On this day in 1936, the great puppeteer Jim Henson was born. For someone like me, there is nothing better than The Muppet Show. I love puppets, but it is more than that. It is the zeitgeist of the whole show. The fact that it is a collection of marginally talented characters who decide to “put on a show” that makes it especially compelling. It also has a very high silliness to funny ratio.

Of course, Henson did a lot more than that. And his legacy will long out live him. I continue to see non-Muppet related work being done by the Jim Henson Company. It is the kind of stuff that goes back to the great film Labyrinth. Here is a collection of clips of the Swedish Chef, which was apparently the Henson character that all the staff most loved:

The film director Bert I. Gordon is 91 today. He is best known for his B-movie classic The Amazing Colossal Man, which is really quite good. But I know what you are thinking, “Didn’t you slam one of his films just last year?” Yes, in Earth vs. Burt I. Gordon! I did review Attack of the Puppet People. But even though I was critical, I concluded, “As drama goes, Attack of the Puppet People is a disaster, and yet it somehow works.” And that is a lot more than I can say for most big budget action films that are produced today. Regardless, Gordon has greatly improved the world with his work. I assume that his 91st birthday finds him well, because he is currently in post production for a new film, Secrets of a Psychopath. Totally fucking awesome!

Other birthdays: jurist John Marshall (1755); comedian Phil Hartman (1948).

The day, however, belongs to one of the very greatest American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald who was born on this day in 1896. He wrote beautiful prose at a time when most writers were more inclined to play with language. Probably the best of these writers was Gertrude Stein, but even on the micro-scale, I don’t think she compares. What’s more, Fitzgerald crafted great characters existing in complex worlds. What most appeals to me is the thematic thread that I think links all of his work together: the power of love simultaneously for good and ill. We see this most explicitly in Tender Is the Night, where love is effectively transferred from one declining character to another ascending character.

Of course, I need to be careful in discussing Fitzgerald’s work. A couple of years ago, I wrote about The Love of the Last Tycoon and how the line “There are no second acts in American lives” didn’t mean what people thought. In addition, I noted that the book was written in the first person and just because a character thinks something, doesn’t mean the writer thinks that. Some idiot took exception, “I truly love it here online when people with pretty thin resumes take on the dead masters. Amazing to read.” What I find amazing is that people take the time to comment on articles they clearly haven’t read. I wasn’t criticizing Fitzgerald; I was criticizing those who ignorantly quote him. So I always worry that there are idiots waiting around to bash me for things that exist only in their own very limited minds. Perhaps this time people will defend the “dead master” for the slight of only considering Fitzgerald “one of the very greatest American writers” rather than the greatest writer in any language ever. Whatever.

Happy birthday F. Scott Fitzgerald!

Should we be worried about the Democrats’ chances in the 2014 elections? Charlie Cook thinks we should. He has been looking at the polling from NBC News/Wall Street Journal. And he is right that it isn’t a slam dunk for the Democrats regardless. But I think he’s overstating the problems.

Most of his article presents relatively good news to the Democrats. In generic polling, Democrats have a 45-42 advantage over Republicans. But these generic polls tend to overstate the Democratic advantage by 2 percentage points. Thus, right now, it looks like the Democrats have a 1 percentage point advantage in 2014. This is not great. In 2012, the advantage was 47-42. According to Cook’s 2-point rule, that gave the Democrats a 3 percentage point advantage, which is about right (the Democrats did better than that in the White House and Senate, but worse in the House). In 2010, the disadvantage was 43-45, or a 4 percentage point advantage for the Republicans. So the Democrats are looking a lot better for 2014 than they looked for 2010.

In addition to this, remember that the 2010 election was a great defeat for the Democrats in part because they held so many marginal seats. The Republicans have won those seats back. So the idea that the Democrats could lose another 63 seats is ridiculous. But as I wrote in The Next Three Election Cycles, the 2014 election is likely to be a wash for both parties. This is assuming that the Republicans don’t do anything really stupid. But barring that, I assume that Republicans will make minor gains in the House and Senate. That might mean they take control of the Senate. But we aren’t likely to see huge changes.

Cook’s concern about the Democrats comes from the polling of independent voters. There has been a decided shift among this group of voters toward the Republicans. Right now, they are divided 25-43. This is dramatically different from 2012 when it was 35-34 and even worse than 2010 when it was 26-40. I don’t really trust the category of “independent voter.” In general, it is just a bunch of people who are Republicans or Democrats who refuse to admit it. And the fact that there is this huge swing from off to on to off year elections makes me think that this is mostly just a question of extremely conservative “independents” who always vote and moderate “independents” who only vote for the president.

There’s another issue: since 2005, there has been a steady increase in “independent” voters and decrease in Republican voters. In 2005, there were 33% of voters claiming to be independent and 33% claiming to be Republican. In 2012, 40% claimed to be independent and 27% claimed to be Republican. So part of the change is just the fact that more and more Republicans are claiming to be independents. What’s more, I think most of these people have changed because they think the Republican Party is too liberal. So these are the most conservative (Tea Party, most likely) Republicans.

Charlie Cook is not really partisan and so I’m sure he is just presenting the data as he sees it. But like most such people, I suspect he has a bias toward the supposed center of the political spectrum. And that is what all of the concern is about the “independent” voters. Of course, as I’ve noted: these supposed independent voters aren’t all that independent and regardless aren’t centrists. Should the Democratic Party start pandering to this group? After all, it did very well with this group less than a year ago. Has anything happened in that time that would make a reasonable person turn against Obama and the the Democratic Party? I don’t think so. This isn’t a group that the Democrats are going to convince regardless. And the “independent” vote is already factored into the total vote. The last thing the Democrats need to do is move to the right yet again.

Jonathan Bernstein wrote a really great article over at The American Prospect, The Day After Shutdown. Although he doesn’t think there will be a shutdown, he has put together an overview of how a shutdown would get resolved. Based upon it, I can see why he doesn’t think a shutdown will happen. The whole thing seems pretty straight forward. So you have to wonder why the Republicans would allow it. There is one very good reason, however: there is too much power in the House Republican caucus vested in inexperienced legislators who don’t know what they are doing. In that case, this will be a learning opportunity.

The beginning of it is obvious. Parts of the government will shutdown and this will anger people who will complain to our representatives in Washington. This will cause Congress to at least try to put together some limited fixes—you know, things like the air traffic controller fix to the Sequester (can’t allow the rich to suffer). And the partisan press will blame the other side.

The whole thing gets interesting when the mainstream press gets involved. Bernstein argues that they will come down on the side of the Democrats. This isn’t because the mainstream press is liberal. (In part, that’s because they aren’t.) As he correctly notes, the main way that the press is biased is toward the status quo. Thus, they will not see a government shutdown as a good thing—especially when it is done for an unprecedented reason: to defund one bit of legislation that they don’t have the votes to repeal in the normal democratic way.

He adds a very important footnote:

As the media goes, so goes the public and this will lead the parties to the bargaining table. What the final deals is, is uncertain. It will depend upon which side is the more desperate, but that will most likely be the Republicans. As Bernstein says, “[The deal] probably won’t even be as good for Republicans as whatever their best deal would have been before a shutdown, and it might even be better than the status quo for Democrats.”

Assuming that Obamacare is not defunded, the Democrats will win this fight. The Republicans set it up that way. If they had said they wanted a trillion dollars cut from the budget and ended up with a hundred billion, they could claim victory. But defunding Obamacare is all or nothing. They’ve argued that Obamacare is such a big threat to freedom in America that it must be stopped. That doesn’t allow for any compromise. In the end, I think they will look both weak and incompetent. That’s very bad for them.

Bernstein explains where that leaves the Republican Party: nowhere.

That’s correct. Just like Christians whose leaders promise the Second Coming of Jesus that never comes, the Republicans will always have an explanation for why they were always right. The only way they go away is through electoral defeat. The crazies cannot be reformed; they must be defeated. And it seems the crazies are determined to defeat themselves.

On this day in 1800, William Holmes McGuffey was born. He is known for writing the McGuffey Readers. For their time, they were undoubtedly quite good. What I find most interesting about them is how conservatives since then—Even today!—love these books. It doesn’t make sense. There has been a lot of great children’s literature written since that time. What’s more, there is a much better understanding of reading levels. But the conservative love of the McGuffey Readers is not about pedagogy; it is about culture. They like the “old ways,” and whether they know it or not, that includes racism. The books are filled with antisemitism and other racist attitudes. Recent efforts to take the racism out of the books to make them more palatable for the home schooling market just proves the point. Why hang onto a set of racist books that is nearly 200 years old, if not to reinforce some very old cultural prejudices? McGuffey himself totally misunderstood the character of the recently created nation, “The Christian religion, is the religion of our country. From it are derived our prevalent notions of the character of God, the great moral governor of the universe. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions.” That’s wrong in just about every way possible and that is why many people love it today.

Typhoid Mary (Mary Mallon) was born in 1869. She was a cook in and around New York City who was a healthy carrier of typhoid fever. She was apparently responsible for transmitting the disease to a number of people who she worked for. As a result of this, the health department put her in “quarantine”—a nice name for jail. After three years, she was released on the condition that she not work in food service. But she found it hard to make a living doing laundry, so she soon went back to being a cook. Eventually she was caught and imprisoned for the remaining 23 years of her life. What I find interesting is that the state cared enough to imprison her and cared enough to deprive her a decent livelihood, but it didn’t care enough to provide her with a decent means of living that would have protected the public health. This is the great approach to public health that the Republican Party would like to return us to.

Flutist Julius Baker was born in 1915:

The great Ray Charles was born in 1930:

The great Bruce Springsteen is 64:

Other notable birthdays: Mickey Rooney (93); singer Julio Iglesias (70); and actor Jason Alexander (54).

The day, however, belongs to the great jazz musician John Coltrane who was born on this day in 1926. There aren’t many people who do great work with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk and manage to go on to do even greater work by themselves. Sadly, Coltrane died at just 40 years old of liver cancer. Still, he left us an amazing amount of material. This includes some of the very best free jazz. But here is some of his more traditional work, his great version of “My Favorite Things”:

Happy birthday John Coltrane!

My head is filled with all the House Republican madness about defunding SNAP, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. The whole thing is such a clear demonstration of what the Republican Party has become. In his column this morning, Paul Krugman wrote, “Even some conservative pundits worry that the war on food stamps, especially combined with the vote to increase farm subsidies, is bad for the GOP, because it makes Republicans look like meanspirited class warriors. Indeed it does. And that’s because they are.” Of course, it is even worse than this. It’s even worse than Jonathan Chait says when he claims that Republicans are narcissists. The modern Republican Party is a nihilistic movement. They really don’t believe in anything. They simply have a vestigial memory that the rich are good and the poor are bad.

For some time now, Dean Baker has been on a crusade against big numbers without context. He pointed out that all of this talk of $40 billion in cuts gives the Republicans political cover. In my defense, I’ve been presenting the number in terms of how it affects the poor. In fact, I put it in context of how many people could be affected (6 million). But when talking about what the Republicans are doing, it is more correct to look at how much money the Republicans are saving the country. And it isn’t much. Over the next decade, the Republicans would be saving us 0.086% off what we will spend.

Of course, in this particular case, the Republicans are not arguing that we must cut SNAP because we don’t have money. But that doesn’t much matter. Republicans throw out justifications for their policies in a random way. It is all about providing political cover. They know that their arguments don’t have to convince people; they just have to be good enough so that the mainstream press will report them as one side of their “both sides now” coverage. And as we see, the bar for that is low enough that a mouse could climb over it.

In order for a society to function properly, it is necessary that everyone agree on norms. What we are struggling with here is a press that can’t admit that one side of the political process has abandoned norms. We continue to get the most naive reporting where journalists pretend that Republicans really believe what they claim. In a normal system, it really would be okay for the press to go to both sides and see what they have to say. That would provide actual coverage. But in our system, reporting without analysis just plays into the hands of the Republican Party.

In the case of the SNAP defunding, we see very clearly how disingenuous the Republicans are. But even in this very clear case, the mainstream reporting does not go beyond he and she said. “The Democrats say that SNAP is a program with low costs, great effectiveness, and little waste. The Republicans say it is a program with high costs, poor effectiveness, and rampant waste. No one can say who’s right; it’s just a matter of opinion!” But of course there is an objective reality. The Republican position is actually just that they don’t like the government to spend money on the poor. And that’s fine! But they should be forced to make that argument and not hide behind falsehoods about fraud that our journalists could easily check if they weren’t afraid of not appearing “objective.”

The biggest political theory of the last 30 years is supply side economics. It was the basis of the policies of all Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan onward. The idea is that if the rich are given more money, they will use it to invest in business and thus create jobs. According to the theory, if you give money to the poor, they will just spend it. The rich, on the other hand, will help businesses to grow and this will help the poor.

The idea is nonsense as anyone who has ever run an actual business should be able to explain. Businesses expand when they see a lot of demand for their products. If a computer repair business has to turn away business for lack of resources, it will hire another tech to be able to take the extra work. This is as simple a notion as there is. Now it is also the case that in rare instances, a company may see a market opportunity but not expand to meet it because they simply don’t have the start up capital to do it. Maybe expanding would require buying more property and the cost of a loan is too high. But that is a rare case. In general, businesses are demand constrained.

But this isn’t a matter of conjecture. If businesses really acted the way that conservatives claim, then businesses should invest a lot more when profits were high compared to when they were low. That’s why I found the following graph from Dean Baker so interesting. It shows corporate profits and investment as a share of GDP since the end of World War II. The thing to notice here is that there is nothing to notice:

In general: corporate profits don’t seem to have any effect on investment. In there is any effect at all, in the long term, it seems that high profits lead to lower investments, not the other way around. So it seems that the very basis for supply side economics is wrong. In fact, look at the 1980s. As taxes went down (not seen on the graph), the share of investment went down. When taxes went up in the 1990s, investment went up. I’m not saying that high taxes cause investment to increase. Rather, tax policy doesn’t seem to have much effect on investment at all.

Associated with this is the conservative obsession with budget deficits (at least when a Democratic is in the White House). Again, the argument against deficits is that government borrowing “crowds out” private borrowing and thus investment. It is certainly true that if the government is borrowing a lot of money while the economy is booming, borrowing costs may be high and thus cause the private sector to invest less than it normally would. The problem is that conservatives rarely complain about deficits when the economy is doing well. Instead, they complain about them at times like now when the economy could use government spending. Right now there is all kinds of money sitting around looking for places to invest. Unfortunately, there are few private sector takers for that money because businesses don’t see any reason to invest when demand is so poor.

Bobby Jindal was right when he said that the Republicans had become the stupid party. It is very strange. I understand that not everyone agrees about policy. But the Republicans have lost any grip they once had on good policy. Their policy is entirely driven by ideology. They don’t push free market solutions because they think that they produce the best results. They define free market solutions as good and don’t care what results come from them. That’s no way to run a country. We saw where such thinking brought the Soviet Union. That is where the Republicans are headed.

According to legend, 190 years ago Joseph Smith found those golden plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon. There is no doubt that there were no golden plates. But that still leaves an important question: was Smith delusional or was he just a charlatan? I tend to think the latter. What really makes me think that is the fact that Smith put together the Book of Mormon witnesses. If he had been simply delusional—prone to religious visions—he would not have felt compelled to justify his loony story. As a con, Mormonism is far more interesting than it is as a religion. As a religion, it is a throwback to much earlier faiths. By the start of 19th century, there was much more interesting religious thought and it just isn’t found in Mormonism. This isn’t to say that Mormonism is a bad religion. I figure that most religions started as one form of a con or other.

Singer Nick Cave is 56 today. Here he is with the Bad Seeds doing “Red Right Hand”:

Other birthdays: political activist Christabel Pankhurst (1880); Tommy Lasorda (86); Jeremiah Wright (72); singer Debby Boone (57); and comedian Sue Perkins (44).

The day, however, belongs to the great physicist Michael Faraday who was born on this day in 1791. In physics, we tend to only celebrate the theorists, but Faraday is one of the few exceptions to this. His experimental work led directly to the development of Maxwell’s equations, which are pretty much the beginning and end of of electromagnetism. Among Faraday’s many discoveries was electromagnetic induction. This is the process by which changing magnetic fields create electric potentials. In other words, if you apply a magnetic field to a circuit, it will cause a current to start. Faraday is an example of how one doesn’t need to know mathematics to do physics. Of course, he clearly had great mathematical reasoning ability—he was simply never trained in its formalism. My experience teaching physics was that students who claimed to understand the physics but not the math actually understood neither.

Happy birthday Michael Faraday!

On this day in 1866, the great writer H. G. Wells was born. One of the holy trinity of early science fiction (with writer Jules Verne and publisher Hugo Gernsback), he is best known for novels like The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. As he got older, he turned away from science fiction and became much more interested in realistic social commentary in the form of the more talented Upton Sinclair, who won the day only yesterday. Still, as with Sinclair, his politics were worthy and he did much to improve society. I find him compelling even when he was wrong about things; if it can be said of anyone, it can be said of him: he had a pure heart.

Novelist Stephen King is 66 today. I’m not a huge fan of his, but I’ve read enough of his work to know what an incredible talent he is. The Shining, for example, is really well done. It is extremely frightening and engaging. According to him, the great Richard Matheson is his biggest influence. (Note: I just learned that Matheson died on 23 June; I had hoped he would make it into his 90s; I’m very sad.) He also said something that I really like, because it means that King thinks I’m talented, “If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.” I don’t really agree with that, however. I’ve been paid to write some fairly bad stuff and no one is interested in paying me to write my best work. But I do like the idea that no one should be able to doubt my talent because I paid my PG&E bill with money I made from writing.

The prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe is 59. He is important because he is now doing in Japan what none of the “serious” rulers in other developed countries are doing: he’s spending money. Roughly 70 years ago, the whole world learned that the way to get an economy out of recession is for the government to spend money. This acts as a way to jump start the economy. But somehow, when the world went suddenly into recession in 2008, all the “smart people” of the world forgot the lessons that we learned from the Great Depression. Instead of calling for governments to spend money, all these people called for balanced budgets and other forms of austerity. After five years of this madness, we clearly see what everyone should already have known: Keynesian economics works. Shinzo Abe is the only major leader who is acting on this. Of course, he hasn’t been in power long enough for us to see the final results. The initial results are good and I have little doubt he will be successful. But I also don’t doubt that once he is successful, the “smart people” will refuse to accept the fact and will instead insist that the only way out of recession is more austerity.

Other birthdays: the great Mannerist painter Lodovico Cardi (1559); low temperature physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853); composer of The Planets Gustav Holst (1874); the founder of Penguin Books Allen Lane (1902); novelist Fannie Flagg (69); producer Jerry Bruckheimer (68); actor Bill Murray (63); filmmarker Ethan Coen (56); actor Rob Morrow (51); actor Ricki Lake (45); and actor Luke Wilson (42).

The day, however, belongs to the great animator Chuck Jones who was born on this day in 1912. He is best known for being the most innovative of the directors during the golden age of Warner Bros. Cartoons. He started as an assistant animator and worked his way up. By 1938, he was directing whole cartoons. At first, these were very much in the tradition of Disney Studios: they were beautifully rendered, but not really funny. Slowly, he developed the style that we associate with Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes; it wasn’t until the late 1940s and 1950s that he was creating his best work. He continued to work for Warner into the 1960s, when he started his own studios (which did work for Warner Bros. in addition to many others). One of his greatest triumphs was the animated Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in 1966. Here is Rabbit Seasoning from the peak of Jones’ creative period at Warner in 1952:

Here is a video clip I found some time ago where Chuck Jones teaches how to draw Bugs Bunny. Of course, using it, I tried to draw the wascally wabbit and found it was not nearly as easy as the master made it appear:

Happy birthday Chuck Jones!

On 13 January 2012, the cruise ship Costa Concordia hit a rock off Isola del Giglio and basically fell over. It was sad—mostly because 32 people died. But I’ve never been that interested because as tragedies go, it wasn’t much of one unless you are a shareholder of the Carnival Corporation. But yesterday, an acquaintance sent me a link to the image above (the link has a higher resolution image). And I am interested in the photo.

In a fundamental sense, I have a very immature appreciation for art. I like bright colors. A lot. And in that way, I don’t suppose that I’m much different from most toddlers. There is much to like in this picture. The composition is great—the various elements fit together like blocks. The light on the pole out frame is a nice touch. And the whole thing looks like the mess that one wakes to after a hard night of drinking.

But mostly, I just like the red, blue, and yellow.

Update (21 September 2013 10:58 pm)

Originally, I wrote that 2 people had died. I don’t know why I thought that. And that makes it a far more tragic accident. Sorry about that.