A lot of politics is just about differences of opinion. You know: reasonable people can disagree. I’ll give you an example. I believe in a guaranteed minimum income. Providing this would allow people to go out and be creative: they could build innovative businesses without worrying that failure would ruin them. It would also raise the wages of difficult and boring jobs because people could get by without doing anything. And it would improve the level of human dignity. But there are those who say the opposite. They claim that it is only when people are staring into the face of total destruction that they come up with great ideas. I think they are totally wrong and history proves it, but these people really do believe what they argue.

What if, however, the state of California started a project to provide a guaranteed income and it worked really well. Suddenly, California’s economy was booming with highly innovative new products and the happiness index went through the roof. Imagine that the people that didn’t believe in a guaranteed minimum income tried to hide the success of the program. Or even worse: imagine they tried to keep the people in California from knowing about the program so they didn’t take part in it. That would be evil.

Well, that’s what we have with Obamacare. Jonathan Cohn reported yesterday, A Shameful Victory for Obamacare’s Opponents. McKinsey and Company did a study of Obamacare and found that about half the people who shopped on the exchanges ended up not purchasing insurance. But here’s the key, “[T]wo-thirds of these people said they didn’t know they could get financial assistance.” How proud the conservative movement must be that their disinformation campaign worked so well!

You may remember back last year when Sean Hannity had on four couples who were hurt by Obamacare. It turned out that all the people were mistaken. But I was especially interested in Robbie and Tina Robison:

Or there was Julie Boonstra who just knew that Obamacare was going to cost her money even though it was going to save her well over a thousand dollars per year. These and many millions more have been lied to very effectively by the right wing disinformation system. It’s disgraceful.

I’m sure that as the years go on, everyone will see that they are better off with Obamacare than they were before Obamacare. Eventually, Republicans will stop talking about it and Fox News will find that it doesn’t boost their outrage ratings. Within ten years at the most, we will be at that glorious moment of, “Keep your government hands off my Obamacare!” But the cynic in me will still be sad. Because all the same “journalists” will be lying about something else and all the same viewers will have learned nothing and will believe whatever lies come next.

Last year on this day, I wrote about the great British painter Thomas Gainsborough who was born in 1727. But it was a very short article and I can think of no one more deserving to talk about in a bit more depth. He was mostly a portrait painter by trade and his best known work is The Blue Boy. It is a remarkable painting, especially for the way it renders the light on the rumpled clothing.

But Gainsborough wasn’t fond of his portrait paintings. I’m guessing, but I suspect that he didn’t especially like having to deal with the rich patrons he was forced to work so closely with. What he wanted to do, and did do at the end of his life was work on landscapes. In this way, I suspect that he anticipated Romanticism, although without all its annoying baggage. If you look at his early portraits, you will often see quite impressive backgrounds. He wasn’t inclined to paint people sitting in a chair in a drawing room.

Because I am very sentimental, my favorite piece by Gainsborough is Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher. It was painted during the last years of his life. It is a narrative painting although without any symbolic content as in William Bouguereau The Broken Pitcher. Sometimes, a broken pitcher is just a broken picture:

Happy birthday Thomas Gainsborough!

Glenn Hubbard is the ultimate example of a conservative economist who has given up all pretense of being a scientist and works just as an apologist for conservative policy. See my article, Conservative Apologia Economics. I really can’t see him talk without having a strong desire to slap him. He’s got the smug demeanor of a man who knows he was once smart and knowledgeable, but now thinks the smartest thing he ever did was to sell his soul for thirty pieces of silver. Unlike Judas, however, I doubt that Hubbard will give his blood money back and hang himself. But it’s pretty to think so.

Any time that Hubbard publicly embarrasses himself, I am very interested. If there were a new cable network “Glenn Hubbard Speaks” (which is the same as embarrassing himself), I would get cable. In fact, that would be a good way to kill me. I don’t think I could tear myself away from the station to eat. It would be like the best drug ever. Or better: Infinite Jest!

So I was all excited this weekend when Hubbard and Tim Geithner got into a bit of a fight. Now I’m no fan of Geithner. But he isn’t Seventh Sign evil like Hubbard is. So there was little doubt where my sympathies would lie. And it turned out like that. In Geithner’s new book, he says that he had a conversation with Hubbard. Hubbard criticized the White House for not jumping all over the Simpson-Bowles budget plan. Geithner said they would when the Republicans said they would be willing to raise taxes as the Simpson-Bowles plan required. Hubbard replied, “[W]ell of course we have to raise taxes, we just can’t say that now.” At least, that’s what Geithner claims.

This exchange makes Hubbard look like a jerk. For one thing, it has been a big Republican talking point that Obama didn’t embrace Simpson-Bowles, even though they are even more against it than the Democrats. But it’s worse than that. Is Hubbard an economist or a Republican political hack? Well, we know the answer to that, but Hubbard would claim that he’s an economist. And just like John Roberts, he would tell you that he just calls economics as he sees it. He has no ax to grind!

Hubbard shot back. “Geithner is making it up. It’s pretty simple. It’s not true.” Oh! My! God! Tim Geithner is lying about Glenn Hubbard! Or so says Glenn Hubbard who has all the credibility of that scorpion who kills the turtle in the famous Aesop’s Fable. Still, it’s he said, he said. Who can know the truth?

Well, Matt Yglesias took a dive into the facts, The Geithner-Hubbard Spat Shows How Conservative Wonks Try to Have it Both Ways on Taxes. He found that Hubbard had actually written an OpEd in The New York Times where he admitted that taxes would need to go up. What does this mean:

There’s a bigger issue here that goes beyond what a repugnant little prig Hubbard is. The conservative movement is based upon this idea that they are just telling the prols what they want to hear but that once they are in power, they’ll do what has to be done. But that never happens. Ever since Bush the Elder, Republicans have decided that raising taxes is toxic. So Hubbard may write the occasional OpEd that says what he knows to be true. But if he were high up in a Romney administration today, he’d be selling the idea that we really need to lower the top tax bracket to 25%. It’s like that line from Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” The conservative elites pretend to be as ignorant as the loony base, and in the end, they are as ignorant as the loony base.

Stephen Colbert is fifty years old today, but like a lot of entertainers, his life is really boring so I skipped him. Instead, I went with a really great director who you’ve probably never heard of. He got his start as a choreographer on stage and then eventually on the screen. This isn’t so strange. Bob Fosse was one of the greatest choreographers ever and then went on to be one of the great directors. I don’t think that’s too surprising. Dance is all about telling a story, but without words. And regardless of how you dress it up, films are about story telling. Oh, I forgot to tell you who I’m talking about!

On this day in 1927, the film director and much more, Herbert Ross was born. Most people haven’t heard of him, but they’ve seen and enjoyed his films: The Owl and the Pussycat, Play It Again, Sam, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The Goodbye Girl, Footloose, Steel Magnolias, and Boys on the Side. I’ve left out a lot of films, most of which you’ve probably seen and enjoyed. He wasn’t an ostentatious director, but he was artful.

My favorite of his films is Funny Girl. He didn’t direct the film. (William Wyler, also a great director, did so.) Ross choreographed it. But my understand is that he directed the musical numbers. And they are the high points of the film. So here is what might as well be a short film, the “I’m the Greatest Star” number. I just love it:

I think we over-value what film directors do. From D W Griffith to Martin Scorsese, they are just trying to tell stories. And when they do it artfully with style, they are at the top of their profession. Herbert Ross was such a director who made the raw materials of his films into something even better. The next time you are looking for a good, funny, and entertaining movie to watch, find one by Herbert Ross. You won’t be disappointed.

Happy birthday Herbert Ross!

Afterword

Another of Ross’ films was Pennies from Heaven. I wrote a fairly harsh review of the film recently. But as I note, the film is great; it is just brought to its knees by Steve Martin’s performance. Despite everything else, it is worth watching.

For a long time, I’ve puzzled over something. Why has the conservative treatment of Obama been almost exactly the same as the treatment of Bill Clinton. Yes, there have been little differences. For example, no one ever claimed that Clinton wasn’t qualified to be president because he wasn’t born in America. And that is a bit of overt racism that should have embarrassed the conservative movement far more than it did. I think the reason that it didn’t cause more of a stir was that the media are loath to admit anything quite so disturbing as the fact that one of the major political parties in the United States owes most of its appeal to racism. And the white majority mostly wants to compartmentalize racism as nothing more than people who use the n-word. But other than this bit of clearly racist behavior, Obama and Clinton were treated the same.

What I mean by this is that both men were treated as though they were treated as though they were invalid. And conservatives seem to believe that either men are capable of anything. There are stories about how Obama is secretly gay married and of course who can forget that Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster. What’s more, during both presidencies, the conservatives have kept going with supposed scandals that not only don’t come to anything, but don’t even seem to be about anything. What was Whitewater about? What is Benghazi! about? It isn’t just that I don’t know. The people pushing these scandals don’t seem to know either.

But leave it to Ta-Nehisi Coates to straighten out my thinking on this issue, Bill Clinton Was Racialized, Too. He pointed out that the issue isn’t so much who is leading the Democratic Party. The issue is that to the racists, the Democratic Party itself is the black party. It’s the part that looks after the interests of “those people.” He explained it:

Then he linked this to the very long history of white Americans seeing black Americans as invalid—not “real” Americans. I was especially amazed to read that people argued that Frederick Douglass didn’t actually write Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass because he was just an ignorant black man. This goes right along with claims that Obama didn’t write Dreams from My Father. How far we’ve come! But the point is that anyone but white Europeans are not just The Other, but are beings who just can’t be anything but unworthy outsiders.

So any Democratic president is going to be treated as an interloper. It doesn’t matter if they get 90% of the vote. And as we saw after the 2008 election, a certain segment of the conservative movement doesn’t accept voting. This is why ACORN was such a prime target for them. These people will never believe that the nation is changing. Instead, we get “black presidents” because ACORN and other nefarious groups are stealing elections. This is also why conservatives have embraced voter-identification laws. It isn’t about winning future elections (for the base). It is about making sure that elections are honest because they just know that real America (white America) could never have a president who cared about those non-white aliens.

Update (12 May 2014 7:42 pm)

As if on cue, The Blaze published, Texas Gun Shop’s “Funny” Sign Is Sure to Rile Up the Left: “I Like My Guns Like Obama Likes…”

I don’t see the need for the scare quotes. It is funny if you accept the premise. I bring it up because it works perfectly with what I just wrote about: conservatives’ belief that Obama is an interloper because he wasn’t really elected. It was all those non-citizens who illegally voted for him. So it’s a racist sign, but I don’t think that’s going to rile up a lot of liberals. It’s just SOP from conservatives. It wouldn’t even cause much of a stir if it had been displayed on a church’s sign.

Emily Letts is a young abortion counselor who decided to made a video of her own abortion to show that it wasn’t some scary thing. I don’t know exactly what she was thinking, but it seems to me that a lot of people in the anti-choice movement think that abortion involves doctors going inside the vagina with scalpels to cut full growth babies to pieces like something out of a slasher horror film. Given the size of fetuses during early term abortions, the procedures is more like hair electrolysis.

Amanda Marcotte over at RH Reality Check summed up the typical anti-choice reaction, Anti-Choicers Desperately Insist You See Things That Are Clearly Not There. Mostly, it is like Breitbart‘s William Bigelow who noted, “Of course, it wasn’t so pain-free and safe for the baby, but there is no mention of the baby in the entire article—or, for that matter, his or her father.” That one’s delicious! Not only does he (It’s always a he!) focus on it being a “baby” but he’s also concerned that the father’s rights are somehow being denied. That’s the first thing that I think about when a woman decides to have an abortion, “Is this okay with the father?!”

I don’t know how far along Letts’ pregnancy is. But I do know it is well within the first trimester. I also know that it is only in the fifth week that the brain starts to develop. It is not until well into the third trimester that what we think of as an actual human brain begins to develop. Pain is something that we experiment because of our brains. The nerve impulses are not themselves pain.

I have to admit, though: abortion does bother me. I don’t like it when things are killed. I try to get house flies to leave my room rather than kill them. Just the same, if they don’t, I have no problem killing them. I place my comfort above the life of a house fly. I am not a Jain. (Although I greatly respect them!) Of course, I’m not suggesting that a house fly is a fetus. Just the same, the annoyance of a fly buzzing me is not the same as a fetus growing inside me that might kill me. And note: women die during childbirth at a much greater rate in the United States than they do in other advanced countries. But I don’t hear anyone in the Breitbart empire upset about that.

Don’t misunderstand, I know that the real reason that people are against abortion is because they claim that the fetus has a soul. How do they know that? No one knows. It’s just a commonly held opinion in the religious community. But it’s funny how when these people, who supposedly only care about the souls of fetuses, start talking about killing “babies” when they are trying to make a political argument. And that’s especially interesting because, as I noted above, they don’t seem to care about mothers dying as a result of childbirth. And they don’t much seem to care about the babies dying after they’re born. Get ’em born; get ’em baptized; and let ’em die!

But Emily Letts shows in her short, not at all graphic video, first trimester abortions are simple, painless, and quick medical procedures. There are no babies involved. And if you ask Thomas Aquinas, there are no souls involved either.

I’ve never been a good team player. If the side I’m pulling for commits a foul, I call it. Affinity doesn’t mean a great deal to me. That’s why people tend to see me as a political radical. I don’t see any reason to accept our political Overton Window. Indeed, if the Republican Party were not totally insane and divorced from reality, I wouldn’t be a Democrat. But that doesn’t much matter, given that I’m also not much of a partisan except in the sense that the Republicans basically never have any good ideas and the Democrats do.

I wasn’t born this way, of course. But like most people (I think), I was born not liking to be lied to. And all through grammar school, I was lied to. I used to be a true believer in what America stands for. But my disappointment came not because things were more complicated than young minds could understand. My disappointment came about because those in power don’t even try to live up to our ideals. It doesn’t matter if you look at Nazi Germany or Stalin Russia or 1984, the power elites are interested in one thing and one thing only: power and power and more power. I accept that. But no country’s power elite has ever made such a big show of only being interested in the ordinary folk.

Since we are nominally a democracy, it’s important to keep the people focused off what is actually keeping them down and focused on something else. Usually these things are real, just not that important. We saw just such a thing last week where 60 Minutes got the nation to weep for BP because a couple of unscrupulous small businesses conned them out of a couple of bucks. And of course, the Republicans have Benghazi! for all their followers. But the general approach is just to keep the people afraid.

And that brings us to Julius Rosenberg was was born on this day in 1918. As I said, the things were are supposed to be afraid of usually are bad things. In Rosenberg’s case, he really was a spy for the Soviet Union. The information he leaked caused the Soviet Union get get the atomic bomb anywhere from one year to not at all faster than it would otherwise have. My guess is “not at all.” This was from a period where people in the United States thought the Russians were a bunch of idiots. That was a widely held view until Sputnik.

But Rosenberg was a spy. Why did we kill him? And even more: why did we kill his wife, Ethel? There were lots of people involved in the plot, including the guy who actual stole the documents, David Greenglass. And none of them were killed. Why did we kill the Rosenbergs? Certainly, part of the reason that we killed Ethel was they were trying to use death as leverage to roll over on other people. But it doesn’t appear that there were any other people to roll over on. I think it was all panem et circenses. Killing the married couple—the Jewish married couple—was a great show! It was like a magic trick: look at the commie infiltration in my right hand while I take away your union rights with my left!

I doubt Ethel Rosenberg had anything to do with this plot other than knowing about it. Julius Rosenberg strikes me as a naive man at least as far as what he thought about the Soviet Union. But he was clear-eyed as he waited to die. He wrote:

He was 35 yeras old.

Happy birthday Julius Rosenberg!

The eighth level of hell is reserved for the Fraudulent, Malicious Panderers. This is where all the people who work in the right wing echo chamber are going to go. And this is clear in a recent poll by CNN, Should Obamacare be kept or repealed? But before we get to where in hell Sean Hannity will spend eternity, let’s go over what is overall good news.

According to the poll, 61% of Americans think Obamacare should be left alone or some changes should be made to improve it. Another 20% think that the should just be repealed and we should go back to the system we had before. This is bad enough because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but for people who had insurance before, they pretty much have exactly what they had before. So their opinions are largely based upon the usual right wing propaganda that claims that Obamacare is a takeover of the the healthcare system. But I’m sure a lot of them are just people who have theirs and don’t care that the old system was terrible for most people.

What really bothered me, though, were those who thought the law should be “repealed and replaced with a completely different system.” What system might that be? I assume these aren’t the people like me who would like the whole system replaced with a single-payer system. These must be the people who have been fed a constant diet on Fox News about the “just about to be released” Republican replacement plan.

Over the last six months we’ve heard a couple of ideas for what the Republicans might get behind. One is a law that is basically just Obamacare with a couple of tweaks. The other is nothing but a bunch of typical conservative ideas that have nothing to do with healthcare reform and would, if anything, make healthcare in America worse. But they would manage to take money from the poor and give it to the rich, which is why the Republicans are for them.

I’m sure all the folks at Fox News and those producing hate radio feel very good about all the money that they are making by being Fraudulent, Malicious Panderers. But if they really are Christians and they believe all that nonsense about hell, they really ought to be worried about their eternal souls. It ain’t looking good.

“Get your ice cold beer right here!”

I remember that from the Giants games I went to when I was a kid. Now, of course, you have to walk to get your beer at the stadium—I assume it is to keep people from drinking too much and making sure that people can at least still walk. But I still remember those wandering sellers pushing their iced cold beer.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve wondered about that. If the water that comes out of your faucet doesn’t taste good, the thing to do is to create ice water. The colder a drink, the less of a taste it has. So what does it say that people sold “ice cold” beer? Does that mean the beer doesn’t taste very good? In a word: yes.

Last week, I had dinner with a neighbor and the only beer she had was Coors Light. I decided to take a can, because I’d never tasted it. And it wasn’t bad. I wouldn’t call it beer, though. And I can see why people like to drink it really really cold.

A good beer, however, should not be drunk really cold. Something like Arrogant Bastard is highly complex. If you drink it really cold, you miss its wonderful taste combination. I just came upon an article in The Kitchn (Yep, it’s spelled that way!), Why Chilling Your Beer Glass Isn’t a Waste of Time. Of course, that title is totally misleading. All they really mean is that using a chilled glass with a room temperature beer works perfectly for serving beer at the right temperature.

And what is that temperature? According to them, it is between 40°F and 55°F. Personally, I think it is better to get towards the high end of that scale. Beer as cold as 40°F makes for some tasteless beer. So chill your beer and put it in room temperature glass, or chill your glass and put room temperature beer in it.

Now if you like tasteless beer, buy your Coors Like, put it in your cold frig, and pour it into a frozen glass filled with ice cubes. Just don’t do it around me.