John Nichols is angry at Harry Reid. Of course, who isn’t. Let’s look back at a little Harry Reid history, shall we? In January 2011, Harry Reid just said no to filibuster reform. (Note: he said no in 2009 too, when he could have changed the rules over a Republican filibuster!) But then Reid changed his mind. Last May, he went to the Senate floor and said, “If there were ever a time when Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley were prophetic, it’s tonight. These two young, fine senators said it was time to change the rules of the Senate, and we didn’t. They were right. The rest of us were wrong—or most of us, anyway. What a shame.”

This is what people hate about liberals. Sure, in the abstract liberals stand for something. When it is theoretical whether to reform the filibuster, Harry Reid is there to give a full-throated endorsement! But after a few months tick away and he has the ability to actually do the reform, he goes all soft: “The Democrats will someday be in the minority and we will want the filibuster!”

(As I’ve said ad nauseam, this shows a shocking lack of political savvy. The Republicans, for all their faults, are not a bunch of spineless assholes. What they believe in is generally all wrong, but I will grant them that they actually do believe in it. They will destroy the filibuster the moment it is to their advantage. And when they do, Harry Reid will be out of office and he’ll say, “If there were ever a time when Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley were prophetic, it’s tonight. These two young, fine senators said it was time to change the rules of the Senate, and we didn’t. They were right. The rest of us were wrong—or most of us, anyway. What a shame.”)

This week when the Republicans filibustered Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Secretary of Defense, Harry Reid was shocked, shocked I tell you! He was again on the floor of the Senate, “It is shocking that our Republicans colleagues would leave our nation without a secretary of defense with all the things going on and when we’re in a war.” As Nichols points out, if Reid means troubling or unsettling, then yes, it is shocking. But if he means surprising or unexpected? Well then, I have two little words for the majority leader: fuck you!

Basically, everyone told Reid this, except, you know, his political enemies. People claim that doing the same thing twice and expecting something different makes you insane. That’s not true. But it does make you a dumbshit. Let’s see now, Reid got a handshake agreement from McConnell in 2011. And it was worthless! So Reid got a handshake agreement from McConnell in 2013. And it is worthless!

There are really only two ways to look at this. Perhaps Reid really is as big a dumbshit as he appears to be. Or, and I think this is more likely, he cares far more about his “friends across the isle” in the senate than he does about the United States of America. Regardless, that mother fucker better not try to get another term as senator in 2016. His “use by” date is long expired.

Afterword

Jonathan Bernstein has argued that Reid could fix the filibuster at any time. Unfortunately, I just spent a half hour trying to find the article and I can’t.

I was doing a job at a church and I had to be reminded by my partner not to discuss, you know, theology. This is because the Baptists we were working for might mistake the question I raised with some children as anti-religious. The question: if God created the universe, what created God? This is, of course, the ultimate theological question that all religions try to answer. But I have to admit, most Christians I talk to are so obtuse that they do indeed see the question as more an affront to religion than a basis of it.

One of the children I was speaking to actually gave me a great answer. He smiled and shrugged. That very nimbly sums up my theological thinking. Existence itself makes no sense and I’m quite happy with that.

I just finished reading Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? I wrote my thoughts about this subject before reading it, as a kind of test to see if the book changed my thinking. And it did: I now realize that all of the thinkers who deal with this stuff are deceiving themselves in very clever ways. It is all intellectual folderol designed to hide the great paradoxes that are existence.

There is just something at the base of my being that finds infinite time and spaces and the feedbacks they imply very comfortable. I have no problem believing in an infinite number of universes. There would have to have always been an infinite number of universes because existence has always been. There is no beginning and there is no end. Or the beginning and end are the same thing in some kind of Mobius strip of time and space. Regardless, we are parochial by nature. We are part of the universe and thus can never really understand it.

Why Does the World Exist? is filled with really smart people. But in the end, the only one who speaks to me is Adolf Grunbaum. This is strange, because after first reading him, I hated what he had to say. Basically, he nullifies the very question of why anything exists. He claims that this is just our prejudice. (He doesn’t say this, but I suspect that it comes from the fact that we start out nonexistent—or at least we think we do.) On first brush, I felt that his answer to the question was to not answer the question. But actually, his thinking is more or less the same as mine: it only seems natural that nothing should exist because of our parochial nature.

But there is one thing I got from the book: a quote from Claude Levi-Strauss on a 91st birthday celebration. It gets to the heart of what I have long thought about dying. “Montaigne said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter or half the man. But Montaigne only lived to be fifty-nine, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find myself in today.” Exactly! The way I see it is that I am constantly dying. Through the wonders of metabolism, I am always turning into to something else. It is a chemical trick that I think that I am something. Instead, I am a series of related things. And who knows? Maybe the infinite things that I have thought myself to be all still exist and my tiny collection of cells that make up my consciousness is just too focused on chasing some kind of time gradient to notice. Regardless, it won’t be me who dies, because I am not dead.

I wonder if such thoughts bother other people. To me they are a welcome respite from the horrors of politics and all the other trivialities that make up everyday life. As such, Why Does the World Exist? is a fun read for those so inclined. And there are cool things in the book like how one might create a new universe in the lab. I knew I should have taken more chemistry when I was in school!

Afterword

The only other book by Holt that I’ve read is Stop Me If You’ve Heard This. It is a history and philosophy of jokes. Holt is my kind of guy. He clearly understands what is important: existence and jokes!

Greg Sargent (with the help of Paul Van de Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) has an idea for how Republicans can win the Sequester fight. He notes that winning this fight is all about appearances. Thus far, the Democrats have agreed to $1.5 trillion in spending cuts and the Republicans have agreed to $700 billion in new tax revenue. If the Republicans just accept a one-to-one spend and revenue package to cancel the Sequester, they will have succeeded in getting 1.6 times as much in spending cuts as revenue increases. They should take it and declare victory.

But they won’t. Sargent writes that the Republicans have already defined victory as a total rout. And this is now what the Republican base expects. A moment’s thought will show that this is ridiculous. The Republicans are saying, “Let’s replace all these military spending cuts with Medicare cuts!” But somehow, they’ve convinced themselves that the previous spending cuts don’t count because “that was then.” And that the Fiscal Cliff tax increases should count because “that was now.” The previous spending cuts don’t matter in this debate but the previous revenue increases do matter. What it seems to all come down to is that the Republicans feel that they were humiliated in the Fiscal Cliff deal and the Sequester is where they get their revenge. It’s just silly.

Once again we come back to this tactical philosophy that if they can’t get everything they want (or at least 98%), they are going to take their toys and go home. I use a lot of hyperbole in my writing. But it really does seem that the Republicans behave on the level of five-year-olds. This goes back a lot further than Mitch McConnell’s statement that their number one goal was to make Obama a one term president, but that statement is telling. What he’s saying is that nothing else is as important, “If we Republicans don’t hold the White House what’s the point of being in Washington at all?”

I still think it is possible that somehow we will come up with a replacement for the Sequester. The Republicans have a habit of thinking (or pretending) that they have leverage that they don’t. And then they figure it out at the last minute. “It’s called wisdom; it comes to some suddenly.” But maybe it is just that the 100 or so totally crazy House Republicans have to be pacified until the end. I don’t really know. What is clear, however, is that Republicans continue to not only embarrass themselves, but our entire democracy.

This is interesting: Bill O’Reilly has a conservation where he’s the reasonable one! I like Sam Harris well enough. He’s a pretty good thinker. But there are times…

He really became noted as an atheist neoconservative. His rhetoric toward the Islamic religion was shocking. What I think I found most disturbing was that his knowledge of Islam is actually quite limited. He claims that the religion has jihad as a fundamental part of it. But this really is not more true of it than it is any of the Abrahamic faiths. The question is always how much any given follower is going to focus on this stuff. It is certainly the case that at times in the past, Muslims were a whole lot more reasonable than Christians. And today, I think the vast majority of people of all beliefs just want to be left alone to live their lives.

The following video is interesting in that it shows how a fine intellect can be used to justify base prejudice. Basically, his argument is this: All I know about Islam is what the terrorists claim; I haven’t heard any moderate Islamists attack the terrorist; therefore, Islam is a terrorist religion. This is a particularly shameful exercise, because Sam Harris must know that here in the United States, we really don’t hear a lot of Christians going out of their way to argue against anti-abortion Christian terrorists. If Harris cared to look, it isn’t hard to show that there are tons of Muslims speaking out against terrorists. (By the way: I’m neither pro-Islam nor anti-Islam; I find the faith as interesting as any of the Abrahamic religions; but I think it is pretty silly to believe in, of course; the same as I think about any of the Abrahamic religions.)

This video is remarkable in that it makes Bill O’Reilly seem reasonable. At least in the first interview; in the second one, O’Reilly is his usual stupid self. There is something really bizarre about seeing O’Reilly be the voice of reason. “I don’t know what good [using such inflamatory rhetoric] does other than to t-off Muslims around the world.” Well shut my mouth!

I think that I’ve noticed some thawing of Harris’ rigidity on this issue. But it may be just that he doesn’t talk about it much anymore. Regardless, on most other issues, he’s a pretty reasonable guy.

Bruce Bartlett is one of those Republicans who stood still. But he is still a Republican and still has a real conservative bent. But I’m the first to admit that not all conservative ideas are bad; I just think that all Republican ideas are bad (in as much as they have ideas). Today, in The Fiscal Times, Bartlett writes, The Minimum Wage: A No-Lose Issue for Democrats. Most of the article is some really vile strategizing about how the Republicans might win the fight over the minimum wage.

Basically, he offers the Winner-Take-All Politics approach to defeating popular legislation that you hate. “I am totally in favor of raising the minimum wage. If we were raising it to $8.99 per hour, I would vote for it. But I just cannot support $9 per hour!” Actually, Bartlett has some great ideas. He notes a couple of ways that the Republicans could kill a minimum wage bill by adding poison amendments like applying it to unpaid interns. (Actually, I kind of like that idea. I think the whole unpaid intern thing is totally out of hand.)

The first part of the article discusses why the minimum wage is such a great issue for Democrats. Even Republican women overwhelmingly support raising the minimum wage. And Republican men (“You know: morons!”) are against it, but not overwhelmingly so. What’s more, he notes that if raising the minimum wage hurts jobs (and he certainly believes so), it doesn’t hurt the currently employed; it just hurts people who would have gotten a minimum wage job at the lower rate:

Of course, we should care about this. But even still, Bartlett makes no argument that this will happen. As noted before, the increased wages of the poor will increase demand economy wide. And what this economy desperately needs is more demand.

A couple of years ago, David Kadavy wrote an article explaining to all the prols why the Comic Sans font sucks. But it is also kind of a defense of the font. As he notes, Comic Sans is very readable at low resolution. So what is the problem with the font? There are some technical matters—mostly just that text is not consistent; it tends to be splotchy. But just how much does that matter?

You would not want to read a book printed with Comic Sans. But a flyer? Or even a website? Who cares? The truth is that most hatred of Comic Sans comes down to a lot of pretentious brats ostentatiously showing off their graphic design knowledge. And I really question how much they all hate the font so much as just use said hatred to self-identify with a particular group.

I understand why people like Comic Sans. It is a friendly and fun font. It seems unpretentious. And for people who would once have created a “lost dog” flyer by hand, using Comic Sans is the closest thing. Personally, I find the font kind of boring at this point. But it certainly has its uses as with the t-shirt in the Vsause video below:

But there is one good reason to use Comic Sans on websites. HTML has very awkward font capabilities. In most cases, you just provide a large number of font names and hope that the client computer has one of them. The last time I checked (about 13 years ago), Comic Sans was by far the most common font, found on over 90% of all computers. So as a webpage creator, you could depend upon pages looking the same way on your computer as they do on your readers’ computers. And that is kind of important. (I tend to use Verdana, because it is a pretty good font and probably as ubiquitous as Comic Sans at this point.)

But really, don’t use Comic Sans. If Cute Overload is not using Comic Sans, you shouldn’t either.

Afterword

Here is the excellent Vsause video:

Nia-Malika Henderson and Felicia Sonmez reported yesterday on liberal and conservative responses to the president’s voting rights commission, Obama’s Proposed Voting Commission Under Partisan Fire From Both Sides. I’ve already provided the liberal complain: low expectations and working with anti-democratic conservatives. But I’m really surprised by the conservative complains about the new commission.

The arguments basically come down to the same thing they were saying about the Voting Rights Act. “Some conservatives view the initiative as federal overreaching on an issue that is rightly the province of states…” I see: if the states want to limit voting rights then the federal government should have nothing to say about it. After all, it isn’t like we have any founding principles or a document that says people ought to be equal before the law.

This is all interesting. Conservatives love to wrap themselves in the Constitution the same way they wrap themselves in the flag. They’re like typical American Christians who love the Bible but never take the time to actually read it. As Andrew Sullivan wrote yesterday, the GOP lunges “malevolently toward anything that is not far right. That includes the Constitution…” To them, the Constitution is just a stick to beat liberals with, “You’re not patriotic enough!” It is shameful.

Hans von Spa­kovsky of the Heritage Foundation makes the specious argument that since the average waiting time for voting is only 14 minutes, we should do nothing. In other words, because in Northern California I never have to wait at all, Floridians having to wait 6 hours is not a problem. Or to put it another way: the average temperature of my oven is only about 80 degrees, so it doesn’t work at all!

Of course, von Spakovsky’s main point is the usual conservative one: the more people who vote the better liberals do. “Obama’s commission may just be a stalking horse to implement liberals’ latest partisan ­fantasies of automatic and election day voter registration—so-called reforms that will stifle real improvements and endanger the integrity of our elections.” In other words: don’t make it easier to vote!

As I’ve said before: I understand why conservatives are against voting rights. Just the same, they could be a bit more subtle about it. They could at least claim to believe in democracy. But I suppose the onus is on liberals to highlight this fact. Conservatives are against democracy. Do you really want these people in control of government?

No entity in our polity right now is more radical and revolutionary than the current GOP: their contempt for institutional custom knows few bounds when it comes to the short-term tactical possibility of impeding even a newly re-elected president, after losing the popular vote for the presidency, Senate and House. The whole concept of putting country before party is that sometimes you take the long national view rather than the short partisan one. You give the other party a chance to govern, as the Democrats did Reagan. But the anti-conservative revolutionary party that Gingrich began and Kristol egged on is now in its zombie stage—with no viable way back to majority status but lunging slowly and malevolently toward anything that is not far right. That includes the Constitution and its evolved customs and parliamentary traditions.

—Andrew Sullivan
Holding Hagel Hostage, Ctd