On last night’s The Daily Show, Al Madrigal talked to Third Way, the folks who want to stop partisan gridlock. This brought to mind something that has especially been bugging me this last month and a half of election coverage: the fetishization of bipartisanship. I hear it from liberals and conservatives alike. Everybody loves bipartisanship! But I don’t.

There is a reason that Democrats and Republicans (under normal circumstances) don’t get together on policy: they disagree. I want my elected officials to fight for what I believe in. For example, I think that the poorer classes have paid more than enough these last three odd decades. I think the “grand bargain” should be the rich paying higher taxes and the rich feeling good that we don’t raise their taxes back up to 91%. That’s my grand bargain. I don’t think that the rich giving up what Digby calls their tip money in exchange for raising the retirement age to 70 is any kind of “grand bargain.” I don’t want compromise or “bipartisan consensus” on this matter.

Of course, there is another matter here. For the last four years (and longer to a lesser extent), Republicans have tried to block policy when they were given exactly what they had always wanted. We saw this in the debt ceiling debate (How you feeling about that now guys?) and with healthcare reform. In this case, something really should be done. But this is not about the two sides coming together. The Democrats have come toward the Republicans time and time and time again. And the Republicans have moved further away time and time and time again. Calls for bipartisan consensus just obscure this fact.

As we see in Al Madrigal’s segment, it is often worse when legislatures get things done than when they are stuck in gridlock. And everyone knows this when it is a fact. It is only in airy theory that bipartisan consensus sounds so good. Who’s up for a good ol’ repeal of Rode v. Wade?

Afterword

Just for the record, I currently think it would be good to create two more marginal tax rates. For the rate above $250k up to $500k: 40%. For $500k up to $1m: 45%. And for income over $1 million: %50. And as usual, bring the Social Security tax cap way up: $250k or higher. We would have surpluses as far as the eye can see.

I understand that it must suck to be Israel. That’s a hell of a place to be Jewish. Of course, at this point, I think at least a large part of the area’s hatred of Israel comes from the country being an asshole and a bully. But that’s understandable. If I lived there, I’d have to be properly medicated—high doses of Valium. Otherwise, I’d be basket case.

But I really don’t understand the last two days. Egypt brokered a ceasefire two days ago. Everything seemed to be going well. And then Israel launched an attack that killed more Palestinians in Gaza than all the Israelis killed by projectiles from Gaza in the past three years. And what coverage are we getting about the situation here in the United States?

Most of it could be taken right from Elliott Abrams at the Council on Foreign Relations, Why Did Hamas Provoke a Conflict?

But that’s not what Abrams wrote earlier this week before the ceasefire. He wrote this today. Note that everything he writes is true. He just fails to mention anything that Israel has done wrong. You know, little things, like breaking the ceasefire and killing a bunch of people. And as always, he makes a very big deal of the mostly impotent rockets from Palestine.

I admit that I don’t understand what is going on. It is hard to sort through all the conflicting information. It certainly seems that Israel has done something very bad, but I’m sure they have their reasons. The problem is that most of our media just follow the Elliott Abrams line that Israel is always right and Palestine is always wrong. And as a result, we never get anywhere near the truth.

Afterword

It is interesting to compare Abrams bit of agitprop with The Daily Beast article by Yousef Munayyer. Munayyer seems to be every bit as much of partisan as Abrams but he presents the conflict between two groups of people with conflicting desires. Abrams presents it as a conflict between good and evil. My internal sense of drama tells me that I have to side with Munayyer. I think there’s a general rule here: when someone presents a conflict as clear cut, he is lying.

Munayyer ends the article:

Aaron Carroll, our go to man for healthcare reform and chewing gum swallowing, has written an article over at The Incidental Economist, Zombie Life Expectancy Arguments. In it, he provides five charts that show that it is wrong to say that we should raise the retirement age because people are living long. In particular, he shows that while life expectancy at birth has gone up 10 years since 1950, life expectancy at 65 has only gone up 4 years. What this means is that fewer people die as babies but that doesn’t mean a thing regarding Social Security.

The situation is even worse than this 4 year number indicates. Most of that comes from upper income people. Since 1977, those in the upper half of the income distribution have seen their life expectancy rise 6 years. But those in the lower half of the income distribution are only living 1 year longer. In other words, the people who most rely on Social Security are not living longer and so the whole argument goes away.

There are a couple of other perspectives to look at regarding raising the retirement age. First is one that a lot of people talk about: those doing manual labor might have a hard time continuing to work until they are 70. The people calling for changes in the retirement age are all white collar workers who don’t need to do anything that requires physical strength or fast reflexes. We really need to take these workers into account when discussing these issues.

The other issue that I give a lot of thought to is age discrimination. In the high tech field, I started experiencing this at 30 years old. More to the point, age discrimination is everywhere. Sure, Morley Safer keeps his 60 Minutes gig even at 81, but he’s a star; they get to do whatever they want. But the manager at Big Lots? At 65, he’s going to find his life harder. In fact, he’s probably going to find his life harder at 55. We have a very ageist society—old people are not appreciated. Or at least not appreciated enough.

So it is wrong to push up the age for retirement benefits when the society is not similarly pushing up the age that it thinks people are still valuable members of the workforce.

Before you ask: I had my reasons! I watched the film Stargate this evening. And I was really impressed with the first half. Other than that the film encourages people to believe Erich von Däniken‘s silly claims about ancient astronauts, it is impressive. There are two very compelling character arcs. James Spader is searching for the family he’s never had (and a steady job). Kurt Russell is trying to get over the death of his son. These two things are handled really well.

And then the shooting begins. Basically, the second half of the film is just action. And all action films have to have the same bullshit. James Spader goes from a clumsy nerd to a gun toting stud; as does his “wife”; as do all the local kids who have never even seen guns before. The villain acts stupidly just to allow the heroes to get away—repeatedly, but especially when Spader is supposed to publicly execute his comrades. The badass hero has to spout “clever” lines right before he kills a bad guy, “Give my regards to King Tut, asshole.” (Do people like these kinds of things? They just embarrass me.) In other words, all the intelligence that the screenwriters showed in the first half of the film leaves in the second half.

Another problem with these kinds of action movies is the conservative rhetoric that gets spouted. “Father, we will not live as slaves!” I’m at least as much against living as slaves as anyone else. But there is a subtext here that I find disturbing. Such statements are distinctly jingoistic. They imply that slavery is something you have if you are peaceful and freedom is something you have if you kill people.

As action films go, Stargate is quite good. You get a whole half of a movie that doesn’t totally suck. Then you get another half that doesn’t suck any more than most action films. So there’s that. Of course, you could just watch Johnny Got His Gun.

I like to put up things that amuse me. Lewis Black is a hit or miss kind of guy, but he’s very good here. Just for the record, the standard Creationist explanation for why vegetarian Tyrannosauruses had six-inch serrated teeth was to better bite into watermelons and other tough-skinned fruit.

Jonathan Chait discovers the real Mitt Romney. And guess what?! It’s exactly what we thought: “The real Romney is indeed a sneering plutocrat.”

This comes from an article in the Los Angeles Times by Maeve Reston, Romney Reflects on His Loss in Call With Campaign Donors. The article is about a conference call that Romney had with donors today. Basically, Romney gave the Bill O’Reilly line: the poor want “free stuff” and President Obama is giving it to them. This isn’t true, of course: if anything, it is Romney who was pandering.

Chait notes that this is what we already thought:

I would go further. This is how the all the Republican elite think. They don’t have to make $20 million per year. In fact, that whole message that says loafers are stealing your stuff is an especially strong argument to people who are just scraping to get by. But it’s hard to say this about your unemployed brother-in-law who you know is working hard to find a job. It is much easier if you can imply that it is those brown-skinned people who you don’t much interact with. And this is part of the Republican demographic challenge.

Yesterday, paste eating pundit Thomas Friedman told us that the Middle East is about to explode. In fact, he claims that Obama could be facing all the Middle East conflicts suffered by presidents from Eisenhower on. “Does that mean Egypt is going to nationalize the Suez Canal?” you ask. Don’t take Friedman literally; he just means that some country will try to nationalize some body of water. Or something. Mostly: paste tastes good!

Let me lay Friedman’s theory on you because it is brilliant. Iraq was like a grenade that went off, but America jumped on it—saving the whole region. But that grenade was exploded by… America! And that’s what you’ve got to understand about the Middle Easy. It is a tender box and we need nations to come in and explode them. Or something:

You know: the explosions that these outside powers create.

So what is the solution for Syria? Friedman claims that we should talk to Syria’s lawyer, which is Russia. (I swear I am not making that up.) Once we do that, we can set up a meeting with their CPA (Mongolia), cardiologist (Indonesia), and massage therapist (strangely, also Russia). Then, if necessarily, we can bring in their home decorator (Germany, of course), and change the colors to something more soothing. If none of that works, we’ll just bomb the fuckers.

Afterword

In all seriousness, what is up with Friedman? He was for the Iraq War. For years he promised that the following six months would be critical. Finally, he admitted that Iraq was a mess and the war was a mistake. How easily he forgets! Now he wants to rush into Syria? I used to think for all his nuttiness about globalization and all his war monger tendencies, he was still pretty smart when it comes to foreign policy. I was wrong. He is stupid and dangerous.

Back in the late 1980s, NeXT released a high end workstation that had no hard drive. It only had a CD, because, hey, hard drives were a thing of the past. Sure, they been coming down in price at an amazing speed, but how long could that last? The manufacturers had worked all the magic they could. There just was no way they were going to be able to keep this up. The hard drive had come to the end of the road. It was time for something new.

There was just one tiny problem: the hard drive manufacturers seem to have had an endless supply of magic to do on magnetic plates.The cost of hard drive storage has gone down exponentially over time and there seems to be no end in sight. Let me just give you a little taste of it. This is the cost of one gigabyte of data storage over the years.

1980: $1,000,000.00
1985:   $100,000.00
1990:    $10,000.00
1995:       $300.00
2000:        $10.00
2005:         $0.20
2010:         $0.03

Of course, the drives are smaller, quieter, and faster. So there’s a trade off. Oh, wait…