coal miner dies every other day. But the coal industry counters that they don’t give a shit”? The fact is that the film gives the owners quite a bit of time to speak for themselves and it only makes them look worse. Most of all, however, the comment shows that Dennis Schwartz has lost his way as a critic; he was judging the film when he should have been living it. That’s why it takes multiple viewings before one can reasonably discuss a film.

I cannot recommend Harlan County, USA enough. Even apart from its politics (which ought to appeal to readers of this site), it tells an incredibly engaging story of actual human beings trying to live their lives under difficult circumstances. And the music is fantastic.

Afterword

None of the people in the films are made to look particularly noble, and yet, I could not help thinking of the chorus to Bruce Cockburn’s “Nicaragua”: “In the flash of this moment; you’re the best of what we are.” And indeed, warts and all, they are.

Eric Alterman had a great article in last week’s print edition of The Nation, Cuomo Vs. Cuomo (that link it behind a pay wall, but a subscription only costs $9.50 per year—I think The New York Times charges more per month). In it, he talks about the two sides of Cuomo the Younger (Andrew): Socially Progressive Economically Conservative. This is so common (as readers of this blog know) that some clever pundits have coined an acronym: SPEC.

I have a better term for such people: Pretend Liberals. It is really quite simple: it doesn’t matter what laws you have if the power of individuals is too unequal. If you have the money, you can get around most laws. Wanna launder drug money? That might cost you a few bucks, but certainly not your freedom. If you don’t have money, you just better be lucky. Wanna launder drug money? You’re looking at life imprisonment. Hell, you don’t have to do anything at all for the state to kill you.

(It’s interesting to think about this for a moment. There is a great test case: OJ Simpson. Rich OJ had no problem getting a not guilty verdict against a case that was pretty strong. Poor OJ got 33 years for a fairly trumped up charge. Rich man poor man: free man caged man.)

Thus, I think we really need to do something about the Democratic Party. Over the last 20 years, the party really has abandoned economic issues. Just watch MSNBC. It is frightening. Now, I’m not suggesting that the people on MSNBC don’t believe in economic liberalism. Rather, they are all well-to-do, and are more than willing to overlook the economic issue if they can get some decent policy (Or lip service!) on guns or gay rights. What’s more, we have our great liberal president whose idea of fair is for the rich to pay an extra percent in taxes while the elderly get their benefits cut by substantially more. That’s not liberalism; that’s conservatism; it’s just not fascism.

We need to rework our political party. We need to embrace economic liberalism. It is not an option. “Economically conservative” means “conservative.” And the only way that most liberal voters will understand this is if we promote the idea. We’ve lived through 20 years during which the Democratic Party has been nothing more than Republican Lite. Not only is that completely at odds with what most liberals want, it is a losing strategy. The Republicans were still winning in 2009 when Democrats controlled the executive and legislative branches of government because the terms of the debate were still conservative. Note that even with overwhelming control of both houses, we couldn’t even discuss single payer healthcare. The Republicans won before the debate started.

We need real liberals. New Deal liberals; Fair Deal liberals; Great Society liberals. Not Economic Conservative liberals. They aren’t real liberals. When we elect one, we lose.

I’ve been thinking about two comedies recently that have what I normally consider problematic third acts. The first film is kind of a classic of this kind of problem, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The third act is a total muddle. Lothos tries to woo Buffy, she rejects him, he attacks her and is killed in an action sequence so brief that you need to watch it over just to figure out what happened. (Not much.) Now, I’m all for quick third act resolutions, and overly long third acts are now the fashion. But the third act needs to pay off the other two and Buffy provides nothing other than showing Kristy Swanson in a very pretty dress.

The second film is Happy, Texas. It too has a very short third act with one of the most forgettable car chases in movie history. Yet, it works perfectly. There are a number of reasons for this. Fundamentally, it is about characters. Happy has lots of interesting characters with their own story arcs. By the end of the second act all the characters have become new people. All the third act needs to do is some clean up. The two romances must face the reality of who the men really are, the beauty pageant must be held and the bank robbery stopped, and of course, we have to provide a happy ending for Sheriff Dent’s sexual awakening. And all of that (And more!) is done in just a couple of minutes of screen time.

Comparing the two movies, what matters is not the length of acts. Famously, North by Northwest cleans up all of its many loose ends inside a minute. What really matters is the dramatic momentum going into the third act. Happy, Texas has great momentum with lots of different plot lines colliding. Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a number of different plot lines, none of them interesting and they certainly aren’t colliding. Will Buffy’s friends stay with her as she takes off with Pike? They’ve already abandoned her and there is no reconciliation. I’m not sure what the vampires want except that Lothos wants a date. The only compelling relationship in the film is Buffy’s with Merrick. And after his death, the film just muddles on. (It does, however, pretend to set up the third act, but totally fails in the effort.)

When it comes to theater or film, dramatic momentum is all. Sadly, it seems more and more a thing of the past. I watch far too many movies with almost random plots. I have a very hard time predicting where these plots are going. This isn’t because they are clever. It is just that where they’re going is random. It’s film making by the numbers: a car chase, then a sex scene, then a fight. Or perhaps: a fight, a sex scene, then a car chase. But I don’t think that I’m just some old guy who can’t get behind the new trend. The truth is that 500 years ago, theater was much like this. The history of drama has been mostly about the refinement of dramatic momentum. I don’t think it is going away. I just think there are a lot of really bad films made.

Afterword

Yesterday, I wrote about weak acting performances and how it is often the director’s fault. That is certainly the case with Rutger Hauer in Buffy. I know he is a talented actor from other films. But in this one? He seems like an amateur.

Matt Yglesias has a modest proposal. He says we should get rid of the corporate income tax. It only brings in 1-2% of federal income taxes. So given how good corporations are at getting out of it, let’s just abolish it. As he notes, the main good it does is to provide employment for “a small army of accountants, tax lawyers, lobbyists, and CNBC talking heads.” He says we can replace it with a better targeted tax.

Fair enough. But what kind of tax? Here, I’m totally with Yglesias: get rid of the current low tax rates for dividend income. In doing that, we would effectively be taxing the same people the corporate tax did. Except it would be even better: creating a more focused, direct tax. What’s more, it would get rid of the specious argument that corporate taxes just get passed onto consumers.

The problem I have with this idea is that (like most of Yglesias’ bright ideas) it wouldn’t work that way in the real world. Sure, both political parties would be happy to eliminate the corporate income tax. Really: both. But Republicans would claim that tax cuts don’t have to be offset because they pay for themselves. That would result in another huge tax cut for the wealthiest among us.

The other possibility is that the Democrats would force some offsetting tax. But there is no way that the Republicans would allow the tax to be offset with a tax on the rich. It just wouldn’t happen. Instead, we would get some tax that (as usual) soaks the middle class. So Yglesias’ idea is sound in theory, but in practice would just redistribute more income upward.

We don’t need any more of that.

Afterword

Now that I think about it, the idiotic idea that corporate taxes are just passed on to consumers might be used to justify a middle class tax increase. Conservatives could argue that the middle class will get better prices from corporations so it is a wash. This, of course, is totally wrong. But I can well imagine it catching fire in the conservative echo chamber.

This is by far the worst day for birthday since I started this. But let’s get it over with. Carl Perkins was born on this day back in 1932.

Hugh Hefner, who I think is a distinctly creepy guy, is 87. Objectivist psychologist and Ayn Rand lover (as in sex, not necessarily devotion) Nathaniel Branden is 83. Jim Fowler of Wild Kingdom is 81. Dennis Quaid is 59. Idiot pundit Joe Scarborough is 50. And the actress who plays the least annoying character on Sex in the City, Cynthia Nixon is 47.

And the day belongs to a really great drummer, Steve Gadd, who is 68 today. He isn’t really associated with any band, he’s mostly just a studio hired gun. Check out this amazing drum solo on “Aja” by Steely Dan:

Jamelle Bouie wrote an interesting article over at The American Prospect this morning, Did Obama Lose Votes Because of His Race? In it, he reported on some very clever research by Harvard economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. He combined regional voting patterns from 2004 with regional Google searches of “racially-charged material.” By comparing how voting in different locations changed based upon the prevalence of these searches, he was able to discern a racist signature.

An example will help. Consider Denver, CO and Wheeling, WV. Both of these areas voted about 50% for John Kerry in 2004. Taking into account demographic changes, Denver voted as much for Obama as they had for Kerry. Denver, had a very low rate of “racially-charged material” searches. So that’s as it should be: little racial effect, little effect on voting. However, support for Obama in Wheeling was way less than it was for Kerry. What’s more: lots of “racially-charged material” searching in Wheeling. Do enough comparisons like this and you can figure out how many people were not voting for Obama because he was black.

Stephens-Davidowitz found that the effect in 2008 and 2012 was between 3 and 5 percentage points! Not excited? That’s just because you are one of those dull human beings who does not live and breathe statistics. Let’s assume that it is the lower number: 3 percentage points. That would mean that correcting for the bigot vote, Obama would have beat Romney 55%-45%: a ten percentage point defeat. What’s more Obama would have beat him by more than 12 million votes. (For the 5% number: 57%-43%, almost 18 million votes.)

Admittedly, there are enough caveats to this research to fill my new 2 TB hard drive. One that I don’t think matters, but I’ll bring up because it relates to my life: the meaning of “racially-charged material.” The truth is, I very often search for things that make me feel very uncomfortable. Now, I know that the nature of my research is always clear in the context of many searches. Just the same, I often feel queasy that people will see my search string in their Google Analytics. (For the record, it mostly has to do with Nazism and fascism, not racism; but I’m not keen on people thinking me a neo-Nazi.)

But assuming that the research is correct (in direction if not amount), Bouie notes that this means that 2016 looks very good indeed for the Democratic Party. And screw it, I’m going to take any good news I can get right now.

There was a very interesting discussion on All In about the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. I quite agree with what Chris Hayes says at the beginning of the clip below. But at one point, he asks Cass Sunstein if there is anything about Thatcher that liberals should applaud. Sunstein mentions the ozone layer: Thatcher and Reagan both pushed for the ban of the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Let’s stop right there. (We might as well, he doesn’t mention anything else that liberals might like about Thatcher.)

The reason that we got the ban on CFCs is that DuPont wanted CFC-11 and CFC-12 banned. Why? The patents were running out and they had brand new patents on the replacement compounds. So as usual, these great lions of conservatism were just doing what the corporations wanted. I assure you that there would be a stampede of Republicans calling for carbon taxes if it were to Chevron’s and Exxon’s economic advantage.

So no. Liberals should not give even the slightest bit of respect to the Rusted Out Iron Lady. In banning CFCs Thatcher was doing exactly what she did when she privatized state utilities: the bidding of the power elite. That’s all she (or for that matter Reagan) ever did.

Afterword

Cass Sunstein also says that the ozone hole causes skin cancer. That’s not really true. The only thing known at that time was that the ozone layer over the south pole was decimated. At that time, global stratospheric ozone had not been shown to be decreasing. This is an issues that has long confused lay people. But this is not to say that the ozone hole isn’t important. Environmental problems don’t have to affect humans directly to be important.

Margaret Thatcher was an evil woman. Now she’s dead. At the end of her term in office, Elvis Costello released a song about her, “Tramp the Dirt Down.” In it he sang, “And when they finally put you in the ground; I’ll stand there laughing; And tramp the dirt down.” I agree completely about that sentiment. It would be one thing if Thatcher had only ruined the United Kingdom, but she had a pernicious effect all over the globe. Nowhere was the effect greater than in the good ol’ United States of America under Ronald Reagan. Thatcher England led the western world into the abyss of free market authoritarianism (fascism without the explicit racism). It hardly matters that she’s dead now.

It would have helped so much if she had died at 50, say. Of course, I tend to think that the world was destined to go through this proto-fascist phase that (on good days) I think we are slowly clawing our way out of.

I’m glad she’s dead, but I do not look forward to all the hagiographic obituaries. Because you know how it goes in American papers. The obituaries of leftists have to be evenhanded and talk about the good and the bad. The obituaries of rightists only talk about what good men/women/gargoyles they were.

I love the anger in this song; it is Costello at his best:

Thatcher was a good example of the kind of person I wrote about last night, Cynical Son of a Bitch.

Mary Pickford was born in 1892 on this day. According to Wikipedia, she was an alcoholic. But if she was, how did she live to be 87? Really. The definition of alcoholic has really gotten out of hand when it is applied to Pickford. The great economist John Hicks was born in 1904. And another alleged alcoholic, Betty Ford, was born in 1918. She lived to be 93.

Comedian Shecky Greene is 87 today. The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is 76. Special effects master Douglas Trumbull is 71. John Madden, director of Shakespeare in Love and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, is 64. And actresses Robin Wright and Patricia Arquette are 47 and 45.

But the day belongs to the great Jacques Brel who was born in 1929, but died unacceptably young in 1978. Like many musicians who died young, he left us much to remember him by.

Adieu Jacques je t’aimais bien tu sais!

For my analysis of this song, see It’s Hard to Die in French.

I just read the Philip K. Dick short story “The Minority Report.” I’ve seen the film that is based upon it a number of times before. But as with any written story, reading gives you time to think. In this case, I began to think about the metaphysics of precrime. For those of you unaware of the plot, it revolves around the existence of so called “precogs.” They can predict crime—hence “precrime.” As a result, the police arrest assailants before they commit crimes that the precogs have predicted. This creates all kinds of metaphysical problems that I will get to shortly.

Dick wrote the story when he was just 28, and I don’t think he really understood what he had come up with. Both the story and the film have a fundamental paradox. It is a little less troubling in the story, so let me lay it out as it occurs in the film. Anderton is accused of killing a man he has neither met nor heard of. In the process of trying to prove his innocence, he comes into contact with a man who claims to have killed Anterton’s son. Anterton then (more or less) kills the man.

But this begs a very big question: how did the precogs know that Anterton would meet this man when it was only because of their prediction that he did? The answer is that the whole idea of precrime is even more aggravating than time travel! But there’s more, because there is no way that precrime could work in any philosophically justifiable way.

When the precogs predict a crime, there are two possibilities:

1. They are predicting the crime that would take place given all of the ways that their prediction will alter reality.
2. They are predicting the crime that would take place without the many and assorted ways that their prediction will alter reality.

If it is case 1, then the prediction itself is altering reality. There is no way to say that the crime would have been committed without the prediction. This is the case in the story and the movie. There is no way to truly see Anderton as culpable given that he would never have committed the crime without the precrime system causing him to do it.

If it is case 2, then the precrime system is arresting people who might well be guilty in another universe, but who are very clearly not guilty in the universe in which they are found guilty. The precrime system does exist. Predictions that depend upon it not existing are not valid for the universe in which it does exist.

I know that all of this metaphysics may strike some as ridiculous. Yet this is exactly what the story is about. There could not be an ethical precrime. It is quite literally a system that punishes thought crimes. There is no way around this. If you think in terms of wave equations: until an event occurs, the future is just probabilities. Now, I am enough of a mystic to believe that multiple (even infinite) strands of time may branch off at each instant. And someone outside of time might be able to map each of branches. But no one inside that time can do so because in doing so they change the branch.

(Think about it this way. Suppose there was a god or something outside of time and he was able to pump his knowledge into the precogs’ heads. Doing that would change the time branch—the universe. There is no way around that.)

Strangely, the movie Minority Report ends correctly where the short story does not. (The writers had 45 years to think about.) In the movie, the flaws in precrime are exposed and the system is ended. (However, they are not the metaphysical flaws I am discussing here.) In the story, Anterton does as the precogs predicted in order to save the system. It is unfortunate, because Dick explicitly discusses branches of time as the different timing of the precog predictions affect later ones. But the more fundamental problem that I’ve discussed here seems completely to have eluded him. But it’s a really great story!

Afterword

I just looked up the title of this article on Google to see what people had written. I have to say, I’m pretty disappointed. No one seems to be aware of the issues I’ve raised here. These do not strike me as terrible profound or intelligent observations. Maybe it just my peculiar combination of mysticism and science that draws me here. But these metaphysical question are explicitly raised in both the story and the movie. Geez!

I am a cynical son of a bitch. I am the first to push emotion aside for the purpose of the greater intellectual good. So I was surprised how much tonight’s episode of 60 Minutes struck me. The show brought together a group of parents who lost children at Sandy Hook. The cynical side of me was very clear: this was a very manipulative segment; the producers should have been ashamed. And I thought that as someone who agrees with the parents fully on the issue of gun control.

But I thought that with a small part of my brain. The majority of my brain was overwhelmed, desperately trying not to be emotionally destroyed by the stories that the parents were telling. My brain failed utterly. There is just no way to get past the emotional tug (more like a tractor beam) of these very human stories and the tragedy of these deaths. I had to turn it off. I don’t need to hear this kind of thing. After all, I’m the guy who says fuck the assault weapons, let’s outlaw handguns.

It got me thinking. (Of course!)

I understand the arguments of the gun lovers. They says things like, “Rights are more important than lives.” And, “If you outlaw guns, even more people will die.” I have a very clear answer to this: bullshit! Just admit it: you care more about keeping your assault rifles than you care about the lives of these grammar school kids. And may God make you fry in hell for the privilege.

But it’s worse. These gun people are not arguing that gun rights are more important than the lives of these children. They are arguing that the simplest reforms—getting rid of the gun show loophole of a law they claim to be for—is more important than the lives of these children. Are they fucking kidding me? Really: I get the slippery slop argument. It’s bullshit, but I get it! But this isn’t it. I don’t even know what this is. “If we fully enforce the law then the Nazis will come in and take away all our guns”?

I am a cynical son of a bitch. And I just don’t get it.