Let’s get right to the obvious stuff. Last year, Maurice Sendak died shortly before his 84th birthday. Having been born in 1928, he would have been 85 today. He was an author and illustrator of what he refused to call children’s books. His best known book is Where the Wild Things Are though he wrote and (especially) illustrated loads more. Google created an excellent doodle that runs for a minute and 45 second for the occasion. Check it out.

The great French realist painter Gustave Courbet was born on this day in 1819. His self-portrait is one of the best I’ve ever seen. When anyone thinks of 19th century French paintings, they think of the Academic and Impressionist schools. And the Realist school fed into those two. But Courbet’s art has a nearly unhinged aspect to it that is especially compelling.

Andre Derain was born on this day in 1880. He founded Fauvism along with Henri Matisse. I’m very fond of this school of art (which should surprise no one). And I’m fond of Derain. But I’m more fond of Kees van Dongen. That’s probably just because he painted more pretty girls. I fully admit that Derain is the greater artist. He’s also greater than Matisse who mostly annoys me in my old age.

Art critic and really quite interesting painter Fairfield Porter was born in 1907. Blues singer Howlin’ Wolf was born in 1910. Here he is doing “Smokestack Lightning”:

One of my favorite writers when I was a kid (go figure), Saul Bellow was born in 1915.

French singer Patachou is 95 today. Controversial sociobiologist E. O. Wilson is 84. Celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey is 80. Much vilified politician John Edwards is 60. Human frailties aside, I think he would have made a better president than Obama or Clinton. It’s sad that unlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party seems incapable of forgiveness. And speaking of Republicans, John “Torture Memo” Yoo is 46. The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility found that he had committed professional misconduct and recommended that the Pennsylvania Bar discipline him. This was later blocked, of course. And Yoo continues to be a Berkeley Law School professor and to get good paying speaking engagements. Similarly, Bobby Jindal is 42. He’s noted for claiming that the Republicans should stop being the “stupid party” while going around every day acting as proof that it is.

The day, however, belongs to another of my endless list of crushes: Judy Garland who was born on this day back in 1922. What’s not to love? She was beautiful, talented, and unstable—the Holy Trinity for me! Here she is doing a song from the turn of the century, “I Don’t Care”:

Happy birthday Judy Garland!

America does not believe in democracy. Remember the 2006 Palestinian elections when Hamas won? There was a total administration freak out over that one. Democracy is only valid if people vote for what the United States government wants. That’s in the Constitution. Look it up!

For a decade and a half, the United States has claimed that Venezuela couldn’t possibly be a democracy. They voted for Hugo Chavez! We don’t like Chavez. Therefore, Venezuela is not a democracy. Q-fucking-D.

Well, now Chavez is gone. Unfortunately, those stupid Venezuelans blew it again! They voted for someone else that the United States doesn’t like: former Chavez vice-president Nicolas Maduro. Don’t these Venezuelans know how democracy works?

It turns out that they do; it is just that they have an old fashioned idea that democracy involves the will of the people and related institutions. In fact, they have a very good electronic voting system with a clear paper trail that allows for vote audits. And thus far, they have audited 53% of the 14 April 2013 election results. And guess what: Maduro won fair and square.[1]

Well, a group of 14 economists and statisticians mostly from the United States have had enough. In an open letter, they say that the audit “leaves no room for doubt about the result.” They’ve calculated the probability that the election results are wrong at one in 25 thousand trillion. Yet, “The State Department has called the outcome of the election into question, and refused to recognize the results.” And even worse, the mainstream media just follow along, giving the impression that somehow Maduro stole the election.

I understand that a lot of people in the United States didn’t like Chavez and don’t like Maduro. My colleague Michael J.W. Stickings at The Reaction is one. And even I think that Chavez could have done a lot more with the resources he had at his disposal. What is not open to question is that Venezuela is a democracy and that the 14 April 2013 election was a free and fair one.

The government of the United States has to accept that it can’t always get its way. Is it any wonder that the Republican Party won’t compromise on anything when the government itself takes the same approach to the rest of the world? Regardless of what we think, other countries have a right to manage their own affairs. And that is especially true when we prop up truly vile dictatorships only to scream about the outcomes of free and fair elections that don’t go the way we want.

[1] The election was fairly close. Maduro got 50.6% and Capriles got 49.1%. There was a post-election audit of a random sample of 53% of the votes. It found no irregularities, but Capriles refused to accept defeat. He demanded that all of the votes be recounted. Eventually, the election commission relented and agreed to recount the rest of the votes. After first being satisfied, Capriles rejected this and asked for complete access to the entire voting system. It ought to be clear that the only election result that Capriles will accept is one where he wins. And that goes for the United States as well.

How people continue to think that America is even moderately a meritocracy amazes me. Look at the banks. The Federal Reserve loans them money at low interest rates and allows them to lend it out at high interest rates. It would be like if Apple gave only you and your close friends the right to buy iPhones for ten bucks. You could then sell them for the going rate. You could not possibly lose money, right? Well, that’s what the Fed does for bankers because they are the “right” kind of people.

A similar thing is going on with the credit rating agencies. They are supposed to make sure that investing is sound. If they rate a bond as AAA, an investor should know that while the returns on that bond are poor, it is safe. But a big problem with the housing bubble was that banks were packaging a bunch of highly risky mortgages together and the the credit rating agencies dutifully rated them as safe investments—even AAA at times! When the financial crisis happened and all those ratings were shown to be dead wrong, the rating agencies just shrugged. “You can’t blame us,” they said. “It was just our opinion.” They make billions of dollars but aren’t accountable enough that their total failures even cause a ripple in their business models. S&P is supposed to make money because, you know, they are the “right” kind of people.

In 2011, around the time of the Debt Ceiling debacle, Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgraded the federal government’s credit rating from AAA to AA+. That was the first time that this had ever happened. And for good reason. If the United States gets in a situation where it can’t pay its debts, it would mean that the entire world is struggling with Armageddon. So it wasn’t surprising that the S&P downgrade caused not the slightest blip in the borrowing costs of the United States. Apparently, companies are all for paying S&P and the other ratings agencies for legal cover. But actual investors knew that the S&P downgrade was meaningless.

Well, there’s big news out this morning. Standard & Poor’s has upgraded the federal government’s credit rating! Actually, its credit rating outlook. It is still AA+, but the outlook has changed from “negative” to “stable.” I’m sure that this will have as big an effect as the original downgrade. But something puzzles me. If S&P had this sub-credit rating tool, why didn’t they use it two years ago? Instead of downgrading us from AAA, they could have just changed our outlook to negative. That would have made the point without the embarrassment of demonstrating just how irrelevant the rating agencies are.

According to Politico:

This strikes me as very weak tea. If there was any real concern in 2011, it was the fact that the House Republicans were willing to cause a federal government default over the Debt Ceiling. Otherwise, our debt situation was fine. We still face a Debt Ceiling crisis at the end of the summer. And despite what many want to believe, it looks serious. There are many in the Republican Party who really do want to refuse to raise the limit. And the lack of crisis over the Fiscal Cliff and the Sequester has just made them think that fears of catastrophe are over blow. So S&P is just continuing on with their pretend analysis.

The United States is divided into the “right” kind of people and the “wrong” kind of people. The “right” kind of people are the rich. If a poor person manages to claw his way to become rich, well, that just shows that the system works. And that is why for the last 35 years the rich have systematically made it harder and harder for the poor to do just that. At the same time, they’ve made it almost trivial for the “right” kind of people to get even richer on the backs of the “wrong” kind of people. And today we see another example of the “right” kind of people getting paid for useless analysis. If you invest based upon their advice, you are the “wrong” kind of people. The caste system is alive and well in America!

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) published a good article on Bill O’Reilly’s “evolution” on one part of the IRS scandal. As you may recall, the Daily Caller published an article in which they claimed that former IRS Chief Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times while Obama was president. It took about a day for Garance Franke-Ruta of The Atlantic to write, The Fake Story About the IRS Commissioner and the White House. In it, she explained that those 157 times were not actual visits of Shulman to the White House, but just times that Shulman had been provided with clearance by the Secret Service to come to mostly standing meetings. As far as we can tell, that was 11 times. Shulman visited the White House compound (not usually the White House itself) 11 times. He only met with Obama twice and both those times were with a large group of people.

Let’s look at the timeline:

29 May

The Daily Caller article appears.

30 May

Bill O’Reilly reports, “This man former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House—ready—157 times. Incredible.”

31 May

The Atlantic corrects the Daily Caller article.

3 June

Bill O’Reilly reports, “So far, we have been dead on. Last week we told you that former IRS Chief Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times, far more than any other department head.”

4 June

Bill O’Reilly reports, “How about the Shulman guy with 157 visits?”

5 June

On The Factor, guest Kirsten Powers tries to inject a little fact into the discussion, saying, “The number of times he actually showed up is something like 11, I think.” O’Reilly corrects her, “Oh that’s—that’s false. We don’t know that. He was cleared in 157 times.”

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! Savor this moment, because this is the closest we ever get to a correction or apology from Bill O’Reilly. He’s right: we don’t know that he was only at the White House compound 11 times. He could have been there more. Not a lot more. And certainly nothing like 157 times, as O’Reilly keeps saying. But we don’t know that he was there only only 11 times. Bill O’Reilly likes to get his facts straight if they counter his ridiculously false claims.

I think of Mike Konczal as an economics writer, but he is usually just as illuminating when writing about other things. Yesterday at Wonk Blog, he wrote, Is a Democratic Surveillance State Possible? In it, he described work by Yale law professor Jack Balkin where he argues that there are two kinds of surveillance states: authoritarian and democratic. Of course, in the United States, we have the authoritarian kind. And that is perhaps understandable. It matches our pretend democracy.

Authoritarian surveillance states act as gluttons and misers of information. They are gluttons in the sense that they collect all the information they can without regard to content or source. As Konczal puts it, “More is always better, indiscriminate access is better than targeted responses, and there’s a general presumption that they’ll have access to whatever they want, at any time.” But they are misers in that they want as little information as possible to get out about who they are and what they do. In other words, authoritarian surveillance wants ultimate power and no accountability or transparency.

Democratic surveillance states, on the other hand, are, “information gourmets and information philanthropists.” They are highly selective about the information they collect and generous about what they are doing and for what purpose. Konczal points out that a big part of this would be information destruction. That’s one thing you can count on: the government might, for example, take your finger prints to identify you. But they will use those fingerprints even after you die to accuse you of crime. The information just goes on and on. In the case of fingerprints, it probably makes sense. But does it make sense for the NSA to maintain all of my phone records until the end of time? I assure you that they think so.

The worst part of all this is that we know that we can’t trust the courts. As I reported earlier this year, FISA just acts as a pass-through filter for the surveillance state. Over 32 years, the FISA courts got 38,093 requests for secret monitoring and they denied just 11 of those requests. That means they approved more 99.97% of those requests. Great oversight guys! Konczal notes:

Clearly, we need to move toward a democratic surveillance state. Actually, I’m even more liberal (Libertarian!) than that. I think most of our secret services are unnecessary. Just like with our imperial guard all over the world, they aren’t there to make us safer. They are there to keep the rich and powerful rich and powerful. But I understand that few people think like I do. So the least we can do (the least) is to limit the scope of the surveillance state and make it transparent so that we know in a general sense what it is doing.

Afterword

Today at Wonk Blog, Timothy B. Lee asks, Has the US Become the Type of Nation from Which You Have to Seek Asylum? This is in reference to Edward Snowden, the NSA surveillance leaker who is in Hong Kong trying to get political asylum from the United States. He sums up:

That’s an understatement. All indications are that someone like Snowden would be treated quite unfairly by the American “justice” system. Can you say John Kiriakou?

On this day back in 1812, the discoverer of Neptune, Johann Gottfried Galle was born. By “discoverer” I mean that he was the first person to see it and know what it was. The planet was already theorized and Urbain Le Verrier had predicted roughly where it would be. Still, Galle’s achievement is notable.

The founder of the Repository for Germinal Choice, Robert Klark Graham was born in 1906. Very creepy eugenics stuff. Iron artisan Philip Simmons was born in 1912. Guitar legend Les Paul was born in 1915. The longest serving Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara was born in 1916. Although he came to regret the Vietnam War, he was one of its principle architects. Still, there were larger social forces working. McNamara was not an evil man like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.

The late great rhythm and blues singer Johnny Ace was born in 1929. He wasn’t bad at all. His biggest song was Pledging My Love. But he is best know for his death. He was playing around with a .22 caliber revolver while drunk. And he accidentally shot and killed himself. He was 25.

Contemporary of Jacques Brel, the French chanson singer-songwriter Barbara (Monique Andree Serf) was born in 1930. Here she is doing “Le Bel Age” about her affair with a beautiful young man:

And Jackie Wilson was born in 1934. Here he is doing “Higher and Higher”:

Writer of the novel The Graduate, Charles Webb is 74 today. Film composer James Newton Howard is 62. Crummy but popular crime novelist Patricia Cornwell is 57. Michael J. Fox and Johnny Depp is the big five-oh. Natalie Portman is 32. And “Egg” from Arrested Development, Mae Whitman is 25.

The day, however, belongs to the great songwriter Cole Porter who was born on this day in 1891. He wrote so many great pop songs, they are hard to list. So I’m not even going to try. Here is Frank Sinatra doing one of them, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”:

Happy birthday Cole Porter!

On Real Time last Friday, Bill Maher claimed that Ronald Reagan was the original Teabagger. It’s a funny bit that’s worth watching. It highlights some problematic liberal mythology. But it doesn’t actually attack what many people mean when they say that Reagan wouldn’t fit into the modern Republican Party.

Politics is relative, and Maher is right to point this out with regards to tax policy. Reagan may have raised taxes from time to time, but the main thing he did was cut the taxes of the rich in half. Modern Republicans would likely tinker with new taxes too if the Democrats would allow them to cut the top tax rate to 20%. But the more fundamental issue is how Reagan would act if he were on the radio or in the White House right now. And there is no doubt: he would be the conservative populist he always was. So he would be a Tea Party leader. There is no question of that.

A more interesting question is where Nixon would stand in the modern environment. He was not ideological in the sense that Reagan was. But there is no doubt that he was a cultural conservative. However, his neuroses were so extreme, that they could have taken him in any direction. And I have a hard time imagining him in the context of the ideological extremism of the Tea Party. I don’t think he would have felt comfortable there.

Another part of this—certainly for Obama when he quotes and otherwise refers to Reagan—is the tendency for one party to look back fondly at past leaders of the opposition. The Republicans do this with Clinton—a man they seriously accused of murder when he was in office. This is the part of Maher’s rant that is most important. Obama should be saying that Reagan is the man who first got this country way off the tracks. He should not treat Reagan as a hero because the people of the United States and the greater cause of liberalism have been terribly hurt by Reagan. The problem is that Obama pretty much agrees with Reagan’s positions. Like most New Democrats, he just wants to take conservative ideas and implement them better. See, for example, the last four and a half years.

When I, and I think others, compare the modern Republican Party to Reagan (which I rarely do) or Nixon, it isn’t to say that they would be different from modern Republicans if they were in politics today. Rather, it is a claim about the changes in the party itself. Primarily, it is a claim that at one time the Republican Party was actually interested in government. It is a claim that the Republicans have moved from a normal political party to a revolutionary party. But it is because I know just how radical Reagan was that I normally hearken back to Nixon. Because Maher is right: Reagan really was the start of this Tea Party nonsense.

On this day back in 1625, Giovanni Domenico Cassini was born. The name probably sounds familiar because of NASA’s Cassini–Huygens spacecraft that they sent to Saturn. That’s because Cassini did some important early observations of the planet. He discovered four of its moons and also the division of Saturn’s rings. Christiaan Huygens did a lot of the same kinds of things at the same time. But it isn’t Huygens’ birthday. Cassini also made important discoveries about Jupiter. And most impressive from my standpoint, he calculated the distance to Mars. He did this by sending a colleague to French Guiana while he stayed in Paris. Then they each took simultaneous measurements and were able to get a rough approximation of the distance. Since scientists already knew the relative distances of most things in the solar system, this calculation established the distances for everything. Very cool!

Baroque composer Tomaso Albinoni was born in 1671. He is best known for his Adagio in G minor. I assure you that you’ve heard it, but if you really want to know, you can listen to a fine guitar arrangement for it by Peo Kindgren. At this point, I really don’t want to hear it again. But here is a much more fun performance of his Concerto for 2 Oboes in C Major:

Romantic composer Robert Schumann was born on this day in 1810. I fully admit that he was a great composer. I just don’t like him. British illustrator George Charles Haite of The Strand fame was born in 1855. The mind-blowing four-dimensional geometry mathematician Alicia Boole Stott was born in 1860.

The great and under-appreciated Flemish Symbolist painter Jan Frans De Boever was born in 1872. His work is, well, morbid. If Edgar Allan Poe had lived a hundred years later, and was a painter, he would have been De Boever. It is just the perfect combination of eroticism and death. Some might have a problem with that, but the connection to me is very strong. I will stay away from the obvious and just say that both highlight the decay of the flesh—the essential impurity of the material world.

Not completely irrelevant Abstract Expressionist Harry Holtzman was born in 1912. Biologist Francis Crick was born in 1916. Actor Robert Preston was born in 1918. I was very surprised to learn that he wasn’t gay. I clearly have a bias, because I had the same reaction to Joel Grey. Just because a man can sing and dance does not mean he’s gay. Anyway, here is Preston at his best:

And pop artist LeRoy Neiman was born in 1921. You know his work.

Barbara Bush is 88 today. Jerry Stiller is 86. I’ve always though his wife was funnier. They will celebrate their 60th anniversary next year. Joan Rivers is 80. Nancy Sinatra is 73. Boz Scaggs is 69. Bonnie Tyler is 62. The great guitarist and founder of Black Flag, Greg Ginn is 59. Unfortunately, I can’t find any good video of him. Cartoonist Scott Adams is 56. And comedian Keenen Ivory Wayans is 55.

What a day! With so many great people, who would rise to the top? Well, it isn’t that I think he is necessarily greater than Francis Crick or Robert Preston or even Scott Adams, but the day belongs to Frank Lloyd Wright who was born in 1867. Consider Fallingwater on the left. Or pretty much anything he did. It is all beautiful and smart work. I think sometimes people exaggerate his greatness in comparison to other architects. There was a lot of great architecture going on in the United States. And also Europe, even if Tom Wolfe doesn’t like it.

Here is the Guggenheim Museum, a perfect combination of form and function:

Happy birthday Frank Lloyd Wright!

I just saw Jonathan Alter explain something really interesting about this whole fight involving Obama’s three simultaneous nominations to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. A couple of weeks ago, I mocked Chuck Grassley from claiming this was “court packing.” As I explained, that’s not what the phrase means. It dates back to Roosevelt’s threat that if conservatives on the Supreme Court wouldn’t let his legislation stand, he would just increase the number of people on the court and pack the vacant seats with liberals. This is not what Obama is doing. He is just filling already vacant seats.

After writing that, I was surprised to see that Mitch McConnell was saying the same thing that Grassley was. It was apparently a new conservative meme—false though it was. But McConnell took it further. He claimed that what we really needed to do rather than fill the three vacancies on the DC Circuit Court, was to just reduce its size to the eight members it now has. He claimed that it was an underused court anyway and the extra judges could be better used in other courts. That turns out not to be true. Shocking! In fact, the DC Court deals with more complicated cases, so the fact that they hear fewer cases is irrelevant. But clearly, McConnell is just attempting a political maneuver, and that is clear enough to everyone.

This is where we get to Alter. He noted that although Obama is doing nothing like “court packing,” McConnell is proposing exactly that—just in the opposite direction. The court is now fairly conservative with its eight judges. He doesn’t want it to get more liberal by allowing it to be filled with three more judges from a Democratic president. Alter calls this McConnell’s “court shrinking” scheme. And he is quite right to! Here is the sequence on Up with Steve Kornacki:

This is entirely in keeping with the modern Republican approach to minority politics. Despite what Josh Barro my think, he and other conservative pundits function primarily to give conservative politicians plausible justifications for their positions. In Barro’s case, he claimed that I was against talking about infrastructure cost-effectiveness. But that wasn’t the case at all. What I was arguing was that Barro was giving political cover to Chris Christie’s ideological position. And there is no doubt that this is true.

In McConnell’s case, he must know that he isn’t making any sense. But no one in the mainstream is attacking him for it, because his argument sounds plausible. But even if the situation were like with Barro (having the benefit of being correct), it would still be the case that the justification was ex post facto. Since McConnell is more than simply wrong because he throws in hypocrisy, he ought to be laughed out of politics. But of course, he won’t be. There is nothing short of cheating on his wife with a man that can cause a conservative to lose credibility with the mainstream news.