Getting ready for tomorrow, I was reminded of the great Sonny Curtis. Here he is doing a version of his song I Fought the Law, which kind of sums up my life: an iconoclast who lost.

He also wrote and sang the theme song to The Mary Tyler Moore Show and wrote Leo Sayer’s hit More Than I Can Say.

In an update for a post earlier today, I noted that Jim Naureckas tweeted, “If only an armed guard could be placed next to every state trooper.” Well, it has become a thing. David Frum has now similarly tweeted 14 times.

First, dental clinics:

We need a federal agent at every dental clinic abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?sec…

— davidfrum (@davidfrum) December 22, 2012

Later, strip clubs:

We need a federal agent at every strip club wdrb.com/story/20372337…

— davidfrum (@davidfrum) December 22, 2012

And most recently, muffler shops:

We need a federal agent at every muffler shop topix.com/forum/philly/T…

— davidfrum (@davidfrum) December 22, 2012

He’s now up to 22 in the time it took me to embed those tweets. The point should be clear, just as I discussed in, NRA Calls for Militarizing Schools. There is no end to this. Gun violence is everywhere in America. The NRA call for protection for our children is really just a call for having a cop in every home. David Frum is being so reasonable these days, he may have to change parties. (Just kidding. He was defending Robert Bork earlier today.)

Update (22 December 2012 3:54 pm)

In the end, David Frum did a total of 32 tweets. He has collected them all in one place, ‘We Need a Federal Agent’.

Jonathan Bernstein at The Plum Line blog encourages us, Don’t Worry Too Much About John Kerry’s Senate Seat. I not exactly worried about this, but I have been opposed to it. Of course, that was when Kerry was going to be moving to the Pentagon. Moving to State seems like a better deal, but I still think it is a questionable idea.

Bernstein argues mostly that Scott Brown isn’t that big a threat. First, he says that Brown is not the favorite to win the special election next summer. But as reported yesterday by his own paper, Scott Brown Would Win Special Election Today. That’s just a poll nine months out, of course. But exit polling of the 6 November election showed that the people still liked Brown by a lot; they just liked Warren more. So Brown has at least a decent chance to take Kerry’s seat.

Bernstein says not to worry because the seat comes up for re-election in 2014. So the Democrats would have a second chance to defeat Brown. This strikes me as a very weak argument. If Brown wins the special election, he will almost certainly win the off-year election.

There is one issue that Bernstein brings up that I think is strong: Kerry is almost 70. He may not run for re-election in 2014 anyway. That’s an excellent point. It is also the case that the Democrats are prepared for a fight in this upcoming election in a way that they were not after Kennedy died. But I’m concerned about this nomination for another reason.

Obama shows an amazing lack of strategic thinking. We see this in the Fiscal Cliff negotiations where he wanted to include a two year extension of the debt ceiling. In this case, he seems to have forgotten that in 2014 there will be 20 Democrats to only 13 Republicans up for re-election in the Senate. Losing Kerry’s seat might not be a big deal now, but it could be the difference between a Democratic and Republican majority at the start of 2015.

So I’m still not convinced that Kerry’s move is good for the Democrats. But I like the idea of him at State. That would be good for America. But I’m not sure it would be enough to make up for the harm that Scott Brown would do in the Senate.

In his farewell address to the Senate, Jim DeMint said, “If we can win the hearts and minds of the American people with these ideas, I know we can engage and enlist them to convince all of you here to set the politics aside, the parties aside, and to adopt those ideas that work.” It has a certain charm to it: let’s put politics and parties aside and all agree to be Republicans. This is kind of at the heart of the Republican Party: the religious belief that they have good ideas. But as I’ve written before, other than tax cuts for the rich, destroying the social safety net, and an intense desire for power as power, they have no actual ideas. And regardless, they never test their ideas. They don’t mean to shrink the size of government because it will be good for the country; the want a smaller government because they believe in a smaller government.

Jamelle Bouie reports at The Plum Line blog, GOP Elevates Reactionary Tim Scott to South Carolina Senate Seat. How reactionary? He has the usual Republi-Crazy positions: climate change denier, deep water oil drilling proponent, stem cell research opponent. But in addition, he proposed a bill that would deny assistance to any family that had a member who went on strike. And he wanted to impeach Obama for the debt ceiling.

Bouie notes, “It should be said that for all of the real problems the GOP has with diversity in terms of its organization and its candidate pool, the party does an excellent job of elevating the minorities that do find themselves in its tent.” Of course, that is just a symptom of their fundamental racial problem. Rather than court minority groups with policy, they instead elevate those few minorities in their coalition. Frankly, I don’t think that Bobby Jindal or Marco Rubio are really ready for prime-time national politics. Neither would have risen so fast in the Democratic Party.

The same is at least as true of Tim Scott, who is an African American. He has only been in the House for one term. But more to the point, he is yet another example of the Republican Party trying to change its brand without changing its policies. Michael P. Jeffries writes in The Atlantic, “Scott’s policy positions prove him just as tone-deaf to the modern political world as his most conservative GOP colleagues. That makes him one of them at the same time he’s a useful foil. What he won’t be, however, is someone who helps the GOP win black and Hispanic voters.”

Jeffries goes on to talk about how it is that Scott is just a token in the Republican Party. Primarily, as with Herman Cain, he is a black man who completely reinforces the white power structure. And as a result, he wins by getting almost exclusively support from whites. But even more, he is only accepted in the party as long as he follows along. This makes me think of David Brock who explains in his book Blinded By the Right how he was accepted as a gay man as long as he was shilling for the conservative movement. The moment he strayed even a little, he saw what he had always been to them: a useful tool.

So the Republican Party continues to look for ways to not change. The appointment of Tim Scott is an excellent example of this doomed effort.

H/T Dean Baker

John Boehner seems like a nice enough guy. The truth is, I feel kind of sorry for him. He doesn’t seem like a ideologue. It’s possible that over the years, he’s come to realize that his party has no ideas other than the commitment to stay in power. Every time I see him, he looks like he would much rather be in a bar somewhere drinking. (And I’m pretty sure he spends a large part of the time I don’t see him doing exactly that.) At this point, I suspect his beliefs have ossified and he doesn’t even think about it any more. Outside of the House, he’d probably be an all right guy.

Having said that, I’m really enjoying this whole thing. The Republicans (and to a lesser extent the whole conservative movement) is in a full tilt meltdown. I don’t usually allow myself to experience this much schadenfreude, but I think I deserve this. It isn’t just that the vote for “Plan B” had to be called off. It is that they went ahead with a really vile spending cut bill to woo recalcitrant Republicans. This bill was a great big “Fuck you!” to a large majority of America. And they voted for it, because—and I don’t say this lightly—Republicans hate America. They have a hard time passing up any opportunity to flip off the Home of the Brave.

Had Boehner’s little tactical move worked, it still probably wouldn’t have worked. If, through some miracle that almost certainly would have required putting some blood on a page for Mephistopheles, Boehner had managed to force an Obama veto, who would have cared? At best, there would have been enough coverage to note the repellent nature of the harsh spending cuts on the poor in order to save tax cuts for the rich. This all brings me back to my suggestion a couple weeks ago in, The Obama-Boehner Conspiracy: Boehner understood all along that there could be no deal this year.

In the end, I don’t think this is really about Boehner. What we are seeing is how a movement that believes in very little other than power deals with a situation in which they have no power. Although even when they have power, their thinking seems only to converge on doing more damage to the Democrats. These people really don’t have any idea what they want to do. If suddenly they had 538 Republican members in Congress as well as control of the White House, they would be very confused. Sure: they would lower taxes and cut spending for just about everything. But otherwise? What would be the point of running a government they think is by definition too large?

But for now, it is a hell of a lot of fun watching them implode.

Afterword

I understand that conservatives love some idea that they call “America.” It is usually the country as they perceive it must have been at some earlier time: in the 1950s or the 1780s. But the truth is, what we are is pretty much what we’ve always been: for good and for ill. So they love some myth while they hate the fact of their country.

10 Vaguely Comforting Things About Little American Children Dying

Had they lived, we all know the happy bits of life they would have enjoyed, but here are a few things they’ve been spared in this random, heartless existence:

Never learning that Santa is a lie.

Never having to experience the circle of Hell called High School.

Never knowing what unrequited love feels like.

Never knowing the pain of a broken heart.

Never feeling unwanted or misunderstood.

Never knowing guilt or regret.

Never living in a twisted society that glorifies the very violence it supposedly finds abhorrent.

Never knowing hopelessness or despair.

Never finding mental illness hiding behind the door of adulthood.

Never knowing loss.

*If Wishes Were Changes by Nanci Griffith

Dylan Matthews over at Wonk Blog has a remarkable little interactive budget calculator, Choose Your Own Fiscal Cliff Adventure! It is interesting to play around with. The main thing that you will notice is that liberal policies tend to improve the economy and help the budget deficit. Conservative policies tend to hurt the economy without doing much to help the budget picture. For example, extending Unemployment Insurance has a huge effect on the economy and almost no effect on the budget. Raising the retirement age, however, does almost nothing for the budget deficit while it causes great pain.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but Republicans really don’t care about results. They are so locked into their ideology (such as it is) that they can’t be bothered to think about good policy. For example, one great policy for our long term budget picture is to allow a public option in healthcare. But we can’t have this, even though it would cost the government less money. Why? Socialism! So a program that makes the government smaller is socialism, but being against that program is a sign that you are for small government. Fucking brilliant!

Ezra Klein posted his choices via twitter. It is very similar to mine. In fact, we agreed on everything in the “fiscal cliff” and “stimulus” parts of it. But we disagreed a lot in the “deficits” part. In particular, he is for eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. The truth is, I’m not too keen on that deduction myself. I don’t think that home ownership is something that the government should be encouraging. Just the same, cutting the deduction would be a huge blow to the building industry that is even now in bad shape. In the model, this has no effect on economic growth. It would have an effect.

Anyway, these kinds of tools are fun and educational. They are good at teaching how policies affect the economy. Of course, that’s one of the reasons that conservatives are so bad at this little game. If a Democrat is in the White House, nothing the government does can affect the economy. Why Boehner & Co are so worried about the Fiscal Cliff I can’t say. Unless they’ve been lying these last four years…

Supposedly, ITV canceled Kingdom because it was too expensive to produce, not because it was unpopular. The show, which stars Stephen Fry, is beautiful to look at. It has too many helicopter shots for my taste, but I can’t say they don’t work. Nonetheless, the show would have been as successful on a smaller budget. It is, after all, a little show about human foibles.

Fry plays Peter Kingdom, the one reasonably together sibling of a family that seems too dysfunctional to have gotten as far as they have. And they are surrounded by a group of idiosyncratic locals like Sidney Snell, the brilliant but socially awkward eccentric who almost single handedly manages to stop the encroachment of modernity on Market Shipborough. The series has long story arcs that are probably the weakest part of it. Peter Kingdom has a very unlikable brother Simon who takes up much of the air in these stories. This is sad because other potential story arcs are destroyed by the shrapnel of Simon’s past.

There are generally two stories during each 45 minute episode. One is usually light and the other designed to provoke convulsions of tears. For example, in the first episode of the second season, the whole town is trying to save the local lighthouse. Two older sisters are secretly trying to get it demolished because (unbeknownst by anyone) it was run by their uncle who sexually abused them as children. Sounds horrible, right? It is actually handled reasonably well. But it brought me to gasping sobs. As do most episodes. Usually, however, it isn’t something terrible. Instead it is something wonderfully sweet.

Thus far, you probably think that I don’t much care for Kingdom. That’s not true at all. It has exactly the combination of wit and sentimentalism that I desire. I am sad that it was canceled, because it certainly had another couple of good seasons in it. So if you get a chance to see it, I recommend it.

This is a little early. NASA means to put out the video below on 22 December 2012. They want to be there to explain why the world did not end. Even though it has not yet not ended. If you know what I mean.

My friend Toni asked me what I was planning on doing for the end of the world. I told her I would stay in and watch some comedies. I would definitely want to to see a few films again: Animal Crackers, The In-Laws, His Girl Friday. But if I really thought the world was coming to an end: I’d be frantically looking for a painless way to kill myself. I’m assuming here that we would be killed by an asteroid and that it would result in being burned alive. I don’t want to be around for that.

Luckily, the odds are that I’m not going to burn to death. What’s more, it almost certainly won’t happen tomorrow. So part of how I am spending my day is watching this video. According to it, the Mayan calendar is supposed to be cyclical like a car’s odometer. After you get to 999, it goes back to 000. All of my cars have managed this transition without exploding or even being hit by an asteroid, much less being engulfed by a huge solar flare.

So tonight, feel free to party like it’s 1999. But remember: odds are that you will still be expected at work in the morning.

They say two thousand zero zero
Party over, oops out of time
So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999

Or 20 December 2012. Whatever.

H/T Sarah Kliff