Ed Kilgore brought my attention to a rant by Matt Continetti in the Washington Free Beacon, Dialing It In. Basically, Continetti is upset that President Obama is continuing to have a good time and not spending all his time wringing his hands about all the fake scandals that Fox News and idiot writers at the Washington Free Beacon are obsessed with. It’s really quite a silly article.

This is especially true, when you consider that this is almost a journalistic genre. Around the same time in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Richard Restak wrote an OpEd arguing that Reagan wasn’t suffering from senility, “[I]f the president can be faulted for his mental performance, it is entirely likely that the flaw results not from dementia but from laziness.” And note, this was when Reagan was embroiled in a very real scandal: the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. But what’s a journalist to do? You write the same stuff over and over because these websites aren’t going fill themselves!

What struck me was Continetti’s imagination of what the president talks to his liberal friends about at these cocktail parties that he goes to rather than dealing with the fact that Susan Rice said something that turned out to be wrong on some Sunday news shows. Get ready for the unleashing of the conservative id:

Let’s leave aside the stupid political talking points. I know that both Democrats and Republicans do that kind of thing when they are together. The focus here isn’t on politics. It is on cultural signifiers. Eric Ripert and the litany of television shows that appeal not to liberals but to urbanites. Continetti is doing the regular guy conservative rap, but in reverse. Instead of “I’m into fast cars, guns, and big boobs” he gives us “They’re into Volvos, lattes, and sushi.” How does he know they talk about The Wire and Mad Men and Homeland and House of Cards and Orange is the New Black? Because all his friends are into them. After all, he’s the Columbia University graduate who has worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Financial Times. I’m sure he watches those shows. I’ve only seen a single episode of House of Cards and none of the other shows. I’m sure he has eaten at one or more of Eric Ripert’s restaurant. I’d never heard of him before. How can it be that he is the real American and I’m the America-hating liberal?

That’s the thing about conservatives: they are elitists. The majority of the rich vote Republican except in California and New York. They drive more Volvos, drink more lattes, and eat more sushi. A big part of their appeal to poor is this kind of social identification, even though it isn’t true. And someone as smart as Continetti knows this. But he’s more than willing to spew this nonsense to other conservative elites at the Washington Free Beacon, which I assure you is not read by blue collar workers in Mississippi.

Notice also the implication that Obama is out of touch. This is coming from a political movement that when it isn’t talking about keeping women pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen, is only interested in how much more money can be given to the rich. But no, it is Obama who is only listening to Ezra Klein and Michael Tomasky and Ta-Nehisi Coates and EJ Dionne—all men who have been rather critical of the president. But again, these are urbane intellectuals, and the point is to associate Obama with the not-real America—with that place that Sarah Palin does not represent.

This is what we get from a fairly serious conservative journalist. And it highlights what I wrote about last week, Hopeless Search for Honest Conservative. Because Matt Continetti is smart—there is no doubt of that. But he is not honest. He knows exactly what he’s doing. And it is indicative of the total vacuousness of conservative intellectual thought. They have nothing but made up scandals and claims that Democrats are out of touch because they watch the same television shows the Republicans do.

On this day in 1848, the great painter Paul Gauguin was born. As a human being, he was troubled. It isn’t surprising that he was close to Vincent van Gogh. So I think we can look past the fact that he lived a questionable life, most especially in Tahiti. But let me just yield the point that Gauguin was probably a horrible human being. Now we can get onto his art.

It is interesting to compare Gauguin with van Gogh. This goes back to something I talk about a lot: the eclectic and non-eclectic artists. There are great artists who have a singular vision that they do variations on. It seems that van Gogh could only paint in that one way that he did. And as an expression of himself, there is great value in his work. But really, a little van Gogh goes a long way. Gauguin was of the eclectic variety of artist. He did amazingly varied work, which should put an end to any thought that his primitive period was anything but exactly what he was trying to do.

Here is his painting from 1879, The Market Gardens of Vaugirard, which strikes me as rather like Pissarro:

And then here is his painting from 1903, Landscape on La Dominique, which strikes me as rather like no one else:

Happy birthday Paul Gauguin!

Last night, I read a review of a production of As You Like It in 1897. It was written by George Bernard Shaw and the focus was on Ada Rehan in the part of Rosalind. He’s very fond her. I would even go so far as to say that he might have a bit of a crush on her. But much of the review is about how he doesn’t actually know if she can act. And the reason he doesn’t know if she can act is that he always sees her in the same part, just with a character of a different name in a different play.

He wrote of Rehan, “I must live in hope that some day she will come to the West End of London for a week or two, just as Rejane and Sarah Bernhardt do, with some work of sufficient novelty and importance to make good the provincial wear and tear of her artistic prestige.” This rather reminds me of William Goldman’s contention that the only thing that matters in a screenplay is structure. And before film, I think that was largely true of the theater. Thankfully today, the theater is more likely to produce actual interesting characters.

One of my biggest complaints about the way people idolize Shakespeare is that they will gush about the great characters that he created. To this, I always respond, “And what characters would those be? I would certainly like to know.” Yeah, in some of the tragedies there are some characters that begin to be something other than standard parts going back to the ancient Greeks. But in the comedies? Come now!

Shaw loved Shakespeare (As do I!) but he wasn’t blind his many weaknesses. In his discussion of Rehan, he wrote:

Yesterday, I was listening to an interview with Stephen Sondheim about Sweeney Todd, and he talked about how for over a hundred years, the title character was just this evil man. It wasn’t until 1970 when the British playwright Christopher Bond took the character and provided him with motivation. In other words, he turned it into a revenge play. The revenge play was around in Shakespeare’s time, of course. That’s what Titus Andronicus is, after all. But Shakespeare’s plays do an especially bad job of providing motivation for female characters, who are basically just four types: passive youth, quick witted youth, whore, and old hag. And as much as I love the dialog that Shakespeare wrote for Beatrice, once in love, she is not much different than Hero.

Above all, I hate the idea of Shakespeare as theatrical or literary broccoli. My impression is that most people who claim to like Shakespeare don’t appreciate it enough to much enjoy it. And fundamentally, we keep seeing the plays and movies because the performers love them. And it is true now if it wasn’t in Shaw’s time: actors commonly turn standard parts into something much greater. Certainly, Kenneth Branagh did that for Iago in Othello. But even Ian McKellen couldn’t overcome the Snidely Whiplash depth of his character in Richard III. It’s all still very much enjoyable. But great and edifying? Rarely.

It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.

I don’t want to write this article. But I think I have to say something. You may remember the movie The Silence of the Lambs. In it, a serial killer by the name of “Buffalo Bill” is skinning women, trying to make his own suit of skin. The best thing about the movie is that the actor who played Buffalo Bill went on to play Captain Leland Stottlemeyer on Monk. Otherwise, I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t think fiction about serial killers is ever very good. It is always filled with the most unbelievable police work. Real serial killers are much more interesting. But I’m getting side tracked. So this serial killer was sewing himself a skin suit, which is at least totally creepy.

That brings us to yesterday, when Alexis Madrigal informed me that, Science Confirms: Yup, This Book Really Is Bound in Human Skin. Not that I am implying anything about Madrigal, but this is not the first time he’s written on the subject; two months ago, he wrote, It Was Once “Somewhat Common” to Bind Books With Human Skin. He started the article like this:

Let’s suppose you were a rich man in the middle of the 17th century and you really loved Shakespeare’s sonnets. (You shouldn’t; they’re weak.) And you die. What a great use of your estate to have a copy of the sonnets bound with your skin. It could be propped up on a table in the sitting room and your children could say, “Dad’s looking good today!” According to Heather Cole, a curator at Harvard’s Houghton Library, “The confessions of criminals were occasionally bound in the skin of the convicted.” I’m thinking something like this:

Anyway, after testing for just about every form of ape and monkey skin around, Harvard now knows it has an actual book bound in human skin. And what is this book? It is Des Destinees de l’Ame by the French novelist Arsene Houssaye. You would think that any article about this book would mention what it is about. It is, after all, bound with human skin! But no. Even though he wrote well over a hundred works, English Wikipedia isn’t much interested in him. French Wikipedia is more interested, providing a more detailed biography and an actual list of works. But there is no entry on this book, but we do know he wrote it when he was 65 years old and the title in English is, The Destiny of the Soul.

According to an article in The Guardian, it is Houssaye’s “mediations on the spirit.” I assume that it was not published bound with human skin. In fact, an inscription on the last page of this copy reads:

That’s 247 years before Des Destinees de l’Ame was published. So someone must have taken the original book, disposed of the pages, and put Houssaye’s book inside it. And why not? I mean, it is a book about the nature of the spirit, it ought to be encased inside human skin. But it’s still creepy as hell.

It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.

The Tax Foundation has put together a great map that looks at how much of each state’s total operating budget comes from federal government aid. But before we get to it, let me lay out a few things. One is that it is not exactly fair that states are compared in this way, because people move. For example, a man might work his whole life in California and then retire in Arizona. Thus, it looks like California is subsidizing Arizona, but at least in the case of this man, California has gotten credit for paying taxes and now Arizona looks like a “taker” when this man is just getting a return on taxes he paid in California. So a lot of this business about certain states taking more from the feds than they give is about the age of the population.

But that isn’t the only thing that is going on. It is also the case that natural resources matter. The bottom two states in terms of taking money from the feds are fossil fuel states. Hawaii is also at the bottom—tourism, perhaps? But this does highlight the fact that federal dollars flow to states that have a lot of poor people in them. So keep this in mind when you look at this graph, Federal Aid as a Percentage of State General Revenue, Fiscal Year 2012 (click over to get the full graph at much higher resolution):

The top state in terms of getting federal money is Mississippi, which gets almost half of all its revenue from the federal government. Yet it is one of the youngest states. But let’s face it: it’s poor. I don’t mind my tax dollars going to help those people out. But it is also a bright red state. So how does that affect the way the state government has decided to tax its people? In a word: unfairly. There is a great deal of really useful information in another publication of the Tax Foundation, Facts and Figures 2014. Mississippi gets 27.5% of its state revenue from property taxes. This is even less than California (28.9%), which has a real problem with under-taxing property (primarily by allowing property to stay under assessed). They get only 3.8% from corporate taxes, compared to 5.2% in California. And they get only 15.1% from income taxes, compared to 27.3% in California. The real tell is the sales tax—you know, the tax that really hits the poor. Mississippi gets a whopping 32% of its state revenue from that tax—almost 50% more than California collects, and that’s with temporarily higher sales taxes to get us out of debt.

It isn’t just Mississippi. In all the red states, we see the same things: low income taxes, low corporate taxes, low property taxes (although not always), and high sales taxes. These are very Republican supposedly pro-growth policies. But if they really were good for the economy, why is it that these red states are so poor? I mean, other than the fossil fuel states that would be rich regardless of their policies. It seems that the supposed pro-growth policies are really just pro-redistribution of income from the poor to the rich.

So I don’t think we should focus on the fact that Mississippi takes a lot more money from the federal government than it gives. We should focus on the fact that the people of Mississippi keep electing governments that take from the poor and give to the rich—all in the name of improving the economy. But the economy never improves. They just depend more on the federal government. You know, the government they claim to hate.

H/T: EJ Dionne

Dean Baker wrote a great article yesterday, Why Do the Media Give So Much More Attention to Jobs We Lose Due to Environmental Restrictions Than Jobs We Lose Because of the Trade Deficit? And he actually answers half the question. I answer the rest.

The issue is that in the entire United States, there are less than 80,000 people who work in the coal industry. Is that a lot? Well, there are roughly 138 million jobs in the country. So that’s less than 0.06% of our work force. It would seem that this is not an industry that we should be all that concerned about. What’s more, as I discussed on Tuesday, because of changes in the way the coal industry is managed, coal jobs have been disappearing for decades. Baker noted that during the eight years from 1985 to 1993 (You know: the Reagan and Bush years!) the coal industry cut 80,000 jobs. And that was when there were fewer people in the work force and so the jobs lost was a bigger deal. As Baker noted, “I don’t recall anywhere near the same focus on this far more serious hit to coal country.”

Meanwhile, our country has seen a sharp rise in its trade deficit. This deficit is due to our strong dollar. It is cheaper for us to buy imported products and more expensive for other countries to buy our exported products. The increase in the deficit represents roughly 700,000 jobs, by Baker’s estimate. That’s in one year. Yet what is everyone talking about: the fact that some coal jobs will be lost because of new power plant regulations—regulations that will take effect over the course of 16 years. So even if all the coal jobs were lost (and they won’t be—not even close), that would be a loss of 5,000 jobs per year. This is an amount that likely could be accommodated by attrition alone. Regardless, this is less than one percent of the jobs lost due to our trade deficit.

So why does this get so little attention? Simple: the strong dollar is great for the rich. If you already have money, it is best that the money be worth as much as possible. But if you aren’t rich and don’t have a job, a strong dollar is bad. But it is worse than that. Baker pointed out that certain businesses you’ve heard of depend upon a strong dollar so they can continue to sell cheap imported goods to the working poor:

Of course, this alone doesn’t explain why journalists aren’t interested in the subject. To understand that, you have to look to Chris Hedges in Death of the Liberal Class. The upper middle class who are our journalists and economists are supposed to be the ones who make the democracy work. They are supposed stop the excesses at the top. They are supposed to keep inequality in check, for example. As a class, that’s what they’re paid for. But over the last four decades, they’ve fallen down on the job and allowed our country to become effectively a plutocracy. That’s why our mainstream journalists focus on tiny issues, getting the people worried about an issue (eg coal) that is really all about how much money owners will make in profit. And that’s why the mainstream journalists ignore huge issues, letting the people stay ignorant of an issue (eg the trade deficit) that is hurting the people themselves.

I am not saying, however, that the journalists know they are doing this. It is just that over the years, the culture of journalism has lost its way. Fundamentally, it is about laziness. The “liberal class” thinks it deserves its decent lifestyle. It has forgotten that those lifestyles were provided for doing real work. And that work was not to be the apologists of the rule elites.

Afterword

Just to be clear, Dean Baker is doing great work as an economist and Chris Hedges is doing great work as a journalist. But the vast majority of the economists and journalists are nothing but lazy apologists for the power elite.