On this day in 1862, the elder of the Lumiere brothers, Auguste was born. His younger brother Louis was born on 5 October 1864. They were moving picture pioneers. They invented, for example, the perforation on the sides of film that allow it to be perfectly fed through cameras and projectors. But they are most known for their films. Together, they made almost 200 films. Admittedly, most of them were like Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, which is 48 seconds long and simply shows a train arriving at the station. But they did arguably make the first comedy, The Sprinkler Sprinkled. I find this period fascinating because you get to see how a gimmick very quickly leads to the production of art. It is only 20 years from these earliest films to The Birth of a Nation, which pretty much has all of the modern film syntax. Another interesting thing about the Lumiere brothers (mostly Louis, I think), is that they had a great eye for photography. The shots are always well framed. This isn’t a surprise, given how much work they did with still photography. But most films at that time were not as well made.

The great professional wrestler Tor Johnson was born in 1903. He is best known for a still popular Halloween mask and, of course, his star role in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. Here he is, and yes, he was a sex machine:

The great musician Peter Tosh was born in 1944. I didn’t realize that he was murdered during a home invasion—just a couple of years after I got into his music. Here he is doing “Legalize It”:

Two conservative assholes are 57 today. The first is also an idiot, Steve Doocy. The second is just evil, Grover Norquist.

Other birthdays: essayist James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784); painter Theodoros Vryzakis (1814); painter Umberto Boccioni (1882); oceanographer Walter Munk (96); writer John le Carre (82); actor Michael Gambon (73); actor Divine (1945); actor John Lithgow (68); and the really bad film director Jon Favreau (47).

The day, however, belongs to Vinicius de Moraes who was born on this day in 1913. He is certainly one of the greatest Brazilian songwriters of the 20th century. And he’s probably the best lyricist. He wrote the lyrics to “Garota de Ipanema,” which is better known as “The Girl from Ipanema.” He was also a great performer. Here he is with a very young Toquinho:

Happy birthday Vinicius de Moraes!

There have been a lot of articles written in the last two days talking about the battle raging inside the Republican Party. Yesterday, for example, Bloomberg published, Republican Civil War Erupts: Business Groups v. Tea Party. But I don’t buy it. If there is a war going on in the GOP, it is only between those who want to immediately eliminate all aid to the poor and those who want to do it incrementally over the next decade: Paul Broun versus Paul Ryan.

I think Josh Barro is beginning to see the light. In the middle of the crisis, he wrote, “The most dangerous group in Congress is moderate Republicans, many from the northeast, who could reopen the government and break extremists’ grip on their caucus’ agenda, but choose not to.” Implicit in that statement, however, is the fact that the supposed moderates are choosing not to do anything for their own personal reasons. And I know from other things that Barro has said and written that he largely thinks it is cowardice.

This is the conventional wisdom in Washington. Most of the Republicans are not so very extreme, they are just worried about challenges from the right. But what really appears to be happening is that these supposed moderates believe exactly the same things that the extremists do. They are just trying to thread a needle. If there were no bad political consequences, they would be voting extremist, not moderate. There are a couple of reasons I think this. First, most right wing challenges fail. Look at how Orrin Hatch turned even further to the right because of a primary challenge. And what finally happened? Hatch won his primary by over 30 percentage points. So the fear may be real, but it isn’t all that valid.

Add to this the fact the Republicans especially overestimate how conservative the people they represent are. What this means is that these supposed moderates are eager to join the extremists. They have fear of the right and the left (actually the center). But when there is pressure from the two sides, they always move to the right. Mike Coffman, for example, won re-election by less than 7,000 votes. In his district, Obama beat Romney by 5 percentage points last year. Coffman, in other words, is extremely vulnerable in 2014. And in the end, he voted to reopen the government. But where had he been? In the nice warm waters of GOP extremism because that’s who he is.

The same thing goes for business interests who are now supposedly upset that their Republican lapdogs are doing things that make them a tad uncomfortable. There is no rift here. The only difference between Ted Cruz and Sheldon Adelson is that Adelson wants policy results. And really, who cares if the Republicans weaken the economy, as long as they also push policies that continue giving more and more to the rich? I’ll admit, the business community might like to soften the edges of the GOP. But that’s just as true with gay rights as it is with government shutdown and Debt Ceiling crises. What the business community (as represented by the nation Chamber of Commerce) wants is exactly what the House extremists want. It’s just that the business community would rather finesse the argument. “Let the poor die!” just isn’t good marketing. But it is a shared policy goal.

Update (19 October 2013 4:26 pm)

Dave Weigel says more or less the same thing, Tea-ism: Why Big Business Won’t Abandon the Tea Party. But as usual for him, he accepts the Tea Party rhetoric at face value. The reason they are unruly is simply because they have actually drunk the tea. The business community knows that Obamacare will not bring about a socialist hellscape. That’s just rhetoric that they generate to get the base’s attention. It just doesn’t work as well to say, “This is the kind of program that might lead to slightly less freedom for the very rich over the coming decades.” Again: the end goal is the same. The only thing that the two “sides” disagree about is urgency.

I saw over on Crooks & Liars today that the anti-LGBT activist Peter LaBarbera was pushing the alleged success stories of ex-gay people in the media. His idea is that since Fox News has been so good about distorting demographics by highlighting the few black Republicans, the network should do the same for the ex-gays.

Let’s think about that for a minute. I can well imagine why Fox News might have a problem with it. As a people, we aren’t too comfortable with sexual vagaries. So even acknowledging that people get confused sexually is likely to turn off the average viewer who is in his 70s. But there is the other aspect of this, which is that almost no one really believes that sexual orientation is something that people decide. I think everyone’s experience is like mine: when I reached puberty, I started noticing girls. If I had been gay, it would have been boys. There wouldn’t have been a decision. So people introduced to the concept of ex-gay generally think that the people involved are really mixed up or they are simply lying to themselves.

For me, this is kind of personal, but I think most people, if they are honest, will understand if not identify. You can ask my many and varied wives and girlfriends and they will all confirm that I do not have a very great sex drive. But my sexual orientation is pretty strongly heterosexual. Still, I can imagine the effect it would have on me if I lived in a world that told me since I was a kid that heterosexuality was wrong. Or if I were told that God himself hated the fact that I had sex with girls and would torture me to the end of the time for doing it. In that situation, I would be an excellent subject for anti-straight therapy.

And look how great it would work if they put me together with some guy who also liked girls but didn’t have a particularly strong sex drive. A night of mutual masturbation, some cuddling while watching a movie, and we’d be home free. We wouldn’t be gay, really. We’d just have managed to stifle our sex drives and focus on the other aspects of our lives. And that, I think, is how it works with those successful ex-gay folks. It is common for ex-gay men to hook up with ex-lesbians. What’s up with that? God forbid an ex-lesbian would hook up with a man who had a strong sex drive!

So my guess is that the successful ex-gays are a collection of people who have been really warped by religion and other social mores. But they’ve got to be people who either have weak sex drives or who are bisexual and can choose to just go one way or the other. What it most definitely is not is a bunch of people who have strong homosexual drives learning to have strong heterosexual drives. And what that means is that the movement does not “cure” the people they ought to care the most about. In that same article, Tea Party leader Rick Scarborough said that “homosexuality much more likely leads to AIDS than smoking leads to cancer.” If that’s the case, you’d want to go “cure” the most intense of the gays.

It reminds me of Prohibition. A lot of people have noted that making alcohol illegal really did reduce drinking. The problem is that it most reduced drinking among those who didn’t have a problem! So they take these poor men away and make them play football and slap each other on the back. And they take these poor women away and, I don’t know, force them to pretend they aren’t capable. And all they manage to do is get some bisexual woman to settle down with an effeminate man. Brilliant!

The whole thing is so sad from the perspective of those who are driven into such ex-gay therapy. The truth is that sex is a strange thing that our society ill prepares us for. And people have all kinds of sexual tastes and when those aren’t the rather narrow socially acceptable tastes, it has to be difficult. But the other side of it is pure evil. These are people who take the weaknesses of others and exploit them. They are the modern con artist and it makes it even worse that they do it for God.

I just finished watching If I Were You, a charming movie about Madelyn, a middle-aged woman who discovers her husband is having an affair with a young European woman. Then a bunch of stuff happens and soon after her mother passes away.

It’s much lighter than it sounds. The only reason I’m even mentioning it is because of this bit of dialogue. At her mother’s funeral, a co-worker offers his trite consolation:

Keith: But just remember – God doesn’t give us any more than we can carry.

Madelyn: God has some formula where he can calculate exactly how much pain to inflict on each individual? (Turning to her husband) Isn’t it interesting that things that are supposed to be mindlessly comforting are really, really horrible. You know, when you think about it.

1867
The United States took formal possession of Alaska from Russia.
[Two places I will probably never see, and I’m okay with that.]

1892
The first long-distance telephone line between New York and Chicago was officially opened (it could only handle one call at a time).
[Kind of like AT&T today.]

1922
The British Broadcasting Co., Ltd. (BBC) was founded.
[I love Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Karl Pilkington.]

1931
Inventor Thomas Alva Edison died in West Orange, N.J., at age 84.
[He was predeceased by Topsy, the elephant he electrocuted.]

1962
James D. Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for determining the double-helix molecular structure of DNA.
[Awesome.]

1969
The federal government banned artificial sweeteners known as cyclamates (SY’-kluh-maytz) because of evidence they caused cancer in laboratory rats.
[I had at least three years of ingesting sweets before it was banned.]

1972
Congress passed the Clean Water Act, overriding President Nixon’s veto.
[Once upon a time, the U.S. Congress actually did a good thing.]

Other than that, nothing awesome happened on this day until 1992 when my son was born (see below).

On this day twenty-one years ago, my one and only son, emerged into the world and posed for his one and only mug shot.

Today he is a bona fide man, planning his very first beer run. He will not be drinking and then driving as he has more sense than his mother used to. To clarify, I do not drink and then drive, not anymore.

Still, the idea that I have a child who is twenty-one years old is a teeny bit unsettling. On the other hand, he is officially no longer my responsibility. Time to get a dog.

The BART strike that started this morning is a major inconvenience for me—totally screwing up a work project. Still, I support the workers in this conflict. Sadly, I think that most American workers look at strikes from the standpoint of management and this is perverse. I see it as akin to a San Franciscan (or anyone, really) supporting the Dallas Cowboys.

Strikes are rarely about what they seem. In this country, they are usually about management trying to put workers in their place. It’s about power. It’s about control. In fact, this is why companies like Walmart are so much against allowing unions. It isn’t that the unions would be that powerful and “steal” all their profits. It is mostly just about keeping workers as helpless as possible so that the management is in control.

A good example of this is Milton Hershey during the first half of the last century. He is a legend for having treated his employees really well. But he was totally against allowing them to unionize. In his mind, he was the patriarch and the workers were his children. He wanted to be nice to them, but he did not want them to think of themselves as peers, much less equals. He wanted to give them good wages because he wanted to, not because they demanded them.

We are seeing the same thing going on in the BART strike. The two sides are in agreement about the economic issues. The negotiations have broken down over the issue of work rules. As it is now, if there are changes to how the work gets down, management and the workers must agree. Management claims this is hurting their ability to manage work. That seems like a reasonable complaint. Management needs to be able to manage, right? But that’s a great overstatement. Their prime example is that if they decide to run extra trains for a special event, then they would be required to do that every year. Okay. But if that’s their best example, I’m not too sympathetic.

The union rightly worries that if management can just change the work rules willy-nilly, they will do so to punish workers who have filed workplace complaints. But the union did give on this issue. They agreed to allow binding arbitration on such matters. That would seemingly address the concerns on both sides.

Unfortunately, it looks like management is engaged in a gambit. They have been pretty reasonable on the economic issues but are sticking with this one issue that they know the union hates. It is terrible but entirely typical. If there is one thing that has been destroying America for the last 60 years (first slowly and then quickly), it is the erosion of unions. What we are seeing in San Francisco is part of that. And this is what happens when the workers still have a strong union; it is much worse for most workers. As annoying as this strike is, we must support the workers.

Something I hate as a reader of political and economic news is how stories just disappear. I was thinking about that this evening because a week and a half ago, I reported on an article by Neil Irwin that highlighted the fact that 30 day treasury bill rates had gone up from 0.03% before the government shutdown to 0.27% in the middle of it. So the question is, “What happened after that?”

They stayed at about that rate for most of the crisis, but on the 15th, with the Debt Ceiling looming, they went up again—to 0.35%. Then yesterday, as a deal seemed more likely, they dropped to 0.14%. And today? They are at 0.01%.

After Irwin published his article, Dean Baker pooh-poohed it. He said that it wasn’t scary because 0.3% is still a really low interest rate. And that is true. But the point was that the behavior of the Republicans in the House was having a very real effect on the economy. No one was claiming that the government wouldn’t be able to handle its short term debt needs.

The bottom line is that the Republican Party is always and forever claiming that they are the party of business. But they are anything but. And just as their brinkmanship hurt the economy, their abject failure last night helped it.

Jonathan Chait has an interesting idea about Obamacare. It is also really dangerous. He suggests that if the websites for the healthcare exchanges are not working properly by December, the federal government should delay the individual mandate for the first year. His argument is that the government shouldn’t penalize people for not getting something that is very hard to get. Fair enough. But my problem with the whole law has always been that the government shouldn’t force people to go to the private health insurance market and pay excessive prices for it. (We pay about twice what people pay for insurance in other advanced economies.) The whole of Obamacare is crony capitalism of the most blatant kind. That too makes getting healthcare harder. But I have seen damned few of my fellow liberals calling for that.

But it is very likely that the administration will have to do exactly that if the websites don’t get fixed soon. The issue is not really the state websites. Covered California seems to be working fine. The problem is with the Republican controlled states where the federal government has to do all the work. So not getting these problems worked out is a major problem. It will only embolden the Republicans to continue their efforts to kill the program with a thousand cuts. What’s more, it will tell the state-level Republicans that they were right to deny federally paid-for healthcare for their current uninsured poor.

Chait’s idea gets even worse in that he isn’t calling for a complete delay in the individual mandate. He only wants to delay it in those states where there is a problem. Again: these are the states where Republican legislatures and governors have not set up exchanges simply out of spite. Chait is offering to give the worst behaved politicians in the country exactly what they want: a delay in the new healthcare law. So what extremist Republicans couldn’t accomplish on the federal level, Chait thinks it is fine to allow them to accomplish on the state level.

The situation is very bad. And the federal government has to fix the problem and fast. It reminds me very much of all the building projects in Iraq after the war. In this case, I really wonder about the contractors that the government hired. My friend Will and I do different kinds of projects: setting up network labs and that short of thing. But it is very easy for us to be passed over for a job because some slick company comes in that spends 90% of its money on marketing. I suspect that the same thing is going on with the Obamacare exchange websites. The truth is that if the government had its own office to do this kind of thing, they’d probably do a great job for far less money. But the trend for the last four decades has been to outsource and that’s a constant problem.

I don’t consider myself any kind of a technical genius, but I have a very clear picture of the technical challenges facing the people working on the system. And they really aren’t that great. Basically, it is just a highly distributed database application. The main problem is making all the different parts work together. It ain’t rocket science. Unfortunately, as I’ve noticed in high tech there is a real prejudice against older techs and against anyone with colorful backgrounds. I’ve had many experiences working in groups where well over half the people were worthless. I’m sure in the bloated consulting firms that the government loves to hire, this is exactly the kind of thing that is going on. But I’m also sure that there are some great people working on the problems.

I think it is way too soon to start talking about granting waivers. What we should be doing is focusing on solving the problem by any means necessary. I really can’t imagine the system being so screwed up that people can’t use it in December—and probably November. And if it does come down to granting waivers, giving them only to the states that have worked the hardest to kill Obamacare is not the way to go. The waivers should go to everyone. Most people without insurance really want to get it. They won’t be doing it to avoid a $95 penalty on 15 April 2015.