On this day in 1601, the Flemish Baroque painter Jan Brueghel the Younger was born. Clara Schumann (wife of you-know-who) was born in 1819. Here is her Pianoconcerto in A Minor:

Good guy plutocrat Milton S. Hershey was born in 1857. As rich guys go, he was one of the best. But there was an amazing amount of paternalism in him. For example, although he always treated his workers well, he was fiercely against unionization. The reason is clear: he wanted to be in control. He liked thinking of his employees as children and he was not keen to see them grow up. Nonetheless, he was a great man. In Hershey, there was no Great Depression. And he founded the Hershey Industrial School, which although changed (it includes girls for one thing) is going strong. But he has been placed on a pedestal that is far too high for any man.

The great but very difficult composer Arnold Schoenberg was born in 1874. Below is an early work, Kammersymphonie Op. 9. This predates his twelve-tone technique by some time. As a result, it is freer, and I think, more playful. But you can definitely hear why people in 1906 thought it was noise. That was a time when most people still had a problem with Debussy. Bearing that in mind, give it a listen:

The great novelist Sherwood Anderson was born in 1876. Novelist J. B. Priestley was born in 1894. Actor Claudette Colbert was born in 1903. I’m not a big fan, but It Happened One Night is one of my very favorite movies. Here is one of the many great scenes from that movie, “A very nice married couple”:

Singer Mel Torme was born in 1925. Actor Nell Carter was born in 1948.

Miss Manners, Judith Martin is 75 today. Novelist Mildred Taylor is 70. Actor Jacqueline Bisset is 69. Film producer Frank Marshall is 67. Political commentator Tavis Smiley is 49. And Fiona Apple is 36. Here is the “Hot Knife” video, which is pretty great:

The day, however, belongs to the great writer Roald Dahl who was born on this day in 1916. When I was a kid, my favorite book was James and the Giant Peach. Of course, I liked many other of his books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr Fox. And even now, I read his short fiction. He was a great talent. Of course, we would know that anyway; there is no way a bookworm like he could have nabbed Patricia Neal was a wife.

Happy birthday Roald Dahl!

Jonathan Bernstein wrote a really interesting article earlier this week, If Obama Wants the GOP’s Help in Syria, He Must Deal with Torture First. His argument is that the Republican foreign policy establishment has never been able to repair itself because the Republican Party has never be required to come to terms with the fact that it was taken over by ideologues during the Bush years. As a result, the ideologues have never been purged from the party. To this day, cable news is filled with stories about what Dick Cheney thinks about the situation in Syria. But it isn’t just him and other media celebrities. Throughout the Republican foreign policy “establishment,” the ideologues are still in control.

And this brings us to the torture issue. It’s funny that everywhere you look, people condemn the idea of allowing bad actors from going without punishment. But when Obama decided that no one in the Bush administration would be held accountable for their torture program, everyone in the mainstream press was on board. We had to look forward not back. But there are a number of problems here. First, just from a political standpoint, does anyone doubt that if the positions were reversed that the Republicans would just “look forward not back”? These are people who impeached a president for lying about an extramarital affair! The only time they’ve decided to “look forward not back” was when Ford pardoned Nixon—one of their own.

But on a much more fundamental level, Obama’s forward looking policy didn’t actually allow us to move forward. The county did a bad thing. And all Obama’s policy did was sweep it under the rug. What we needed was some kind of truth and reconciliation committee. We still need it! Bernstein’s idea is that we pardon everyone so we can get at the truth. That way, no one has to worry about going to jail at the same time that the country can admit error and move on. But of course, that will never happen. It would put pressure on places like UC Berkeley to fire terrible people like John Yoo. And it would require that the Republican Party look in the mirror. That might have happened in 2009, but it ain’t happening now.

As a result of this, what we get from the Republicans on international affairs is the same thing we get on domestic affairs: knee jerk opposition to everything that the Democrats want to do. Of course, in the case of Syria, I think they happen to be right and I’ll accept any ally for any issue, regardless of how screwed up their thinking is. But this was a case when they shouldn’t have been on my side and there is no doubt that if the president were a Republican, they would have been all for it.

I think this all goes a good deal deeper than Bernstein suggests. If the Bush administration had been held accountable for its torture policies, I think it would have removed much of the support for all of their policies. Republicans would have been forced to rethink everything. That doesn’t mean that they would have become liberals, but they might, for example, have supported their very own healthcare reform idea. They might have accepted that it was a good idea even if the Democrats supported it.

American governance is like a dysfunctional family. Everyone knows that something is really wrong with the Republican Party, but we keep pretending that it is just the loyal opposition. If they say that their own healthcare law is socialism, well that must be a reasonable opinion. If they want to cut off food stamps for the poor and give even more money to millionaire farmers, that must be a reasonable position. If they want to force the government to default on its debt, that’s just a reasonable political ploy, even if no one has ever used it before.

As long as the Republicans are not held to account for what they’ve done, they will continue to act badly.

Depending on my mood, I find the whole John Boehner Debt Ceiling government shutdown soap opera amusing or infuriating. I haven’t yet had my tea, so this morning I am angry, but I can still see the farcical elements to it. As I discussed yesterday, Boehner can’t even get his caucus to vote for a continuing resolution (CR) without simultaneously defunding Obamacare. That in itself is extremely frustrating. What is the House Republican Caucus—a kindergarten class? Since when do legislators think that just because they don’t like some law, it gives them carte blanche to not do their jobs until they get their way? Clearly, the Republicans have worked themselves up into an unsustainable froth over what is after all their own fucking law. And it may very well end in their destruction, even if they don’t go quietly.

Since Boehner couldn’t get his caucus to make a reasonable deal, now he is turning to Obama and the Democrats. What he wants is a deal that will maintain the support of a majority of his caucus that enough Democrats will vote for to allow passage. As such, he wants to link the CR with the Debt Ceiling. But this isn’t a negotiation—at least in the common sense of the word. According to Boehner, the federal debt is killing the country. In fact, the Treasury Department released figures yesterday, and the deficit is down to its 2008 level—the level before the financial crisis. But facts don’t much matter in this case; the deficit is killing us because the Republicans think the deficit is killing us. What’s more, this killer deficit can only be stopped with spending cuts. There can be no tax increases. And the spending cuts must come only from programs that Republicans don’t like. So there cannot be any military cuts, even though it is the most bloated program we have. By Boehner’s definition, negotiation means that the Democrats agree to do everything that he wants.

The administration and the Senate Democrats are playing hardball:

To add insult to injury, both Reid and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said they felt sorry for Boehner. I agree. But it is hard to feel too sorry for him or any of the less crazy Republicans. They are, after all, reaping what they have sown. You can’t set up your own alternative “think” tanks and media outlets, tell all your base that Obama is a Kenyan Manchurian Candidate, and not expect that they aren’t going to believe the scare stories. John Fleming, the Louisiana Republican said, “Obamacare is the most dangerous piece of legislation ever passed in Congress. It is the most existential threat to our economy… since the Great Depression…” I doubt that Fleming could explain why it is so dangerous. It is just that he’s been told by important thinkers like Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist.

So buckle your seat belts because it is going to be a bumpy month. My best guess at this point: government shutdown; country wide freak out; Republicans cave; mostly clean CR; clean Debt Ceiling; Republicans lose a few more seats in the House in 2014.

Update (13 September 2013 11:11 am)

Ed Kilgore has a great take on what’s going on:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spoke to a “defense and intelligence contractor trade group” on Tuesday. And he said something that I thought was very interesting about the Edward Snowden leaks, “I think it’s clear that some of the conversations this has generated, some of the debate, actually needed to happen.” From the reporter’s standpoint, that’s the money quote. But I think that’s being far too charitable and, to be blunt, naive.

Just on the most obvious level, what do you expect Clapper to say? He isn’t going to say that the leaks were the worst thing ever and that if we had any sense we’d fire him. Instead, he’s going to talk on all sides of the issue. After saying that we needed to have this discussion, he said that this doesn’t take away from just how horrible the Snowden revelations are. According to the article, “The ‘continuous stream of revelations’ that has appeared in U.S. and British newspapers has damaged national security, and is far from over, Clapper said.” All of this is standard surveillance state propaganda.

What bothers me a lot more if how Clapper implies that there is some kind of perfect leak. Snowden could have leaked documents that would have started the debate, but not ones that “damaged national security.” That is such a load of crap. It is just like Obama saying that we ought to have a debate before anyone knew who Snowden was. Sure: pretty words. But we weren’t having that debate. In fact, we couldn’t have that debate. It’s like having a discussion with your doctor about a health problem you have. If he refuses to tell you what the problem is, it is hard to have a real discussion. Is it an ingrown toenail or cancer? It really does matter.

So the government (it doesn’t matter what the administration is) wants us to have a conversation about our privacy. But they don’t want us to know that they are processing all of our electronic communications. That would damage national security! They don’t want us to know that the spying agencies screw up and infringe on citizens’ privacy all the time—including times where rogue agents spy on people for their own personal reasons. That would damage national security! They don’t want us to know that the high tech world has rolled over and allowed the agencies to put back doors in all their products. That would damage national security!

So what do they want? They want a very public conversation where people say, “We’re worried about our privacy and the acts of the government to infringe upon it.” And then they will say, “But we would never do that!” And the conversation would be over. There is no more to be said. The people couldn’t say, “Then why are you collecting all of our data?” Because the people wouldn’t know they were collecting all our data. And that’s the way the government wants it. They want us in the dark so that we will be compliant.

So when you hear James Clapper or anyone else in any administration talk about “welcoming debate,” just file it under “Yet More Government Bullshit.” All they want to do is cover their own asses and maintain what power and privilege they have.The more information we have, the less powerful they are. And that is not acceptable to them.

Afterword

To be fair to these people, they think they are keeping us “safe.” And it is certainly true that it is safer for them to run an authoritarian state where no terror attacks happen than a free state where they do. But I’m not even sure that their authoritarian methods do make us safe. Every time there is a plot uncovered, it turns out to be nothing more than one agency or another manipulating vulnerable people into using fake weapons that the government provides to try to do something nasty. If the government really is stopping major plots, where are they? If they existed, they would be trotted out all the time. Instead, we get nothing. The surveillance state exists only to keep itself growing. And regardless of how people like James Clapper self-justify, they are still evil men.

On this day in 1688, the sculptor Ferdinand Brokoff was born. Inventor of the rotary press, Richard March Hoe was born in 1812. The inventor of the Gatling gun, Richard Jordan Gatling was born in 1818. And so was Romantic composer Theodor Kullak. Here is his Piano Concerto in C Minor:

The great H. L. Mencken was born in 1880. Maurice Chevalier was born in 1888. Here he is doing “Louise”:

Comedian Billy Gilbert was born in 1894. Artist Ben Shahn was born in 1898. And country music legend George Jones was born in 1931. Here he is doing his mega-hit “He Stopped Loving Her Today”:

The great actor Ian Holm is 82 today. (He looks really good!) He’s done so much great work, but I really can’t find a decent scene to show you. Native American activist Leonard Peltier is 69 today. I don’t think the government will ever let him out of prison alive. And certainly don’t depend upon coward Obama to pardon him.

Actor Joe Pantoliano is 62. He is so smart that he got in The Matrix without having to do any wire work. Gerry Beckley of the band America is 61. Film music composer Hans Zimmer is 56. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that he has written the score to every action film since 1990. And they all sound exactly the same. And he’s been hugely influential. Now most film scores suck. And comedian Louis C.K. is 46. I’m not that fond of him, but this bit on white privilege is great:

The day, however, belongs to one of my favorite musicians, Barry White who was born in 1944. He had a great voice, of course; but more than that, he was a great songwriter and producer. Here he is doing one of his lesser known hit songs, “What Am I Gonna Do With You”:

Happy birthday Barry White!

The following commercial for Chipotle Mexican Grill is really great. I say this in terms of pure entertainment; it is a work of art: sweet, sentimental, smart. But it is also great advertising. Look: I understand. It is actually an ad for some Chipotle game, which is itself an ad for the restaurant. But it really worked for me.

Look: I hate Chipotle. That kind of Tex-Mex food is an abomination. Who thinks it’s good? But then I thought: that commercial didn’t seem like an ad for kind of place that I’ve been. Also, for the first time I read its whole name: Chipotle Mexican Grill. Well, I love Mexican food. And that’s when I realized that I had never actually eaten at a Chipotle’s restaurant. It was that other restaurant that has a chili in its logo: Chili’s Grill & Bar. Which sucks. Did I mention that?

So now I will have to give Chipotle’s a try. But regardless, this video is totally great:

H/T: Matt Yglesias

I think Paul Krugman is being coy this morning. He talks about various technocratic institutions—European Commission, Bank for International Settlements, OECD—that have pushed policies that go entirely against standard economic models. These are theories like, “Cutting government spending won’t cause the economy to contract but rather made businesses confident and cause a burst of investment!” Ideas like this go exactly against what we know about economics. As Krugman puts it, “I guess we should just call these people crats, since the techno got thrown out the window and replaced by intuition, or something.”

But this is not what’s going on. All the ideas of “expansionary austerity” are nothing more than covers. They are presented as a way to justify policies that those pushing them want for different reasons. And it is clear what those different reasons are. These people do not like the welfare state. They are the rich and they are looking out for the interests of the rich.

This is very much like Matt Yglesias’ great example of Quaker budget hawks. If the government went on to balance the budget without cutting the military and the Quakers complained that wasn’t acceptable, then we would all agree that they didn’t care about the budget, just about cutting defense spending. But somehow when almost all budget hawks turn out to only be interested in cutting spending on the poor, they aren’t publicly shamed for their obvious disingenuousness.

We saw this quite explicitly last week when Olli Rehn complained that France wasn’t balancing its budget the right way. You see, France has been raising taxes. Now, normally people would think that was fine. If a person is in debt, he can either cut his spending or make more money, say, with a second job. It really doesn’t matter. With governments, the argument for taxes over spending cuts is even stronger—especially in a depressed economy. Cuts to spending cut that exact amount out of the economy. Raising taxes take most but not all of that money out of the economy. (For the record: both are bad ideas in a depressed economy.)

Krugman knows all this, of course. He was one of the people who called out Rehn for his nonsense. But it may be a bridge too far for him to claim that all of these institutions are disingenuous. But I don’t see how else you explain it. I’m sure that most of the top people at these places have convinced themselves that what is best for themselves and their rich friends conveniently is best for everyone. But just because they have come to believe their own lies doesn’t mean we should let them off the hook.

It is, of course, the 12th anniversary of 9/11. And it is now “Patriot Day,” which is an especially stupid name because we already have “Patriots’ Day,” which celebrates the Battles of Lexington and Concord. But it is an offensive holiday even still. It became a holiday immediately after 9/11 during the time when George Bush Jr was saying things like, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” The idea most clearly is that either you go along with whatever harebrained policies the government decides on or you are not a patriot. That, of course, goes entirely against the founding principles of this country. I remember in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I did not feel any sense of pride and patriotism. It was a horrible event. But almost immediately, it led us on a terrible journey that ended with rights infringed upon, widespread torture, and many tens of thousands of deaths—most of them entirely innocent. So to me, 9/11 is a symbol of a terrible attack on our country and how we then reacted to it in about the worst way possible. It does not honor our dead.

In 1522 the great naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi was born. He was the major force behind the Bologna botanical garden. Poet James Thomson was born in 1700. British composer William Boyce was born in 1711. Here is his Overture No. 4 in D Major:

The astronomer (and mystic) James Hopwood Jeans was born in 1877. Author D. H. Lawrence was born in 1885. I’ve never much liked him but I’m sure I would like him more if I could be scandalized by his work as readers where during his lifetime. Modern composer Harry Somers was born in 1925.

Songwriter Alan Bergman is 88 today. With his wife Marilyn, he wrote the song “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” And, I’m sorry, but I still rather like it. I like pop music that at least tries to be adult. And the Bergmans have been married for 55 years as of this year.

The film director Brian De Palma is 73. Playwright Gerome Ragni is 71. He co-wrote Hair. The great guitarist Leo Kottke is 68. Here he is on Austin City Limits about 20 years ago:

The fine screenwriter Tony Gilroy is 57. He also directs. I’ve only seen Michael Clayton, but as mainstream films go, it is about as good as it gets. Here is perhaps the best scene in the film with the great Tom Wilkinson:

Actor John Hawkes is 54. Dance music (I guess) creator Moby is 48. And singer Harry Connick Jr is 46.

The day, however, belongs to the great writer William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, who was born in 1862. He is mostly remembered today for the surprise endings of his stories. You know the kind of thing: the psychologist helps a boy who claims to see dead people only for it to be revealed that the psychologist himself is dead. No wait… How about this: a couple each sells their most valuable possession to buy the other something for that possession. It’s old hat now, but I’m sure at the time it was every bit as affecting as The Sixth Sense. What’s more, “The Gift of the Magi” still works as a Christmas story—a lot better than most Christmas stories.

What I especially like about Porter is that his past is unclear. Maybe he embezzled from a bank he worked at. Or maybe he was just incompetent. This same dynamic is true of Cervantes who may have stole tax receipts or maybe just screwed up. Regardless, they both spent time in jail and then went on to do their best work. And all of that work came relatively late in their lives. Of course, it didn’t come that late for Porter, who died as a result of his heavy drinking at the age of 47.

Happy birthday William Sydney Porter!