The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. —Anatole France

This is a great quote that cuts to the heart of conservative thought. This is exactly the thinking behind the flat tax. It is also why conservatives think of themselves as, well, “fair and balanced.” And when you think like that, you need a lot of balance!

While looking for the exact quote, I came upon another: “Remember: It’s Only Class Warfare When the Poor Fight Back.” It comes from a blog called The Angry Bureaucrat. The guy tends to be a bit wordy, but he has a lot to say, and—in great Frankly Curious fashion—on a lot of different subjects. Check him out.

I hear this is from the same people who brought you the great Sarah Silverman Let My People Vote 2012 video. This time we get Samuel L. Jackson, who happens to say “Mother fucker!” better than anyone on the planet. I don’t have much to say other than that this is also a fucking great video:

Also: the little girl is adorable.

Update (28 September 2012 9:24 am)

I found the non-bleeped version:

I saw in comments that some people were asking, “What good will this do?” They seem to think it is an ad aimed at Romney voters or something. Just to be clear: it is part of a long history ads designed not to convince but to excite the already convinced. And it succeeds brilliantly.

There’s been a bit of push back against the deification of undecided voters. For election cycle after election cycle, I’ve been wondering who these people are who can’t decide. After all, these are people who are supposedly in the middle. I can understand that a socialist would have a hard time deciding between the Democrat and Republican; but they wouldn’t; they’d just decide Peace & Freedom. I can understand that a fascist would have a hard time… Wait, no they wouldn’t; they’d just vote Republican. But who are these centrist voters who can’t tell whether Obama’s jobs program is better than Romney’s? After all, Obama’s jobs program will create 1.1 million jobs and Romney’s will create 87,000 jobs. Who could say which is better?

In 2004, This American Life did an episode on supposed swing voters. It was very good, but one part of it really bugged me. Ira Glass had a number of conversations with a Cincinnati doctor named James Hackett. Hackett was unhappy with Bush. But regardless of the arguments that he himself found compelling, he ended up voting for Bush. This I think is one of the two kinds of “undecided” voters: not undecided. In Hackett’s case, he was always going to vote for Bush, but he wanted to seem reasonable and open minded. This is increasingly true of Republicans. A good example of this is the Tea Party movement which is as red as can be but insists that they are independent.

The other kind of undecided voter is the low information voter. Last week on Real Time with Bill Maher, in his “New Rules” segment, Maher said, “If you’re one of the 5% of American voters who are undecided on who to vote for, it’s okay to admit: you don’t really give a shit.” Here’s the whole thing, which is funny and insightful:

Saturday Night Live gets straight to the heart of it:

Over the years, what I’ve noticed is that the undecided voters tend to break exactly as the decided voters. So if the polls indicate that Obama is beating Romney 50% to 40%, the undecideds will break the same and the final results will be Obama over Romney 56% to 44%. Regardless, the undecided votes will go roughly half and half. There have been many elections where I’ve wished it were otherwise, but that’s just the way it goes.

Ezra Klein has a good article this morning on WonkBook, Undecided voters probably won’t decide the election. He talks about some work by UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck that shows roughly this (and other interesting stuff). Klein sums up:

Which is what we already know. Now if we can just convince the networks, maybe we won’t have to keep hearing about the undecided voters. And the undecided voters will be happier too. I know it would really annoy me if people kept asking me for my opinions on Jersey Shore.

Earlier this year, David Cay Johnston published a new book, The Fine Print. After reading his last book, Free Lunch, I just couldn’t take 300 more pages about how the corporations game the system.

I did, however, scan the book, reading some parts of it in depth. It’s a good book, of course, Johnston has rightly become a liberal hero to many of us. He is someone I always want to read and hear, because he has keen and well-informed insights about everything that is going on.

He starts the book by showing how AT&T manages to make more from us than it ever did, even though the cost of their primary services have plummeted. They do it by charging extra for things that most people never use, and in many cases cannot use. But it isn’t just AT&T. I was struck by the case of Bank of America over-charging for bounced checks. Currently, they change $47 for the first bounced check:

At the end of the book, in discussing “What it All Means,” he talks about “Faux Free Trade.” I’m not in favor of free trade agreements; they are like most things that everyone in the Beltway think are good ideas: another way to make the powerful more powerful. Johnston provides more evidence. This quote strikes me as a little slippery, though (I’ll let you know if I find out more):

Of course, when someone agrees with me about one of my favorite rant subjects, I know he must be brilliant. On the subject of the stimulus, Johnston write:

In Obama’s defense, the tax cuts were there to get Republicans to vote for it. The fact that almost none of them did does tarnish the argument a bit.

One can never go wrong spending some hours meditating with David Cay Johnston. The Fine Print is a good book that deserves your (and after the election, maybe my) full attention.

This is really interesting even you aren’t a physicist. These people have started 32 metronomes at random times. Then, over the course of about 2 minutes, 31 of the metronomes get in sync and 1 gets perfectly out of sync. This one metronome that is anti-synced seems like it will stay that way. Apparently, this position is an unstable equilibrium, however. What that means is that while it is in equilibrium, everything is fine. But if the movement of the shaking table pushes it slightly off that equilibrium, it will just keep moving, eventually landed at the sync state—which is stable. This takes another 2 minutes.

It seems that all that is happening here is that the metronomes are placed on a swing. This internal forcing causes the metronomes to gravitate toward a shared phase. Note that the frequency of the ticking is given: all the metronomes are set at the same frequency. Setting all of the metronomes at different frequencies could create some interesting percussive music. I’m thinking John Cage.

Matt Taibbi wrote a provocative article on Tuesday, This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close. In it, he argues that Obama should have a huge lead, even if Romney were a good candidate, which he isn’t.

This goes completely against the conventional wisdom (especially among conservatives) that Obama ought to be losing this election. The idea is that the bad economy should make the incumbent vulnerable. But this is wrong. Political scientists have found that the biggest force determining whether a President is reelected is the economic trend in the few months before the election. Most of the punditocracy has misinterpreted this to mean that the determining force is the economic state. Today, although the economy is very bad, and it is improving slowly, it is still improving. As Ezra Klein wrote a couple of weeks back, “Things are going exactly as the political scientists expected.”

What I’ve noticed over the years is that all of the campaign minutia that I, as much as anyone, obsess over makes very little difference in the election. Broader trends seem to swamp everything else. We do see movement in people’s choices. Debates in 1984 and 2004 both caused a 5% swing for the challenger (as I recall), but in the end they still both lost. In 1992, pundits claimed that Bush Sr. lost the election because of the vile RNC, but I don’t think many voters even noticed. And now, people think of Romney as an entitled rich guy, but I’m sure he would still win if the economy was again in free fall.

Taibbi’s argument is deeper than this. He claims that there really is a 99%-1% divide in this country. Unfortunately, one of our candidates is owned by the super rich and the other is the super rich. He says that things would be different if we were given a real choice:

This is a common liberal lament: regardless of what the people call themselves, the policies they overwhelmingly prefer are liberal. Thus, the argument goes, if they were given a true liberal choice, they would vote for it by great majorities. I’m sympathetic to this idea. However, I think it is a big mistake to assume that people are rational—whether in economics or politics. As Thomas Frank shows in What’s the Matter with Kansas? many people are convinced to vote against their real economic interests for the fantasy that they are voting for their social interests. My favorite passage from his book:

That’s not the only reason that people wouldn’t necessarily flock to vote for a real economic progressive. But I think that Matt Taibbi is right that the nation would like a real choice. And in the end, “We win. Because our ideas are better.”[1]

[1] This is from Primary Colors.

As regular readers know, I indulge my crushes on minor celebrities, academics, and grammarians. But no one knows about my most recent crush: Karen Finney. She was Director of Communications at the Democratic National Committee under Howard Dean. But I know her as a pundit on The Last Word.

As you can see in the picture, Finney is a beautiful woman. But you know me, I’m not easily impressed by a pretty face. The truth is that I find her analysis enlightening. I’m surprised that she isn’t a bigger deal—especially considering what a knock out she is. But what do I know? (Actually, I have a theory: I think the TV machine prefers androgynous women, and Finney is womanly in a Marilyn Monroe way; the TV machine wants girls, not women. More evidence of our cultural decline.)

During her segments on the last two episodes of The Last Word, Karen Finney has been allowed to talk only one time during each. Check out this last segment; her look at the end is priceless:

Lawrence O’Donnell: let this brilliant woman speak!

There are two kinds of people in the world: Eli Wallach and not Eli Wallach. And Eli Wallach’s gonna be 97 in December. Soon there will be only one kind of people in the world. Enjoy it while you can.