There’s a little bit of a work slowdown here at Frankly Curious. There are a couple of reasons for this. Primarily, I have been having the worst time sleeping, and even though that means I’m awake a lot, I don’t feel much like writing. Also, I am doing taxes. I think the worst of that is over. So if I can manage to get a decent night’s sleep tonight, I might write quite a lot tomorrow. As it is, I’ve seen a number of films recently—in particular: Identity Thief and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. One of those is excellent; I’ll let you guess which. And of course, there is lots of politics, including the very interesting story of Timothy McKinney who is on death row in Memphis and almost certainly innocent. I also have something to say about plagiarism, Stephen Glass, and Charles Manson.

So forgive my absence but hurry back soon because, as always, there’s lots going on in my scattered brain.

Since I’ve started doing these birthday posts, I’ve never come upon a day like this. I wish I could spread out these birthdays, because normally, I would feature any number of these people.

The last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions, Guy Fawkes was born on this day in 1570. Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743. Butch Cassidy was born in 1866. Scrabble inventor Alfred Mosher Butts was born in 1899. American Atheists founder Madalyn Murray O’Hair was born in 1919. Don Adams was born in 1923. Playwright Lanford Wilson was born in 1937. And Christopher Hitchens was born in 1949.

Al Green is 67 today. Ron Perlman is 63. The great Amy Goodman is 56. And chess player Garry Kasparov is 50.

But the winner of the day, by less than I would have predicted, is the great playwright Samuel Beckett who was born on this day back in 1906. In celebration, here is his short (10 minute) play Ohio Impromptu starring Jeremy Irons:

Happy birthday Samuel Beckett!

Jonathan Chait wrote an interesting article today about how conservative pundits are now attacking Obama from the left, Conservatives Decide Obama Is Too Conservative. It had a particularly good catch from Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon who now says that Obama shouldn’t be trying to cut the deficit, but rather be pushing his jobs program. As Chait pointed out, this is a total reversal from what he said when Obama first proposed his jobs program. At that point, Continetti was pushing the same old conservative canard that the government can’t create jobs. It’s fun to read.

But Chait also pointed out something that is important about the mistake which Obama’s budget is: in his column today, Charles Krauthammer wrote that Obama should offer that the tax increases in his budget go half to reducing the deficit and half to reducing marginal tax rates. Jonathan Chait rightly notes that this is (yet another) conservative attack from the left. But here’s the thing: he and the others are only able to make this attack from the left because Obama has moved so far to the right. Just like I (and oh so many others) predicted!

I understand. There is not going to be a budget deal. This isn’t just because the Republicans refuse to do anything. The truth is that the Sequester is just starting to affect the economy. It will keep economic growth slow for the next two years. A Grand Bargain, as much as I am against it, would be good for the economy in the short term. The Republicans do not want that. They are hoping for a replay of 2010 in 2014. And they have a good chance of getting it.

For all of my adult life, I have watched the Democratic Party compromise in the name of being “competitive” with the Republicans. This was always a mistake. Reagan barely won in 1980 and only did win because Paul Volcker created a recession just in time for the election. And then, he lowered interest rates and created a boom, just in time for the 1984 election. Democrats learned the wrong lesson from those losses, just as Republicans learned the wrong lessons from Bush Sr’s loss. But whereas the Republicans obtuseness has only made them more conservative, the Democratic obtuseness has also made them more conservative. And that leaves us with President Obama.

Regardless of what the president thinks, offering compromises like entitlement cuts just moves the political debate further to the right. What he ought to have done is act like cutting Social Security would be as painful for him as sacrificing Natasha and Malia to the gods. But he didn’t do that—because he continues to hold on to the wrong lessons of the 1980s. And in the end, it might be good for his “legacy” (whatever the fuck that is). But it is not good for the liberal cause and it is not good for the Democratic Party.

Just ask Charles Krauthammer.

Afterword

People sometimes complain that I take too much knowledge for granted, so let me clarify my Paul Volcker comment. Paul Volcker was the Federal Reserve chairman appointed by President Carter. Inflation was very high, so Volcker made money less available (by raising interest rates). This threw the economy into recession. After inflation was under control (1982-83), he made money more available (by lowering interest rates). This caused businesses to invest and started an economic boom that we call “morning in America.” That was all Volcker’s doing; it wasn’t Reagan. In case you were wondering.

In gratitude, Reagan replaced Volcker with Alan Greenspan the first chance he got, which was 1987. (Note: the last two Fed chairmen were appointed by Republicans and kept on by Democrats.)

It’s a burden. You know that, right? Being very smart is a burden. I’m not talking about myself, in case you were wondering, because I’m not very smart. But young Matt Yglesias is, and his intelligence leads him horribly astray from time to time. Like today: two different articles really stood out for their very intelligent cluelessness.

First up, Yglesias explains, Why Aren’t There More Employee-Owned Firms? His answer: it’s the managers, stupid! Workers don’t care about owners; it’s the managers who make their lives hell. In fact, he claims that the self-employed are happier because they don’t have to deal with managers telling them what to do. Having spent most of my life self-employed, I can tell you that this is a crock. What you quickly learn is that your clients (or customers) are even worse and more unreasonable than any manager you’ve ever had.

Now, I don’t know why there are so few employee-owned firms, but I have some ideas. First, its about norms. I understand that modern conservatives have become revolutionary and thus inured to norms. But most people are not. I have had a lot of small businesses because my father did. And he did because his father did. I always knew I could start a business, because lots of people who were no better than I did the same thing. Those trailblazers who don’t know any people in business and yet start their own? They are the exception. (Ever noticed that in any given area, the convenience stores are mostly owned by one group of immigrants?)

Second, the reason there are so few employee-owned firms, is that in the real world (not the corporate and Wall Street world), owning your own business is really hard. When it is yours you are much more likely to do all the extra work. When you are just one-five thousandth, not so much. The same thing goes on with group projects in school. In my experience, one person ends up doing all the work. (That person, of course, was always me.)

So Yglesias was wrong about that. But he wasn’t finished! He asked a second question, Do Immigrant Engineers Depress Engineer Wages? His answer: not that I can tell! Now look: I’m very pro-immigration. I would like to see far more immigration into this country. But this is the most basic of economics. If the quantity of the supply of a product (in this case: labor) is increased, it will cause prices to go down. Would it be a catastrophic blow to engineer wages? Almost certainly not. And in the long run, it would be better for everyone.[1] But don’t tell me it will have no effect. That’s just dumb, even though it is doubtless the result of over-thinking.

Again, I have experience with this. Technology films do not like H-1B Visa employees because they are cheap. In general, they’re a little cheaper. But not much because the companies who provide them get paid excessively for it. (Often more than the employee himself gets.) But what is best about them from a corporate standpoint is that they are reliable, work ridiculous hours, and have no choice! That last part is critical. Going along with this is that it divides the labor force and makes it harder for native employees to unionize. That’s what’s going on.

I don’t mean to beat up on Yglesias. It was a slow news day unless you are naive enough to worry about North Korea or especially fond of Jonathan Winters. Just the same, he’s totally wrong about these issues. But in a totally Yglesias way!

[1] For the record, I think if we are committed to the dynamic economy that everyone seems to think is so great (I disagree), then we need to have really strong and well funded programs to provide for dislocated workers. As it is now, we provide almost no support for such workers and it is wrong.

The Washington Post published an editorial this morning, It’s the GOP’s Turn to be Serious with the Budget. With a title like that, you would think it would be a great read and a strong statement. Instead, it is almost entirely false equivalence, because, I guess, the Post doesn’t want to lose its status as a Very Serious Newspaper. But they couldn’t just pretend that the president hadn’t offered the Republicans what they wanted in entitlement cuts.

Let me go through the editorial, because it really is pretty much all bad. It starts with a statement about why we don’t get “compromise”—that great end in itself that all the professional centrists hold as the highest good. They follow this by attacking the National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club for valuing purity over governing. Note the false equivalence here? The NRA has manage to make even the tiniest of gun law reforms impossible. All the environmental groups combined couldn’t even get a permanent ban on deep water oil drilling after 13 million gallons of oil were spilled in the Gulf of Mexico. But that isn’t even my main problem with the Post’s attack. Interest groups are not in the business of “the art of the possible.” The NRA should be just as pure as it is. The problem is how the politicians treat these groups. In the case of the Sierra Club, it is about right. In the case of the NRA, it is out of all proportion to its actual power. But that’s not the NRA’s fault.

Next, the Post discusses how difficult the politics of the retiring baby boomers is. This is not true. There is no problem with Social Security. There is a problem with Medicare, but that’s just our broken healthcare system that is going to bring down our entire nation if it doesn’t get fixed. It is not a retirement problem. Any of the minor problems we may have could be fixed with a little more in taxes: raise the payroll tax cap! But the Post won’t even acknowledge that solution.

Here’s a great sentence that shows entirely where the Post is coming from: “Republicans want entitlement reform; Democrats want higher taxes.” Do you see that? Republicans want “reform” not “cuts” while the Democrats want “higher taxes” not “revenue reform.” Euphemisms for the unpopular conservative ideas and blunt reporting of the unpopular liberal ideas. Balance!

Finally, in the fourth paragraph, we get a sentence where the Post editors compliment the president: “President Obama’s proposed budget has taken a big step toward acknowledging reality.” Note that it doesn’t acknowledge reality, just takes a step toward it. This sentence is followed immediately with, “No, it’s not big enough.” And they spend the rest of the paragraph complaining about how unrealistic Obama’s plan is.

The next paragraph is probably the best in terms of looking at the situation objectively. The editorial states, “But Mr. Obama has injected a courageous note of realism where the Republicans so far have shown none.” And then, like the Serious Centrists they are, they celebrate the fact that the president’s base has greeted these cuts with horror. Nothing makes a professional centrist happier than a policy that makes liberals unhappy.

Now we get to the hypocrisy section of the editorial. The Post goes after Republican leaders for responding dismissively. For example, they note that Mitch McConnell said that the cuts were too modest. What is the Post’s problem with that statement? What all Republican leaders are saying (with the notable exception of Greg Walden) is exactly what the Post is saying: a good start but not enough—not nearly enough.

The rest of the editorial is just a call to all the “reasonable” Republicans (who the Post somehow “knows” exist) to step up to the plate. Strangely, they applaud John Boehner because he used the word “encouraging” even though he also explicitly said it was “the least we could do.” But you know the false equivalence brigade: if they say something nice about Obama, they’ve got to say something nice about Boehner. It’s the law!

What the Washington Post is trying to do in this editorial is push back against liberals like me who wrote that Obama’s gambit would not win the praise of the Serious Centrists. But they’ve only managed to prove us right. We never said that they would just dismiss Obama out of hand. In their minds Obama has taken the first step on a long journey, but he is still miles away from the promised land of Compromisia. So the calculus is: Obama dumping all over the wishes of his base equals Boehner saying it is “encouraging.”

That Obama budget really turned things around, didn’t it?!

The great sculptor Felix de Weldon was born on this day in 1907. Six fingered bluesman Hound Dog Taylor was born in 1912. And ethnomusicologist and wacky performer Tiny Tim was born in 1932.

Manuel Neri of the Bay Area Figurative Movement is 83. Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement is 76. Herbie Hancock is 73. Tom Clancy and David Letterman are 66. David Cassidy is 63. And Andy Garcia is 57.

The birthday contest winner is author Scott Turow who is 64 today. I really can’t say how good Turow is, but his books are always fun to read. I give him the day because I really feel that he taught me how to write a novel. I read a bunch of his novels in quick succession, and I picked up a lot of his tricks: pacing, character development, and most of all, how to fool the reader.

So happy birthday Mr. Turow!

Afterword

Here’s a song for all of the birthdays:

Meet Christopher Knight. He disappeared in the wilderness of Maine 27 years ago as a 20 year old. And he just came back out.

Well, perhaps that will give you the wrong idea. He has been living alone in the woods all these years, but he would go to one of the 300 camps around North Pond and steal the supplies that he needed: mostly food, but also clothes, propane, batteries. Finally, the police caught him last Thursday according to the Morning Sentinel.

Knight is a fascinating man. He isn’t mentally ill, and by all accounts he seems to be very intelligent and well spoken. Why he decided to become a hermit 27 years ago is a mystery even to him. He says he was always interested in hermits and loved the book Robinson Crusoe. I figure it is like all of us: you start doing something (like being married or writing a blog) and you just stay with it until there is a really compelling reason to stop.

For years and years, Knight was something of a legend. No one really knew if the North Pond Hermit was a real thing or not. But now that he’s been captured, the story is more amazing than the myth. One detail of his capture that struck me: he was clean shaven with short hair and in clean cloths. If you go to the Sentinel story, you can see many pictures of his campground. He has clothes lines, a tent, even a makeshift shower.

You really should go over and read the whole story. I was riveted. And what’s more, I don’t see how this story doesn’t manage to go viral. It’s just too great.

Matt Yglesias is upset that Taylor Swift’s new Diet Coke commercial perpetuates unfortunate stereotypes about songwriting. He doesn’t like that the video shows Swift scribbling lyrics in a notebook. According to Yglesias, that’s just not the way it’s done in the modern world. He claims that songwriting is collaborative. Well, it often is. But that’s not really what he’s getting at. When he gets down to it, he quite properly writes, “The unfortunate reality is that [Swift’s] operating in a world that’s oddly averse to celebrating the virtues of collaboration and division of labor when it comes to music.” And here I thought we were talking about songwriting!

I love songwriting. And nothing shows off a good song like simple production just as nothing fixes a weak song like great production. Production is very much a team sport. Sure, the geniuses can sit alone and do great work all by themselves. But even they benefit from collaboration. But production is something you do to a song. The song just is. And most songs to this day are written by individuals.

Personally, when I write a song, there is a process to it. I do not pick up a guitar or a notebook. Melodies just come to me. I play with them in my head. I try different lyrics with them. And most of the time it just stops there. But if I think it has potential, I’ll store it in my phone or write it down. Later, I will craft what is usually just a line or two into a song. That’s pretty much it. The whole process can take an hour or years. A lot of times, I’ve finished a song but have never felt that I really did justice to it. Not that any of this really matters. All my songs just sit in notebooks and on tapes (and increasingly in bytes). But my approach is entirely typical of how songs get written.

I’m not against attacking Taylor Swift. Unlike Matt Yglesias, I think she’s a talentless singer and a so-so songwriter. But I have no doubt that the commercial is more or less how most of her songs are written. Now the song “22”? I don’t know. My guess is that Swift wrote the base of the song and then Max Martin and Shellback fixed it. Like I said: she’s a so-so songwriter. Also, they are the producers and maybe they did so much work on the song, it was considered fair to give them songwriting credit. Or maybe it was in their contracts. Or maybe they wrote the song and just added Swift’s name. All of these things happen. But nothing in the commercial is particularly incorrect about how a song gets written.

In Jonathan Bernstein’s Happy Hour Roundup at The Plum Line last night, he provided links to three articles that argue in different ways that there is much to like in Obama’s new budget. I’ve never argued otherwise, but I have been too focused on the entitlement cuts. Let’s be clear though: Obama’s offer of these cuts is very bad. Even if nothing happens in the next four years, Republicans will go on to accuse Democrats of intransigence. “Even that socialist Obama thought we needed to cut entitlements!”

Annie Lowrey over at the Economix Blog argued that Obama’s entire focus, not just his budgets, have been about reducing income inequality. She rightly noted that the ACA (Obamacare) will help the issue. Just on the face, giving people healthcare who didn’t have it before makes them richer; it doesn’t matter that you aren’t giving them cash. But perhaps as important, it will make medical bankruptcies far less common. (Remember the big push by the feds to make bankruptcy harder because all of these spendthrifts were abusing the poor bankers? It was mostly bankruptcies because of our broken healthcare system.)

She went on to mention a number of good things that are in the new budget. It includes a rise in the minimum wage, universal preschool, and of course, slightly higher taxes for rich people. One thing that is in there really surprised me: the earned income tax credit (EITC). The budget would make it permanent. I thought it already was, especially since traditionally, that is one form of welfare conservatives agree with. Well, it is only in effect until 2017. That’s a big deal. The idea that President Paul Ryan would end the program is very troubling.

In the great Wonk Blog fashion, Brad Plumer presented Winners and Losers in the White House Budget. The winners (at least in terms of programs) are primarily the poor. As Lowrey pointed out, there is the EITC and the minimum wage. But in addition, although Medicare is cut, Medicaid is not. To some extent, this defines Obama’s economic policies. I can see that he truly does care about the poor. It is when you move up the income ladder to the middle class, that he thinks things are fine. But they aren’t fine. And helping the middle class thrive is really important to all of the classes.

I disagree with Plumer on his biggest loser, “Wealthy taxpayers and the finance industry.” The amount of money that he is talking about taking from them is very small. An argument can certainly be made that hedge fund managers and others who use the carried interest loophole are losers. But I would counter that taxing someone 15 percentage points more who makes many millions of dollars per year does not qualify as a loser. Regardless, the vast majority of the rich will see little change at all. People like Mitt Romney and Warren Buffett will still get to pay less than 15% in taxes on their income. And, of course, there is not a peep about taxing financial transactions. (If you don’t know why that is, just look at Obama’s Wall Street pals.)

Matt Yglesias does something different: he contrasts the Obama budget with the Paul Ryan budget. It ain’t pretty. He makes three points. First, Ryan balances the entire budget on the backs of the poorer classes; Obama avoids this primarily by taxing the rich. Second, Ryan balances the budget without hurting today’s seniors by screwing tomorrow’s seniors; Obama, as we know, cuts entitlements marginally on everyone. And third, Ryan believes that all we have to do is destroy most of the government and that our economy will boom; Obama actually proposes a small amount of well targeted stimulus spending.

As usual, when you dig down into Obama’s policies, they look a lot better. But that isn’t what I have a problem with. I know that politics is the art of the possible. I know that in real life, I am not going to get policies that I am even close to being completely happy with. My problem is that my side doesn’t even try to push for liberal policies. We can’t talk about single payer healthcare. We can’t talk about raising the payroll tax cap. We can’t talk about adding new tax brackets to make the filthy rich pay for all that they get from a stable country.

And then there is the whole question of how well our team is playing the game. This morning, Jonathan Chait wrote an article in which he argued that Obama wants a Grand Bargain in order to solidify his presidential legacy. The problem, he notes, is that the Republicans don’t want to give him that. And hidden in his argument is my more fundamental argument that Obama really does want Chained-CPI. But the fact remains that the Republicans won’t give him a deal because the optics are terrible. What would people say if the man they claimed was a socialist managed to actually improve the country?

Afterword

I’m not saying that Obama necessarily would have improved the country if he got what he wanted. But I don’t think the Republicans have any idea of what they actually want to do. Whenever asked, they talk around the margins. Healthcare reform? Allow people to buy insurance across state lines! Yeah, that’ll fix the whole problem.

Cartoonist Dale Messick was born on this day back in 1906. The first African-American woman to graduate from Yale Law School, Jane Bolin was born in 1908. The founder of the Church of Satan Anton LaVey was born in 1930. And Stuart Adamson of the band Big Country was born in 1958.

Actor Joel Grey, who I still can’t believe isn’t gay, is 81. Louise Lasser is 74. Idiot filmmaker John Milius is 69. And Peter Riegert is 66.

Today is terrible for birthdays. That’s why I have to give it to Chris Ferguson who is 50 today. He’s the famous poker player with the the cowboy hat and long hair. Plus he has a PhD in computer science. Best of all, the Justice Department is accusing Ferguson of running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded a number of people out of over $400 million. But compared to other famous poker players, Ferguson seems rather nice.

Afterword

If I had gotten any sleep last night, I think I’d go with Messick, Bolin, or even Adamson. Here’s some music:

On tonight’s The Rachel Maddow Show, David Axelrod explained that everything Obama has ever done or ever will again do is just right. We actual liberals just don’t get it. We don’t understand the bigger issues that Serious Democrats understand. We don’t understand that “free” trade agreements are great because they make rich people even more rich, even though they don’t help the poor and middle class anywhere. We don’t understand that the loss of manufacturing jobs is just a sign of globalization and there is nothing we can do so we ought to be happy with those minimum wage service jobs. We don’t understand that what is good for GE, Exxon, and GM is good for America.

In other words: we don’t understand that the Republicans are right about all the economic issues.

Axelrod patiently explained that we just have to do something about Social Security because Medicare is in trouble. He also explains that, sure, he would be for raising the payroll tax cap. That ought to be part of the mix. That was his word: part. Because, you know, we have to be reasonable about this. For every dollar that a rich man pays, we need to take a dollar away from a poor man. Not doing that might, I don’t know, hurt the feelings of the Republicans. Off course, Axelrod was quick to note that a payroll tax increase will never happen. Rachel Maddow pushed back on him pretty hard; it was nice to see. And it even made Axelrod backpedal a bit.

And maybe that’s why he never got around to saying that liberals are fucking retarded. Maybe that’s why he’s not major of Chicago.

When I see a bald guy with ear rings who has clearly never been to jail, I think: prison rape fantasies. That’s what I was thinking while watching gun rights advocate and overall Republican fucktard Kevin Williamson on All In tonight. But he made a great point: the new “gun control” legislation is basically useless. This is in the context of Chris Hayes’ claim that the center of gravity of American politics is moving a bit to the left.

But even in Hayes’ theory, he notes that when it comes to economic issues—you know, the issues that affect almost everyone—there has been no progress (I’d say it is worse than that, and I’ll be discussing it tomorrow). But even when it comes to gun control, the progress is mostly illusory. And on immigration, it is perhaps worse. As I reported back in February, even if the Democrats get what they want, it will be terrible compared to the immigration law that Ronald Reagan signed.

Is this what liberalism has become? Are we so used to losing badly that standing still feels like a win? I wrote as much over the weekend. But then, I was getting at the fact that our “liberal” leaders are not really liberal and that this fact was holding us back. In this case, it’s even worse. Even if we yield all the very good evidence that the Democratic Party has abandoned the goal of working toward an equitable economy, the liberal movement is still just treading water.

I understand that liberals want to feel good about the state of the movement. I know I want to feel good about it. But I’m not willing to be deluded about it. Not only can I wait until there is something really worth celebrating, I know that we must wait. Pretending that things are going well for the liberal movement just makes us more complacent. And most important: it makes real change—Real improvement!—far less likely.

So remember that Chris Hayes! It’s okay if the rest of the MSNBC staff turn into hagiographers for Obama and the Democratic Party. But we expect more from you.