Last night I watched Space Cowboys, Clint Eastwood’s film about a group of old men who finally get their chance to go into space. It reminds me of something Andrea said after the very similar movie The Crew came out. “These films about old men reliving their glory days are really interesting. I wonder if we’re going to get a movie about four old women reliving their glory days of doing dishes and taking the kids to soccer practice?” It’s a good point. I do tire of seeing these old actors pretending as if they really are the hunka hunka burning love they used to be. But I still recalled the movie being fun, so I put it on. Boy was I wrong.

The problems with this film are extreme. And they start, like so many films, with the script. There are some genuinely funny lines in this movie. But without exception, the set-ups are so ham-handed that they almost kill the humor. It’s like watching an airplane land: turn the plane to be parallel to the runway, reduce speed, reduce altitude, lower landing gear, joke! But okay, most people watching are just glad to be in the company of these actors who we’ve loved in the past: Dirty Harry, Agent K, Rockford, and Hawkeye. Alas.

Although I don’t think much of three of these actors, I think that Donald Sutherland is fairly good. And the other three are rather good at being minor variations of themselves of screen. But in this film, I thought that pretty much all of their acting was awkward. I suspect this was not their faults. Rather, I think it was Clint Eastwood’s directing. He’s known for shooting very quickly. In this film, there were a lot of special effects. This no doubt slowed him down. Did that mean he rushed the non-special effects scenes more than usual? I don’t know. For whatever reason, the actors (Especially Eastwood himself!) were weaker than they usual are.

There were many other problems. It is always hard to tell, but the editing seemed choppy for the first half and then the pacing seemed ridiculously slow at the end. The science was laughable. The plot was stupid. The resolution was unfulfilling. Eastwood’s melodies are charitably called uninteresting. The whole thing is lit like it is taking place in a sports arena. But perhaps I’m nitpicking, and I certainly wouldn’t bring these things up if it weren’t for the major problems. Plus, there were things to like.

I especially liked seeing Marcia Gay Harden and Blair Brown. Despite whatever was holding back the men, they gave good performance. Plus, I’ve had a crush on Brown since I was a teenager. Actually, overall the supporting cast seemed pretty good to me, with the exception of James Cromwell who was uncharacteristically weak. Again: I’m sure it’s Eastwood’s fault.

Regardless, if you want to see one of these “old men reliving their glory days” films, skip Space Cowboys. Instead, watch The Crew, which certainly isn’t a great movie, but it’s better made and it has a fantastic comedy script.

Afterword

Speaking of bad science, twice during the film, a character makes this argument about hitting a baseball to moon. “You just need to knock it halfway there, about 100,000 miles, and the Moon’s gravity will take it from there.” Uh, no. Gravity is directly dependent upon mass. The earth’s mass is a bit more than 80 times the moon’s mass. Thus, halfway between the earth and the moon, the earth would have 80 times as much force. (BTW: I calculated that by entering (earth mass)/(moon mass) into Google and it spit back the answer “81.2800178349.” Typically, Bing provides a nice picture of the moon, but not what I actually wanted. You do know that about Bing, right? The reason that people “prefer” its search results is that they provide more images?)

I’m not going to work out the equations for you because I know that you would just skip them. The result is that the baseball would have to be 90% of the way to the moon when it runs out of energy in order for the moon to pull it home. My former (and in some ways current, because I bug him from time to time) physics professor Joe Tenn recently told me, “If you want movies to obey the laws of physics I am afraid you are going to be disappointed.” He’s right of course, but this stuff is too fun not to do.

Are you not entertained?

I have a very bad habit of reading a great book but having so many things to say about it that I put it aside for a while. And then, despite the fact that the text is now full of my comments, I have next to no idea what it was I wanted to say. Such is the case with Eric Alterman’s The Cause. It is basically a history of liberalism from the Great Depression to last year. But the real meat of it is in the end of the book when he looks at the resurgence of the Democratic Party. Just as I do, he finds the “New Democratic” movement wanting.

A good example of this is a contrast between Mario Cuomo and his son Andrew. Mario was a good old school Democrat who stood up against unpopular issues like the death penalty. His son (a prototypical New Democrat) took a similarly unpopular stand… Against the millionaire’s tax. Alterman writes:

One reason that I find Alterman so compelling is that he seems to be (like me) primarily an economic liberal. That isn’t to say that we don’t support social liberal causes. But it is the economic cause that has lately been abandoned by the liberal movement. As he writes:

If you want to know where liberalism has been in recent history, the questionable place it currently is, and where it is going, you really should read The Cause. It is largely inspiring, even if many parts will make you crazy.

According to Public Policy Polling (pdf), 74% of Republicans think that the Benghazi scandal is worse than Watergate. But I wonder: do these people even know what Watergate was about? That scandal has come to be a blanket term for a whole lot of presidential malfeasance. The Watergate break-in was just the loose thread that once pulled unraveled the whole shirt. But we can’t know what these Republicans think about Watergate because they weren’t asked. They were, however, asked if Benghazi was worse than Iran Contra and only 70% thought it was. And even more interesting, 74% think Benghazi is worse than the Teapot Dome scandal.

(Note: the worst thing about the Benghazi “scandal” is that it has forced me to learn to spell it! Look people: I have a hard enough time keeping the spelling of all the really useful words in my mind. There’s only so much space. I blame the Republicans.)

What are we to make of these numbers? I think it’s pretty simple: Republicans don’t like Obama. Because let’s face it, I doubt that 5% of Republicans have even heard of Teapot Dome and 1% know what it was. I suspect if you asked Republicans if Benghazi was worse than Judas betraying Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, they would say, “Yes!” I even know their argument: only one person died in Jerusalem whereas four people died in Benghazi! Okay, maybe they wouldn’t say that because most of them are Christians, but it does make as much sense as the argument, “No one died as a result of Watergate!” (Interestingly, the whole Benghazi “scandal” has been about what the White House said about Benghazi after the attack: the controversy is the “talking points.” No on died as a result of the talking points either, but that isn’t mentioned.)

If you think I am overstating the ignorance of the Republicans, just check out another part of the poll. PPP asked the “worse than Watergate” respondents where Benghazi was. Of them, 39% didn’t know. Here’s what they said:

• 10% Egypt (Close!)
• 9% Iran (Only 1,500 miles off!)
• 6% Cuba (6,000 miles!)
• 5% Syria (1,000 miles)
• 4% Iraq (1,000 miles)
• 1% North Korea (5,600 miles!)
• 1% Liberia (2,600 miles, but it does sound the same)
• 4% Didn’t know (Good answer!)

(I got the distances from this great tool: Distance From To. Check it out!)

I think the people who answered Egypt can be forgiven: it is close by and we have a similar relationship with that country. Similarly, those who thought it was Liberia: they got the first three letters right! But the rest are all, “Pick and enemy, any enemy!” It’s just silly and entirely typical of the conservative “good versus evil” mentality. They don’t need to differentiate between enemies; just like Justice Potter Stewart, they know ’em when they see ’em.

Beside the fact that Republicans don’t like Obama, this poll shows one other thing. Benghazi is a scandal for Republicans, only because they’ve been told it’s a scandal. By and large, they don’t even know what the scandal is. But it would be even bigger if they only knew that no one died in the Teapot Dome scandal either.

H/T: Eric Alterman

I’ve been thinking a lot about why so many journalists I follow went so wrong on the supposed White House Scandals this week. I think it has a lot to do with affinity bias. And that does not speak well for the state of journalism.

A lot of people wonder why, for example, conservatives often hold opinions that are just wrong. Throughout the Bush administration, Fox News viewers were systematically misinformed about important issues. Why was that? It’s quite simple: they trusted Fox News. And that is not only acceptable, it is necessary. We can’t independently become experts on every issue we hear about. So we find people who we trust as experts and believe what they say.

Of course, it pays to be selective. Anyone who gets their information from cable news is cruising for a bruising. In general, I think that MSNBC is a lot better than Fox News. But that isn’t always case. I think Fox News has done a better job under Obama than they did under Bush. It’s all been pretty bad, though. MSNBC has done better generally, but I think they were soft on Obama during the campaign. At times they act as apologists for the Obama Administration—especially certain shows. Regardless, I think that MSNBC does a better job of informing liberals than Fox News does informing conservatives. Of course, the best conservative print publications are better. Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review and Josh Barro of Bloomberg View are both fact based. I wish a lot more conservatives got their news from people like them.

There really is a difference between what liberals and conservatives think about things even when they are working off the same set of facts. And that should be enough. But instead, generally conservatives get different facts than liberals do. I think this is about 90% the fault of conservative media, but it hardly matters. My point is that we’ve got to trust someone.

I’ve worked very hard to find people who I feel I can trust—people who will not knowingly deceive me and will admit when they are wrong. I still feel very dependent on these people. But not always. For example, most of them went crazy this last week. They acted as though there was something to all these scandals. There were damned few people like me who were pushing back against this. And my question is: why?

I think there is a problem with being too plugged into the media structure—something that I cannot be accused of. And in this case, all the liberal commentators were trying to prove that they weren’t just partisans. If the Obama administration had done something wrong, they were going to hold it accountable. The problem is that this kind of thing is just as bad as blind partisanship. From Monday on, there was no information that implicated the White House. Yet much of the reporting was of the type that I saw coming from Greg Sargent: very cautious concern.

This week I wasn’t exactly kind to Obama. I blasted him about firing Steven Miller. And I’ve been very hard on him about the Associated Press, even though the scandal is systemic and not especially Obama. But I didn’t fall for the theatrics, which I correctly labeled a “perfect storm of bad sandal-like news.”

So why didn’t the others see this? I think it is the same thing as for all of us: we have people we trust. Unfortunately, many of the people I trust, themselves trust Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Politico. (I avoid reading them if I can.) They are the very definition of “Washington Insider.” And they create a kind of sports reporting approach to politics. Indeed, in his “nothing to see here” article yesterday, Ezra Klein wrote, “On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out.” But the evidence that became available between Tuesday and Thursday didn’t change the facts as the Monday CNN report did change Friday’s ABC “facts.” All that changed was that the commentariat had a chance to calm down.

The whole thing reminds me of The Ox-Bow Incident. The media depended upon its trusted connections to believe that something happened that the facts just didn’t support. Ezra Klein and others are always quick to note that a stunning revelation could turn any of these supposed scandals into real scandals. But that’s always true. It could turn out that Obama got an Oval Office blow job by an intern. Or that Michelle had Vince Foster killed. Or maybe they both fired the people in the travel office to give their friends a job. Any of this could be true. But barring any actual, you know, facts, it is just a big game of telephone played by journalists who really ought to be smarter than the average cable news viewer.

On this day back in 1831, the co-inventor of the microphone, David E. Hughes was born. He also invented a number of other things by himself, most notably the spark-gap transmitter and the crystal radio. The latter was a very popular radio in the early days because it requires no battery, which is, I don’t know, totally awesome? He was also something of a musical prodigy, later becoming a professor of music.

One of the most creepy and vile serial killers ever, H. H. Holmes was born in 1861. The glamorous Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka was born in 1898. Henry Fonda was born in 1905. In 1910, Socialist realism painter Aleksandr Ivanovich Laktionov was born. And Liberace was born in 1919.

Guitarist Robert Fripp is 67 today. Although it is a different kind of radio that he has on, Jonathan Richman is 62. As far as I’m concerned, Pierce Brosnan was the perfect James Bond, and he is 60 today. And the great gymnast Olga Korbut is 58. Although I actually have a problem with gymnastics in general, I’ve had a crush on Korbut since I was eight. So it’s a good opportunity to enjoy her again:

Actor Debra Winger is also 58. Kevin McDonald from The Kids in the Hall is 52. And Janet Jackson is 47.

The day, however, belongs to the great oral historian and writer Studs Terkel who was born on this day 1912. He stayed with us—and relevant—halfway through his 97th year. He is best known for Hard Times, Working, and The Good War. What I most admire about him is the unusual life he led. He got a law degree, but rather than practice law, he went to work in a hotel. Then he went into theater and found himself in radio. He didn’t really start to do the stuff he was known for until he was in his 40s. And he did his most important work in his 60s and 70s. When it comes to the things that really matter—one of which is our fellow humans and their lives—greatness takes time. For most people, Marsellus Wallace was right: humans are like vinegar. But Terkel was like a fine red wine.

Happy birthday Studs Terkel!

Afterword

Olga Korbut is often credited with (Blamed for?) changing women’s gymnastics from a sport of older, larger women to one of younger, smaller women. That isn’t really true. In the 1960s, there was a trend toward younger and smaller gymnastics and Korbut was just part of that trend. And not the end of it, either.

I caught a few minutes of Fox News this afternoon. Supposedly straight news anchor Bret Baier explained that the resignation of acting IRS chief Steven T. Miller was just political theater because he was going to step down in June anyway. And then Charles Krauthammer added that it just wasn’t credible that a few low-level IRS employees would take it on themselves to give special attention to tea party groups. That, of course, makes no sense at all. If you were charged with checking 501(c)(4) applications and you saw a huge increase in applications from tea party groups, you would very easily think, “Maybe I should look into all these tea party groups.” Krauthammer’s argument assumes that IRS employees are a bunch of buffoons who can’t think for themselves. But that’s his (very typical) conservative prejudice. It isn’t close to reality.

But what struck me about the segment was not that, as usual, Fox News was spouting typical partisan nonsense as if it were news. It was that Fox News was saying just what I said they would say. And as I said, most of it would be true. At least, what Bret Baier said was true: it was political theater. Where I went wrong was to think that conservatives would care that Steven Miller had nothing to do with the scandal, except, you know, to fix it. I guess it isn’t the job of Fox News to report, you know, news. It’s just their job to attack the president, and they had enough for that in the fact that Miller was going away soon anyway.

What boggles my mind about all of this is, if anything, Fox News is being less hysterical than most of the Washington press. To some extent, I suspect this is just because the Fox News staff are relishing it; they think this will go on and on—maybe even bringing down the president—so there’s no reason to rush. Jonathan Bernstein has an excellent article at his A Plain Blog About Politics where he looked at all the excitement on Tuesday about this “important” collection of scandals. A good illustration of this is from last night’s The Daily Show:

When I saw this I was very angry. What Stewart is saying is that because there is a scandal about the IRS and the Associated Press, even if it doesn’t actually have anything to do with the president, that makes Benghazi a real scandal. This is the sort of nonsense that I expect The Daily Show to lampoon. But in its way, Jon Stewart and company are very much a mirror of Washington. And really: I’m getting to the point where I don’t even want to watch it; the aggravation is not compensated by the comedy—the comedy itself getting rarer and rarer, replaced by knowing observations. I don’t need The Daily Show to point out the foolishness of the politics; I get that all day long.

Anyway, according to Bernstein, the mainstream news sources have today figured out what I’ve been arguing all along: what scandals? He is quick to note that we just don’t know what is going to happen to these scandals. And I agree. It could turn out that Obama was bribing those IRS workers to go after his enemies—just like Richard Nixon! But it is much more likely that what is really happening is what I’ve been saying all along: the more we know, the less there appears to be a scandal.

That’s not to say that there aren’t really important issues associated with each one of the supposed scandals. My article Scandal?! is probably the best thing I’ve written this month and it discusses exactly that. But as for any scandal that involves President Obama breaking the law or using his office for undue advantage? That’s just nonsense. It’s a 1% chance at best. Mark my words: by this time next week, only Fox News will be covering this stuff with any amount of passion.

Matt Yglesias has this tendency to apologize for behavior even as he demolishes it. He published a great example of this earlier this morning, AEI Chief: To Win Latino Votes, the GOP Needs an Agenda to Help Poor People. That sounds fantastic and almost unbelievable. The head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, understands that in order to appeal to Latinos, the GOP needs to help the poor? That’s great! I’ve been arguing the same thing for a long time.

Alas, that isn’t what he said at all. After laying out what Brooks has to say, Yglesias adds, “The problem, of course, is that Brooks’ proposed solution looks an awful lot like nothing more than reframing.” And of course, that is Brooks solution. Conservatives love to talk about all the opportunities that they want to create for the poor. But when it gets down to actions, those opportunities end up being nothing more than the opportunities for the rich to exploit them.

Brooks in fact says that he wants the poor to know that they are not the cause of our fiscal problems. Instead, it is those evil middle class people. And by cutting Social Security and Medicare, there will be plenty of money for the poor. Well, Brooks has a different definition or “poor” than I do. I think roughly half the country is poor. Brooks is more of the “if they have a microwave oven they can’t be poor” school of thought.

Yglesias goes after the reality of the Republican Party in terms of how it wants to “reform” the budget:

Not exactly a “protect the poor” agenda. But Yglesias goes on to speculate what Brooks is really doing. Is he trying to push the GOP in the right direction? Is he just clueless? I think Yglesias nailed it at the beginning of article. Brooks is just another good Republican soldier, out there trying to claim that they really want to help the poor without, you know, actually helping the poor.

It is also interesting that Brooks employs racist Charles Murray who only yesterday wrote a defense of fellow racist, with particular attention to Latinos, Jason Richwine. So this is really just SOP for the conservative movement. And that is all clear from Yglesias’ article. Yet he still tries to argue that maybe, in some alternate dark matter universe that I have no access to, the Republicans really are trying to change into something a little less evil. If it makes the young blogger happy, I guess it is okay. But the rest of us don’t need to buy his happy horseshit. His hard nosed analysis destroys it anyway.

Investment banker Jim Roumell has proposed a great idea over at the Washington Post. After 9/11, “strong” young men signed up with the military to defend America against… Well, I actually don’t know. At the time it seemed like an outburst of jingoism that had very little (if anything) to do with keeping America safe. But okay, let’s go along with Roumell’s analogy. Just like those courageous young patriots after 9/11, rich old patriots should sacrifice… Five years after the financial crisis.

But wait: it gets better! Roumell is saying that rich retirees should give up their Social Security. He suggests that those in the top 5% of the wealth distribution should do so. I don’t know Roumell’s net worth, but I’m pretty sure that he is a member of the 0.01%. So it would be pretty easy for him to give up his coming Social Security checks. But the people barely inside the top 5%? They would be earning about $80,000 per years in retirement, according to Dean Baker. Now, eighty grand in retirement is pretty good, but I’m not sure that I would call it rich. What is rich is obscenely wealthy people like Roumell calling this level of income “rich” when a few months ago they were screaming that $400,000 was “middle class.”

Most of Roumell’s OpEd just tries to show that his idea will bring in loads of money. In 2011, Dean Baker and Hye Jin Rho published a detailed study of this question, The Potential Savings to Social Security from Means Testing. They found that unless the government means tested down to the $40,000 per year range, there were very small savings to be had.

I think what is going on with Roumell is shown by what he didn’t mention in his OpEd: the payroll tax cap. Currently, there are no payroll taxes on incomes over $113,000 per year. Raising it even modestly to $200,000 per year would wipe out all of our Social Security funding problems. Forever. But Roumell doesn’t even want people to think about this obvious and just solution because it would cost him money. Let’s assume that the Roumell would normally have a working career (where he made more than $200,000 each year as is surely the case). He would probably have a 10 year retirement. With the higher payroll tax cap, he would lose about 50% more than he would by giving up his retirement benefits.

But who would really get screwed by Roumell’s plan are the people making right about the $100,000 per year mark. They would see no tax increase by raising the cap, but they would see a big hit from the loss of benefits. And that’s really typical of the super rich and their policy plans. They don’t generally recommend screwing the poor. First there is little money there. Second, it looks bad. But the people who have a fair amount of money but not a lot of political power? They’re a great target because the super rich can pretend that their plans will hurt the rich even while they help the super rich.

Regardless, I’m sure that Roumell’s plan is nothing more than an attempt to keep people from thinking about the real solution of raising the payroll tax cap. Because that is something that the rich would hate. If we could raise it to $200,000, what would stop us from raising it to a million? Or even eliminating it all together? And the truth is, other than the fact that we don’t live in a democracy and the rich control our politics, I see no reason not to do just that.

This IRS scandal is going from irrelevant to enraging. What bugs me most is that everyone is running around acting like it is a proven fact that some terrible thing was done. We’ve been through this time and time again. Even thus far in this scandal, the more information that comes out, the more benign it all appears. The IRS targeted conservative 501(c)(4) groups because the vast majority of the applications were coming from conservative groups. Politically incorrect? Absolutely. Wrong? Sure. But some kind of attack on conservative America? No way!

Here’s something that hasn’t gotten much coverage: those applications that the IRS preferentially targeted conservative groups for were voluntary. The groups didn’t have to get approval; they could have just filed their taxes as 501(c)(4) groups and waited to see if the IRS complained. Which would take up to six years. What’s more, I have yet to see any reporting of a conservative group getting denied 501(c)(4) status but there has been reporting of liberal groups being denied. Like I said: the more you know about this scandal the more it seems like a tempest in a teapot.

Now, of course, there is talk of impeachment. Impeachment! Based upon what? As far as I can tell the reason is that the conservatives don’t like Obama and they think the proper thing to do when you don’t like a president is to impeach him. There is a very real sense in the Republican Party that if you can’t have things the way you want them, you are justified in destroying the system. As I’ve noted time and again, American conservatism is no longer a traditional political movement and the Republicans have become a revolutionary party.

In an article yesterday at the National Review we got the take on all this from one of the “reasonable” Republicans, Portman to Obama: Come Clean. In it, Rob “my son’s gay so now I support gay rights” Portman magnanimously said that talk of impeachment is “premature.” This is because there has been no direct connection between Obama and any of these scandals. It hasn’t even been clear that any of these scandals would be an impeachable offense. That’s even true of the Associated Press scandal. (That’s what’s so terrible about that case.) Of course, Portman hasn’t thought it through that much. In fact, he seems to assume that the administration was directing these low-level employees in the IRS. But if the administration were even talking to the IRS, that would be an impeachable offense. Portman doesn’t seem clear on that.

But there was one thing that Portman said that really floored me. “The American people have been betrayed in fundamental ways by the most powerful agency in government.” That’s a conservative all over. The IRS is the most powerful agency in government. It isn’t the Pentagon—you know, the people with all the guns. It isn’t the Department of Energy with all those nukes. No, it is the IRS. Because again, in Republican World, whatever it is that you don’t like is the most powerful and most pernicious.