This post seems to draw people to the site and generate comments even years after the fact, so I might as well follow it up by commenting on the series Hannibal. Also, yes, I am deliberately writing more on pop culture since politics is so damn boring at the moment.

I think the show’s great. I really do. I hope this is correct and it gets a full or at least another partial season. The show is more in the Manhunter/Silence of the Lambs tradition than the later and less successful films, where it’s a story about a person, rather than a story about Hannibal. I like Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham, he’s a little less internal than William Petersen’s, but projects the same kind of wounded vulnerability. And Mads Mikklesen’s Lecter is restrained and utterly top-notch. Certainly a more interesting Hannibal than Hopkins’s version, more in line with Bryan Cox’s interpretation. Really, it does feel a lot like Manhunter in the best ways, with an appropriately updated style and all. 

What’s surprising about the series so far is that it’s actually succeeding in making Hannibal Lecter an interesting, deeper character than he ever has been (in the movies). They’ve actually made him capable of surprise again! The series has played coy with its advertisements and such, and it doles out information about the character only as necessary. I’m not entirely sure where along the line he is in his journey to cannibalism and complete alienation from humanity, but he’s not quite there yet, and quite often the show surprises me by having him do something, then you wonder why he did that, and then ultimately it’s revealed in a way that makes sense and defies expectations. It’s ever-so offbeat, and this is highly appreciated by me. Bryan Fuller’s accomplishment here is distinctive, but most impressive is that he’s actually made a version of Hannibal that could probably carry a show. I am happy though that it’s still Will Graham’s show, as I fear that a Hannibal-centric series would be inevitably soulless, and having a Graham or a Clarice figure really is essential to making the thing work.

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Admittedly, this chart is a little propagandistic. Simply having the same elements doesn’t mean you automatically tell the same stories. First Contact was also about revenge, and a threat to destroy earth, and had one main villain for the crew to defeat. However, that movie was redeemed by the ingenious twist of making the vengeance Picard’s, rather than the Borg Queen’s. This made it a movie about the psychological battle going on within Picard’s mind, rather than a pedestrian plot to stop an unambiguously evil supervillain bent on destruction (though, admittedly, every movie in the second sextet aside from First Contact has this very story, with the most modest of variations between them). And obviously there are quibbles: Chang from The Undiscovered Country could be counted as a main villain, though I see the cross-species conspiracy of hawks to be the villain of that film, and Chang is merely their muscle. Also, trying to accomplish specific political goals is different from the mad ambition of, say, a Khan, who is uninterested in doing anything other than indulging his own grief and anger at Kirk.

But nonetheless, I think this chart does say a lot. For one thing, it’s not fair to blame J.J. Abrams alone for the problems with Trek movies, those started even before his Felicity days. If anything, he’s found a better way of combining all those elements so that they’re more entertaining to watch, even if he can’t payoff anything to save his life, such that every movie he’s ever made has had a shitty climax. In the first six movies, pretty much every movie represented a change in tone, theme and content from what came before. The only two that really resemble each other are The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country, i.e. II and VI, which happened to have the same writer-director and thus a lot of the same preoccupations, such as aging. But even in that case, the aging theme was updated and developed. Khan was a movie about adapting to middle age, while Country was about adapting to old age. That’s moving the ball forward, not stagnating. And it told a different kind of story: Country was all about politics, and Khan was not. But other than that, about half the movies kept the spirit of the show alive by often centering around dealing with different kinds of life from us, and all featured at least some sort of moral or ethical dilemma. Admittedly, some of those were more sophisticated than others. Also interesting to note that the two original cast movies with main villains and the two in which Earth was threatened were not the same movies. The more recent half-dozen, on the other hand, present the audience with a simple moral situation where it’s not even a question of who’s right or wrong, and then it’s all about taking out the bad guy. Really, it just makes a person appreciate First Contact more and more–problematic as the script to that movie was, it fundamentally told a human story, one that made some logical sense and was pretty compelling, and presented us with at least some kind of challenging questions about our characters. I doubt we’ll ever see its like again.

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The sheer number of patents in the U.S. is fueling frivolous litigation and drastic action is needed to make patents more difficult to obtain and easier to invalidate, U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit said Tuesday.Speaking at a debate with two retired judges from the Federal Circuit, Judge Posner said that there were too many patents, particularly on relatively minor software innovations, which “creates confusion and uncertainty about what one can do without running into patent minefield.” He called for sweeping changes to the patent system, including eliminating the presumption that patents are valid once they are issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and shortening the term of patent from the current 20 years.

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I continue to think that there’s no deeper scandal on Benghazi and that the IRS issue is not really something I’m inclined to worry about as it wasn’t national policy, the AP scandal is something that is very worrisome as it clearly was national policy and exposes one of the more disgraceful areas of the Administration’s national security policy. But it’s hardly inexplicable. Secrecy is an excellent way of cementing power, if people don’t know about it, then it can’t hurt you. Both LBJ and Nixon were well aware of this fact. Preventing leaks is the sort of thing you just expect powerful people to do, regardless of party, and that Obama used to strongly champion transparency (I remember that!) back when he was a Senator is hardly shocking since that’s what you’d expect someone outside the executive apparatus to do. However. My philosophy is that leaks are something we shouldn’t be worried about, since there’s no right to privacy when it comes to government activities, and if it’s going to look bad on the front page of the New York Times then you shouldn’t be doing it, Mr. President. This goes double for national security stuff. If it really is impossible to conduct a presidency in the modern age absent massive secrecy, prosecution of whistleblowers, imprisonment of leakers and so on, then we probably ought to rethink the role of the military-industrial complex and the GWOT so that it is possible to do so, as we have entered an area where democracy is threatened by the nature of our institutions. In 2009 I probably wouldn’t have believed in the premise of that statement, but increasingly I think I do.

Incidentally, I don’t entirely agree with this. It’s true that Watergate didn’t permanently damage the Republican Party, or even hurt it for a very long time. But it made permanent the notion that government is corrupt/hopelessly flawed/can’t do anything right that definitely helped the right wing gain ascendance. The thought experiment to use here is this: had Hubert Humphrey won in 1968 and served two terms as president, with an administration that ended Vietnam promptly and was reasonably transparent, honest and accountable (and signed large stacks of progressive legislation), would the public have regarded the abuses of Lyndon Johnson as an aberration? I strongly believe the answer to that is yes. Instead, with Nixon, it all became just part of the equation, to the extent the president is the most visible symbol of government, it became in the public mind a corrupt government. Nixon dwarfed LBJ in fact, since Nixon lied even more about Vietnam than Johnson had, executed Watergate and had to resign to avoid getting kicked out of office and maybe even criminally prosecuted (LBJ had merely declined to run for another term). Before Watergate, it was at least possible that the longstanding American idea of trusting the government might have survived. Watergate ensured it wouldn’t. Of course, none of this is particularly germane to the current moment, the stakes are very different. This isn’t a crisis moment for liberalism so far as I can tell. It could be a crisis moment for Barack Obama, I guess we’ll have to see.

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In fact, I’m convinced that we’re living in a post-scandal world for the most part, within and without politics (but especially when it comes to politics). The scandal fixation among the press is obsolete, frankly. Since the ’70s and ’80s, political polarization has become an immutable fact of life, one of the few areas left where Americans are allowed to be proudly, unrepentantly tribalistic (sports team rooting is another). In both of these areas, this tendency is taken to silly extremes, but if you basically assume that people are tribal creatures and that our society gives very little space for expression of this fact, it kind of makes sense. Back in the Good Old Days*, all manner of racial, religious, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation tribal hooks were considered more or less fair game. Now, none of that is acceptable in polite society, only in the realm of dog whistles. And let’s not act as though tribalism is entirely a right-wing phenomenon–though it does appear stronger there due to unending pseudopopulist appeal from talk radio and FOX News–in fact, a lot of liberal tribal identifiers from long ago have not really aged as poorly, as it’s still quite acceptable to reduce large parts of the country as being as ignorant and religiously fanatical as Republican politicians tend to be, while this is an exaggeration of a more complicated picture. In any event, my point is that if you accentuate these tribal instincts–and conservative attempts to do so will wind up working both ways–you come into a place where loyalty to parties and leaders essentially become cultural attitudes and aren’t really porous to things like scandals. Dubya held onto his base for his entire time in office, though he lost literally everyone outside of it due to utter incompetence in nearly every conceivable domain. Obama is not going to lose much from a scandal that doesn’t even go all the way to the top of the IRS, probably just some low-info types who aren’t likely to vote in a midterm anywhere. Really, short of a double-dip, there’s no reason to be especially worried.

*For White Men

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Congresswoman Michele Bachmann threatened to leave Minnesota today if the state goes ahead with its plans to legalize gay marriage. In an interview with a local television station, the conservative firebrand said she believes God will destroy Minneapolis once the legislation is enacted, and wants to be far away when the reckoning happens. [...] “I have a friend from Eden Prairie who’s already packed everything she owns into her car and is driving out to Montana as we speak. These are very scary times. I don’t want my family to be the last ones out.” [...] In a subsequent interview with The Daily Currant Bachmann says she’s not sure where she’ll go if she leaves, but is seriously considering Oregon as a possibility since its constitution bans same sex marriage. “I’ve heard wonderful things about Eugene,” she says, “and I think congressman DeFazio may be vulnerable to a challenge. They’re the nicest people in the world out there, I’m sure we’d be welcomed with open arms.”

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… there’s no doubt about how mad Republicans are about Benghazi. 41% say they consider this to be the biggest political scandal in American history to only 43% who disagree with that sentiment. Only 10% of Democrats and 20% of independents share that feeling. Republicans think by a 74/19 margin than Benghazi is a worse political scandal than Watergate.

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“As baptism of the Holy spirit is at the center of Christianity – of which I am a devout believer – I am basically being forced to make a choice between committing extreme blasphemy by my actions in choosing to accept this ‘choice’ or forced to quit playing the game before it even really starts,” Malmberg explained to Kotaku.

“Of course I cannot hold true to my beliefs and also commit this act, so I am therefor[e] forced to not play the game.”

1.  Is there any group of people in this country that whine more about persecution than christian fundamentalists?  (well, besides paranoid schizophrenics, of course)

2. I really don’t get what is so blaspheme-y about a game character undergoing a baptism.  Isn’t getting baptized supposed to be a good thing?

3. The Waaaahmbulance just arrived.

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This afternoon Senator Reid asked unanimous consent to go to conference on the concurrent resolution on the Budget. Senator Cruz was unavailable to be on the floor at this time to object. Out of respect for the long tradition of comity in the Senate, Senator Reid withdrew his request.

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How awesome.

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I swear to motherf’ing jeebus that the Obama administration STILL THINKS that he will someday win over some Republican dead-enders.  How else do you explain the DOJ appealing a Judge’s order that Plan B be made available to girls of all ages without a prescription?

In December 2011, Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, blocked a decision by the F.D.A. that would have allowed morning-after contraceptive pills to be distributed to young teenagers over the counter. She said there was not enough data to show that the drug would be safe for girls as young as 11 years old. Instead, over-the-counter access was limited to girls and women aged 17 or older.

In his ruling last month overturning Ms. Sebelius’s decision, Judge Korman was highly critical of the Obama administration, saying it had put politics over science and health. In that ruling, he called Ms. Sebelius’s action “politically motivated, scientifically unjustified and contrary to agency precedent.”

Last week, the F.D.A. agreed to allow the sale of the drug to girls 15 and over, even as the administration sought to appeal Judge Korman’s earlier ruling.

Judge Korman said that move by the F.D.A. was an attempt to “sugarcoat this appeal of yours,” according to The A.P. He also suggested that the administration’s decision to appeal his ruling could have dire consequences for young women. When a Justice Department lawyer asserted that a delay of Judge Korman’s order was in the public interest, the judge replied, according to The A.P., “Is there a public interest in unwanted pregnancies … that can often result in abortions?”

Can we please get a real liberal in the White House sometime in the next 100 years who doesn’t continue to buy into the unicorns-and-puppydogs notion that Republicans will ever stop calling him Hitler? Please??

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The GOP’s sacrificial lamb might well be one Abel Maldonado, former Lt. Governor, failed candidate for Congress and my state senator once upon a time. I’ve often called Marco Rubio an overrated commodity, someone without the brains to govern effectively and probably without the guts to do it either, and almost certainly lacking the mythical minority-converting Republican Jesus powers that his party desperately hopes he has. But Rubio, at least, is able to play politics at a national level, cultivating an image and taking on some responsibility for passing immigration reform. This is vastly more than one can say for another heavily hyped Hispanic GOP politician, who seems to think that the best way of winning California in 2013 is to play to white conservatives’ ancient fears:

Former California Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, the Republican running to challenge incumbent 3-term Democratic Gov.Jerry Brown in 2014, filed papers Wednesday to form a committee in support of a ballot measure to end prison realignment. [...]

The issue of realignment and early prison release has been a hot button for Brown since a federal court order was issued mandating the move to alleviate state prison overcrowding.

The order demanded California reduce its prison population to 110,000 inmates by the end of 2013. The order cited needed improvements in treatment of sick and mentally ill inmates in the state’s 33 prisons for adult inmates.

Putting aside the politics for a second, let’s get real about this. California has a huge prison problem. Too many prisons, which cost a lot of money, is the gist of it. And all those prisons are crowded to the max, to the extent that the state was sued in federal court over it and lost. That money has been siphoned off from schools to a large extent, godawful symbolism to be sure. Jerry Brown won my vote with his strong, perceptive attacks on this very trend, and if you read my prior posts on him, I’ve noted how he’s paid close attention to this problem, stopping a billion-dollar prison project in the state. He cares about education a lot, has identified this specific problem, and he’s taken steps to fix the problem.

So, essentially, it’s deeply irresponsible for Maldonado, often referred to as one of the brighter bulbs in the state’s GOP (heh), to attack Brown for trying to comply with a court order and fix a very real, costly problem. What’s especially interesting is the timing. Maldonado’s attack would have been par for the course in the 1980s or early 1990s, back when Deukmeijian and Pete Wilson (an alleged moderate) decided it would be just swell to lock up as many people as possible for as long as possible. (Shocking that another of California’s intractable problems is due to something the GOP did back in the day, huh?) But the state’s politics have changed since it voted for George H. W. Bush in 1988, and so have the politics of the GOP. One of the very few positive developments in the Republican Party in recent years has been a much deeper skepticism toward old “tough on crime” policies, reflecting a decreased crime rate and spending that is wasted by definition (if necessary to some extent). And in this state, the public has shown a greater understanding of the problems wrought by overincarceration. Last year the electorate defanged the Three Strikes Law here, and very nearly repealed capital punishment outright. The electorate in this state gets that this is a problem, as the media has covered the crisis well. There is little indication that Brown has jumped too far in front of the public on these issues, and it’s unlikely he will do so since it was exactly that which caused such problems for his 1982 Senate race, and allowed the GOP to take his seat in Sacramento as well. He’s cautious but deliberate on this. It’s not really a weakness.

Essentially, Maldonado is working against two trends here, both within his party and within the state’s electorate. And it makes Maldonado’s candidacy for governor ironic. I basically assumed that the idea was something concocted by GOP consultants so that way they could run another minority for high office, as the guy wasn’t even able to win an election for Lt. Governor against Gavin Newsom (and had severe difficulties fundraising in that race as well). He has no base, his ideology is too moderate for the state’s GOP, and the Marco Rubio argument seems utterly hilarious in light of this announcement. Minority voters are unlikely to be won over by a “tough on crime” politician regardless of a skin color, as they bear the brunt of these unsuccessful policies. It makes me think that he’s a very silly, unperceptive person with poor political instincts and little awareness of the state. Of course, this makes him pretty much like every candidate the GOP has run for governor since Pete Wilson, so it’s not a shocker.

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We have a responsibility to get the word out—to not be wishy-washy on the question of religion as a way of knowing, but to be clear and direct and loud about how reality really works. And when we blur the lines between science and religion, or seem to contribute to their blurring, or even just not minding very much when other people blur them, we do the world a grave disservice.

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The studio is actually quite far along in the development of the project, as it will use a script by Wrath Of The Titans and Red Riding Hood scribe and Frank Darabont protege David Leslie Johnson.

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So, with respect to guns, I do feel some sympathy for Obama, since he’s clearly damned either way. Victory ain’t up to him, and indulging activists’ feelings isn’t really feasible either.

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Four researchers at three different institutions joined forces to ask a simple question: why is it that people have such extreme positions on subjects that are rather complicated and nuanced? “We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do,” the authors write, going on to discuss their experimental method: asking people with extreme opinions to explain the issue. That brought an end to their subjects’ belief that they actually understood the issue they were otherwise willing to argue passionately about (or, as the authors put it, “undermined the illusion of explanatory depth”). Once people recognized their ignorance, positions tended to moderate.

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The Bible for opponents of high-stakes testing is a 2010 book called The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, by Diane Ravitch, perhaps the nation’s preeminent education historian. Ravitch, who grew up in Texas and attended Houston public schools, was once an advocate of both high-stakes testing and charter schools. She served as the assistant secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush and was later appointed by President Bill Clinton to head the National Assessment Governing Board. [...]

“Like everyone else,” she told me during a stop in Austin in February, “I was drawn to the idea that schools might benefit from a business sensibility, that we should set goals and then reward high performers and punish low performers.”

Throw our children into the cutthroat world of private enterprise and profit maximization?  What could go wrong?

One of the key things that pisses me off when I read yet another story about the harm all of this is causing is that it seems to be the millionth recent example of trying to treat the symptoms without dealing with the underlying disease:

“The number one determinant of how well kids will do in school is socioeconomic background,” Ravitch told me. “It’s not how good your teacher is or which school you go to.” Ravitch makes a convincing case that those pining for a lost golden era of American education are misremembering. Sixty years ago, black and Hispanic kids weren’t allowed to attend public schools—or at least, not real ones—and most didn’t even go to high school. Kids with disabilities were excluded as well, and there were far fewer recent immigrants enrolled. Comparing that system with the one we have today makes no sense.

Why would we want to throw any additional money at alleviating poverty or child hunger, when we can just throw countless $billions at dubious, unproven band-aids that probably aren’t doing much of anything to cure just one of the dozens of symptoms of poverty and child hunger?

… o_o

Read the whole article from which I took the quotes above.  It will make you angrier than anything you’ve read recently.

-

* And yes, Democrats (the “Me too!” party) have, true to form, signed onto the same bullshit.

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There appears to be a new rash of arguments out there about how we’d all be better off if Barack Obama had just read his Robert Caro a little more closely. The broader arguments have already been made elsewhere. I’m sure I’ve probably made such arguments myself in moments of high emotion too. But the more I think about it, I just see this particular theory–that with some combination of cajoling, bullying, and pleading, Obama could pass his agenda over a stone-crazy GOP House and a filibuster-prone Senate–as not that compelling. So I’d advise proponents of it to make a more sophisticated argument: that Obama has already failed to be LBJ. Specifically, that the decisions he made in 2009-2010 ensured that Democrats would lose Congress and that he’d thus lose the ability to pass big, important legislation. I think this is actually a plausible argument, though I don’t fully believe it. Johnson had been a Washington legislator for over two decades when he became president, while Obama had really only done the job of a day-to-day U.S. Senator for two years upon getting into the White House. It’s been exhaustively documented that Obama cared much more about policy than politics and was insistent about bipartisan outreach, leading to a situation where he led the banks out of crisis by taking extensive political damage, and taking over a year to pass health care while the economy was pushed to the back-burner. The public got fatigued by the debate, the Tea Party made a stronger narrative about the ACA than the White House did, and so on, which led to Scott Brown and the rest of it. This is a plausible argument and I could go either way on it depending on the weather and so forth, but it’s not exactly ironclad when one remembers just how hapless those large Democratic majorities were, and even a second stimulus wouldn’t probably have staved off significant losses in 2010. But you could make more of an argument there.

For my money, the only moment where Obama needed to show that mythical LBJ/FDR spine of steel and didn’t was the first time the debt ceiling was threatened. Sequestration is turning out to be a policy disaster for the liberal project and a political disaster for Obama, the original sin from which (nearly) all others entered our world. He damned himself by not putting himself and his presidency on the line to shut down this disaster, and given that the Republicans folded like a 2-7 hand in Texas Hold ‘Em in March when it came up again, there’s even less reason to assume that Obama made the right call back then. Frankly, it almost doesn’t matter what he does now since that decision set the environment perfectly for austerian Republicans to turn the tables on him. It was one of those defining moments you hear about, and Obama flat-out flunked the test. Since then there’s been little opportunity to reverse that catastrophic decision, so complaining that Obama isn’t being tough enough now is beside the point.

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In retrospect, how was the 2008 primary contest not a big farce? I supported Obama because I cared much more about energy/climate issues than healthcare (and he had stronger proposals and gave more emphasis to them), because Obama was much more critical of hawks and had a better record on such issues, and because of Clinton’s bad judgment when it came to certain staffers (such as, you know, Mark Penn). Given that the administration we got was uninterested in the former, delegated foreign policy to Hillary Clinton for the most part, and now apparently is just picking obnoxious people for cabinet posts because Obama is friends with them, I sort of wonder what the point of going through all this was in the first place. If anything, the intervening years have mostly proven Clinton’s circa-2008 perspective on Republicans indisputably correct, while Obama’s still fervent outreach increasingly smacks of an inability to change his opinions when confronted with facts not congenial to them.

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Pages of drawings immortalize various human and animal “monsters,” with tallies of heads, limbs, horns or breasts exceeding the usual. Then comes a large X-ray of Hitler’s nose and teeth, an 1818 Japanese manuscript describing surgical anesthesia decades before it was first used in the West, and a first edition of Elbert Hubbard’s 1909 play “The Doctors: A Satire in Four Seizures.”

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All participants were asked a bit about their demographic information and their political leanings. Then, one set was asked a series of questions about energy efficiency, which gauged how much the participants valued things like energy independence, limiting carbon emissions, or simply saving money on energy.

In the initial analysis, each of these factors appeared to be a negative for the conservatives, which didn’t make a lot of sense—who actually devalues saving money on energy? But the lack of enthusiasm for curbing carbon emissions among the conservatives was rather dramatic, so the authors separated that out. When it was controlled for, it turns out that the conservatives in the study actually valued energy independence and saving money more than the more liberal study participants. It’s just that they disliked the thought of avoiding carbon emissions so much that it overwhelmed these tendencies.

Anything to fuck those dirty hippies. (via)

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Conservative Man: Allowing gays and lesbians to marry will destroy the institution of marriage!

Liberal Man: No it won’t.

Conservative Man: It’ll destroy traditional marriage and the nuclear family!

Liberal Man: Yeah, that’s never happened. And if it was going to happen, we’d have seen signs of it by now in all the places it’s legal.

Conservative Man: Come on, it goes against God’s wishes!

Liberal Man: Irrelevant, and debatable besides. American laws aren’t based on Biblical law. Adultery is perfectly legal, for example. So is capitalism.

Conservative Man: If we do this, then my church will be forced to marry gays, and that’ll put us out of favor with the Lord!

Liberal Man: See, that’s just craziness altogether. Literally nobody wants that, and the Constitution wouldn’t permit it beside. You know what your problem is?

Conservative Man: What?

Liberal Man: You see marriage as just one homogeneous thing.

Conservative Man: DAMN RIGHT I DO.

Liberal Man: Oh, get a dictionary already. You think it’s just one thing: The Institution of Marriage. ‘Cept it’s not. All we care about in this conversation is the civil, legal side. The religious side is not really relevant to this debate. You know what, let me get some help here to explain it to you. Hold on a second. [opens door, brings in someone else]

Conservative Man: Who are you?

Stranger: Hey! Look, it’s me from ten years ago! You didn’t tell me about…

Conservative Man: What’s going on?

Liberal Man: Could you explain about marriage?

Older Version of Conservative Man: Yeah, I’m the future you, and I’m saying don’t sweat it. Look, we lost that battle, but it didn’t matter. Nobody forced our church to do anything. The state started issuing marriage licenses to gay people and we just decided to ignore them. No biggie.

Conservative Man: But how can you just change the defintion-

Older Version of Conservative Man: I’ll just stop you there. The definition of marriage is complicated. Like our friend says, you have the civil, you have the religious, and these two have a lot of tensions between them. But the civil side is just bureaucracy, just for the law and all that.

Conservative Man: Just bean-counting.

Older Version of Conservative Man: Right. You can still keep the religious definition as it always was. Which is what really matters to us, right? What do we care what some bean-counters get to fill their charts a little differently? As if we care about them anyway! [laughs]

Conservative Man: I’ll have to think about this. [leaves]

Liberal Man: Well said, though you left out the part about how your church started performing same-sex marriages two years after it became legal. And how you supported it as deacon.

Older Version of Conservative Man: One step at a time.

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A perennial highlight of Banned Books Week is the Top Ten List of Frequently Challenged Books, compiled annually by the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF). [...] A challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that a book or other material be restricted or removed because of its content or appropriateness. In 2012, OIF received 464 reports on attempts to remove or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves. This is an increase from 2011 totals, which stood at 326 attempts. The most challenged books of 2012 are: “Captain Underpants” (series), by Dav Pilkey; “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie; “Thirteen Reasons Why,” by Jay Asher; “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E. L. James; “And Tango Makes Three,” by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson; “The Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini; “Looking for Alaska,” by John Green; “Scary Stories” (series), by Alvin Schwartz; “The Glass Castle,” by Jeanette Walls: and “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison.

established in 1970 as a special trust in memory of Dr. LeRoy C. Merritt. It is devoted to the support, maintenance, medical care, and welfare of librarians who, in the Trustees’ opinion, are:

• Denied employment rights or discriminated against on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, race, color, creed, religion, age, disability, or place of national origin; or
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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

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Incidentally, it’s interesting to see this shift occurring at about the same time that pretty much everyone has given up on the Obama Administration’s ability to operate on budgets. I actually see this as a positive sign, a very positive sign in fact. It means that liberalism is indeed capable of overcoming the hero worship seemingly inherent in presidential rule, and instead taking a realistic appraisal in the Administration. Republicans would have been much better off if, in 2005, they’d just admitted that Dubya had zero ability to manage U.S. foreign policy. But they couldn’t, since too much of their party’s identity was tied up in the heroic heroism of George W. Bush to see what a morass Iraq and Afghanistan have become. It was all they talked about in ’04, after all. Democrats have less invested in Obama as an economic miracle worker, I suppose. But much of Bush’s coalition was perfectly happy to excuse the disasters on his watch because he was taking aggressive action against the horrific affront to humanity that is Islamofascism*–they were happy with the basic thrust and didn’t need to hear about all those small details–while Obama’s miscalculations mostly involve a complete inability to understand his opposition and make sound decisions on that basis. He never learns and he never gets better. The basic flaw here, again and again, is the thing in Obama that makes him assume that his opponents approach problems from the same basic way of thinking (if not the same assumptions) as he does, and if he just takes care of the substantive issues they have, then a big deal ought to happen. They don’t have that philosophy, and to the extent that Obama gives in on their substantive demands, they’ll just demand more outrageous ones. Virtually everyone from the center leftward gets this except for Barack Obama, and I have little confidence he’ll learn it anytime soon.

* How did this not become a meme? Just toss fascism onto whatever thing you don’t like. Still, this does make for an interesting parallel. Bush’s disasters were supported by his base because they liked the aggressiveness directed at a target they hated. Obama’s critics frequently wish for a more assertive, tough, practical governing philosophy. I don’t really think toughness and aggressiveness alone would accomplish more of his objectives, though the lack of it has dampened enthusiasm among his base for sure.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

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See, since this sentiment’s patently, excruciatingly the case, I’d be, well, not “impressed”…let’s say “slightly less inclined to mock it” — if the above linked MotherJones article had not first quoted a chunk o’ LuntzSpeak thusly:

It’s not what you say that matters. It’s what people hear.

That’s Frank in a luntzshell, ladies and gentlemen, right there. Or, as Joseph Palermo put it a year ago on HuffPo:

This advertising technician [Luntz] has proved that George Orwell was correct in his prediction that political language would be manipulated by the most powerful elements of society to entrench their power. Like Norquist, Luntz has become a power among the organized Right because his amoral, unethical, manipulative, dishonest, and downright greasy wordsmithing for the 1 percent works wonders and has already polluted our public discourse. With no real watchdog in the press exposing his lies and misinformation Luntz has been free to employ his techniques with great effect for his right-wing clients.

Fortunately for lovers of trooth and defenders of Civilization™, it ain’t just what people hear, it’s what they *want* to hear, and more accurately, what they’ll shell out their hard-earned Bitcoins to hear. The fetid fond of what remains of the GOP loves them some repugnant shit, and, if the free market has taught us anything, wherein lies a buncha suckers with fat wallets and hate in their hearts, earners gonna earn off ‘em, amirite?

In short, if Luntz is really concerned about messaging, he better hope tha dregz start wanting to hear something else — or else that they start maxing out their Diner’s Club cards. Or possibly that Ammurricans get over their love affair with pizza-pie, so sales go down the pooper.

I mean, soda futures are tanking, so who knows?

Article title a quote by Aakash Abbi, in Secret Tape: Top GOP Consultant Luntz Calls Limbaugh “Problematic” by David Corn on MotherJones. For other, more cogent, takes on the Right’s perverse political incentives, see pretty much the whole last couple of year’s worth of Jonathan Bernstein. It’s a theme that comes up repeatedly, the why for the life of me I can’t figure out.

NSFW, play me out:

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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

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One possible explanation for [Bush's failures] would be that he’s dumb. Or alternatively that he’s incredibly lazy. The president of the United States has a tough job, after all, and it’s totally possible to imagine a person with roughly correct ideas to nonetheless screw it up through incompetence and blundering. But if conservatives want us to believe that the United States blundered through a major terrorist attack, two major failed military adventures, dismal economic performance, and then finally an epic economic collpase all while under the watch of a very bright and attentive leader then it seems like a much deeper failure of the movement.

Intelligence and ideology were major causes of Bush’s disastrous reign, though there were many others.

I actually think it’s possible to make the scope argument here: that the presidency has grown so ridiculously large and unwieldy that it’s impossible not to find several areas to specialize in and pay only cursory attention to the rest. I definitely think you see this with the Obama Administration, where some areas of public policy are just completely delegated because there’s too much to do. Problem with that is much of that growth has been due to shifts in the scope of foreign policy since WWII, and Bush was absolutely horrible at managing foreign policy. Apart from the wars that sapped any post-9/11 goodwill in the Arab world, Bush managed to tank relations with Russia and much of Europe (with the exclusion, of course, of Poland), allowed Hamas to gain official power in Gaza, and so on. Bush had little foreign policy preparation before entering office–substantially less even than Barack Obama, with those couple years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee–and while he seemingly spent more than the appropriate amount of time on that subject for a president, to the detriment of domestic policy. What with the floods and bridge collapses and all that.

I think the other factor, aside from intelligence and ideology, that led to Bush’s disastrous tenure was character. Bush was no judge of it in others, and his flaws were so apparent that it made it easy for tougher, cannier men in the White House to handle him and turn him to their views. I’ve written in the past that you can make the argument that Bush grew a little bit during his time in office, and that he eventually learned his lesson and stopped letting Rove and Cheney and Rumsfeld jerk him around so much. But ultimately, a president who hadn’t been born to George and Barbara Bush would never have been able to rise to the top without finding ways to keep those flaws in check. Dubya basically went from nothing to a weak governor job to president, and never had to confront his own failures and make changes. There’s no real substitute for it in growing personally and careerwise. This is, perhaps, why the Bush years were so frustrating, because the guy had never really had to grow up.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkWt84F7FY0

This, from the typically sharp Dave Weigel about a New Hampshire Senate poll showing Scott Brown down double-digits against the incumbent senator, doesn’t make much sense:

That’s… really not a horrible first test. In Massachusetts, where Brown’s actually from, he got 46 percent of the vote in a 2012 Senate race. Brown scores better than some actual New Hampshire politicians, including two former members of the state’s congressional delegation. (New Hampshire only has two House seats, so serving in that body means representing half the state.) [...]

[H]e could certainly run as a generic Republican moderate who’d undo as much of the Obama record as he could. Why shouldn’t he?

Obviously, nobody can stop him from doing so, but there’s no reason to think that it would be anything other than a self-indulgent waste of time. Comparing Scott Brown to a few obscure officials and former officeholders is a strange test. Brown is a national political celebrity. His win in the 2010 special election was a major national news story. And he just ran an extraordinarily expensive campaign in the same media market as much of the state he now wants to represent. Comparing him to a one-term former Rep. who won in the 2010 election and yet another of the endless Sununu clan doesn’t quite fit in either case. In any event, while Brown would not lose by 11 points to Jeanne Shaheen finally, due to partisans inevitably returning to the fold for the general election, she’s already over 50% against him. Really, a better metaphor would be if in 2010 John McCain had ditched Arizona and run for Senate in Nevada instead to avoid a primary, or if Bob Dole had tried his luck in Oklahoma after losing the presidency in 1996 (I rather wish he had, but that’s another thing altogether). It would have appeared as though someone couldn’t live without having a Senate office and staffers and Meet The Press gigs, which would have been undoubtedly been true in every one of these cases. With Brown, the story seems clear enough. He declined a winnable but difficult bid for John Kerry’s seat and figured he could keep up his profile by throwing out some hints about running for governor and taking a Fox News gig. That would keep up the buzz! Within weeks, he became completely forgotten as Republicans found new handsome macho men with shoulders you could land a plane on. How can Scott Brown compete with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz? So suddenly, Scott Brown desperately tries to find some way back into elected office, and comes off like Norma Desmond, with New Hampshire as Bill Holden, and the 2014 Senate race as the unfinished treatment of Salome. Being as I am, ahem, not much of a fan of Brown’s, I’m torn between wanting him to just go away (I’m fine with him just doing segments on FNC, cause I’ll never hear from him again that way), or go through another humiliating defeat. Okay, I choose the second one. Fuck that chump for ruining the most productive Congress in fifty years.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

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What’s bizarre about House of Cards is that it’s theoretically a drama, but it’s not very dramatic. There aren’t any “edge of your seat” moments in the series, because there isn’t really any suspense. After a few episodes you know that Frank Underwood is going to want something, he’s going to do whatever it takes to get it, and he’ll be completely successful doing it. There will be no ramifications or unintended side effects. He’s always going to win. Inevitability doesn’t make for good drama, quite the opposite. Underwood is clearly the creators’ version of a ruthless politician, but he’s somehow less than that. Applying “ruthless” to a politician implies further attributes and characterization. Like Mitch McConnell, who aptly deserves the term as an palpable source of incredible and inexplicable anger and bitterness. Or Lyndon Johnson, whose climb out of desperate poverty created a character so restless, so corrosive and clinging, that he just couldn’t stop himself from making the mistakes that tanked his presidency. You could also toss in Richard Nixon, another poor child driven to a large extent by hatred of condescending swells who looked down on him. The sorts of men this term is applied to help shape the connotations of the word, make it suggest a broader theme of character, of darkness and negativity manifest.

In the case of House of Cards, it doesn’t. He’s “just” ruthless, in that he doesn’t care about how his decisions affect people other than himself, and he has no scruples. This is more like full-on psychopath territory than standard Tony Soprano-inspired antihero stuff. Tony was selfish and inconsiderate, and a violent killer besides, but he wasn’t identifiable as a genuine psychopath until the tail end of the series. Underwood more or less starts out that way. Where else can you go with this character if that’s the start point? You have to give the audience some reason to root for the protagonist. With Tony Soprano, the major reason is because all of his rivals were far worse than he was, and also that he tried to be a good father as well as his version of a good husband (which did not include sexual fidelity, of course). And he had other intriguing attributes as well: he was genuinely curious about certain things, like history and animals, for example. He had depth. If The Sopranos had begun with the version of Tony we saw in the last season, it would have tanked. And yet, this is precisely what House of Cards does with Underwood. Having him be the final iteration of this character would have been inspired. The initial version, eh, not so much.

Of course, his predecessor was very different from all that. Francis Urquhart rocked the UK series for a number of reasons. He was a master of the political game, cheerful and cynical. But he was also an arrogant man with an impulsive streak, which often got him into trouble. Sometimes he’d underestimate his opponents and pay a price. Sometimes he’d overreact to a threat and get into trouble from that. The basic story of the UK series is a man trying to hold his conscience together while maintaining power, but the drama often revolved around his matching wits with opponents with different philosophies than his own, but of the same political caliber as he. So he had to resort to desperate measures to secure victory. These things had the effect of creating something called suspense. On one level, you know that Urquhart is most likely going to win, because he is the show. But on the other hand, because of well-managed stakes and strong characterization, how this happens is a mystery, and it always comes with a cost to Urquhart. Urquhart isn’t an antihero, he’s really just a decent guy who keeps trying to make his values fit with his desire for power, often fails to do so, and slips ever further into melancholy, self-hatred and grief. Meanwhile, you have Frank Underwood just winning all the time and flashing a smile. Why we should care is unclear.

Ultimately, House of Cards just depresses me, and makes me worry we’ll never get a great US politics television series (though I do have high hopes for Veep). The instinct to pander to the audience is simply too extreme in US political shows, it would appear, to really tell the truth about what the problems with our politics are. And it’s time we called out the backstabbing politician who is only looking out for himself for what it is: a Hollywood cliche without much basis in reality. Even the shallowest knowledge of politics makes a person realize that this is almost a complete fiction, that getting such a reputation is a career killer because nobody will want to have anything to do with you, and getting elected Speaker of the House, let alone President of the United States, requires the support of lots and lots of people. The real work of officeholders is about building relationships, doing favors, continually accomplishing gradual progress. Politicians are self-interested and ambitious as a group, but there’s only very little one person can do alone out of 435. It’s depressing to see such cliches just thrown around, especially since I think the public largely has this image of politicians too. It’s the equivalent of the evil businessman in movies, though it has less of a basis in truth as there are some businessman who do such things (though usually more in bullshit and denial than in movielike gleeful self-awareness). But both mislead as to where the real dangers in those professions lie.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

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After all, being nice worked for Dalton.

This Times article is simply horrible. The article implies that it’s some deep failing that Obama was unable to twist enough Democratic arms on background checks, ignoring the fact that even with every Dem on board the filibuster would have ensured it wouldn’t have mattered. So the idea of whether Mark Begich feels intimidated or not is moot. With only four GOP votes, the venture was doomed to failure. People looking for a place to vent ought to focus either on the filibuster or the power of the NRA, not on Obama. This one really isn’t his fault.

Admittedly, a lack of fight has been a problem for the Obama Administration in places. But it’s been a very small problem in the grand scheme of things. The major problems do not include a lack of fight so much as poor assumptions and lousy priorities. The former comes in the form of baseless assumptions that Republicans are always close to pulling the trigger on a grand bargain and thus must always be placated and not have their feelings tweaked, and the latter comes in the simple reality that, with some exceptions*, if it won’t reduce the debt, the White House simply doesn’t care all that much. Put these together and they account for most of the teeth-gritting, frown-generating moments of the Obama Era. Endless health-care delays? Negotiating strategies that even little kids could outwit? The Smoot-Hawley-esque Budget Control Act of 2011, which included sequestration? Letting Tim Geithner guard the henhouse of FinReg? Shrugging at a climate bill? That’s most of them, and they’re all easily explained by one or both of the two flaws. Toss in an inexplicable fear of conservative talkers and a misguided attempt to placate coal country and you get a few more, like the Plan B decision, delay of climate regs, the indefensible SMOG decision, and so on. But really, between fear, assumptions and priorities, there’s really not much failure unaccounted for. Additionally, in those situations, Obama was in a position to act, and his actions were flawed. With gun control, Obama was in no position to act, making blaming him silly.

Since a lot of critiques of this argument involve Aaron Sorkin, I think it’s time to identify the flaw with Sorkin’s politics. There are different kinds of liberals out there. One kind believes that all you have to do is put the best argument out there and you will win (this assumes that dreaded cliche, the “free marketplace of ideas” along with the supremacy of reason, a curious Victorian idea whose time has long since passed). That’s it! If you don’t win, it’s because you didn’t put the idea out there enough, or didn’t phrase it right, or whatever. Sorkin obviously believes this, and so do quite a few (most?) liberals. But it’s completely wrong and glib and stupid and probably damaging too. Making the big speech is merely the beginning. After that comes organizing, action, and all the other hard work of molding public opinion. I do think the background check episode will wind up having helped. No, we didn’t win, but things will be different from now on. The NRA is never going to command the same prestige it used to. They don’t own the issues, they own the politicians, and politicians change. The NRA were revealed to be extreme, unctuous nutcases whose vision of a world in flames doesn’t have any appeal outside the Right. It’s never going to be the same again. I think so, anyway, and I’m not usually the “find the silver lining” type.

* I actually think Obama played gun control about right. Immigration is the other major outlier here–you could make a bankshot case that making undocumented workers legal, taxpaying citizens would have some impact on the deficit, but that’s a long way off. I think Obama’s support for it is partly political and partly out of social justice concerns, with a small fraction about possible long-term revenue gains.

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