H/T Dean Baker

John Boehner seems like a nice enough guy. The truth is, I feel kind of sorry for him. He doesn’t seem like a ideologue. It’s possible that over the years, he’s come to realize that his party has no ideas other than the commitment to stay in power. Every time I see him, he looks like he would much rather be in a bar somewhere drinking. (And I’m pretty sure he spends a large part of the time I don’t see him doing exactly that.) At this point, I suspect his beliefs have ossified and he doesn’t even think about it any more. Outside of the House, he’d probably be an all right guy.

Having said that, I’m really enjoying this whole thing. The Republicans (and to a lesser extent the whole conservative movement) is in a full tilt meltdown. I don’t usually allow myself to experience this much schadenfreude, but I think I deserve this. It isn’t just that the vote for “Plan B” had to be called off. It is that they went ahead with a really vile spending cut bill to woo recalcitrant Republicans. This bill was a great big “Fuck you!” to a large majority of America. And they voted for it, because—and I don’t say this lightly—Republicans hate America. They have a hard time passing up any opportunity to flip off the Home of the Brave.

Had Boehner’s little tactical move worked, it still probably wouldn’t have worked. If, through some miracle that almost certainly would have required putting some blood on a page for Mephistopheles, Boehner had managed to force an Obama veto, who would have cared? At best, there would have been enough coverage to note the repellent nature of the harsh spending cuts on the poor in order to save tax cuts for the rich. This all brings me back to my suggestion a couple weeks ago in, The Obama-Boehner Conspiracy: Boehner understood all along that there could be no deal this year.

In the end, I don’t think this is really about Boehner. What we are seeing is how a movement that believes in very little other than power deals with a situation in which they have no power. Although even when they have power, their thinking seems only to converge on doing more damage to the Democrats. These people really don’t have any idea what they want to do. If suddenly they had 538 Republican members in Congress as well as control of the White House, they would be very confused. Sure: they would lower taxes and cut spending for just about everything. But otherwise? What would be the point of running a government they think is by definition too large?

But for now, it is a hell of a lot of fun watching them implode.

Afterword

I understand that conservatives love some idea that they call “America.” It is usually the country as they perceive it must have been at some earlier time: in the 1950s or the 1780s. But the truth is, what we are is pretty much what we’ve always been: for good and for ill. So they love some myth while they hate the fact of their country.

10 Vaguely Comforting Things About Little American Children Dying

Had they lived, we all know the happy bits of life they would have enjoyed, but here are a few things they’ve been spared in this random, heartless existence:

Never learning that Santa is a lie.

Never having to experience the circle of Hell called High School.

Never knowing what unrequited love feels like.

Never knowing the pain of a broken heart.

Never feeling unwanted or misunderstood.

Never knowing guilt or regret.

Never living in a twisted society that glorifies the very violence it supposedly finds abhorrent.

Never knowing hopelessness or despair.

Never finding mental illness hiding behind the door of adulthood.

Never knowing loss.

*If Wishes Were Changes by Nanci Griffith

Dylan Matthews over at Wonk Blog has a remarkable little interactive budget calculator, Choose Your Own Fiscal Cliff Adventure! It is interesting to play around with. The main thing that you will notice is that liberal policies tend to improve the economy and help the budget deficit. Conservative policies tend to hurt the economy without doing much to help the budget picture. For example, extending Unemployment Insurance has a huge effect on the economy and almost no effect on the budget. Raising the retirement age, however, does almost nothing for the budget deficit while it causes great pain.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but Republicans really don’t care about results. They are so locked into their ideology (such as it is) that they can’t be bothered to think about good policy. For example, one great policy for our long term budget picture is to allow a public option in healthcare. But we can’t have this, even though it would cost the government less money. Why? Socialism! So a program that makes the government smaller is socialism, but being against that program is a sign that you are for small government. Fucking brilliant!

Ezra Klein posted his choices via twitter. It is very similar to mine. In fact, we agreed on everything in the “fiscal cliff” and “stimulus” parts of it. But we disagreed a lot in the “deficits” part. In particular, he is for eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. The truth is, I’m not too keen on that deduction myself. I don’t think that home ownership is something that the government should be encouraging. Just the same, cutting the deduction would be a huge blow to the building industry that is even now in bad shape. In the model, this has no effect on economic growth. It would have an effect.

Anyway, these kinds of tools are fun and educational. They are good at teaching how policies affect the economy. Of course, that’s one of the reasons that conservatives are so bad at this little game. If a Democrat is in the White House, nothing the government does can affect the economy. Why Boehner & Co are so worried about the Fiscal Cliff I can’t say. Unless they’ve been lying these last four years…

Supposedly, ITV canceled Kingdom because it was too expensive to produce, not because it was unpopular. The show, which stars Stephen Fry, is beautiful to look at. It has too many helicopter shots for my taste, but I can’t say they don’t work. Nonetheless, the show would have been as successful on a smaller budget. It is, after all, a little show about human foibles.

Fry plays Peter Kingdom, the one reasonably together sibling of a family that seems too dysfunctional to have gotten as far as they have. And they are surrounded by a group of idiosyncratic locals like Sidney Snell, the brilliant but socially awkward eccentric who almost single handedly manages to stop the encroachment of modernity on Market Shipborough. The series has long story arcs that are probably the weakest part of it. Peter Kingdom has a very unlikable brother Simon who takes up much of the air in these stories. This is sad because other potential story arcs are destroyed by the shrapnel of Simon’s past.

There are generally two stories during each 45 minute episode. One is usually light and the other designed to provoke convulsions of tears. For example, in the first episode of the second season, the whole town is trying to save the local lighthouse. Two older sisters are secretly trying to get it demolished because (unbeknownst by anyone) it was run by their uncle who sexually abused them as children. Sounds horrible, right? It is actually handled reasonably well. But it brought me to gasping sobs. As do most episodes. Usually, however, it isn’t something terrible. Instead it is something wonderfully sweet.

Thus far, you probably think that I don’t much care for Kingdom. That’s not true at all. It has exactly the combination of wit and sentimentalism that I desire. I am sad that it was canceled, because it certainly had another couple of good seasons in it. So if you get a chance to see it, I recommend it.

This is a little early. NASA means to put out the video below on 22 December 2012. They want to be there to explain why the world did not end. Even though it has not yet not ended. If you know what I mean.

My friend Toni asked me what I was planning on doing for the end of the world. I told her I would stay in and watch some comedies. I would definitely want to to see a few films again: Animal Crackers, The In-Laws, His Girl Friday. But if I really thought the world was coming to an end: I’d be frantically looking for a painless way to kill myself. I’m assuming here that we would be killed by an asteroid and that it would result in being burned alive. I don’t want to be around for that.

Luckily, the odds are that I’m not going to burn to death. What’s more, it almost certainly won’t happen tomorrow. So part of how I am spending my day is watching this video. According to it, the Mayan calendar is supposed to be cyclical like a car’s odometer. After you get to 999, it goes back to 000. All of my cars have managed this transition without exploding or even being hit by an asteroid, much less being engulfed by a huge solar flare.

So tonight, feel free to party like it’s 1999. But remember: odds are that you will still be expected at work in the morning.

They say two thousand zero zero
Party over, oops out of time
So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999

Or 20 December 2012. Whatever.

H/T Sarah Kliff

The single political issue that I care most about—the only one that really even exists—is out-group vilification. It is what allows us to have some people starve to death while others have dozens of servants waiting upon their every need. It is what allows us to deny healthcare for tens of millions in the name of theoretical concerns like liberty and choice. And most of all, it is what allows us to kill other people.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks put together the video below that calls attention to the many children who have been killed in our drone strikes. I’ve been in horrible conversations even quite recently with people claiming that our drone strikes are right and proper. Normally, politicians will say that they are unfortunate and unavoidable casualties. But most regular people either don’t think of it at all, or think that the people in Afghanistan hate us and therefore deserve to be killed. They should have loved their kids more by loving America.

The contrast now with this killing and the children killed at Sandy Hook last week is stark. In the defense of some conservatives, I’ve heard the same arguments. I’ve heard people say that these mass shootings are the price we pay for the 2nd Amendment. But mostly, this is not what people say about mass murder in the United States. So there is a disconnect. It is unacceptable that our children are murdered. And that’s absolutely true. But somehow it is acceptable to kill their children because it could be maybe that—if the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars—those kids were near a terrorist.

This is hard to watch, but not because it is graphic. It is hard to watch because it is true.

I get a lot of grief from people when I talk this way. The idea is that I am anti-American just because I don’t think that an American life is worth more than than Afghani life. Somehow, nationalism is a good thing, despite all of the lessons we supposedly learned from the 20th century.

Afterword

Just to make myself feel better: