With political news so depressing (see, for example, my last article), I find I spend most of my fun hours each day working on a totally awesome high tech project that I still can’t talk about. But there are stories that come by that while still in a fundamental sense depressing are also deliciously fun. And we got a great one this afternoon via Caitlin MacNeal at Talking Points Memo, Blackburn: GOP “Led the Fight for Women’s Equality.” Tennessee Republican Representative Marsha Blackburn told Face the Nation yesterday that all this Democratic talk of a conservative war on women was “almost silly.”

I like that she pulled her punch there. So it isn’t up to Bugs Bunny. It’s more Popeye the Sailor. Or something. But Blackburn got to her main point, “It is Republicans that have led the fight for women’s equality. Go back through history, and look at who was the first woman to ever vote, elected to office, go to Congress, four out of five governors.” You gotta love that! This is what Republicans always say, “Of course we’re a vile party now. But go back a hundred years and you’ll see we weren’t always!”

What have the Republicans done for women recently? Not much. MacNeal quotes a Huffington Post article that noted that Blackburn herself voted against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. This was the act that made it so that people could take legal action against discriminatory pay when they find out about it rather than when it secretly happens. Blackburn has said that women “don’t want” equal pay laws. I have little doubt that if Blackburn had been around before the Nineteenth Amendment, she would have claimed that women didn’t want the right to vote either.

But Ed Kilgore wrote this afternoon, Equal Rights For Women and the GOP: I Wouldn’t Go There, Sister! He noted, the Republican Party really was good about civil rights in the past. At one time they were for African-American rights and women’s rights. But that isn’t who they are now. Really:

The rich love Reagan because he reduced their taxes and eliminated many regulations. But the base primarily love him for making the culture war seem reasonable. Cutting welfare wasn’t about economics; it was about getting those welfare queens. And taking the ERA out the platform was about taking a stand against uppity women. This is not your great-great-grandmothers’s GOP.

It seems that I wasn’t depressed enough about the current state of American politics. So yesterday, Jonathan Chait wrote an article to make me feel even worse, If Republicans Win the Senate, What Crisis Will Mitch McConnell Cook Up Next? It is about the effect that a Republican Senate will have on the last two years of President Obama’s term. Chait’s thinking Constitutional crisis.

In those two years, it is quite possible that one of the liberal justices will die. That would be bad enough. As we know, the Republicans are generally unwilling to confirm even moderate justices like Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. But even if they were so willing, we would likely get an even more conservative court. This is especially true if the only truly liberal justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who is 81), left us.

But the really bad prospect is what would happen if a conservative justice died. Antonin Scalia is 78. Anthony Kennedy is 77. Based upon demographics, there is roughly a 20% chance that one of them will die in the next two years. And if that happened, I can’t imagine the Republicans allowing Obama to nominate anyone to the court. Just look at how they behaved about the DC Circuit Court. That was really what caused Harry Reid to “go nuclear.” Republicans were unwilling to allow any judges to be confirmed because the court was balanced.

If that happened, there would be a constitutional crisis. And frankly, I don’t see any way out of it. The only hope is that no conservative justices die. Or better yet that no justices die at all. And that’s pathetic. But it goes right along with my long held belief that the Republicans have become a revolutionary party. And a big part of this is thinking that the entire system is invalid. Thus, it is okay to totally gum it up.

Chait went even further. He noted that McConnell was the man who innovated the “oppose everything” strategy against Obama and showed that in fact the people didn’t blame him or his party in the least for this behavior. (Sadly, because of the implicit bias in the media, I suspect that a similar move by the Democrats would cause a backlash.) As a result of this, it is likely that McConnell can come up with lots more creative ideas to destroy democracy in the United States.

Of course, the only way this happens is if the Republicans actually take over the Senate. And the only way that happens is if Democratic voters allow it. And they do have to allow it—by not voting. And my best guess is that they will allow. They won’t even bother to show up at the polls. The Greeks understood that democracy wasn’t a gift. It was a social duty—something that was required of citizens. In America, we’ve never really understood that. And that is why we pretty much don’t have a democracy. The whole country can go on tilt and all that is required is for good people to do nothing.

I used to be the head of IT at moderate sized investment company. I loved the job but hated the company. It was owned by a couple of old millionaires and every day I had to walk past their pictures with Ronald Reagan, Bush the Elder, and eventually Bush the Younger. And as is usually the case in such places, the big wheeler-dealer types were mostly very conservative. In fact, they were reflexively conservative. They didn’t have to think about it and that was good, because they were not great thinkers.

Much of what I think about the “job creator” brigade comes from this period of my life. I don’t use that term just to be cute. All these agents were employees. In fact, there was a big issue when I was there that the owner, who was showing clear signs of dementia, wanted all these “independent contractors” to be at their phones from nine to five. Neither the fact that they were only paid on commission nor them being required to work set hours (which made them unqualified to be independent contractors) mattered in the least. In their minds they were “job creators,” even if the term wasn’t in widespread use. I’m sure their six-figure salaries made them think they were. I mean, the economy would come to a standstill without them constantly lubricating it!

During the 2004 campaign, John Kerry’s heroism during the Vietnam War came up just in passing. One of the agents said, “What did he do? Get shot in the ass was all!” I wasn’t as involved in politics as I am now, so I let it rest. But even I knew that what Kerry had done was amazing. And the guy who said that had never been in the military. But like most Republicans, he was for a belligerent foreign policy. I lost a great deal of respect for conservatives at that time. Until then, I had always thought that at least they had respect for the military. But when it came down to partisan politics, they were eager to dishonor an American war hero just to elect a man who at best finessed his way out of the war and at worst was a deserter.

I bring this up because of an article this morning by Josh Marshall, Into the Truther Jungle. It is his reflection after running right into the conservative movement’s inability to look at facts. He sent out a tweet about how the resignation of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius showed that the Obamacare rollout had been a success. That’s a no-brainer. She had been waiting for victory before she resigned. That should be obvious to anyone. But apparently it isn’t. He received replies like this:

The point isn’t the disagreement. As Marshall wrote, “What is notable is the total shock that there’s not total unanimity that the program is failing.” The entire conservative movement keeps itself so walled up from inconvenient truths, that they just can’t manage when those truths fall on their heads. That’s where we got “John Kerry just got a medal because he was shot in the butt”—a still common belief on the right. And that’s where we got Unskewed Polls—now morphed into “ACORN stole the election,” even though it didn’t exist in 2012. And that’s where we now get “Obamacare is a failure and the government is just lying about it.”

The only thing that changes from here is that the explanations for why Obamacare really is failing will become more extreme. Or at least they will until conservatives just stop talking about it. That’s how they give up. And in 20 years, a new crop of conservatives will protest outside the White House with signs that read, “Government hands off my Obamacare!” And sadly, that will be a major improvement.

I was introduced to an artist this morning, Mono Caron. She is a San Francisco artist who specializes in murals. And her work is beautiful. It is expansive and varied even though it maintains a single style. It also combines nature and city life in a way that this very much in keeping with San Francisco. According to her website, “Much of Mona’s public art deals with social history and utopian possibility, and chronicles the street life of its surroundings in the past, present, and imaginary future.” So in addition to everything else, she is politically exciting too. You can see all of this and more on her website. Go check it out!

But there is one aspect of her work that I’m especially interested in: her surrealism. You don’t see this in the painting as a whole, but rather in small bits of it. For example, in one mural, a flower’s stigma becomes a fairy riding a bicycle. In another, cities are embedded inside a streamer covering vegetables—a common motif for her. Another example is her Murale Clownesco, where an acrobat holds up a miniature elephant whose trunk becomes a streamer with two scenes embedded. I’ve avoided the word up until now, but there is no escaping it: magical.

For me, the most exciting of her works is Manifestation Station. It is an addition to an enormous mural, Duboce Bikeway Mural, celebrating the bicycle path that leads riders from the east side of San Francisco (the bay) to the west side (the ocean). And for an added bit of life-art interaction that only murals can provide, the bike path runs along the mural. But that isn’t the greatest part. She was commissioned by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) to paint one of their electrical boxes. She did it so that from a specific angle, the image replaced what you are looking it, just like Magritte did in The Human Condition:

Courtesy Mono Caron

But this is so much better than Magritte! He focused on the object recreating exactly what it obscured. Caron creates a utopian future. Instead of the Safeway that was and still is there, she’s destroyed it in this alternate universe. All that remains is the one wall that her mural is on. (No utopia without that!) And in place of our corporate oligarchs’ market, there is a farmers’ market. And there is grass and plants and water. This is the highest form of art.

Sadly, what the SFMTA giveth, the SFMTA taketh away. Caron completed the box in the Fall of 2012. But within a year, the agency decided they needed a new box there and so Caron’s masterpiece was moved—destroying much of its contextual beauty. We still have the photograph, of course. And art is no less great because it is ephemeral. (In fact, it might be greater.) But I am so sad that I will never have the experience of standing on the northwest corner of Church and Duboce and seeing the future.

Jonathan Bernstein wrote a typically insightful article on Friday, The Good, the Bad and the LBJ. His main purpose is to push back against the inevitable calls for Obama to be more Johnson. The idea, I guess, is that if only Obama held conversations while sitting on the toilet, everyone would fall in line behind him. Admittedly, such admonitions are normally phrased in terms of charm or arm twisting. But it’s all the same.

The truth is that there is a sliver of truth to all this business. Early on in his presidency, Obama was a horrible negotiator. Instead of taking a strong stand, he rushed to the conservative side. Like an idiot, he thought that such behavior would show how reasonable he was. But the conservatives just saw it as soft and took advantage of it. Gladly, those days are gone. Obama is a much better negotiator. Now all we have to worry about is his mushy middle ideology.

But it certainly is the case that LBJ’s skills in arm twisting are greatly exaggerated. And such as they were, they were effective then in a way that they would never be today. Now with super-PACs and generally so much money in politics, what leverage does the party have? It doesn’t even have earmarks anymore. I just watched Lincoln again last night. Getting the Thirteenth Amendment passed was all about patronage. If a president did that today, he’d be impeached. (New Jersey governors apparently can still get away with it.)

Bernstein did allow that Johnson had some skills. But he made a really important point:

This isn’t just true in politics; it’s true of everyone in every situation. This is what’s so frustrating about how we treat the rich as though they are oracles. Being rich may or may not indicate that a person understands their own business. But there is no more reason to think that the rich know more about the macro-economy or education or anything else than any man on the street. In my experience, being good at business is about two things: self-promotion and lack of empathy. These “skills” are terrible in many other areas, including life in a general sense.

In a different time, LBJ might have been a great president. Or he might have been a terrible president. As it is, he’s a mixed bag. But what determined his legacy was primarily luck. And that, in all things, can’t be stressed enough. I wrote about this in, Unstable Weirdos and Business Success. People always want others to be everything to everyone. But humans don’t work that way. We already have an LBJ-like politician who might become president. And you will likely be able to vote for him come 2016. But I’m not willing to support a “get things done” candidate at the expense of the rule of law. And with Chris Christie, the things he gets done are, almost without exception, bad things.

Last year on this day, I celebrated the birth of Samuel Beckett. I do love his work. Although I have come to think that to some extent he’s overrated. Or rather that people appreciate him in the wrong way. For example, much of Waiting for Godot is pure silliness. That’s true of Happy Days and Endgame as well. Act Without Words I is cruel silliness. I’ve read that he was a big admirer of Charlie Chaplin. I don’t doubt that. Look at the business with the hats in Godot. That’s straight out of Vaudeville or silent comedy.

When Beckett is serious, he has a strong tendency toward the sentimental. But he was quite aware of this and so explicitly pushed against it. Look at Ohio Impromptu. It is extremely sentimental, which he manages to avoid focusing on too much with the use of repetition and the knocking. Much the same can be said of Krapp’s Last Tape or even Not I and Footfalls. They are still all brilliant, though.

In the end, I’m not sure what I get out of many of them. Certainly I get a great deal out of Godot and Krapp because I am very interested in those subjects. But a lot of his work is too involved with what can be done in the theater. Too much of it is intellectual more than truly affecting. There is far too much Come and Go, which like everything, I admire. But I don’t think there is too much of a point to his lesser work.

At the same time, I never tire of Waiting for Godot. I never tire Krapp’s Last Tape. But it simply isn’t true that he was always great. And this is despite the fact that he didn’t write that much. And of the few plays he wrote, most were short. Godot is about the only true full length play. Happy Days and Endgame are kind of like theater novellas . Krapp can be too, but it is only 20 short pages long in published form. So it shouldn’t shock us too much that every word was so well chosen given that there weren’t all that many of them.

Still, I do love his work. Here is Rick Cluchey in Krapp’s Last Tape in a production meant to mimic the way that Beckett felt it should be performed. The Beckett on Film version is not so reverential and it works better as a result. But I’m sick of embedding videos from that series because they always end up getting taken down.

Happy birthday Samuel Beckett!

Will sent me a little video of the band Translator playing one of their rare gigs back in 2009 at Slim’s in San Francisco. Translator has been a problem for me for almost three decades. In the early 80s, they were really big around here—kind of like American Music Club in the early 90s. But then they more or less broke up, probably for the usual reasons: they were popular but not popular enough to make a decent living. That was bad enough, because they were great live. But it was less than ten years ago that their four albums from that period came out on CD.

At one point, I did manage to get a digitized copy made from vinyl of their first album, Heartbeats & Triggers. It is a great album—one of my favorites. They were literate and funny and combined this with wonderfully expansive music. They were one of the few bands who could do an extended jam without losing control of the musical structure and devolving into narcissism. A good example of this is their underground hit, “Everywhere That I’m Not.” If you are familiar with with the song, you should listen to the live version at Slim’s, where you can hear the audience singing along with it. But here’s the video for it, which is dreadful as most videos of that time, but the song is great:

According to Wikipedia, ten years after its release, “Cry for a Shadow” was mistaken by some people as The Beatles version. It’s hard to imagine anyone making that mistake. I guess it is because it’s an instrumental. As it is, I don’t think it was ever on an album. It was the B-side of “Break Down Barriers” from their second album, No Time Like Now. (The title song is very much typical of them.)

Their third album was just Translator. I think a lot of bands, by that time, just can’t be bothered to come up with a title. But it is an excellent album, although a bit uneven. I remember rather liking “Another American Night” and “O Lazarus,” although it’s been years since I heard the album. And I don’t much remember their fourth album, Evening of The Harvest.

But what’s exciting, and the reason that I’m writing about Translator today, is that two years ago they released a new album, Big Green Lawn. Unfortunately, it apparently hasn’t been released as a CD but just as MP3. And you know me: I’m an Old Man who likes something tangible. I listened to the clips on Amazon and it sounds rather good. So if money ever starts flowing again, I may be forced to buy my first MP3. I did, however, find this sorta music video for the first song on the album, “Soul on Fire.” It is very good:

If you haven’t checked out Translator in the past, I highly recommend doing so. They are a great band with a lot more to offer than most music I come upon these days.

Dean Baker has noted a common bit of conservative propaganda, UK Conservatives Redefine Success Downward. What has been going on is that the conservative government under George Osborne has imposed harsh austerity on the country since 2010. Even though the economy was terribly depressed, the government went along with Alberto Alesina’s loony idea that less spending and higher taxes would be good for growth. The results were predictable for anyone but the true believers: the recovery stalled and they had a double dip recession.

After almost three years of this policy not working, the government reversed course. And the economy bounced back substantially. So now Osborne is running around claiming that the government was right to impose austerity on the country. Paul Krugman wrote earlier this week, “If I keep hitting myself in the head with a baseball bat, and then I stop, I will start to feel better; this doesn’t mean that hitting yourself in the head with a baseball bat is a good thing.” And that’s a very good analogy.

Osborne specifically mentioned that last year the UK investment spending rose 8.8%, four times the 2.2% rate in the US. But as Baker pointed out, you can’t just pick a good year and claim that everything is great—especially when it is clearly the result of you not doing the thing you now claim was good. He provided the following graph that in addition to everything else, shows that the UK hasn’t even made it back to pre-crisis levels of investment spending:

This is why it is almost impossible to have political debates: if a government pushes bad policy long enough, things will work out. Often that’s the case when the bad policy clearly doesn’t work, so it is changed. Even after this, the Osborne government claims they are vindicated when the lack of their policies improve the situation. It’s just hopeless.

Where I grew up here in California, much of the milk comes from Clover Stornetta Farms. And for decades, they have advertised using billboards featuring their mascot, a white milk cow named Clo. And these billboards always feature puns. For example, in one, Clo is dressed as a judge and she has quart of milk in her “hand.” The billboard proudly proclaims, “Supreme Quart.” There have been hundreds of these over the years, most of them real groaners: “Splendor in the Glass” or “Claude Moonet” or “No Business Like Clo Business.” But one of them was especially inspired. It was 25 years ago. They had Clo prancing through a field of tulips. And the caption read, “Tip Clo Through Your Two Lips.”

I bring this up because on this day in 1932, Herbert Khaury was born. But you probably know him better as Tiny Tim. But I’m not that interested in his one hit (which reach #17 on the pop charts), “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” He did far greater work. But even apart from the music, he is really interesting as a historian of Tin Pan Alley songs. I once heard that he had over a thousand songs memorized. That’s an incredible feat, especially given the diversity of the work.

As an act, he doesn’t seem that strange to me. He used the high pitch voice and wore makeup. But if you watch him on Laugh-In, he does whatever is necessary for the joke. I tend to think people like him are the bravest people around. He clearly wasn’t worried that people were going to get the wrong idea about him. He was an entertainer. Ultimately, I think he found an act that people were willing to pay for, so he ran with it.

Personally, I would rather just hear him sing. His first album, God Bless Tiny Tim (Funny title!) is a great album. It is filled with classics like “Livin’ In the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight” and “Daddy, Daddy, What is Heaven Like?” In the second song, we can hear his beautiful baritone voice as the “Daddy” part. He sounds a bit like Dean Martin. The whole album is kind of like what The Madcap Laughs might have been like if Syd Barrett hadn’t been crazy.

But that isn’t all. Right before he died, he produced Girl with Brave Combo—the band he always deserved. Of particular note is perhaps the greatest version of “Stairway to Heaven” ever. The title track is a cover of The Beatles’ “Girl,” which is also better than the original. The album really doesn’t have a single loser: “New York, New York,” “Springtime In The Rockies” (sorry, no link), and a wonderful version of “Over the Rainbow.” But just see if you can avoid smiling while listening to this rousing version of “Hey Jude”:

Happy birthday Tiny Tim!