On this day in 1883, the great Douglas Fairbanks was born. His career is quite interesting in what it shows about the American film industry. America had an extremely vibrant industry during the silent era. But when sound came in, we fell in love with it. Films became much less cinematic. Calling them “talkies” is accurate. That’s when Europe and Russia really took off and it took us some time to catch up.

Fairbanks was famous for being an action hero, when that meant something. Let’s just look at one of his masterpieces, Robin Hood, which he also wrote and produced. Note all the wonderful crosscutting, fast editing, great stunts. It is state of the art filmmaking and as thrilling today as ever:

But then sound came in and it really gummed things up. There were suddenly a lot of movies with people standing around talking because the microphone technology demanded it. But Fairbanks’ first sound film was different. It was the first sound version of The Taming of the Shrew, with his wife Mary Pickford playing Kate. But it was made the way that the Italians long made their sound films: silent with dialog and sound added in post-production. As a result, I think the film is great, and Fairbanks as Petruchio is particularly good. It is pretty much the role he was born to play. But it wasn’t received well, despite or perhaps because, it wasn’t like other sound films.

It’s generally thought that the audience turned against him. I guess that’s true. But I think it is more accurate to say that his age forced him to make films that people didn’t want to see him in. I think he was as good as ever, all the way up to The Private Life of Don Juan, his last film. More than anything, I think he was tired. He was apparently a heavy smoker and he died only five years after his last film. His last words were supposedly, “I’ve never felt better.” These strike me as the words of a man who has been hiding physical pain for a long time.

I haven’t been able to find a collection of scenes from his films, but here is a get section of the documentary, The Great Swashbuckler, which has a lot of great material:

Happy birthday Douglas Fairbanks!

You can’t have missed all the news about the upcoming House Select committee on Benghazi—or as it is more property referred to, Benghazi! As it is, the hearing is a political stunt. There have already been four committees that have looked into it and they have found nothing. But why not another committee? After all, it isn’t like the Republicans are going to do any actual work. And it isn’t like they are even trying to make this look like anything but a show trial.

Pelosi asked that Boehner make the committee half and half in terms of Democrats and Republicans. After all, that’s pretty close to the make up of the House: 53.8% Republican. But Boehner wouldn’t hear of it. So he made the committee have 7 Republicans and 5 Democrats. Given that the Republican head of the committee is the only one with real power in terms of subpoenaing people, why not let it go at 6-6. As it is, the 7-5 make up of the committee makes it 58.3% Republican. But by adding just one more Democrat and making it 7-6, the percentage would be exactly what the House is: 53.8%. Whatever.

In the lead up to this hearing, something interesting happened. Normally, I avoid signing petitions. For one thing, it is usually just an excuse to get my email address to send me spam. But recently, I actually signed a petition. It was to make Alan Grayson at least part of if not the entire Democratic Party contingent on the upcoming committee. So I was very disappointed when the list of Democrats on the committee came out and it did not include Grayson.

Look, the people on the committee are fine. Elijah Cummings (MD) is very good on policy and a great fighter. Adam Smith (WA) is good on policy, but I’ve never seen him in action. Adam Schiff (CA) is very good on policy, but again I don’t know how he’s going to be against the Republican pit bulls. Linda Sanchez (CA) is fairly good on policy, and represents her district’s interests quite capably, but not really the kind of person I want representing the truth in this political cause. And then there’s Tammy Duckworth, whose policies are good but who is very new. Still, I think we all know why she was put on the committee: she’s charismatic and she’s an Iraq War veteran. In fact, she is the only person on the whole committee to have actual war experience. Only one other member, Republican Mike Pompeo was in the military. He had a comfy five years in Germany at the end of the Cold War.

It’s a fine group, but I would really have liked to have seen Grayson on the committee. For one thing, he would have added a little style. It might have been worth watching. But according to John Amato at Crooks & Liars, “Steny Hoyer was afraid that Grayson would be too rambunctious for his taste.” Personally, if anyone as boring as Hoyer thought that Grayson was too rambunctious, that should have sealed the deal in Grayson’s favor. So we got Schiff instead, who didn’t think the Democrats should send anyone to the committee. Is this really all about individual Democrats fighting and making the Democratic cause weaker? Maybe.

It doesn’t really matter, though. This morning at The Plum Line, Paul Waldman explained how it is going to go, The Big Benghazi Dance. He even quotes Macbeth:

He wrote:

I think that’s a total mischaracterization of Grayson, who while pointed, fiery, and quotable, is also professional and known for being good at working with Republican idiots. But doubtless, Waldman is right about what Pelosi is trying to do. And he’s right about how the circus is going to go. On the first day, the Republicans will get a lot of coverage with their outrage and fist pounding. Then there won’t be much coverage until Hillary Clinton testifies and counters the Republicans as well as she has in the past, which you may remember is really well:

And then the media will lose interest and the Republicans, led by Fox News will start screaming about a liberal media cover-up.

But what if this committee, unlike all the other committees and the FBI and the press turn up something?! Frankly, I don’t know what they would turn up. I’ve been confused the whole time. I get the IRS scandal: the Democratic president going after his conservative enemies. It wasn’t true, but I see that if someone proved that happened, that would be terrible for the president—he would rightly be impeached and thrown out of office. But in the Benghazi case, I still don’t get it. The administration said that one thing caused the attack when it was another thing? Neither would have made the administration look any better or worse. In the video above, Ron Johnson seems to think that the scandal is that the American people were misled out of incompetence for a couple of days. That’s the scandal? Really?!

Benghazi! is the worst example of a scandal I have ever seen. I really think that the House should hold a hearing on the death of Vince Foster. At least he died and it is technically possible that Hillary Clinton killed him. But this Benghazi! scandal is madness! And that’s especially true when you consider that the scandal could be that four Americans died as a result of poor embassy security. But apparently, that scandal won’t work because the Republicans pushed to reduce funding for embassy security. If the Democrats are really smart, they might be able to make this show trial about that. And maybe the whole 2014 election!

But Waldman sums it up well:

I just hope that this backfires on the Republicans. This isn’t even about the election. I just want politics to get back to the old days when it was terrible but not useless.

Sometimes, Jonathan Chait annoys the hell out of me. But other times I just want to kiss him. When I disagree with him, it is usually about fairly minor issues of policy and ideology. But when it comes to the state of the Republican Party, no one is more clear. Just about an hour ago, he wrote an article, Why Republicans Love Taxing the Poor. And it is great.

Most of the short article is about an article by one of my favorite conservatives, Ramesh Ponnuru. Ponnuru himself has a clear view of the Republican Party, like when he suggested that Republicans stop talking about how Latinos are natural Republicans because of their “family values.” As he said, “I suspect most people throughout human history have been hard-working, family-oriented, and religious, without sharing conservative views about limited constitutional government.”

But as clear-eyed as Ponnuru is, he is still a professional apologist for the interests of the rich. So he still pumps out the propaganda and Chait called him on it today. Ponnuru was saying that the Republican Party ought to show that it really does care about the poor even while staying against raising the minimum wage, by raising the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). This way, the Republicans could signal that they are against the government interfering in the free market as exemplified by the minimum wage, but still help out the poor with the tax credit for low wage workers. Chait called him on this by noting that the the Republican Party—far from wanting to raise the EITC—wants to lower or even eliminate it. Chait noted that Ponnuru made no mention of this. I will only add that Ponnuru knew what he was doing because he’s a propagandist.

One thing that Chait did not talk about is the contradiction of Ponnuru’s choice. Raising the minimum wage would take money away from everyone in higher costs and lower profits. As such, however, it would be highly progressive: the rich would pay a lot more for a rise in the minimum wage than the poor would. But raising the EITC would be much less progressive because it would be paid for by our taxes, which are modestly progressive but at the super rich level are actually regressive. So there is no narrative here about government intervention. All that Ponnuru is concerned about is how best to protect the money of the rich. This is something he can’t come out and talk about explicitly because the rich are just not a very large constituency. Politicians do the work of the oligarchs, but they’ve still get to get the votes of the working man.

Chait ended the article with what I think is about the clearest description of the modern Republican Party and the tough choices it faces (or rather doesn’t face):

That’s right my fellow Americans: the Republican Party hates the poor. But it’s worse than that. It hates anyone who is not rich. I am still amazed that this country could get one political party to go so far on tilt. A large part of the problem is the New Democrats and their move to the right. But another part of the problem is the very intelligent propaganda of pundits like Ramesh Ponnuru, who go around lobbying the people to believe that the Republicans stand for the exact opposite of what they actually stand for.

But it’s okay, America; just keep voting to end abortion and sex education, so that the babies of your thirteen-year-old daughters can grow up to be serfs of the grandchildren of the Koch and Walton families.

Fifty years ago today, Lyndon Johnson announced his Great Society goals. They were massively successful. But of late, we hear conservatives complain about the Great Society programs. And here is the logic, “If you exclude all the gains of the Great Society programs, the poor are no better off than they were before!” This is like saying that your car doesn’t go any further after filling it up with gas if you exclude the gas you just put in. I know what they’re trying to say: that the poverty programs should have lifted people out of poverty. They should be successful now. You know: teach a man to fish… But these very same conservatives are against programs to help the poor help themselves. They are against raising the minimum wage. And Fox News has spent the last two years complaining about the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Since I’m on the subject of the poor, can I make a request: let’s stop using the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” Bootstraps a little cloth or leather loops at the top of boots (actually, even my tennis shoes have them) to allow the wearer to pull them on. The original meaning of the phrase was something that is impossible to do, not something that is difficult to do but which can be accomplished with good old fashioned American pluck. So no more encouraging people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and no more claims to have done it.

The phrase has a vague beginning in an episode of that 18th century classic, The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In it, he falls into a swamp but is able to pull himself out by his pigtail. The first known use of the bootstrap maneuver was in 1834. And it remained the tall tale that it is for about a century—like Paul Bunyan batting down cannonballs during the Revolutionary War. In the early 20th century, people began to use it as something that is hard to do, but possible. It is not surprising that a phrase that for so long was considered ludicrous and therefore funny, became “encouraging” advice following Horatio Alger and the robber barons.

What’s especially sad about the metaphor, however, is that today the phrase is pretty much true—but not in the way that most people think. Our country does provide about as much help to the poor as a couple of bootstraps. If you are born poor, you will almost certainly die poor. If you are born rich, you will almost certainly die rich. And those who manage to upset this overwhelmingly consistent fact of American life are either extremely lucky or extremely unlucky. But of course, no one ever means that the poor are screwed when they admonish them to get pulling on those bootstraps. They mean to say that it isn’t all that bad and that the poor have options.

The idea of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, is distinctly American. It sucks to to be poor in Europe, just as it does here. But there, poverty is generally seen as something bad that happened to you. In America, in addition to the many and varied ways it sucks to be poor, we add the social disapproval that the only reason one would be poor is that he wasn’t trying hard enough. He isn’t pulling hard enough on those bootstraps. But America is now pretty much the world you see in Gosford Park. There are those who have their boots pulled on for them and there are those who have no boots at all.

In late November of 1978, I was at a conference in San Francisco for kids who were interested in politics. I don’t remember much about the conference, although it was probably a very good introduction to local politics and the issues that must be faced. Local politics is really interesting because it is so practical. There is very little ideology. In my father’s neighborhood, there was a zoning ordinance that restricted it to single story houses. Well, my father wanted to build onto his house, so he went door to door in the neighborhood and got everyone to sign a petition asking that the zoning ordinance be changed. He then went to a supervisors’ meeting and it was changed. The government exists to help people. This is a fact that is often lost at the national level—especially on the right. This kind of simple problem solving is what I got from the conference, and it may be why I’m a Democrat today.

But all that was dwarfed by the day that Dan White assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, who was born on this day in 1930. I knew Moscone, because he was a legend in the Bay Area. Milk was on his way to being a legend, and of course, in San Francisco, he already was. He was the first openly gay elected official in California. It was a big deal. People don’t understand just how terrible life was for gays in the state at that time. In the 1960s, oral sex was still illegal. In 1970 alone, 90 people were arrested for this “crime.” What’s more, Mayor Alioto really went after the gay community, pressuring the police for raids on gay bars, which eventually pushed the gay community to meet in parks. Here’s an amazing statistic: in 1971, 63 people were arrested in New York City for public sex; 2,800 were arrested in San Francisco.

There’s no doubt that Milk was kind of an interloper. He had not really been involved in the politics of the gay community and so a lot of the old timers resented him. But he had a lot of energy, was an excellent speaker, had a great ability to build coalitions. Wikipedia describes a good example of how he worked, “The Teamsters wanted to strike against beer distributors—Coors in particular—who refused to sign the union contract. An organizer asked Milk for assistance with gay bars; in return, Milk asked the union to hire more gay drivers. A few days later, Milk canvassed the gay bars in and surrounding the Castro District, urging them to refuse to sell the beer. With the help of a coalition of Arab and Chinese grocers the Teamsters had also recruited, the boycott was successful.”

But Milk was only able to become a supervisor because of a change in the way that they were elected. They had been city wide, meaning whoever had the most money tended to win. And it certainly limited the appeal of those representing minority groups. But when elections were changed to city districts, Milk won election, representing the Castro. He served for just over ten months. There were various reasons that White murdered Milk and Moscone. In particular, Milk and White did not like each other. White was a Catholic, but he wasn’t virulently anti-gay. The truth was that Milk was a much better politician than White. And let’s not forget: White was unstable. After serving five years of his ridiculously lax seven year sentence for two murders, White killed himself. He was a deeply troubled man and really ought to stand as a symbol for mental health problems and our very poor tools for dealing with it.

Meanwhile, Harvey Milk is a great symbol of gay empowerment. Part of his legacy is what has brought us to our much more liberal climate for gay rights today: he urged all gay people to go public. And that is, in the end, the greatest weapon that the gay rights movement has had. It is hard to hate gays when you sons and daughters and friends and coworkers and church members are gay. Hatred is just a special kind of ignorance.

Imagine that you were trying to get me to do more exercise for my health. Maybe you argued that walking a mile a day would extend and improve my life. I countered, “There is no evidence that walking a mile a day is going to improve my health!” But one day, a paper appears in The Lancet, “Study shows Frank Moraes will have a longer and healthier life if he walks one mile per day.” My friend shows me the article. I read it and can find no fault with it. It absolutely is the case that walking a mile a day will make me healthier and happier; it’ll even make me a chick magnet. So do I start to walk a mile a day? No! Sure, walking a mile a day would be good for me, but the cost is too great: 20 minutes out of every day when I could be watching television and eating bonbons.

At that point, unless you were a complete idiot, you would know that this issue is not about the health benefits of exercise nor the time required to do that exercise. You would know that I just don’t want to exercise. But of course I wouldn’t want to say that because it makes me look like a lazy guy and all that. Somehow, though, when it comes to the exact same behavior in politics, everyone is expected to assume that anyone, like me in this example who constantly changes his reason for being against a policy, is a good faith actor.

This leads us to yet another great Jonathan Cohn article, Obamacare Critics Now Admit the Law Is Saving Lives, But Say the Price Still Isn’t Worth it. Earlier this month, I reported, Good Obamacare News Is No News to Conservatives. It was about how conservatives were ignoring data that indicated that the uninsured population was going way down and that having insurance was actually saving lives. Well, last week, Cohn found that a number of conservative wonks (and I use the term advisedly) have accepted these findings but have come up with a new reason to be against Obamacare.

You should read Cohn’s whole article (actually, you should read everything Cohn writes because he’s brilliant). Basically, it talks about how some Cato Institute drone figured out that for every life that was saved, we were spending $4 to $5 million. And that, is apparently too much. Cohn doesn’t accept that number, but more important, he goes on to show that this is the wrong way to think about the new law. Healthcare reform is not primarily about saving lives. It is about reducing medical bankruptcies. It is about providing people with peace of mind and allowing them to switch jobs and start business. And it is about trying to reduce healthcare costs which are almost twice as high as they are in other advanced countries that provide better care.

That’s all very important stuff. But do we really need to have this conversation? I mean, let’s suppose that someone does a very thorough analysis of Obamacare and comes to the conclusion that because of increased productivity and fewer emergency room visits that Obamacare actually saves money. Does anyone think that conservative healthcare “wonk” Avik Roy is going to become an Obamacare booster? Of course not! He would come up with yet another reason why Obamacare was terrible. There will always be another reason why Obamacare is unacceptable because the conservative argument against Obamacare is based on two things: it raised taxes on the rich by a tiny amount and it is a Democratic law.

So I go back to my original article, Good Obamacare News Is No News to Conservatives. Because there is no such thing as good Obamacare news for them. It is just an opportunity to nitpick the news and when necessary, to come up with another justification for why they hate the law. But Jonathan Cohn does yeoman’s work to keep these charlatans honest. Because eventually, their arguments are going to sound ridiculously thin. Like, “Obamacare is bad, because it gives an unfair advantage to poor people in the states that didn’t expand Medicaid!” Thanks Obama!

I probably shouldn’t tell this story. All my friends will hate me. No, they both already know.

Recently, I was thinking about the perfect day of my life. I came home from work. My roommate was gone. She was the bartender at a strip club. She had been a stripper herself when she was younger. I’ve known a lot of strippers. I like them. I like how they manage to get men to give them money for nothing. Men are pigs and deserve it.

My roommate was one of those great female friends that I’ve had where there really was no sexual interest on either side. On my side, I’m just not that sexual. On her side, I’m ugly. So she’s off serving beers to the guys, probably getting tips that are bigger than the naked women. And I am all alone.

So I walk down to the video store where the guy there likes me because I’m into the same kind of movies he’s into. And the gal there probably has a crush on me, but I don’t realize it at the time because I’m kind of an idiot. It’s too bad too, because she had really good taste in movies too. After flirting with her a bit, I rented Comfort and Joy, which is still not available on DVD in this country, which is a sin against God and country and pretty much anything else you can name. But this was in the days before DVDs, so I just rented the VHS, which you can still get.

I walk home, because this is Portland, where you can do that kind of thing because things are close by. And on my way, I stopped at a local cafe that was just closing. I buy a bowl of tomato soup (not cream), which came with a big piece of sour dough french bread. And then at home, I watch the movie and eat my soup and bread. And it is wonderful. No. It is perfect.

There have been many other great times in my life. And most of them involved other people. I used to host a lot of dinner and cocktail parties. When I was very naughty, I hosted cocktail parties that had secret cocktail parties inside them. Oh yes, I’ve been around!

But you really can’t beat a little flirting, some nice food, and a Bill Forsyth film. I really can’t imagine ever topping that.

This is delicious!

Back in 1981, when the recently elected President Ronald Reagan was pushing to lower income taxes, he said something that is really great to the Washington Post. Unfortunately, that particular article doesn’t seem to be online, so I’ve had to get it from The Christian Science Monitor, No “Voodoo” in Dole’s Tax Cut.

Are you ready, because this is really great. Wanna get a beer? Some popcorn? Okay, here we go:

There’s a serious part of the this, but let’s just bask in the glow of that false equivalence. The great Hollywood stars: Bogart, Gable, and… Reagan?! You gotta give it to the guy, he didn’t lack for confidence. Let’s see now: Bogart starred in Casablanca and The African Queen. I assume you’ve heard of those. Gable starred in the Oscar sweeping It Happened One Night (also one of my very favorite movies) and a little sleeper called Gone With the Wind. And Reagan starred in (well: co-starred in) Knute Rockne, All American and Bedtime for Bonzo. For the record, Bonzo Goes to College was far better, but Reagan wasn’t in it. Not that I’m implying anything!

But the truth is that the high tax rate was not actually limiting Bogart and Gable from making films. From 1936 onward, the top marginal tax rate was at least 9 percentage points higher than it was when Reagan was complaining about the tax rate in 1981. But Bogart wasn’t making two pictures per year. Of course, he really didn’t become a star until High Sierra in 1941. But from 1945 onward, when he was a big star and the top tax bracket was 90% or more, he made a lot of films. In 1953, with a tax rate of 92%, he made three big pictures: The Caine Mutiny, Sabrina, and The Barefoot Contessa.

Similarly, with Gable, who was a star much earlier, he made five films the year he won the Oscar for It Happened One Night. He only made two the year of Gone With the Wind, but that isn’t surprising since the principal photography for that one film took up over half the year. Regardless, you know that if it took Reagan two films to reach the 90% tax rate, that Bogart and Gable reached it in one film easily.

But if you look at stars today: Johnny Depp or George Clooney, they also make about two films per year. This is despite the much lower top marginal tax bracket and the much lower capital gains rate, which they get as being executive producers.

What’s especially interesting though, is that Reagan was lying about himself. Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s (after which he got into television), he made tons of movies. So I don’t even know what he’s talking about. Maybe the dementia was already strong in 1981.

Reagan went on to talk about how the fact that he wasn’t willing to make more movies meant that grips and other movie professionals were hurt. The idea I guess is that rather than find another actor, the studio would just not make a movie because people only wanted to see a chimp work with Ronald Reagan. The studios make what the studios make. If George Clooney dies tonight, Hollywood will make exactly the same number of pictures next year.

Anyway, I thought that quote was funny as hell and I had to share it. It is weird though, that conservatives always talk about how liberals don’t see the world as it is. But they just make up stories to prove their points. If we were to believe Reagan, To Have and Have Not never would have been made, because the top tax rate was 94%. What was Bogart thinking!