On this day back in 1831, the co-inventor of the microphone, David E. Hughes was born. He also invented a number of other things by himself, most notably the spark-gap transmitter and the crystal radio. The latter was a very popular radio in the early days because it requires no battery, which is, I don’t know, totally awesome? He was also something of a musical prodigy, later becoming a professor of music.

One of the most creepy and vile serial killers ever, H. H. Holmes was born in 1861. The glamorous Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka was born in 1898. Henry Fonda was born in 1905. In 1910, Socialist realism painter Aleksandr Ivanovich Laktionov was born. And Liberace was born in 1919.

Guitarist Robert Fripp is 67 today. Although it is a different kind of radio that he has on, Jonathan Richman is 62. As far as I’m concerned, Pierce Brosnan was the perfect James Bond, and he is 60 today. And the great gymnast Olga Korbut is 58. Although I actually have a problem with gymnastics in general, I’ve had a crush on Korbut since I was eight. So it’s a good opportunity to enjoy her again:

Actor Debra Winger is also 58. Kevin McDonald from The Kids in the Hall is 52. And Janet Jackson is 47.

The day, however, belongs to the great oral historian and writer Studs Terkel who was born on this day 1912. He stayed with us—and relevant—halfway through his 97th year. He is best known for Hard Times, Working, and The Good War. What I most admire about him is the unusual life he led. He got a law degree, but rather than practice law, he went to work in a hotel. Then he went into theater and found himself in radio. He didn’t really start to do the stuff he was known for until he was in his 40s. And he did his most important work in his 60s and 70s. When it comes to the things that really matter—one of which is our fellow humans and their lives—greatness takes time. For most people, Marsellus Wallace was right: humans are like vinegar. But Terkel was like a fine red wine.

Happy birthday Studs Terkel!

Afterword

Olga Korbut is often credited with (Blamed for?) changing women’s gymnastics from a sport of older, larger women to one of younger, smaller women. That isn’t really true. In the 1960s, there was a trend toward younger and smaller gymnastics and Korbut was just part of that trend. And not the end of it, either.

I caught a few minutes of Fox News this afternoon. Supposedly straight news anchor Bret Baier explained that the resignation of acting IRS chief Steven T. Miller was just political theater because he was going to step down in June anyway. And then Charles Krauthammer added that it just wasn’t credible that a few low-level IRS employees would take it on themselves to give special attention to tea party groups. That, of course, makes no sense at all. If you were charged with checking 501(c)(4) applications and you saw a huge increase in applications from tea party groups, you would very easily think, “Maybe I should look into all these tea party groups.” Krauthammer’s argument assumes that IRS employees are a bunch of buffoons who can’t think for themselves. But that’s his (very typical) conservative prejudice. It isn’t close to reality.

But what struck me about the segment was not that, as usual, Fox News was spouting typical partisan nonsense as if it were news. It was that Fox News was saying just what I said they would say. And as I said, most of it would be true. At least, what Bret Baier said was true: it was political theater. Where I went wrong was to think that conservatives would care that Steven Miller had nothing to do with the scandal, except, you know, to fix it. I guess it isn’t the job of Fox News to report, you know, news. It’s just their job to attack the president, and they had enough for that in the fact that Miller was going away soon anyway.

What boggles my mind about all of this is, if anything, Fox News is being less hysterical than most of the Washington press. To some extent, I suspect this is just because the Fox News staff are relishing it; they think this will go on and on—maybe even bringing down the president—so there’s no reason to rush. Jonathan Bernstein has an excellent article at his A Plain Blog About Politics where he looked at all the excitement on Tuesday about this “important” collection of scandals. A good illustration of this is from last night’s The Daily Show:

When I saw this I was very angry. What Stewart is saying is that because there is a scandal about the IRS and the Associated Press, even if it doesn’t actually have anything to do with the president, that makes Benghazi a real scandal. This is the sort of nonsense that I expect The Daily Show to lampoon. But in its way, Jon Stewart and company are very much a mirror of Washington. And really: I’m getting to the point where I don’t even want to watch it; the aggravation is not compensated by the comedy—the comedy itself getting rarer and rarer, replaced by knowing observations. I don’t need The Daily Show to point out the foolishness of the politics; I get that all day long.

Anyway, according to Bernstein, the mainstream news sources have today figured out what I’ve been arguing all along: what scandals? He is quick to note that we just don’t know what is going to happen to these scandals. And I agree. It could turn out that Obama was bribing those IRS workers to go after his enemies—just like Richard Nixon! But it is much more likely that what is really happening is what I’ve been saying all along: the more we know, the less there appears to be a scandal.

That’s not to say that there aren’t really important issues associated with each one of the supposed scandals. My article Scandal?! is probably the best thing I’ve written this month and it discusses exactly that. But as for any scandal that involves President Obama breaking the law or using his office for undue advantage? That’s just nonsense. It’s a 1% chance at best. Mark my words: by this time next week, only Fox News will be covering this stuff with any amount of passion.

Matt Yglesias has this tendency to apologize for behavior even as he demolishes it. He published a great example of this earlier this morning, AEI Chief: To Win Latino Votes, the GOP Needs an Agenda to Help Poor People. That sounds fantastic and almost unbelievable. The head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, understands that in order to appeal to Latinos, the GOP needs to help the poor? That’s great! I’ve been arguing the same thing for a long time.

Alas, that isn’t what he said at all. After laying out what Brooks has to say, Yglesias adds, “The problem, of course, is that Brooks’ proposed solution looks an awful lot like nothing more than reframing.” And of course, that is Brooks solution. Conservatives love to talk about all the opportunities that they want to create for the poor. But when it gets down to actions, those opportunities end up being nothing more than the opportunities for the rich to exploit them.

Brooks in fact says that he wants the poor to know that they are not the cause of our fiscal problems. Instead, it is those evil middle class people. And by cutting Social Security and Medicare, there will be plenty of money for the poor. Well, Brooks has a different definition or “poor” than I do. I think roughly half the country is poor. Brooks is more of the “if they have a microwave oven they can’t be poor” school of thought.

Yglesias goes after the reality of the Republican Party in terms of how it wants to “reform” the budget:

Not exactly a “protect the poor” agenda. But Yglesias goes on to speculate what Brooks is really doing. Is he trying to push the GOP in the right direction? Is he just clueless? I think Yglesias nailed it at the beginning of article. Brooks is just another good Republican soldier, out there trying to claim that they really want to help the poor without, you know, actually helping the poor.

It is also interesting that Brooks employs racist Charles Murray who only yesterday wrote a defense of fellow racist, with particular attention to Latinos, Jason Richwine. So this is really just SOP for the conservative movement. And that is all clear from Yglesias’ article. Yet he still tries to argue that maybe, in some alternate dark matter universe that I have no access to, the Republicans really are trying to change into something a little less evil. If it makes the young blogger happy, I guess it is okay. But the rest of us don’t need to buy his happy horseshit. His hard nosed analysis destroys it anyway.

Investment banker Jim Roumell has proposed a great idea over at the Washington Post. After 9/11, “strong” young men signed up with the military to defend America against… Well, I actually don’t know. At the time it seemed like an outburst of jingoism that had very little (if anything) to do with keeping America safe. But okay, let’s go along with Roumell’s analogy. Just like those courageous young patriots after 9/11, rich old patriots should sacrifice… Five years after the financial crisis.

But wait: it gets better! Roumell is saying that rich retirees should give up their Social Security. He suggests that those in the top 5% of the wealth distribution should do so. I don’t know Roumell’s net worth, but I’m pretty sure that he is a member of the 0.01%. So it would be pretty easy for him to give up his coming Social Security checks. But the people barely inside the top 5%? They would be earning about $80,000 per years in retirement, according to Dean Baker. Now, eighty grand in retirement is pretty good, but I’m not sure that I would call it rich. What is rich is obscenely wealthy people like Roumell calling this level of income “rich” when a few months ago they were screaming that $400,000 was “middle class.”

Most of Roumell’s OpEd just tries to show that his idea will bring in loads of money. In 2011, Dean Baker and Hye Jin Rho published a detailed study of this question, The Potential Savings to Social Security from Means Testing. They found that unless the government means tested down to the $40,000 per year range, there were very small savings to be had.

I think what is going on with Roumell is shown by what he didn’t mention in his OpEd: the payroll tax cap. Currently, there are no payroll taxes on incomes over $113,000 per year. Raising it even modestly to $200,000 per year would wipe out all of our Social Security funding problems. Forever. But Roumell doesn’t even want people to think about this obvious and just solution because it would cost him money. Let’s assume that the Roumell would normally have a working career (where he made more than $200,000 each year as is surely the case). He would probably have a 10 year retirement. With the higher payroll tax cap, he would lose about 50% more than he would by giving up his retirement benefits.

But who would really get screwed by Roumell’s plan are the people making right about the $100,000 per year mark. They would see no tax increase by raising the cap, but they would see a big hit from the loss of benefits. And that’s really typical of the super rich and their policy plans. They don’t generally recommend screwing the poor. First there is little money there. Second, it looks bad. But the people who have a fair amount of money but not a lot of political power? They’re a great target because the super rich can pretend that their plans will hurt the rich even while they help the super rich.

Regardless, I’m sure that Roumell’s plan is nothing more than an attempt to keep people from thinking about the real solution of raising the payroll tax cap. Because that is something that the rich would hate. If we could raise it to $200,000, what would stop us from raising it to a million? Or even eliminating it all together? And the truth is, other than the fact that we don’t live in a democracy and the rich control our politics, I see no reason not to do just that.

This IRS scandal is going from irrelevant to enraging. What bugs me most is that everyone is running around acting like it is a proven fact that some terrible thing was done. We’ve been through this time and time again. Even thus far in this scandal, the more information that comes out, the more benign it all appears. The IRS targeted conservative 501(c)(4) groups because the vast majority of the applications were coming from conservative groups. Politically incorrect? Absolutely. Wrong? Sure. But some kind of attack on conservative America? No way!

Here’s something that hasn’t gotten much coverage: those applications that the IRS preferentially targeted conservative groups for were voluntary. The groups didn’t have to get approval; they could have just filed their taxes as 501(c)(4) groups and waited to see if the IRS complained. Which would take up to six years. What’s more, I have yet to see any reporting of a conservative group getting denied 501(c)(4) status but there has been reporting of liberal groups being denied. Like I said: the more you know about this scandal the more it seems like a tempest in a teapot.

Now, of course, there is talk of impeachment. Impeachment! Based upon what? As far as I can tell the reason is that the conservatives don’t like Obama and they think the proper thing to do when you don’t like a president is to impeach him. There is a very real sense in the Republican Party that if you can’t have things the way you want them, you are justified in destroying the system. As I’ve noted time and again, American conservatism is no longer a traditional political movement and the Republicans have become a revolutionary party.

In an article yesterday at the National Review we got the take on all this from one of the “reasonable” Republicans, Portman to Obama: Come Clean. In it, Rob “my son’s gay so now I support gay rights” Portman magnanimously said that talk of impeachment is “premature.” This is because there has been no direct connection between Obama and any of these scandals. It hasn’t even been clear that any of these scandals would be an impeachable offense. That’s even true of the Associated Press scandal. (That’s what’s so terrible about that case.) Of course, Portman hasn’t thought it through that much. In fact, he seems to assume that the administration was directing these low-level employees in the IRS. But if the administration were even talking to the IRS, that would be an impeachable offense. Portman doesn’t seem clear on that.

But there was one thing that Portman said that really floored me. “The American people have been betrayed in fundamental ways by the most powerful agency in government.” That’s a conservative all over. The IRS is the most powerful agency in government. It isn’t the Pentagon—you know, the people with all the guns. It isn’t the Department of Energy with all those nukes. No, it is the IRS. Because again, in Republican World, whatever it is that you don’t like is the most powerful and most pernicious.

Recall back in 2008 that the CIA prepared a secret report (subsequently leaked to WikiLeaks) that presciently noted that the election of Barack Obama would be the most effective way to stem the tide of antiwar sentiment in western Europe, because it would put a pleasant, happy, progressive face on those wars and thus convert large numbers of Obama supporters from war opponents into war supporters. That, of course, is exactly what happened: not just in the realm of militarism but civil liberties and a whole variety of other issues. That has had the effect of transforming what were, just a few years ago, symbols of highly contentious right-wing radicalism into harmonious bipartisan consensus. That the most vocal defenders of this unprecedented government acquisition of journalists’ phone records comes from government-loyal progressives—reciting the standard slogans of National Security and Keeping Us Safe and The Terrorists—is a potent symbol indeed of this transformation.

—Glenn Greenwald
The major Sea Change in Media Discussions of Obama and Civil Liberties

In the past, I’ve been really disappointed with President Obama. But now I’m really angry. He forced the resignation of acting IRS chief Steven T. Miller. This wasn’t done because Miller is culpable. Sure, you will hear that he testified before Congress that the organization wasn’t targeting groups based upon their political leanings. But that was because while he was heading the IRS they weren’t targeting groups based upon their political leanings. There was no credible reason to force his resignation.

So why did Obama do it? Because he’s a coward. Because he doesn’t stand for anything. Because he can’t take even a day of political heat. Just like with Shirley Sherrod, this administration doesn’t care what the facts are. They can’t wait until the facts are know. They need a scapegoat and they find one.

And what exactly does Obama get from all this? Does he really think that tomorrow all the papers will be hailing him for his leadership? Mark my words: tomorrow, there will be a lot of coverage of the fact that Miller was not the head of the IRS at any time during which this scandal was going on. And people (Including the conservatives who Obama wants to appease!) will call his actions into doubt. I know people will be writing much what I’m writing, “Rather than deal with the problem, Obama just looked around for a convenient scapegoat and fired him!”

Of course, most of the conservative world will just claim it was a political decision that is meaningless. And I hate to admit it, but they will be right. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the controversy and Obama is only doing it to quiet his critics. And guess what? It won’t work. And on the one scandal that really matters—the Associated Press phone surveillance—Obama is standing firm. According to him, what he did was right and proper because it dumps all over the United States Constitution. And Obama ought to know it, because he used to teach constitutional law. Of course, that was in his younger days when he believed in something other than accumulating power.

Shame on you, Mr. President!

Afterword

Mitch McConnell said, “More than two years after the problem began, and a year after the IRS told us there was no problem, the president is beginning to take action. If the president is as concerned about this issue as he claims, he’ll work openly and transparently with Congress to get to the bottom of the scandal—no stonewalling, no half-answers, no withholding of witnesses.” John Boehner said, “The IRS admitted to targeting conservatives. My question isn’t about who is going to resign. My question is who’s going to jail over this scandal?”

And that’s within an hour of the president’s announcement.

Pathetic.

Revolutionary proto-Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi was baptized in 1567. Why does that matter? If you’ve ever listened to Renaissance music, you probably didn’t like it very much. And no, the music you heard at the Renaissance Faire was almost certainly not Renaissance music. That music is highly modal; it doesn’t have the sense of chord progressions. To me, it sounds almost random, like it doesn’t know where it’s going. It is nice enough but not the kind of thing that holds your attention.

Monteverdi’s most famous piece is the two plus hour long opera L’Orfeo. It isn’t exactly Le Nozze di Figaro, Ossia la Folle Giornata, but it is really good. You can find a few complete performances of it online, but you really owe it to yourself to at least listen to this short excerpt from the beginning. It is worth it, plus it is a chance to hear a kind of music one rarely hears but that is also really good. (A lot of pretentious people listen to Gregorian chants, but it is really only interesting to specialists.) I think after listening to this, a lot of people will want to hear the whole thing:

Romantic modernist painter Viktor Vasnetsov was born on this day in 1848. American actor Joseph Cotten was born in 1905. English actor James Mason was born in 1909. And the great neo-Keynesian economist Paul Samuelson was born in 1915.

The great English playwright Peter Shaffer is 87 today. Painter Jasper Johns is 83. Two 60s icons Wavy Gravy and Ralph Steadman are 77. Madeleine Albright is 76. The evil Roger Ailes is 73. And musician Brian Eno is 65, so we won’t be hearing anything about him in the future.

The day, however, belongs to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz writer, L. Frank Baum who was born in 1856. He wrote a total of 14 Oz books. They are a lot of fun. Of course, in the books, Oz is a real place. I rather like the movie, but the whole “it was only a dream” bit kind of bugs me. In the eighth book, The Emerald City of Oz, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry fall on hard times and Dorothy arranges for them to retire there. Kind of subversive, when you think about it. Of course, people of that time were used to terrible recessions. That’s one of the things that bugs me about the gold standard libertarians who think all would be well if the government just went away. Well, we tried that. And do you know what? Aunt Em and Uncle Henry had to move to Oz where they had a better social safety net.

Happy birthday L. Frank Baum!

I’m not much into science fiction except in as much as it is about the nature of consciousness or is just well written. It is rarely either. I am more or less a Star Trek fan, but that has nothing to do with science fiction. Just because a melodrama is placed in space doesn’t make it science fiction. At its best, Star Trek is fun.

One of my favorite bits comes from Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home. The crew has gone back in time to get a whale to stop some space craft from destroying the earth because the extinct whale is not answering its call. Silly, but that’s not what I love. In present day earth Scotty and Bones go in search of a tank for the whale. Scotty offers this guy the secret to transparent aluminum (if memory servers me) in exchange for building the tank. Bones protests, “Won’t that change history?” To which Scotty replies, “How do we know he’s not the guy who invented it?” It could plausibly be the guy so therefore it is the guy. Of course time travel narratives are always silly. There are lots of other problems with the movie. But it doesn’t matter. The point is to have a fun time with a bunch of actors, their silly accents, and pointy ears.

And then it all went wrong. Gene Roddenberry decided to “fix” the series and created Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is the most tiresome series ever created. It makes me long for the days of My Mother the Car.[1] What made Star Trek work was that the characters didn’t get along. Spock and Bones actively hated each other. In The Next Generation we got a crew of people so well adjusted that I always believed there was a dungeon on the Enterprise where they all tortured sex slaves. If that wasn’t bad enough, the plots were ridiculous contrivances where everything worked out perfectly. Gone were the days of “City on the Edge of Forever” where Joan Collins has to die or “A Piece of the Action” where Kirk leaves a crime syndicate in charge of a planet. No more! The only thing that wasn’t just perfect was Denise Crosby dying in the second season because even she couldn’t take the series anymore.

After that came Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Luckily for it, Roddenberry was long dead and could not “fix” the series. It had conflict and generally worked well enough. It took by far the stupidest species ever created, the Ferengi, and created a reasonable character of Quark. And it had the Irish guy from The Commitments and about half of every other film to come out Ireland in the last three decades. It wasn’t bad, but I didn’t particularly care.

That marked the end of my Star Trek days. I did manage to see the first “new cast” Star Trek film. It shocked me that people thought it was so good. To me, they took the silly concept and kooky characters and made them stale. Then they put them in a typical Hollywood action film that was overlong and under-fun.

The reason this all comes to mind is that earlier today, Matt Yglesias posted, The Greatest Star Trek Movies, Series, Episodes, Villains, and Crew Members. And when he listed the movies from best to worst, I totally agreed with him on the first two: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Now, he may not know it, but the reason these films are at the top of the list is that they were directed and co-written by Nicholas Meyer. And Nicholas Meyer is no Star Trek fan. But he’s a good storyteller and that’s all that matters in the end.

The rest of Yglesias’ list is hit and miss: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (agreed; also co-written by Meyer); Star Trek VIII: First Contact (horrible, stupid movie); Star Trek (as I said, not very good, but probably the right position); Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (lots of fun; good: “Klingon bastard! You killed my son!”; bad: Merritt Butrick); Star Trek: Generations (pretty bad, but I like seeing Kirk ride a horse); Star Trek: Nemesis (never saw it); Star Trek: The Motion Picture (greatly underrated film); Star Trek: Insurrection (never saw it); Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (just wait). It is so easy to put down The Final Frontier. It is a mess. Shatner is at least 50 pounds over weight. And Nichelle Nichols is close. But in its complete failure, it’s an amazing thing to behold. The production designer introduced our first ever glimpse of an Enterprise toilet! Spock has a crazy half-brother who is a hell of a lot more fun than Spock. And he’s searching for God! Plus, would Kirk, Spock, and Bones really vacation together? It doesn’t get any sillier than The Final Frontier and it is definitely better than any The Next Generation episode or movie (that I’ve seen).

Next Yglesias gets to the series from best to worst: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, The Original Series, and Enterprise. Oh my! I haven’t seen even a clip of Voyager and Enterprise. I’ve been told that Voyager is rather good. It probably isn’t. Whatever. But I think that Yglesias puts The Next Generation on top because we all love most the Star Trek of our childhood. And that takes us to an important point. Star Trek is silly and even stupid. But we naturally look back on the shows of our youth in a nostalgic fog. Sure, I can justify why the original series was the best, but the fact is that I remember being four years old watching the Metrons force Kirk to battle the lizard man. And yes, I’m sure from Matt Yglesias’ perspective it’s just stupid. But to me, it’s charming.

Afterword

Yglesias’ top two characters are Spock and Data. What is this guy? A twelve year old?

[1] I don’t think that My Mother the Car is as bad as people say. I was just making a point.