I just found out about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I saw a bunch of chatter about gun control on Twitter. It actually made me feel good, because I thought that it was about the Portland shooting. I’ve been bothered by the lack of coverage of that shooting, because I figure it is due to the fact that “only” two people were murdered. Sure, you can say I’m clueless, but the truth is that I’m not very good at this quick change, short attention span culture we have. I’m not over that shooting yet.

The best reporting that I’ve found on the shooting is from the Wall Street Journal, Dozens Killed in Connecticut School Shooting. It seems that we now know that at least 27 people were killed, 18 of them were children. Details are few in this story, but the WSJ article was really pushing one part of the story. There is a locked double door entry system at this school. This is the result of past tragedies like Columbine. No one knows how the shooter got through, but the WSJ sure is interested.

My perspective about this is: who the fuck cares?! Clearly he did get through. It seems that he was the son of one of the teachers there. (They are both reportedly dead now.) That might explain it. Regardless, something explains it. But that is not going to explain why 27 people were murdered. This is a typically American approach to a problem: look everywhere but not at what is right in front of you.

I don’t know why this horrible event happened at Sandy Hook. But I feel fairly sure that a big part of it comes down to this:

So I’m thinking that maybe we need to start talking about mental health and gun laws in this country. Because no amount of investigation of the school’s security system is going to improve the situation in the future. If you have well-armed crazy people walking around, people are going to die unnecessarily.

Update (14 December 2012 5:20 pm)

Most recent data: 26 murdered, 20 of which were children.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the question of just how tolerant I am of people being dicks. I know that to some extent, I admire dicks. Bill Maher is a dick, and I generally like him. Of course, he’s funny, so there’s that. But I’m thinking more of the people from Americans for Prosperity who put up a tent in the middle of the right-to-work protests in Michigan. The only reason they did it was to be dicks and hopefully get the protesters to misbehave.

I try to turn it around. Would I have thought it clever if some guy had handed out copies of the Socialist Worker at Tea Party rallies? Yeah, I probably would have gotten a kick out of that. And if that guy had gotten in a fight? Well, it would depend. If some Tea Party person had just come up and slugged him, I would be angry. But if a confrontation happened where pushing led to punching, well, that happens. And I think I would have realized that “my guy” was being kind of a dick.

Yesterday, I saw a clip of Steven Crowder on Fox News. He was the guy who got punched by one of the protesters. Even if we accept Crowder’s claims (and we shouldn’t—see below), there is a very big difference between this situation and the Socialist Worker guy at the Tea Party. The people at the Tea Party rally were mostly upper income people: not necessarily rich, but secure. Crowder and his gang are being dicks around people who will be hit hard by this legislation. So Crowder is more like a kid loudly rooting for the concentration camp director Amon Goeth at a screening of Schindler’s List: yes, yes, free speech, but if the kid ends up bruised, no one is going to shed any tears.

Now it turns out that Steven Crowder selectively edited his video to make it look like the punch he got was unprovoked. The unedited footage shows that the guy who punched him was on the ground right before. He was there due to an altercation. Just the same, there is no indication that Crowder had anything to do with it. But this is what happens when you get into the middle of a fight. This is why most people do not get into the middle of a fight.

So it seems that Crowder is following in the footsteps of James O’Keefe, with the added feature of being a big whiner. (Actually, when it comes to it, I’ll bet that O’Keefe will whine like the rest of them.) Republicans are big on claiming that foreign civilians deserve to be bombed, minorities deserve to live in poverty, and women deserve to be raped—because they live, work, or walk in the wrong places. But when a conservative white man gets bruised after he jumps into the middle of a fight he helped to instigate? That’s an outrage!

The good aspect of this is that Steven Crowder will likely continue to have to hang with people like Gretchen Carlson, Steve Doocy, and the black-haired guy who is not Steve Doocy.

Update (14 December 2012 11:13 am)

The Young Turks covered the story. Watch it, it gives more details:

Robert Reich was the first person I heard make the argument for not balancing the federal budget. The argument is simple. Imagine that you have a business partner. You work very hard to save the company money and collect payments from customers. But every time you take a couple days off, your business partner spends all the company money on booze and hookers. That’s what it’s like to be a Democratic president: you cut the deficit or even eliminate it. And then a Republican comes in and spends all the savings—And more!—on foreign wars and tax cuts for the rich.

It is even worse than this. To a large extent, Democrats don’t even get credit for being fiscally responsible. Most Republicans to this day don’t know that Obama has slashed the budget deficit the last three years. In fact, I’ve had conversations with Republicans who didn’t know that Clinton had balanced the budget. The only Republican to cut the federal deficit in the last 30 years was Bush Sr, and only by a little. Yet the perspective, even among some Democrats, is that the Republican Party are the fiscally responsible one.

Yesterday, Matt Yglesias wrote, Cutting Spending To Obtain Tax Hikes Is Nuts. He explains this whole dynamic in a lot more depth than I’ve ever seen:

He notes that if Obama gives Medicare cuts in exchange for tax hikes, it hurts the Democratic program in the long run. Let’s suppose that Hillary Clinton is the next president. If she wants to start a program (Yglesias uses universal preschool as an example), she will have to pay for it, because that’s how Democrats govern. But where will she get the money? If Obama had not traded Medicare cuts for tax increases, she would have two options: raise taxes or shift money from Medicare to universal preschool.

The point of all this is that the budget isn’t some theoretical game. It is about policy choices: what you value. Obama may put the budget in a better state, but in doing so, he only makes good governance harder in the future. People—especially those like our president who suffer from “centrist syndrone”—generally think that anything that both sides hate must be good policy. Yglesias shows this is not true.

There is another aspect of this that Yglesias doesn’t talk about. But I think it is even more important. It is easy to cut taxes. It is hard to enact important government programs—especially now. Does anyone think we could ever get Medicare or Social Security passed now? I don’t. But once the economy starts running on all cylinders, there will be calls for tax cuts. Even before the economy is good, any eliminated deductions will be quietly put back in. And regardless, as soon as the Republicans are back in the White House, there will be tax cuts.

Obama spent most of his first term learning that bipartisanship was a crock. I fully suspect he will use his entire presidency to learn that budget balancing too is a crock. Alas.

Chico’s favorite people were actors who gambled, producers who gambled, and women who screwed.

—Gummo Marx, about his brother

David Frum has written two articles in as many days about what he calls “doomsday conservatism.” Both relate to a column by conservative nutjob and Pillsbury Doughboy standin Marc Thiessen. He is the part of the Republican Party who think of themselves as The Little Party That Could. If they are just true and strong then that big meanie President Obama will wave the white flag.

Really, this guy is delusional. This is the opening of his Washington Post column, “When the 1st Marine Regiment was encircled by communist forces at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, Marine Col. Lewis ‘Chesty’ Puller was said to have declared: ‘We’re surrounded. Good! Now we can fire in any direction.'” He should have quoted General Douglas MacArthur, “I shall return.” Because let’s face it, the best the Republicans can hope for is to survive to fight another day.

But no, Thiessen won’t have it! He claims that the Republicans have two options: stand and fight or surrender. As you can probably tell, this is not a guy who knows much about military tactics except for the anecdotes he learned during his trust fund education and well-paid lobbying jobs. But he wouldn’t even need to have served in the military to know better. Anyone with a little experience getting kicked in the teeth by life could have told him there are more than just two options. But this is the Republican Party all over. Remember John Boehner’s comment that he got 98% of what he wanted—and then turned it down? It seems that this is a world in which you can’t have it all and more and more it looks like that means Republicans are going to take nothing.

Thiessen has a three step plan:

1. Don’t raises taxes! And when they are raised automatically in January… Forget step one, go on to step two!
2. Come up with a new plan to—Wait for it!—lower taxes!
3. Pass your plan and if Obama doesn’t like it, destroy the economy!

This really is his plan. And Frum takes him to task for it. Mostly, he notes that there are no existing plans so somehow the Republicans would have to work all of this legislative magic with their backs to the wall and with the threat of creating the worst economic crisis in the United States since 1861.

But more important, as I noted above, there are not only two options. Unfortunately, all the blood seems to have left Thiessen’s brain and pooled in his dick. Frum explains:

In the end, I think that the Republicans will be more reasonable than this, because Thiessen is not proposing a plan to win these budget negotiations; he’s proposing a plan to destroy the Republican Party.

Recently, there have been a lot of articles about people who pleaded guilty to this or that crime. This came as a bit of a shock to me, because I’m a careful reader, and I just assumed that they pled guilty. You know me: the practical pedant. And this issue is very clear. Either of these constructions are okay.

How do I know? Well, as always, I checked Fowler. He thinks “pled” is an American thing. He appears to be wrong, but the fact that he doesn’t make a big deal out of the issue should tell you something; Fowler had no problem making a fuss when he thought it was right. So I checked my favorite grammar sources, The Grammar Bible and Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences. They don’t even mention the issue. And the Merriam-Webster dictionary? They not only mention “pled,” they offer “plead” as well!

Let me go further: why are we still using “pleaded”? The only words that are much like it are “lead” and “read.” And both conjugate the same way. There is no reason to hang on to this archaic usage. So “pleaded” is on notice around here. You won’t be seeing it. Except, of course, here:

Like all people who refuse to grow up, I love the Marx Brothers. But I fully admit that their movies are a mixed bag. There is total insanity followed by total boredom. I am not talking about Margaret Dumont here. She is brilliant and I don’t think Groucho is ever funnier than when he’s interacting with her. The problem is that the films are filled with standard stories with anemic characters who no one cares about.

Take Animal Crackers for example. I love this film. I often put it on to cheer myself up. But what is the plot? It is rather clever, to be honest, but I doubt that one out of a hundred viewers notice it. A painting is being unveiled at the party. The romatic couple decide to replace the painting with one that he did to illustrate what a great painter he is so that they can get married. The paintings switched, some social rivals of Margaret Dumont switch his excellent copy with a terrible copy. In the end, everything is righted, the young man is proclaimed a genius, and the couple can marry.

The problem is that almost nothing is done to make this main plot interesting. Add to this the extreme heights of brilliance whenever the Marx Brothers are on screen and you end up with a film that is half great and half boring. I think this is why most people hold Duck Soup in such high regard: it is pretty much all Marx Brothers all the time. And I agree. But I think it suffered at the time of its release because it was ahead of the times. It is just gag after gag without much in terms of a plot. Just to give it some cohesion, it brings back the Sylvanian ambassador multiple times to remind everyone that this is all about the country going to war.

I think the Marx Brothers really manage to bring it all together in their first MGM film, A Night at the Opera. I just watched this film again and I was very impressed with how it manages to integrate the brothers into the story. In a fundamental way, the story is no different than Animal Crackers: the romantic couple want to marry but they can’t until he gets a chance to show everyone what a great singer he is. But in this case, Chico is his manager who makes a contract with Groucho who kind of represents the opera. Actually, this is my favorite scene (unfortunately a very bad copy):

I think there is a reason that there hasn’t been a lot of just dumping Marx Brothers bits together. It can be kind of hard to take. They are at their best when they are integrated into a story. I also appreciate that they are a little more likable in A Night at the Opera. Even though Duck Soup is funnier, I think that A Night at the Opera works better as a film.

Yesterday, I responded to the Fed’s decision to tie interest rates to unemployment. Although I think this is good, it is the least they could do, and they are doing it much too late. My biggest problem was that the Fed’s new unemployment target is 6.5%, which is nowhere near full employment. I noted that they were continuing to do the heavy lifting of the rich. And note: high unemployment (and 6.5% unemployment is very high) is great for business owners because it gives them the pick of the best employees for the lowest prices.

Robert Reich responded to the policy change this morning, Why the Fed’s Jobs Program Will Fail. His analysis is different than mine. In fact, it is even more depressing. He says that this is good policy, and I agree for the most part: it is at least better policy. But the real problem is that the low interest loans will not be used in a productive way for our economy:

What he’s getting at here—although he doesn’t say it—is that the American economy is not capital constrained. The truth is that companies are sitting on huge sums of cash. If they want to invest in infrastructure, they can. But they don’t, because there isn’t a demand for their products. This is kind of a game of anti-chicken with the economy. Everyone is waiting until someone else starts to spend.

It is interesting to look back at how Milton Hershey dealt with the Depression. Instead of sitting on his huge piles of money, he assumed that the depression would eventually be over. So he invested in his infrastructure and when things got better, he was in a great position to capitalize on it. Of course, there were other reasons why he did so well. For one thing, it is a hell of a lot easier to get people to splurge on a nickle candy bar than on a thousand dollar Buick. But still, Hershey was farsighted in a way that most businessmen can’t even imagine.

Reich says, rightly, that what we really need is to invest in the middle class. But instead, we are tearing down the middle class. The Michigan right-to-work fiasco is a good example. But it is bigger than that. We have Republicans who think that if only the rich get richer, all will be fine. Well, let’s look at how that’s going:

This graph illustrates what Ed was saying over at Gin and Tacos yesterday. Basically, we are told that prosperity is just around the corner. All we have to do is take another pay cut or another benefit cut, and then all will be well. But as you can see in the graphs above, this isn’t the case.

Of course, I tend to think that the issue isn’t particularly the Republicans. We know that they are out to get us. But so is much of the Democratic Party. President Obama seems eager to “reform” Medicare. He, like many Democrats, seems more interested in seeming reasonable than in doing what’s right. Unfortunately, the Democrats are all we’ve got. And to their credit, they are at least trying to make the economy better for all of us. (But better still for the rich!)

And now we are in a situation where we cannot depend upon the Fed to save us. Instead, we must depend upon the crazy and evil Republicans and the morally uncertain Democrats. Reich sums up:

But there is good news. If the government doesn’t do anything really bad, the economy will eventually heal itself. And I feel very confident that the Democrats will not do that much harm. This is why they are infinitely superior to the Republicans. This is why I voted for Obama.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but I’ve been feeling really down the last few days. But I just noticed something that really improved my mood: Avik Roy tweeted my last rant about him:

A lefty blogger: “I want to rip off your scrotum and suffocate you with it. Cock sucking plutocrat bastard!” franklycurious.com/index.php?item… #avikroy

— Avik S. A. Roy (@aviksaroy) December 10, 2012

When I wrote those words, I knew they had a certain poetic charm. Like Crow T. Robot’s six pages of “no” in Earth Vs. Soup, I wanted to get across the raw terror I must feel as a giant bowl of California Cornucopia Vegetable Jubilee slithers towards me on all fours. I mean: my raw anger at Avik Roy’s public disinformation campaign. I’m glad they didn’t go to waste on a bunch of people who agree with me!

And now my opinion of Avik Roy has gone way up for two reasons. First, he tweeted my link out which resulted it quite a lot of traffic. Second, that picture of him with the open collar makes him look kind of cool. Or like some lounge singer. Not that I take back a thing. He really is a cock sucking plutocrat bastard. Maybe I’ll take back the exclamation point.

There has been a lot of reporting on the fact that there isn’t anything to report about the Fiscal Cliff negotiations. John Stanton makes a big deal of this in his almost fun article for BuzzFeed, The Fiscal Cliff Is Boring Washington To Death. Everyone seems to agree that the lack of leaks indicates that the negotiations are at least going fairly well. I have a different theory.

The two sides have decided that they can’t get anything done until next year. The Republicans just can’t allow a vote on supposedly raising taxes. And it’s even worse than that. If they struck a deal on the income tax rates, they would either have to give on the extension of the payroll tax holiday, or they would also be in effect raising payroll taxes. So everything gets a lot easier for Boehner & Co. in 2013.

But there is a wrinkle. The staffs of Obama and Boehner really are meeting all the time. What could they be doing? They could be working on a deal that they will make on January 2nd or 3rd. I really don’t know. What I do know is that Obama gets a better deal in 2013. And I know that Boehner will have a much easier time selling a deal to the Republicans in 2013. (I would be embarrassed if I were a Republican and I had to take a worse deal just to satisfy the idiots in power in my party.)

So I’m still inclined to think that we are going over the Fiscal Cliff. Or maybe I’m just optimistic. Or drunk.