Am I the Only One ...?

... who sees that Michael Medved's pieces in The Daily Beast are, well, stupid, badly reasoned, and generally silly?

Recent examples:

• He thinks that people are getting older, and that older people are more conservative than younger people, and so a Republican resurgence is imminent.
• He believes that John McCain was a charismatic presidential candidate, and offers as proof the fact that he outpolled Republicans seeking congressional seats, in 2008.

There are many more: instances in which Medved looks at a piece of information, then draws conclusions that ignore the history, the context, or an important countervailing factor. I expect him, any day now, to point out that average temperatures have plunged since last August, disproving all the claims about "Global Warming."

A Gubmit Takeover of Fop!!!

An increasing number of "red" states have stood up against the federal government and for their principles of states rights: they've announced their refusal to establish the state insurance exchanges required under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). So, as the Act provides, the federal government will do it for them.

That's right: to defy the feds, these states will, in effect, invite the feds in to supervise directly the operation of their health care systems.

And another thing ...

Two disc-jockeys on an Australian radio station called the hospital where the Duchess of Cornwall had been admitted, pretending to be the Queen and the P. of W., and managed to get through to a nurse who told them something about the young woman's condition.

Then the nurse who took the call committed suicide.

Everyone is shocked and dismayed. Of course, the death of the poor nurse is sad, and regrettable. And probably the prank phone call and the resulting notoriety caused it: I have known people in my life who, I am certain, would have been driven off their tracks had they been the subject of any public notice of any kind. Some people are just not capable of dealing with a lot of attention from strangers --that's one reason they don't go into politics.

But can we really pretend to be outraged by the behavior of radio announcers? Not, I suggest, if we have listened to many of them. Literally nothing is out of bounds for them these days, no matter how offensive, puerile, nonsensical, or just plain stupid and meaningless. The sort of stuff that occupies the airwaves, at least on talk radio, is literally no different than you can find in any video arcade or fast-food restaurant. And that includes the empty pauses, the stuttered phrases, the back-and-forth bickering and side conversations --talk radio is really just a race to the bottom, aimed at making the ordinary chap feel comfortable. That is especially true on local shows; but those local jocks have learned at the feet of the masters (we all know who I mean).

Failure Is Not An Option

I mean, can we just, please, drop this stupid formulation?

Is success an option? If so, just choose it, boyo, and be done.

We ought to insist that, at least, people in responsible positions, when they make pronouncements on important public issues, avoid the simplistic and the stupid.

Neither failure nor success are options! They are potential outcomes.

Everywhere I turn: Fop.

So, Which Is It?

I mean, what do the Repubs mean to tell us about the "fiscal cliff?"

Remember, two or three years ago, when they discovered the national debt, I mean, the Debt, it was declared "an existential threat" to the United States. It was essential to our very survival that we take any and all steps, immediately, to reduce the debt, which of course means reduce spending. To be sure we did so, our fearless leaders placed a metaphorical bomb in the Capitol, and metaphorically lit its metaphorical fuse.

Now we are entering the winter of our discontent. The fuse has pretty much burned down on the Austerity Bomb, a.k.a. the Fiscal Cliff (to mix metaphors), and the same prognosticators who came up with the "existential threat" notion are very, very upset at the prospect of ... a drastic reduction in the Debt. The prospect of Reducing the Debt is, suddenly, the existential crisis du jour.

That is what will happen if there's no deal; debt reduction on a  big scale. There will be big tax increases (Boo! Job Killing! Punishing the Job Creators!) and big spending cuts (Yay! I mean ... wait a minute ... the cuts are to defense industries? Boo! We meant cut payments to The Takers who are too lazy to work! Boo!), and they will all happen on January 1 unless the President gets serious, ignores the fact that he campaigned on tax increases for the rich, and he won the election, and settles down to extend the tax cuts for the rich.

But what about the debt? It's an existential crisis, remember?

Or is it?

Fiscal Cliff Notes

Let's see:

• Obama wants tax increases for the rich; additional stimulus; and to keep the Bush tax cuts for the bottom 98%.
• The Repubs want to cut Social Security & Medicare; $800 billion in tax revenues; keep the Bush tax cuts for everyone.
• The fiscal cliff promises big cuts in defense, big tax increases on everyone.
• No one is talking about the payroll tax cut, which affects primarily low- and middle-income wage earners, and effects them immediately and significantly.

So, what's to argue? As the only serious thing, on January 1, is that the payroll tax cut lapses, thus decreasing everyone's take-home pay with their very first January payroll check; and there's apparently no one on either side who cares, let's just all relax. Obama would be nuts to cave to the Repubs; in January he will have plenty of congresspeople knocking on his door to talk about lowering tax rates. He should wait until then.

Oh, yeah: Boehner has promised to insist, every time in the future that a debt ceiling increase is needed, on tying any increase in the ceiling to further budget cuts. This is a congressman threatening to hold up payment of expenditures that the Congress has authorized, in order to score political points. How very adult!

It's as if the Repubs in Congress, like George Clooney, can only think of one thing when they wake up in the morning. But for George, it wasn't Fop. 

Retreading

Fred Kaplan, whose work I seldom appreciate, has got me here. He deconstructs the actual argument of the  Truscott piece I celebrated yesterday, about Petraeus, by a close reading and a simple inquiry: what is Truscott actually saying, rather than what's the emoticon equivalent of his tone?

I must confess that Kaplan seems to have nailed it, in his response. He still manages a careful critique of the war and its masters, but he shows that Petraeus wasn't really all that culpable, as far as Iraq is concerned.

I think there is FOP on my shoe.

General Fop-traeus

In today's NYT, this boffo piece that tells the truth our Serious People in D.C. would rather not admit about America's favorite philanderer, and, by extension, about our military and its efforts generally.

Didja ever wonder what the 30 and 40 year-old blondes with the hard bodies see in all those 60-something politicians and generals with expensive haircuts? It's the power, baby.

Take it from a sixty-something. I don't think it's my haircut.

Prognostications, After the Election

1.        Obama will preside over a gradually expanding economy with prosperity measurably improved by the end of his administration (although still shy of full employment). The same would have been true had Romney won. Presidents can influence the general state of the economy only by direct intervention, and then only at the margins. Bush did so, with his tax cuts and resulting deficits; Obama did so, with the stimulus bill and the auto bailout (which won him this election). Bush was much more influential in this regard than Obama, but in the long run this will have seriously damaged Bush’s reputation, and Obama’s influence will have enhanced his reputation.

2.       Taxes will rise next year.  The Republicans in the House will scream bloody murder, and their concern for the deficit will be forgotten. But to prevent taxes from rising, they will actually have to engage in negotiation, and they don’t know how.

3.       The Senate would be in Republican hands were it not for the Tea Party. This is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog, or of the “useful idiots” wreaking havoc against their masters.

4.       Obamacare will largely be forgotten within a year. It’s over, as an issue.

5.       Wall Street will stop (and soon) whining that the President looked funny at them, and that the resulting lack of business confidence is what is killing jobs and the recovery. If they don’t, truly punitive tax increases on them will be the result.

6.       The phrase “job-killing” will be retired. No one believes it, really.

7.       Within 5 years, gay marriage and legal marijuana will be over, as issues, because they will have become commonplace in an increasingly large part of the country.

8.       The Catholic Church will retreat, gradually, from its strident involvement in politics. Its opposition to Obama (he carried 52% of the Catholic vote) having failed, they will start to worry about more pressing concerns, like the revolt of the nuns, the jailing of bishops, and the accelerating departure of the faithful from the Church.

9.       The Republican Party will be embroiled, for the next several months, in fierce recriminations, on one hand, and soul-searching, on the other. They will face the demographic facts that they have worked so hard to ignore, and will either (1) cast out the loonies (who will form their own fringe party) or (2) will become a permanent minority, able to influence local and some state politics in small rural states but unable to compete nationally.

10.   Rubio and Christie qualify as potential national forces, but few others in the GOP are serious contenders (certainly not Ryan). However, Rubio and Christie will have to repudiate the Taliban element in the party if they are to appeal broadly enough to succeed.

11.   Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most popular person on the national stage (who woulda thought?) will be a serious contender for the 2016 Democratic nomination, with the enthusiastic backing of Barack Obama. Susan Rice will be nominated to replace Hillary at State, but the Repubs in Congress will prevent her from taking that office; and the Republicans will regret this.

12.   Although we have elected a center-right president (William Saletan called Obama a Republican president), the country is moving slowly leftward. This is not because anyone is changing his mind, but because the old white guys are shrinking in number.

13.   The Republicans will get serious about immigration reform, now that demagoguery on this issue has cost them their chance (which was never very good) to reverse Obamacare and Dodd-Frank –halfhearted though both those measures may have been.

14.   If Obama replaces Tim Geithner with Erskine Bowles, he will face a revolt in his own party, and lose his opportunity to resurrect the “Grand Bargain” with Boehner.

15.   Obama, having learned his lesson, will be disinclined to play nice with the Republicans in the House; as he starts calling them out on their duplicity, they will either (a) flounder and end up replacing the “Young Guns” with more reasonable leaders, or (b) lose their majority in 2014.

16.   My neighborhood will have four more years of sudden and unexpected closings of arterial streets.

17.   A slow but increasing movement to reform the electoral college will begin to form; it will go nowhere, but only after a long period of controversy, because reforming the Electoral College would call into question the premise on which the US Senate is based.

18.   Harry Reid should do away with the current filibuster system, as he should have done at the beginning of the last Congress, and which he could accomplish in the first session of 2013. But he won’t.

19.   OK, this one’s just an opinion: The intelligence of the American electorate (and therefore of the American public generally) may be abysmal (witness all those people on the call-in radio shows this morning complaining about how the networks awarded some state or another to Obama (or to Romney) when only a fraction of the votes had been counted). But the dumbing-down has been encouraged by people at the top who know better but who encourage know-nothingism because it suits their personal and political ambitions.

Political FOP; or Ryan is Tryin'

Tryin' that is, to change the subject from the aimless, almost meta-campaign of Mr. Romney (whose campaign is about campaigning) to serious, deep-thought-provoking matters such as how to cure the deficit. You remember the deficit: it is a serious concern of Republicans everywhere whenever the Democrats hold the White House; at other times, "deficits don't matter," as the most recent Republican vice-president famously said.

Ryan knows the deficit, and the Debt. He is the "intellectual leader" of the Republicans in Congress, as established by his Roadmap budget. That's the one that everyone swooned over, when it was released last year, the one that would cut a skazillion dollars out of the federal expenditure, magically balance the budget, and restore prosperity.

Only it wasn't so. After all the confetti floated to the ground and was swept away, along with the dog poop in the gutter, the morning after, someone thought to take a look at Ryan's numbers.

And, in what follows, forget the broad implications, like the privatizing of Social Security and Medicare, and the elimination of Medicaid --how well would all those Bush "privately invested" Social Security accounts have fared in 2008, I wonder? Today, we're just talking about the numbers themselves.

Here's how he would do it: cut discretionary spending --total discretionary spending, not just waste, fraud, and abuse (which among Repubs are thought to be matters of actual budgeting by the Dems), from its current level of 12% of the federal budget to 3%, in the future. Now, given that the military budget is part of "discretionary spending," and the defense budget alone is over 4% of the federal expenditure, it became obvious that (1) it was impossible, without going back to Coolidge-era levels of government inactivity, and (2) no Republican would ever allow a 25% cut in the defense budget.

So Ryan's plan was, from the outset, simply dishonest, so much so that once this sleight-of-hand was noticed, and publicized, the details of the numbers were removed from his website, and even conservative commentators retracted much of their praise.

No worries: there are plenty of credulous people like Erskine Bowles, and journalists who cannot, and would never stoop actually to, read a budget or a balance sheet, who bought the meme: Ryan is courageous, serious, etc, etc. Once his status is proclaimed, never mind that it's based on a fraud, it's the story forever after.

Oh, and one more thing: Even Ryan's "bold, courageous" cartoon of a budget failed to achieve actually balancing the thing, for decades.

So now we get to hear the Romney-Ryan campaign talk endlessly about how they have a wonderful plan to fix the economy.

But they don't, and they know it.

FOP: Ever closer to Home

Our story so far:

My printer, the one I bought less than a year ago, needs a new "drum." As far as I can determine, the drum is the removable cradle that the toner cartridge sits in.

Sigh.

So, off to Office Depot, where I bought the thing, and where I regularly buy the $75 toner cartridges. My spending on toner cartridges by now dwarfs the original cost of the printer. But it's a good printer-copier-scanner; prints very rapidly, and so forth.

Oops. I can't seem to find the drum, even though I see lots of drums for other Brother printers. After a bit, a helpful young man joins me. He verifies that they have no drum. So, of course, I ask if he can order me one, call me when it comes in.

"Just step over here with me," he says, and I comply, assuming he wants to write down my phone number and maybe the number of the drum I need.

But no. He proceeds to go to the Office Depot website and order the drum, from start to finish, all the dreary pages finding the right item, entering the product number on another screen, selecting the type of payment --he clicks "pay at register"-- and then he needs all my information. How did I learn about the website, for crying out loud. My address, etc.

By this time I am getting antsy, and irritated. He selects "send," and tells me it'll probably arrive at my house on Monday.

"No. I want to pick it up here. I wanted you to order it, and call me when it came in. Why all this stuff?"

"We can't do that. We don't stock it."

"So what? Get one for me. And, by the way, I bought the damn printer here; you stock that. And I have a new toner cartridge under my arm, here. You stock that."

"We don't stock that drum. We'd have to change our whole order series if we wanted to start stocking that drum. And we can't just order it. They'd charge us for it." This brings me up short, for a sec.

Whatever. We proceed to the register, where I will buy my cartridge. He's carrying paperwork. When we get to the register, he rings up two sales: one for the toner I am taking with me, and one for the $110 drum I have ordered --and for which I now must pay in advance. And he's called a manager, because to change my e-order so the drum will be sent to the store, he needs a manager. They can't change the shipping address, and I tell them that, regardless of when anyone tells me it'll be delivered, it won't. And when it is delivered, I won't be home to get it.

But I am intrigued, even as I am getting pissed off. So I ask the manager, is this really just a franchise?

"No. Officer Depot owns and operates this store."

"Then what's all this about them charging you if you order it? And who cares if they do? You obviously have a market for the drums, as I can promise you, the ones that come with the machine don't last a year."

Well, it turns out that an intercompany charge is apparently just as bad as employee embezzlement, or storm damage, or something. They must floor-plan these stores like the carmakers do the dealers. If you want something they don't have, it's to the internet.

Now, you can't pick up a news magazine these days without finding a piece on how Amazon and other virtual stores that run out of faceless fulfillment houses scattered in godforsaken rural sinks of depression around the country are bankrupting the retail stores of America. So what do the retail stores do, to save themselves and their local-merchant friendliness and personal service? Why, they operate exactly like Amazon does, except that you order on their computers instead of your own.

In the film that gave this blog its name, there is a scene where George Clooney is standing at the counter of a country general store, in need of a fan belt for his (stolen) flivver. Turns out it'll take two weeks for the fan belt to be delivered. Clooney says, "Two weeks! That don't do me no good."

In frustration, thinking, he says, offhand, that he wants some hair pomade. The storekeeper turns to a high shelf and comes back with a can of Fop.

"I don't want Fop, goddammit," Clooney expostulates. "I'm a Dapper Dan man."

"Watch your language, young feller; this is a public establishment. I can get you Dapper Dan. Take two weeks."  (You can tell I'm having fun, here.)

Clooney explodes. "Two weeks! Why, ain't this place a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere!"

Like George, I don't want Fop. And I don't go to a store expecting that it's actually a big walk-in computer terminal. But, apparently, that is our future.

And it's Fop. And I don't want it.

Get the Point, Rick!

Mr. Santorum, speaking with an adversarial group in New Hampshire, took the anti-gay marriage argument in a typically (for him) ridiculous direction the other day. "So what's okay?" he asked (I am paraphrasing). "What about three people --what about polygamy? Is that okay? How about man on dog? Where do you draw the line?"

In trying to fit his particular bias into a reductio ad absurdium argument, he misses the entire point: Okay, say that  no, a polygamous marriage is not okay. That has no effect on the argument in favor of gay marriage. Polygamy is not okay, nor is polyandry (assuming we decide so); but they are not okay for anybody: if you allow three-person marriages in the case of two men and a woman, say, but not two women and a man, you are then in the place we find ourselves now.

The point is that the US government privileges certain people by allowing them special rights and privileges; these rights and privileges have real, serious, and lasting effects on the people so favored. If you are going to do this, then equity requires that the same rights and privileges be extended to everyone --you cannot pick and choose.

Here's how this works: if two people can file a joint tax return, then any two people ought to be able to do so, not just two of whom you happen to approve. If my spouse can be covered by my health insurance policy, and can inherit my property by operation of law, and my surviving spouse can enjoy my social security benefits, by what right do you tell me who my spouse has to be? Some years ago, states took it upon themselves to deny me the benefits of marriage to some women, but not to others: that is an impermissible intrusion into my private affairs, on one hand, and disadvantages me socially and economically in comparison with others, on no reasonable basis. This is well settled.

If you wish to do away with the joint federal tax return, fine: we will all be treated equally as a result, in taxation, and nobody can complain. If you want to change the laws of inheritance, etc, do so --but don't create separate classes of benefits for some people that others cannot enjoy.

The point, again, is simple: we don't care how you define "marriage." But you cannot define it in an exclusionary way and then privilege "marriage" in the legal system.

Maybe the government --all governments, at whatever level-- should just get out of the marriage business. Drop the concept from our laws, and gays won't have any complaints.

And if you still want to keep three people from living in a sinful menage a trois, go ahead and try.