My apologies for not crediting the artist of the original art, as I was unable to make out the name. I found the image at this site

CBS News reports, House GOP: We have the votes for “Plan B”. This does not come as a surprise. All the Republican authoritarian followers got the word from Grand Poobah Grover Norquist that it is okay to vote for this bill, so they will. I hope you weren’t all thinking that previous Republican resistance to tax increases came out of some ideological commitment. They were resistant because they hadn’t been given permission.

The CBS News story tries to tell both sides of the conflict, but they completely miss the point that “Plan B” would be a tax increase for many middle income families. When discussing modern American politics the media can be either even-handed or objective. They always go with even-handed. Being objective would require making a judgement and that would lead to conservatives calling them liberal. Of course, the conservatives call them liberal anyway, so I don’t exactly know what they think they buy with this false equivalence.

There is still a fair chance that the House will not bring a vote on “Plan B” to the floor. It will not take that many defections from the Republican Caucus for it to fail. But the fact remains that if Uncle Norquist had not given his consent, Boehner wouldn’t even try; he wouldn’t have half the votes that he needs.

Update (20 December 2012 5:30 pm)

Well, I guess they didn’t have the votes after all. It doesn’t mean all that much. There were roughly 25 Republicans who were not going to vote for “Plan B” and almost no Democrats who were. So what I wrote above was exactly right. And in the end, they might have squeaked out a win. But that would have been even more embarrassing than canceling the vote. Good fun!

A remarkable thing happened yesterday. Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain sent a letter to Michael Lynton, the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment. It was regarding the portrayal of torture in the new film, Zero Dark Thirty. Feinstein does it as the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

It is a most reasonable, if direct, letter. They point out that they understand that writers make things up to tell a more dramatic story. Their concern is with the opening of the film which displays on the screen, “Based on first-hand accounts of actual events.” They call for the producers to make clear that torture was not helpful in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

They spend more than a page discussing not only the ineffectiveness of torture in this particular case but in general. And they are very concerned about what the Bush (never mentioned by name) torture program has done to the soul of America. They end the letter:

It is rare that I feel pride about an elected representative. This is a very good letter and it is nice to see some people in power stand up for at least a small part of what I always believed were this country’s values.

Charlotte Allen over at National Review Online has interesting ideas for how we might be able to stop mass shootings in the future. They mostly have to do with having more men at elementary schools. I am so not kidding. And not just that, “Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.” Just imagine! Too bad it couldn’t be televized: the Male Teachers Who Had Played High-School Football against the nut with an assault rifle! That sounds like a hell of a match—equal power on both sides.

She has other great ideas. When a shooter comes after you, you should run. “[B]ecause most shooters can’t hit a moving target.” What’s with all that hiding in the closet business? Sure, doing that probably saved hundreds of lives. But it’s so girly!

Two things come to mind here. First, you know one reason why it is that not many men work as grammar school teachers? The pay sucks. But the National Review Online isn’t for paying teachers more. Teachers are just one of the many moocher groups trying to steal all the good, honest money made by hedge fund managers and bank CEOs. This isn’t about some secret feminizing project of liberals trying to stop 12-year-old-boys from being husky.

Second, there are standard procedures that people should follow when they are in a situation with an armed gunman. You should run away if you can. This is just to get away, however; it is not because shooters have a hard time hitting moving targets. If you can’t run, you should hide. If you can’t hide, you should fight. Here is a video from the Department of Homeland Security that explains this:

Charlotte Allen is really vile. Not only is she giving out really bad advice, she is insulting all the people who have actually faced this situation. The National Review Online should be ashamed, but I fear they are far beyond that by now.

H/T Jonathan Chait

Afterword

That video was originally sent to me by a friend back on 5 November. It was passed around at her work because there was an incident where someone saw a gunman, but the police couldn’t find anyone and no one was harmed. She sent it to me because it is kind of dorky. But even at the time I defended it. I think it is good advice. You can’t be too careful. And I’m definitely a “fight as a last resort” kind of guy. These people saying that we should run toward shooters are idiots.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend about self-confidence. I am a nervous wreck about what people think of me. If I’m at a club, I find it almost impossible to dance. Or in my work, I’ve created a number of videos that even I think are rather good, but I can’t quite bring myself to post them. It is all so pathetic. But I find it very interesting that I have complete self-confidence about myself as a man. People can openly ridicule me about being weak or bookish or whatever. I don’t care. I think I am the very definition of what a man should be. Even more: I find many men to be very insecure in this regard. In fact, it is largely what defines “male culture.”

Part of this whole disconnect for me is that I just don’t get “guy” stuff. In particular, I don’t get guns. I enjoy target shooting. I find guns to be a fascinating technology. And I can definitely get into the skill improvement aspect of it. But guns mean a lot more than this to most guys who are into them. I think they are compensating. Note: I’m not saying that these guys aren’t “real” men. I just think they are confused about what a man is and so they try to make up for it by faking.

I’ve seen a lot of ads from this Bushmaster “man card” campaign. I think these people know very well that there is a hole that needs filling in the soul of the American man. The one above just happens to be for the .223-caliber rifle that was used by Adam Lanza on Friday. I don’t mean to imply any causal connection here. That’s not my point. My point is that guns are sold in this way for a reason.

I am very aware of commercials that question the viewer’s manhood. My manliness does not depend upon the deodorant I wear, the beer I drink, or the car I drive. But such appeals are fairly subtle. They don’t say that I’m not a man because I drink Negra Modelo rather than Dos Equis. They just show that even if I’m as old and ugly as The Most Interesting Man in the World, girls who could be my grandchildren will still want to fuck me.

This Bushmaster ad campaign is so over the top it looks like it’s in orbit: buy this gun and no one will question your manhood again?! Really, they could not be any clearer than if they said, “Is you dick small? Buy this gun and it won’t matter.” I have no doubt that the Bushmaster ads work very well. And that, I think, is a big problem. If I were a gun fanatic, I would give that some deep thought.

H/T Jessica Valenti

The choice of the Justice Department to not prosecute HSBC for their criminal money laundering is the kind of thing that should cross all political lines. And indeed, we are seeing a bit of it. Marcy Wheeler at Empty Wheel has reported, Democratic and Republican Agreement: Prosecute HSBC. Chuck Grassley and Jeff Merkley have both written letters of complaint to Attorney General Eric Holder.

The sad fact is that this is probably as much push back as we are likely to see. The saying goes, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” It is the one thing that all politicians are in agreement on. And the Democrats traditionally have been as beholden to the financial industry as the Republicans. (Interestingly, however, not this cycle.) The truth is that I don’t see any risk in complaining about this travesty. Many people in the industry were shocked at this decision. But in general, even the most minor criticisms about these Masters of the Universe can bring on an over-sized reaction. Remember the reaction to Obama’s “fat cats” comment?

Merkley is rather circumspect, but he is clear:

Grassley is much more aggressive, although I wonder what he would have to say (if anything) if we had a Republican administration:

This morning I was thinking about Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter. If he had not killed himself, there would be no question but that we would prosecute him. The men at HSBC are culpable in thousands of murders. But they’re rich! They wear business suits! And most important of all: they’re just like the people who head the Justice Department. So they can’t be prosecuted. In America, rich don’t only get away with murder, they have to get away with murder.

There is a bit of disagreement about Zero Dark Thirty among those who are completely in agreement about the politics. Let’s start with the agreement. First, torture is wrong. I am so angry I even have to write that, because when I was a kid, that was a given. Anyway. Second, torture is not effective. Third, torture did not lead to finding Osama bin Laden.

This is a big deal, because sadly, there are many people in this country who don’t agree with any of those statements. We know that Dick Cheney doesn’t. He might say that torture is unfortunate, but given that the “evil doers” use it, we must. So we are talking about people who are firmly on the liberal side of this issue—also known as the right side.

Jane Mayer at The New Yorker really takes the film to task. She calls Kathryn Bigelow a torture apologist. Bigelow defends herself on this score, claiming that she’s just showing the way things were. But Mayer goes to some length to show this isn’t true. The torture in the first half hour of the film is not there to say, “Hey! Look what we did!” Instead, it is there to say, “Hey! Look how we found bin Laden!”

Andrew Sullivan, in contrast, writes an article titled, Kathryn Bigelow: Not A Torture Apologist. Strangely, however, in defending Bigelow, he is making an even more fierce attack on the United States government:

He later writes, “The torture was not for intelligence… It was for revenge.” But after reading the whole review (that is well worth reading), I was left asking, “How is Bigelow not an apologist?”

Apparently, a lot of people wondered the same thing. Today, he wrote another article in which he specifically counters Jane Mayer’s argument. And frankly, I think he digs himself even further in. Basically, he’s saying that of course these CIA people would self-justify. They would have to in order to live with themselves. But this shows that Sullivan has an extremely primitive notion of storytelling. There is no such thing as objective fiction. You can present people doing vile things without showing agreement. And Sullivan must know this, because he notes that Bigelow presents these horror without judging them positive or negative. But that itself is a judgement.

Sullivan goes on to argue that Bigelow is a moral coward. But somehow, she is not an apologist. Still, he writes this, “One has to wonder whether any morally serious director would have chosen a morally-neutral approach to torture if she were portraying torture practiced by, say, the Iranian terror state, or by Nazis or Communists?”

I think this is yet another case of Andrew Sullivan being uncomfortable with who he is. He claims to be a conservative, yet the issues that drive him are all liberal. So I think this is a case: he doesn’t want to be part of the liberal bandwagon who are attacking Zero Dark Thirty. But he actually thinks it is even worse than all the liberals are claiming.

As for me: I would like to see the film so I could say for myself. But I know that at best it would just be another Hollywood action/suspense film with little to recommend it. You know: an Oscar contender.

I’ve already written about how I think the primary lesson of the many recent mass shootings is that we need to do something about the easy availability of guns. But I still think much more needs to be said about mental health and anyway, I’m not sure that I have a lot to add on the gun situation. Go watch Up with Chris Hayes.

When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he had a great idea to save the state money: close down most of the mental hospitals. This was a false economy, to say the least. I’m not sure what the correlation is exactly, but this decision happened shortly before California saw its ranks of homeless skyrocket.

This is not just a California problem, of course. Sy Mukherjee wrote an excellent article over at Think Progress yesterday, It’s Easier For Americans To Access Guns Than Mental Health Services. In it, he notes that for the poor, it is much cheaper to buy a gun than to buy mental healthcare. He has the data in the article. But I was really struck by this passage:

Four out of five? That’s amazing. But that’s what our country has become. It is like the psychopaths have taken full charge of our policy. And now what we hear is that we can’t do anything about the mental health system; we can’t do anything about our gun situation; but we can militarize our schools.

We are a rich society that can afford to take care of our less fortunate.

This is how I imagine the budget negotiation going. Boehner looks Obama in the eye and says, “My final offer is this: nothing. Not even the fee for the gaming license, because… I don’t know what that is!” The one thing that we see coming from every source is that despite the negotiations, the Republicans refuse to say what they want to cut. Greg Sargent at The Plum Line writes, The Morning Plum: Dems Hold the Middle Ground. GOP Is on Fringe. (Kind of annoying: who’s on the left fringe?) He quotes a source who says, “To date [the Republicans] have been unwilling or able to identify a list of specific cuts or changes they would like or a single loophole they are willing to close.”

Sargent goes on to note three aspects of the negotiations that show that this is not a situation where both sides are equally at fault.[1] First, the Republicans are still saying they will never raise the top income tax bracket. Second, the Democrats are pushing a mixed set of policies that include things that they themselves don’t like. Third, as the negotiations go on, the Republicans are demanding ever deeper cuts, even as they refuse to say what to cut. So yes, boys and girls: the Great Pumpkin and reasonableness from Republicans are both myths.

Paul Krugman, following Sargent, notes that there is one thing that the Republicans have been clear about cutting, but even it is a phantom:

But maybe I was wrong at the start of this article when I characterized Boehner as being ignorant of the budget. It is more likely that he is very much aware of where the budget stands. And thus, he knows two thing. First, there isn’t that much to cut. Second, the things he and his Republican allies want to cut are politically toxic. In that case, it would be more correct to characterize Boehner’s position this way, “You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing. Not even the fee for the gaming license, because… The people like gaming licenses. But if you would be willing to take the heat for policies that I want, well then, my offer will be this: nothing. Not even the fee for the gaming license.”

[1] I have a question: is it ever the case where both sides are equally wrong? Over time, you could certainly make that case. You could say that over the last 40 years, the Palestinians and Israelis have been about equally wrong. (I’m not saying that, because I really don’t know; but it seems like a reasonable assertion that people could argue about.) But to say in any given situation that the two sides are equally wrong is just madness. It also doesn’t punish whoever happens to be wrong and it encourages reasonable people to act badly.

I don’t care about the politics. I don’t care who “won” in this fight regarding Susan Rice. Her decision to take herself out of contention for Secretary of State is the perfect example of why we can’t have nice things. And this fits very well with my last article about the apocalyptic conservatism of Marc Thiessen. In this case, it is John McCain, of course. Without the maverick miscreant, the others would not have followed and this whole “controversy” would not have received any traction at all.

John McCain is a sad and bitter old man. I’ve written about this a lot.[1] He is the ultimate symbol of how the Republican Party deals with defeat: with vengeance. No keep calm and carry on for them! No. These are the “throw the Monopoly board up in the air rather than admit defeat” kind of people.

Your party reacted badly to the Benghazi attack? Don’t admit to your error and move on! Much better to trump up a controversy and find a relatively powerless innocent who you can beat up on! That feels nice, doesn’t it?

Election didn’t go your delusional way? Don’t reflect on it and reevaluate the way forward! Much better to grab your most notable and embarrassing fiasco and use it to wreck the economy. Remember what we learned in Ben Tre, “We have to destroy the country in order to save it”! That feels real good, now doesn’t it?

I understand disagreement. I have very strongly held political opinions. But I also understand that I’m wrong about things from time to time. I don’t like it when Democrats lose or voluntarily cave on things I feel are important. But I would never harm this country because I didn’t get what I wanted. And I think that is generally true of the Democratic Party. It was also once true of the Republican Party. But no more.

So it is no wonder that the best and brightest that our culture produces—people like Susan Rice—decide that it just isn’t worth it to take our most important jobs. And this is why we can’t have nice things.

[1] Here are some of previous writings on John McCain:

24 September 2010

I constantly hear of “war hero John McCain” but almost never “war hero John Kerry.” But I had never heard anything about what made McCain a hero other than being a POW and passing up early release available to him because of his powerful father. Thus, I looked up his war record. There is a lot of George W. Bush in the young McCain, but he did receive a Bronze Star and the Navy Commendation Medal—an award considerable less prestigious than the Bronze Star. His Bronze Star was for dropping bombs on Viet Nam—not exactly what I think of as heroic, but okay: he got the award and I guess we can call him a hero.

John Kerry, on the other hand, won both the Bronze Star and the Silver Star—for acts of heroism that I could never see myself doing. By any definition, Kerry is as least as big a war hero as John McCain. And yet, during the 2004 election, Republicans were more than willing to shit all over Kerry’s heroism in the name of politics. And to this day, McCain is the “go to” man in the Senate when it comes to the military—not John Kerry. Could it be that we are not forever hearing about “war hero John Kerry” because he happens to be a member of the Democratic Party? That he is generally against war?

Is it any wonder that we are perpetually at war when the only people we look to are warmongers who mostly have never seen war. And I include people like McCain who only saw the war from a horrible POW camp and a mile above land.

1 December 2010

For years, I’ve been saying that John McCain is no maverick. He’s vengeful: after losing to George W. Bush, he did what he could to poke him in the eye, and that sometimes meant not holding extremist conservative views—which were and still are his stock and trade. But this made him look like a maverick when, in fact, he was just pissed off. Last night on Countdown, Dan Savage said something that McCain is, however. When Keith Olbermann asked Savage why the military leaders’ opinions and this huge military study are not enough for McCain on the issue of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Savage responded bluntly, “Because, not to put too fine a point on it, McCain is a bigot.”

20 April 2011

Paul Krugman makes an excellent point on his blog today:

I know it’s an excellent point, because I’ve been making the same point for some time—particularly about healthcare. Note that “Obamacare” is exactly what John McCain campaigned on. Had he become president, I’m sure that we would have got the same plan. The only difference would have been that conservatives would have embraced it. It would not have been a major battle to get it passed. And the reason is clear: authoritarians (thank you John Dean) don’t stand for anything but standing in line: “for us and against them”—regardless of what “they” stand for.

19 July 2012

I am so tired of McCain getting credit for this. He said this on 10 October 2008. By that time, he was 90% certain that he had lost the presidency. His countering this woman was his effort to save what little dignity he had left. Had the race been a dead heat, John McCain would have pandered as much as, say, Mitt Romney this last year.

Pollsters are constantly asking Americans how much the government spends on foreign aid and how much it ought to spend on foreign aid. The numbers never really change in any substantial way. In a poll in 2010, Americans thought that the government spends about 25% of its budget on foreign aid and that it ought to only spend 10% of its budget on foreign aid. In fact, the government spends 1% on foreign aid.

I know: Americans are ignorant. Nothing to see here. Dog bites man. Now if our political elites thought such rubbish, that would be a story. Jonathan Chait wrote a really insightful column this afternoon that addresses this very issue, Why Republicans Can’t Propose Spending Cuts. Basically, his argument is that Republicans are vague on what it is they don’t like about government. But they are just certain that government is too damned big!

This, according the Chait, is why Boehner keeps yelling at Obama for not offering spending cuts. It isn’t a negotiating strategy. Rather, it is Boehner asking Obama to show him the hundreds of billions of dollars in government waste that Republicans just know is hidden in the budget. The problem, of course, is there is no such thing. By the standards of developed countries, we spend very little on social programs. We do, undoubtedly, spend too much on our military, but the Republicans wouldn’t think of cutting that. In fact, think back on Romney’s budget proposal: he wanted to cut taxes, spend more on military, and spend more on Medicare. What does that leave? Medicaid, basically.

How can we be surprised that Americans think our federal government throws away huge sums of money to help other countries who hate us? The Republican establishment thinks we throw away vast sums of money on… Something! Something bad. Something we certainly shouldn’t be doing. At least the public have an object for their concern. The Republican establishment has the vaguest of ideas. Chait:

How do we move this country forward when one-half of the political spectrum is in an epic struggle with a mythical beast called “bad government” that not even they can see?

I used to live in Portland, and I remember the Clackamas Town Center being the most festive shopping mall I had ever visited. It had a ice rink where I saw Tonya Harding practice—a big attraction in the early 1990s. So I was shocked to read that there was a shooting rampage at the mall this afternoon. Shocked because it hit uncomfortably close to home, not because I was shocked about yet another mass shooting in our vast bastion of gun owners’ rights. There is, after all, a mass shooting here every five days.

I know: crazy people do crazy things; evil people do evil things; stupid people do stupid things. But it is interesting that this shooting happened on the very day that, “The Seventh Circuit overturned Illinois’ law forbidding concealed-carry of handguns—the last remaining law in the whole country against concealed carry.” Now I know what many of you are thinking, “But these permits are only given out to responsible adults!” My tendency is to say that you ought to tell that to Trayvon Martin, and leave it at that. But for me, it is a little more personal.

I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who are what I would call gun fanatics. They broadly fall into two categories (although there is overlap): hunters and paranoids. I don’t too much dig on hunting, but whatever; some people need more to be content than a fine English translation of Don Quixote; I understand. But the paranoids? They’re dangerous. They really think that their guns are going to keep them safe and they are eager to find (or force) a situation in which they can prove it. Add to this the very common spice of libertarianism, and you end up bitter enders who think they are the last line of freedom from the coming Brown Shirts. I actually share some of their concerns, but given that they think the socialist hellscape has already arrived, I don’t have much faith in their judgement. And that is the primary issue.

If you weed out those people who truly need a gun for their jobs (I’m being liberal here), what you are left with is mostly a bunch of my paranoid friends with concealed carry permits. You know: people like George Zimmerman. Mostly, these people are a bigger threat to themselves than they are to anyone else. But that isn’t the critical issue. I’m all for allowing people to make their own mistakes that harm themselves. But I’m not for allowing their paranoia and negligence to harm 7-year-old boys—for one almost random example.

So I’m willing to grant everything: people shouldn’t be stupid; or evil; or crazy. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.[1] I grant you everything. But clearly there is a problem. If we should keep guns out of the hands of crazy people, there are things we could do. But the NRA opposes this. If we should keep guns out of the hands of evil people, there are things we could do. But the NRA opposes this. If we should keep guns out of the hands of stupid people, there are things we could do. But the NRA opposes this.

As long as gun owners continue to support the wackjob National Rifle Association, then nothing will be done. As long as the media refuse to honestly engage this issue, things will get worse. As long as gun owners refuse to admit there is a problem, people will continue to die unnecessarily. I grant you everything but this: you are culpable.

Afterword

I do understand the philosophy of the NRA. I even agree with it. But it is an extremist philosophy. It is only a small group that should constantly be pushing the envelope of acceptable law. When a group as big as the NRA is this extreme, we get bad policy. And hey, we have bad policy. The NRA members can change this because they are much more reasonable than the group itself. If you are a member, ask yourself: do I know what the NRA is doing with the money I send it. It may well shock you.

[1] Frankly, guns don’t kill people; bullets kill people; I don’t really have a problem with guns; it’s the bullets that are a menace.