I want to be perfectly clear. Martin Bashir was wrong. He never should have apologized for his commentary about Sarah Palin last Friday. For one thing, what he said made perfect sense. I am so tired of this pretend outrage. Sarah Palin used slavery as an analogy for current deficit spending. What she said was not stupid by her standards because there are plenty of supposed smart people who agree. Think: Niall Ferguson. But what is truly vile is the conservative tendency to bring up slavery as though it were just a system of control—as though it had nothing to do with racism and the basest of reptilian brain desires to subjugate anyone you can.

So Bashir was right on in his analysis of Palin’s terrible analogy. This stuff isn’t academic. Sarah Palin makes us a worse nation. She not only brings the level of discussion about current events to primordial levels, she carelessly abuses the history of this country and those who have suffered during it. I am fully aware that what Martin Bashir said was harsh. But I’m not at all sure that anything said could compete with the pernicious effect that Palin herself has had on our culture. And to say that maybe someone should defecate in her mouth strikes me as mild to what a traitor like her deserves.

Here is the original video:

Now I’m going to show you Bashir’s apology. As I said, I think he was wrong. No apology should have been offered for what was a very concise bit of political commentary. But if you are going to apologize, this is how you do it. Martin Bashir is a class act. I am grateful that he is part of the liberal movement. There’s no “I’m sorry if you were offended.” If things were reversed, I’m sure right now that Sarah Palin would be claiming that Shakespeare wrote potty humor. But I’m sure she would allow that it might be sad if Martin Bashir’s family were offended. But let me just be blunt: liberals are better.

Martin Bashir is a better man than I am. But Sarah Palin shows that words can be treasonous.

On this day in 1900, the cartoonist Chester Gould was born. He is best known as the creator of Dick Tracy. It is not one of my favorite strips. But one can’t deny that it is iconic: Roman nose and literally squared jaw. What’s more, Gould was a great illustrator. That’s especially true when you compare his work to the other strips of that period. I’ll go out on a limb here (Andrea’s sure to disagree!) but he was the Bill Watterson of his day.

The writer Alistair Cooke was born in 1908. I know him from two things. First, of course, as the host of Masterpiece Theatre where, on a weekly basis, he made millions of Americans think they were beneath the English. Second, he used to do audio essays on NPR that I enjoyed. I didn’t necessarily agree with him but he was always thoughtful, interesting, and amusing.

Robert F. Kennedy was born in 1925. That’s kind of amazing to think about. There’s a fair chance he would be alive today if he hadn’t been assassinated. I’m not so convinced that he would have actually beat Nixon in 1968, however. In general, elections are won and lost on the fundamentals. But it is quite something to think about: a second Kennedy administration and no Nixon? Who knows where we would have gone from there. Maybe no Reagan. We might have a much better nation today.

One of the greatest guitarist ever, Duane Allman was born in 1946. Here he is at the Fillmore East just a year before his death doing “Whipping Post.” Allman is the blond guitarist; Dickey Betts is the brunet, who is pretty damned great himself.

Other birthdays: physicist Otto von Guericke (1602); painter Christian Wilberg (1839); actor Richard Dawson (1932); comedian Dick Smothers (74); two beauties: Bo Derek (57) and Sean Young (54); and screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (52).

The day, however, belongs to the great astronomer Edwin Hubble who was born on this day in 1889. He is known for his observational research showing that the further away a galaxy is from us, the greater its redshift, or speed moving away from us. This indicates that the universe is expanding and is the first experimental finding in support of the Big Bang theory. Although there is no doubt about Hubble’s importance (he did a lot of other work too), the theoretical work associated with this particular finding was actually published two years earlier by Georges Lemaitre. I don’t think there is question but that Lemaitre was a great theoretical astrophysicist and Hubble was a great experimentalist. But we really ought to name some important stuff after Lemaitre. (I actually have a lot more to say about Lemaitre than Hubble. Oh well.)

Happy birthday Edwin Hubble!

Afterword

Happy 71st Joe Biden! Drink a cool one for me!

With a new filibuster fight before us, I knew that it was time to contact my problem Senator Dianne Feinstein. She is one of the old Democrats who always stands in the way of filibuster reform. If Harry Reid is having a hard time finding the votes to counter the Republicans, you can count on Feinstein being missing from his caucus.

For the umpteenth time, writing to your Senator or Representative is really easy. Just go to Who Is My Representative. You enter your zip code (depending upon where you live, you may need your extended 9-digit code), and it will tell you who represents you in Congress. But more than that, it will give you links that take you right to where you can contact your representative. If you care enough to vote, you should definitely care enough to write your representative, because doing so gives you extra influence because most people don’t write.

What’s more, you don’t have to say much. I try to dash off a couple of breezy paragraphs. But a sentence or two is all you really need to do. This is what I wrote to Feinstein today:

But like I said, you don’t even need to do that much. Just say, “You need to support Harry Reid in his fight against the Republican misuse of the filibuster!” It’s not going to mean any less than what I write. And remember that you have two Senators in this case. I will go and send a nice note to Barbara Boxer now. (My letters to her are always nice because she mostly does what I want.)

Now the idea that “dependency” is what makes people poor might make some sense if we were all born with the same opportunities to get ahead. Tragically, however, that American dream is dead, or, at the very least, it lies broken and bleeding on the side of the road. In today’s economy, the single greatest predictor of how much an American child will earn in the future is how much his or her parents take home. Working Americans have essentially bought into a unique social contract: they forgo much of the economic security that citizens of other wealthy countries take for granted in exchange for a more “dynamic,” meritorious economy that supposedly offers them plenty of opportunities to succeed. Of course, this is never explicitly stated, and most of us don’t know about the deal, but it’s reinforced all the time in our economic discourse…

Conservatives have spent the last three decades unraveling those kinds of protections—all have been subjected to death “by a thousand small cuts” since Reaganomics hit the United States. As a result, it has once again become true that the accident of one’s birth dictates one’s life chances to a very large degree, and that is a wholly predictable result of the rise of the conservative backlash.

—Joshua Holland
The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy

The Washington Post is at it again with an all new attack on Social Security and the long con that retirees are perpetuating against the young, Social Security Proposals Are Wrongheaded. It starts by bemoaning the fact that the Holy Grail of the Very Serious “Centrists” have not and probably will not come to pass. This, of course, is the lauded Grand Bargain: cuts in Social Security and Medicare in exchange for mythical tax increases that would be a bad idea even if they were real.

But the editorial waits until the second paragraph to get to its point. You see, there has been some pushback recently on entitlements by liberals. Finally, people are looking around at other advanced economies and seeing that they treat their seniors a hell of a lot better than we do. As much as the Very Serious Choir would have us believe that we are drowning our older citizens in benefits, it turns out that we are actually stingy. You fought in World War II? Who cares?! What have you done for us lately?!

Senator Tom Harkin (Happy 74th birthday!) and Representative Linda Sanchez have proposed increasing Social Security benefits. But the Washington Post calls this “a case study in how not to redefine liberalism for the 21st century.” That’s rich! Over the last 20 years (and to a large extent 37 years), the Democratic Party has moved further and further to the right. But the Post thinks that liberalism needs to be further “redefined”?! How is that possible unless the Post’s idea of liberalism is unusually defined like this:

After explaining the proposal, the Post gets down to the real problem (even though they claim it isn’t), “It’s a massive transfer of income from upper-income Americans to the retired.” Don’t be fooled, this is always the reason that the Very Serious People want to cut entitlements. It isn’t about the kids or the survival of the program. The concern about debt is that it may reach a point where taxes have to go up on the rich. And that is totally unacceptable to these people.

Both Dean Baker and Paul Krugman lashed out at the editorial. I think that Baker is pretty tired of this. It is like a daily battle between him and Fox on 15th as he describes the paper. You can see his weariness in the title, The Washington Post Wants to Kick Seniors Yet Again. Nonetheless, he does put the editorial in the broader context, “However, the greatest absurdity of the Post’s crusade is that its obsession with austerity and budget deficits is denying income to both the young and old…”

This goes back to my main point about the whole deficit scold industry: these people don’t care about high levels of unemployment and millions of wasted lives. They don’t care about improving the economy. They don’t even care about debt as is clear by the fact that they don’t believe in raising taxes. All they care about is protecting the rich from any social demands at all. And this is all coming from a respected mainstream newspaper. People like Harkin and Sanchez are right to pushback against the austerity crowd, because clearly the “centrists” in the mainstream press have been co-opted by the right.

On or about this day in 1786, Carl Maria von Weber was born. He was one of the founders of the Romantic period of classical music. As you all know, not one of my favorite periods of music. But the early Romantic period stuff isn’t so bad. Von Weber is known primarily for his operas, but here is the first movement of his Clarinet Concerto No 1, which will give you a brief and clear idea of his music:

Other birthdays: French painter Eustache Le Sueur (1617); bandleader Tommy Dorsey (1905); business theorist Peter Drucker (1909); Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (1917); two talk show hosts: one mediocre, Larry King (80); and one great, Dick Cavett (77); businessman Ted Turner (75); actor Meg Ryan (52); and actor Jodie Foster (51).

The day, however, belongs to the great screenwriter Charlie Kaufman who is 55 today. I don’t really know anything about his life and I don’t especially want to know anything. He has written some of the best films in the last decade and a half: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York, which he also directed. I don’t want to overstate it, because a lot of writers are only ever allowed to write crap. But there is no doubt that most screenwriters seem to think that crap is all that is worth writing. And Kaufman has a unique style that would stand out even if Hollywood hadn’t become the animation arm of Marvel Comics.

Here is the best scene from Adaptation. The whole film is great way to deal with those awful internal dialogues that we all have. All of us are both Charlie and Donald:

Happy birthday Charlie Kaufman!

Documentary filmmaker Peter Wintonick died today at the age of 60. If you know of him, it is probably from his film Manufacturing Consent. And if you are younger, you probably know Noam Chomsky from the film. Made in 1992 with Mark Achbar, it is a three-hour long exploration of Chomsky and his work, most especially his ideas about how the corporate media push narratives that are beneficial to the interests of the power elite. It is a really good (Dare I say “fun”?) film and an excellent introduction to Chomsky.

It isn’t Wintonick’s only work. He made a number of other films on politics as well as the direct-cinema movement itself that he was part of. But he is most important because of his wide ranging collaborations in the documentary filmmaking community—especially in Canada.

Last fall, he was diagnosed with a rare liver cancer, Cholangio Carcinoma. And on Friday, he was admitted to the hospital for problems related to the cancer, where he died today.

For those who haven’t seen it, I am embedding the entire Manufacturing Consent video here:

Jonathan Chait has written a welcome salve for us liberals still bothered by the problems that have plagued the Healthcare.gov website, Obamacare Hyperventilation to Continue Forever! It is important to remember the “dog bites man” aspect of modern journalism. Things that don’t go wrong are not news. Thus we hear about what’s going wrong with Obamacare and completely miss everything that is going right with it.

Chait mentions any number of the “right” things. Perhaps the biggest thing is that Obamacare has been in effect for years. It is only the exchanges that are six weeks old. And these other parts have been going really well. Healthcare costs have been lower than expected. People with preexisting conditions have been able to get insurance. And kids have been able to stay on their parents policies. Even since the rollout of the exchanges, things have gone pretty well. People are signing up for the Medicaid expansion at a good clip. The state run exchanges are working really well. And the website is getting fixed.

The main point of his article is that it just isn’t true that Democrats are abandoning Obamacare. It is all just wishful thinking on the part of conservatives with a major assist by the mainstream press who would just love the feeding frenzy of an actual Democratic Party war. After the coverage of the supposed civil war in the Republican Party, you would think that everyone would just calm down. But no. And in a couple of months it will be like it never happened.

Of course, the issues with the Healcare.gov website remain. I wrote before that given what I know about software development, it is only about now that we would start to see the system get better. Well, it turns out that we are seeing the website get better. On Friday, Elise Viebeck at The Hill reported, Official: HealthCare.gov Errors Below One Percent. According to the article, the website can now handle between 20,000 and 25,000 users at one time. That is an enormous increase from last month. I don’t think most people appreciate just how good that news is. It mean that almost certainly the website will be working well by the end of the month.

The main thing is that Obamacare is moving forward. I don’t see it stopping. Because computer software is mysterious from the outside, there has been a tendency to assume that the website problems couldn’t be fixed. And it certainly didn’t help that the process of fixing bugs requires a lot of start-up effort that doesn’t produce apparent results. But now that we are at the point where improvements are noticeable, I think even the media narratives will change. And the conservatives can go back to their standard lines about Obamacare being socialism and the end of all that is good in America.

On this day in 1647, the French philosopher Pierre Bayle was born. He is noted for arguing in favor of religious tolerance. But there’s an interesting aspect to words like “tolerance” and “diversity.” They are exclusive. Sure, we do want diversity in our culture. But if we are to have real diversity, we can’t think in terms of that. And with tolerance, there is an implied limit: we tolerate diversity up to a point. In Bayle’s case, he thought various kinds of protestants should be tolerant of each other. But Catholics? Not so much. And let’s not even start with Jews. Personally, I don’t want to be tolerated; I want a lot more.

The great playwright and and lyricist W S Gilbert was born in 1836. He is best know for his collaboration with the composer Arthur Sullivan. And now is as good a time as ever to watch Linda Ronstadt kill it in Pirates of Penzance:

Fox News host Megyn Kelly is 43. Normally, I wouldn’t even bring her up. But according to Joe Muto in An Atheist in the Foxhole, it’s all an act. He said that she was very funny and smart, and not especially conservative when he first worked with her. She went for the dumber host act to become a star at Fox News. I’m not sure what I think of that. Is it more evil to just play the part people pay you to? I tend to think that it is. News readers are nominally journalists; they aren’t actors. Their audiences believe them. Say what you will about Glenn Beck, I don’t doubt that he really believes what he says. So yeah, of all the women on Fox News, I would probably most like to hang out with Kelly. (Of all the people, it would be Shepard Smith, just because he’s such oddball.) But I think what she’s doing is vile.

Other birthdays: Scottish painter David Wilkie (1785); the great botanist Asa Gray (1810); physicist August Kundt (1839); writer Clarence Day (1874); painter Wyndham Lewis (1882); pollster George Gallup (1901); songwriter Johnny Mercer (1909); astronaut Alan Shepard (1923); trumpet player Don Cherry (1936); and actor Owen Wilson (45).

The day, however, belongs to the great physicist Louis Daguerre who was born on this day in 1787. He invented the Daguerreotype process, which was the first practical photographic process. If you’ve seen a photograph from the first half of the 19th century (for example, Edgar Allan Poe), it used this process. It isn’t that different from later processes. Basically, a lens focuses the image on a plate that was coated in silver. The chemistry is kind of complicated, as you can see in this excellent little video:

Happy birthday Louis Daguerre!