Month: July 2009

An Apology Just Doesn’t Come Close

by tristero

Amazon’s apologized for its Orwellian behavior in deleting “1984” from users’ Kindles without telling anyone or asking permission.

Big deal. That’s nowhere enough. In fact, neither is this:

A growing number of civil libertarians and customer advocates wants Amazon to fundamentally alter its method for selling Kindle books, lest it be forced to one day change or recall books, perhaps by a judge ruling in a defamation case — or by a government deciding a particular work is politically damaging or embarrassing.

“As long as Amazon maintains control of the device it will have this ability to remove books and that means they will be tempted to use it or they will be forced to it,” said Holmes Wilson, campaigns manager of the Free Software Foundation.

The foundation, based in Boston, is soliciting signatures from librarians, publishers and major authors and public intellectuals. This week it plans to present a petition to Amazon asking it to give up control over the books people load on their Kindles

Sorry, but as long as it is technically feasible to alter and/or erase information, these devices are fundamentally, profoundly dangerous to a free society. Merely promising to give up control is not enough. It must be impossible to alter the content of a book, magazine, newspaper, etc once a user has purchased it, for any reason whatsoever. And alterations a reader does make must be clearly marked as such the way it is impossible now to alter a copy of a book without knowing it has been altered.

Since that is a daunting, if not hopeless, task for a digital gadget devoted to the sale of books and other print products – and since I want to own my books, not license them – I, for one, have little interest at this point in getting one.

Merce

by tristero

Merce Cunningham died Sunday. He was a truly great artist, a giant, a genius of the highest order. Like Bach, he took formal ideas of a daunting complexity and made them seem like child’s play. But that was hardly all. Like Bach, and like few other artists, Merce had the rare, uncanny ability to infuse his explorations of form and structure with the deepest emotional meaning; I found myself crying more than once at a Merce concert, and always left exhilarated, renewed, filled with the possibilities of art.

To watch Merce dance was a great thing. He was the most graceful man I’ve ever seen. His company, right up to the end of his life, was exceptionally well-trained and rehearsed. A recent performance was so spectacular it put the far better funded ballet companies to shame.

Merce, thank you for so many memorable dances and such implacable devotion to the highest artistic achievement. I already miss you terribly.

It’s Just Too Easy

by digby

Update:
Here’s a little advice for you bleeding heart hippies, brought to you by a guest post at The Corner from an LA Police Officer:

[S]ince the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

When the officer has satisfied himself that it was not you and your Hupmobile that were involved in the Piggly Wiggly heist, he owes you an explanation for the stop and an apology for the inconvenience, but if you’re running your mouth about your rights and your history of oppression and what have you, you’re likely to get neither.

— Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. “Jack Dunphy” is the author’s nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.

Again, you have to wonder what the good people of the NRA — especially all those poor truckers John Thune was going on about, who need to carry concealed weapons across state lines — think about this police officer’s attitude about their “constitutional rights” and running the risk of having holes placed in their bodies. I would guess that odds of said officer putting holes in someone who is carrying a piece are substantially higher than the average person, whatever the race or social status. Especially the very thin-skinned, clearly pyschologically unfit ones such as this fellow.

Do you sense that things are getting a little bit confused out there?

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Don’t think it doesn’t matter

by digby

Media Matters:

In their health care reform coverage, media have repeatedly given considerably more attention to perceived setbacks to progressive reform efforts than to events that signal progress for those efforts. A Media Matters for America analysis of transcripts available in the Nexis database has found that broadcast and cable news featured almost twice as many segments mentioning the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) reported opposition to a public insurance plan as segments mentioning the AMA’s recent announcement that it supported the House Democrats’ health care reform bill, which includes a public plan.

That finding is consistent with an earlier Media Matters study showing that the number of cable news segments in Nexis mentioning an initial Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of an incomplete version of a Senate health committee draft bill was far greater than the number of segments mentioning a later CBO analysis. That later analysis showed that an updated version of the bill would cover more people for less than the earlier scoring had suggested. Media Matters has also documented a pattern in which media suggest that President Obama’s reform effort is in serious jeopardy, despite events — including the AMA endorsement and revised CBO score — that indicate reform efforts have made substantial progress.

Following the June 10 publication of a New York Times article reporting that the AMA “will oppose creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan,” broadcast and cable news networks ran a total of 23 segments from June 11 through June 14 that mentioned or discussed the AMA’s reported stance, according to a search of transcripts available in the Nexis database. By contrast, following the July 16 announcement by the AMA that it supported passage of the House Democrats’ health care reform bill, the networks ran a total of 12 segments from July 16 through July 20 mentioning or discussing the AMA’s endorsement

Americans always get nervous when their leaders are perceived to be losers. In fact, they hate it. And when the media skews toward failure unfairly, it has an effect on public opinion.

It’s been clear to me for some time that much of the media (with some notable exceptions) was looking for failure on this one. They like conflict and they don’t actually care about whether or not health care gets done. Mark Halperin said right out that we should bet against health reform because:

“Most journalists still have health insurance.”

Now one can make the argument that this bias exists against whomever is in charge of the agenda. But you wouldn’t have much evidence to support it:

Network newscasts, dominated by current and former U.S. officials, largely exclude Americans who are skeptical of or opposed to an invasion of Iraq, a new study by FAIR has found. of all

Among the major findings in a two-week study (1/30/03–2/12/03) of on-camera network news sources quoted on Iraq:

* Seventy-six percent of all sources were current or former officials, leaving little room for independent and grassroots views. Similarly, 75 percent of U.S. sources (199/267) were current or former officials.

* At a time when 61 percent of U.S. respondents were telling pollsters that more time was needed for diplomacy and inspections (2/6/03), only 6 percent of U.S. sources on the four networks were skeptics regarding the need for war.

* Sources affiliated with anti-war activism were nearly non-existent. On the four networks combined, just three of 393 sources were identified as being affiliated with anti-war activism–less than 1 percent. Just one of 267 U.S. sources was affiliated with anti-war activism–less than half a percent.

I suspect that there is a bit of mass psychology at work here, in which the media collectively understands that it’s blamed for failing its responsibility under Bush and so feels that it needs to demonstrate its independence this time out. (It also knows that it was pretty gushy toward Obama during the campaign and now that he has come down to earth as a politician, they feel embarrassed.)

This happened with Clinton and Carter too. For a variety of reasons, the press holds Democrats to tougher standards, mostly because of their own failures during Republican presidencies. And because they overreact in Democratic administrations, they inevitably go easier on Republicans. How much of this is political bias is unknown, but it doesn’t matter. The effect is the same.

The media remain a huge part of the problem and it’s important that we not forget that in all of our holding of Democratic feet to the fire. Chuck Todd and the rest of the kewl kidz see it all as a big political game and they are both the umpires and the color men. And that actually makes them very powerful players.

Reforming government will never be enough.

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Moral Hazard

by digby

Dday’s doing some writing for Crooks and Liars these days and (damn him!) gave Amato this gem of a post about Goldman Sachs. Read the whole thing, and be sure to watch the video of Bill Maher and Matt Taibbi sparring on the subject.

Dday points to this fascinating little tid-bit from the NY Times which flew under the radar of the generalist political blogs as we argued over arcane pieces of health care policy and racial profiling the past few days. But it’s certainly something we should find more bandwidth to talk about. After all, it’s a scandal of epic proportions and yet another piece of evidence that Goldman Sachs (along with others) in the last 25 years has become an extra-legal if not a fully criminal enterprise. (Much of what they do is not illegal, but it is immoral and it certainly is cheating.) Here’s the NY Times article from Friday:

It is the hot new thing on Wall Street, a way for a handful of traders to master the stock market, peek at investors’ orders and, critics say, even subtly manipulate share prices.

It is called high-frequency trading — and it is suddenly one of the most talked-about and mysterious forces in the markets […]

Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed. High-frequency trading is one answer.

And when a former Goldman Sachs programmer was accused this month of stealing secret computer codes — software that a federal prosecutor said could “manipulate markets in unfair ways” — it only added to the mystery. Goldman acknowledges that it profits from high-frequency trading, but disputes that it has an unfair advantage.

Yet high-frequency specialists clearly have an edge over typical traders, let alone ordinary investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission says it is examining certain aspects of the strategy.

“This is where all the money is getting made,” said William H. Donaldson, former chairman and chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange and today an adviser to a big hedge fund. “If an individual investor doesn’t have the means to keep up, they’re at a huge disadvantage.”

dday writes:

They literally place their super-fast computers physically close to the machines that govern NYSE trades, to get the jump on competitors and make enough pennies off of the brief ups and downs of stocks to rake in mounds of cash. And in some cases, investors can buy access to buy and sell order information on certain exchanges that can be used to make these quick orders. When Chuck Schumer is calling for an investigation of Wall Street, you know something has gone horribly wrong.

No, Goldman Sachs is not the only organization profiting from this scheme, or any of the numerous others. But their name keeps surfacing among those that are, in pretty much every case. I don’t know how much evidence it takes to understand their role in all of this. Taibbi may not have gotten every single solitary thing right in his very long piece, but he got enough right to make some very powerful people nervous. And rightly so.

Something has gone terribly wrong on Wall Street, and at Goldman Sachs in particular. And I suspect that nobody wants to look too closely because they are afraid that a lack of “faith” in the markets will end up making the economy worse.(More faith based crapola ….) The powers that be in both government and business are scared witless right now that the whole house of cards is going to fall in at once, no matter how much they inanely babble about green shoots and recovery. After all, moving money around and skimming a tidy profit off the top is about the only area where America leads the world anymore. Besides arms and entertainment, it’s our main contribution to the global economy. These firms pretty much own the government and they all agree that unless they have their way, the repercussions could be catastrophic. They are holding a metaphorical gun to the heads of every American and saying, let us make obscene profits no matter what or we’ll take this fucker down. Of course, it’s probably going to come down of its own accord at some point, but they are too big to fail, so no harm, no foul. For them.

But these people are greedheads even beyond the fever dreams of the most ardent disaster capitalist. The smart move is to be prudent and chagrined and keep their heads down and their profile low for a while. But instead they seem to think they need to return to bubbleland as quickly as possible and demonstrate to everyone that they don’t take their recent near death experience seriously in the least.

But then, why should they. They crashed the world economy with their last little gambit but they have been determined to be too big to fail, nobody has gone to jail, the only punishment they suffered was getting their bonuses slashed for a year. You can see why they would assume all systems are go. And since they are Masters of the Universe, social disapprobation is something reserved for the rubes. They just don’t give a damn. They don’t have to.

And frankly, I don’t see what will stop them. Americans care far more about Michael Jackson’s final days than they do about these financial miscreants destroying the economy for their own personal profit. And the politicians are all their buddies from grad school or recipients of their social and financial largesse. I’m finding it hard to see a mechanism besides total social breakdown that would stop them.

Update: Matt Stoller, policy adviser to Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL-8) sent out an email on a related topic.

Next week, the Financial Services Committee is going to be marking up a bill on executive compensation, the so-called ‘Say on Pay’ bill. Among other things, this bill mandates a nonbinding shareholder vote on executive compensation. Now, the vote is nonbinding, so the board could theoretically just ignore a shareholder ‘no’ vote.

Let’s say that the legislation were changed so that the shareholder vote were binding. What would happen if shareholders vote ‘no’? Would the executives then be paid nothing? That seems unreasonable and unworkable.

How could this be structured so that the shareholder vote is binding, but there’s some process to determine executive pay if management is voted down?

Leave your ideas in the comments or send me an email and I’ll see that they get to Matt.

I’m partial to the idea of barricades and pitchforks myself, but maybe something along this lines could be tried first …

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Tasers R Us

by digby

Yes it’s real

h/t to MS

Obama Betrayus
by digbyI would guess that Obama successfully headed this off with his impromptu press conference on Friday, but if he hadn’t the hissy fit was coming to the floor of congress:

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) will introduce a House resolution on Monday demanding Obama retract and apologize for remarks he has made about Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley this past week. Obama had said at his prime time press conference Wednesday that Crowley had “acted stupidly” in the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a racially-infused case which has sparked a national debate on race and policing. The president refused to back down on his involvement in the case, but appeared in the White House briefing on Friday to say he had called Crowley to explain that never meant to insult the officer. (Obama also called Gates on Friday.) McCotter’s resolution would demand Obama “retract his initial public remarks and apologize to Cambridge, Massachusetts Police Sergeant James M. Crowley for having unfairly impugned and prejudged his professional conduct in this local police response incident.”[…]

DRAFT House Resolution Whereas on July 16, 2009, Cambridge, Massachusetts Police Sergeant James M. Crowley responded to a 911 call from a neighbor of Harvard University Professor Henry Louis (“Skip”) Gates, Jr. about a suspected break-in in progress at his residence, which had been broken into on a prior occasion; Whereas on July 22, 2009, in responding to a question during a White House press conference President Barack Obama stated: “Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don’t know all of the facts involved in this local police response incident”; Whereas President Obama proceeded to state Sergeant Crowley “acted stupidly” for arresting Professor Gates on charges of disorderly conduct; Whereas, as a former Constitutional Law Professor, President Obama well understands that all Americans are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and their actions should not be prejudged prior to being fully and fairly judged by an appropriate and objective authority after due process; Whereas, President Obama’s nationally televised remarks may likely detrimentally influence the full and fair judgment by an appropriate and objective authority after due process regarding this local police response incident and, thereby, impair Sergeant Crowley’s legal and professional standing in relation to said incident; and Whereas, President Obama appeared at a daily White House Press briefing on July 24, 2009 to address his denouncement of Sergeant Crowley and stated: “I could have calibrated those words differently” but “I continue to believe, based on what I have heard, that there was an overreaction in pulling Professor Gates out of his home to the station.” Whereas, President Obama’s refusal to retract his initial public remarks and apologize to Sergeant Crowley and, instead, reiterate his accusation impugning Sergeant Crowley’s professional conduct in the performance of his duties; Now therefore be it Resolved, That the House of Representatives– Calls upon President Obama to retract his initial public remarks and apologize to Cambridge, Massachusetts Police Sergeant James M. Crowley for having unfairly impugned and prejudged his professional conduct in this local police response incident.

When it comes to hissy fits, the Republicans are all about “what works” and this is the kind of thing that has always worked for them in the past. It’s clear they haven’t lost their love for absurdist political theatre. Unfortunately, they are falling back on a tired formula and may have opened the show just a little bit too late. But they’re troopers, no doubt about it.

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Building The Mandate

by digby

Here’s an interesting article from a single payer advocate about the “bait and switch” on the public plan, which says that although the original idea of a public plan might have accomplished the cost savings and reform that it promised, what’s coming out of the HELP Committee and the House is a watered down version that won’t accomplish any of it.

I don’t disagree with a lot of this, although I do think that some of it is being willfully naive about the strategy. As TeddyKennedy says, the most important thing is to get a public plan by hook or crook and then expand it. But I would love to know why this fellow and others like him believe that, all things being equal (the same presidential campaign, the same economic conditions) single payer could have been sold more effectively than a public plan. If the medical industrial complex pulled out all the stops with this far less radical change — and managed to successfully erode support for reform already — is it reasonable to think they would have been stunned into paralysis if Obama had introduced a real government run program?

I don’t think there’s any question about that. Could the Democrats have put single payer on the table as an opening gambit and perhaps built more support for a public plan? Yes. They made a tactical decision not to. But that has no bearing on whether or not single payer was a feasible position in its own right.

I would certainly prefer single payer — just expand Medicare and the VA to everyone and call it a day — but I’m not married to the idea. (I’m married to universal health care and if there are other ways to attain that, then I’m open to it.) I just don’t understand why anyone thinks there was any kind of mandate for such a plan — or that there has been any kind of grassroots, bottom-up effort to build one over the past 16 years when the Clinton plan crashed on many of the same shoals the current one is heading toward. There was certainly no demand for this during the last presidential campaign, despite the fact that the crisis was well known and plans were discussed constantly.

This reform debate has been going on for 60 years now and every time an attempt to do it fails, liberals purse their lips and say the plan wasn’t sweeping enough. We say that no reform is better than reform that continues to allow insurance companies to exist anyway and comfort ourselves with the notion that single payer will be inevitable the next time. And then the politicians suffer from their political failure and get wary of tackling the issue again — and we go back to complaining among ourselves for another 20 years until another president gets an opening for reform and the same thing happens.

This person actually seems to believe that if the current legislation crashes and burns that all the politicians have to do is brush themselves off and go back to the drawing board and we’ll get a single payer plan in 2010. That is a fantasy. It does not work that way and anyone who has observed politics in this country for more than five minutes knows this. The politicians will learn their lesson about failed reform — again — and that will be that.

At this point the situation is so grave that taking another 20 years to build that single payer mandate is an untenable position. The economics as well as the moral necessity argue for doing whatever is possible. But, if you nonetheless believe that it’s better to have no reform at all then go ahead and agitate for this plan to fail. Maybe this time, in 20 years things will be so horrible that they won’t be able to avoid enacting single payer. Heck, maybe we can come back to it in only eight years this time — if Republicans don’t come back to power that is.

but if you take that position, I would certainly hope that at the very least, if this push fails, everyone who has been holding out for single payer will not sit around and congratulate themselves on their victory but instead immediately devote their lives with single minded focus for as long as it takes to building that mandate for single payer because that’s what it’s going to take. Otherwise, it simply won’t happen.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Oh, Mama…can this really be the end?

By Dennis Hartley

Sometimes, you see a little kicker on the evening news that puts everything into perspective. Such was the discovery this past Monday that an “object” has recently bombarded the planet Jupiter. As of this writing, experts are not sure if it was a comet, an asteroid, or whatever-but it was a doozey. By initial accounts, the impact area is nearly the size of the Earth. I’m no astronomer, but that is one big-ass crater. It just makes our silly little concerns about religion, politics, war and commerce all seem so…silly, dunnit?

At any rate, the entertainment value of Armageddon (hey-there’s an upside to everything) has certainly not been lost on filmmakers over the years, whether it is precipitated by vengeful deities, comets, meteors, aliens, plagues or mankind’s curious propensity for continuing to seek new and improved ways of ensuring its own mass destruction. With that joyful thought in mind, I’ve assembled my Top 10 End of the World Movies, each with a suggested co-feature (make it a Theme Night!). As per usual, I am presenting the list alphabetically, in no particular preferential order. So enjoy, er…while you still can.

The Book of Life

The WMD: An angry God

Hal Hartley’s visually stylish, post-modernist re-imagining of Armageddon as an existential boardroom soap opera may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but I find it oddly compelling. Set on New Year’s Eve, 1999, the story joins a Yuppified Jesus (Martin Donovan) as he jets in to New York with his personal assistant, Magdalena (British alt-rocker P.J. Harvey) in tow (they check in to their hotel as “Mr. and Mrs. DW Griffith”). This is anything but your typical business trip, as J.C. is in town to do Dad’s bidding re: the um, Day of Judgment. The kid has his doubts, however about all this “divine vengeance crap”. His corporate rival, Satan (Thomas Jay Ryan) is also on hand to do hostile takeovers of as many souls as he can during the world’s final few hours. Although it is ostensibly not designed as a “comedy”, I found the idea of Jesus carrying the Book of Life around on his laptop pretty goddam funny (“Do you want to open the 5th Seal? Yes or Cancel”). Clocking in at just 63 minutes, it may be more akin to a high concept one-act play than a fully fleshed out film narrative, but it’s a thought-provoking ride all the same.

Double bill: w/ The Rapture

The Day the Earth Caught Fire

The WMD: Nuclear mishap

Written and directed by Val Guest, this cerebral mix of conspiracy a-go-go and sci-fi from the Cold War era is a precursor to the X-Files, and has always been a personal favorite of mine. Nuclear testing by the U.S. and Soviets triggers a mysterious and alarming shift in the Earth’s climate. As London’s weather turns more weirdly tropical by the hour, a Daily Express reporter (Peter Stenning) begins to suspect that the British government is not being 100% forthcoming on the possible fate of the world. Along the way, Stenning enjoys some steamy scenes with his love interest (sexy Janet Munro). The film is more noteworthy for its smart, snappy patter than its run-of-the-mill f/x, but still makes for a compelling “end of the world” story. Co-starring the great Leo McKern!

Double bill: w/ Until the End of the World

Dr. Strangelove

The WMD: The Doomsday Machine

“Mein fuhrer! I can walk!” Although we have yet (knock on wood) to experience the global thermonuclear annihilation that ensues following the wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove’s joyous (if short-lived) epiphany, so many other depictions in Stanley Kubrick’s seriocomic masterpiece about the propensity for men in power to eventually rise to their own level of incompetence have since come to pass, that you wonder why the filmmakers even bothered to make all this shit up. In case you are one of the three people reading this who have never seen the film, it’s about an American military base commander who goes a little funny in the head (you know…”funny”) and sort of launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Hilarity (and oblivion) ensues. You will never see a cast like this again: Peter Sellers (absolutely brilliant, playing three major characters), George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, James Earl Jones and Peter Bull (who can be seen breaking character as the Russian ambassador and cracking up during the scene where Strangelove’s prosthetic arm seems to take on a mind of its own). There are so many quotable lines, that you might as well bracket the entire screenplay (by Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George) with quotation marks. I never tire of this film.

Double bill: w/ Fail-safe

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The WMD: Alien “highway” crew

The belated 2005 adaptation of satirist Douglas Adams’ classic sci-fi radio-to-book-to TV series made a lot of old school fans (like me) a little twitchy at first, but director Garth Jennings does an admirable job of condensing the story down to an entertaining feature length film. It’s the only “end of the world” scenario I know of where the human race buys it as the result of bureaucratic oversight (the Earth is to be “demolished” for construction of a hyperspace highway bypass; unfortunately, the requisite public notice is posted in an obscure basement-on a different planet). Adams (who died in 2001) was credited as co-screenwriter (with Karey Kirkpatrick); but I wonder if he had final approval, as the wry “Britishness” of some of the key one liners from the original series have been dumbed down. Still, it’s a quite watchable affair, thanks to the enthusiastic cast, the imaginative special effects and (mostly) faithful adherence to the original ethos.

Double bill: w/ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Original 1981 BBC series)

Last Night

The WMD: Nebulous cosmic event

A profoundly moving low-budget wonder from writer/director/star Don McKellar. The story intimately focuses on several Toronto residents and how they choose to spend (what they know to be) their final 6 hours. You may recognize McKellar from his work with director Atom Egoyan. He must have been taking notes, because as a director, McKellar has inherited Egoyan’s quiet, deliberate way of drawing you straight into the emotional core of his characters. Fantastic ensemble work from Sandra Oh, Genevieve Bujold, Callum Keith Rennie, Tracy Wright and a rare acting appearance by director David Cronenberg. Although generally somber in tone, there are some laugh-out-loud moments, funny in a wry, gallows-humor way. The powerful final scene packs an almost indescribably emotional wallop. You know you’re watching a Canadian version of the Apocalypse when the #4 song on the “Top 500 of All Time” is by… Burton Cummings!

Double bill: w/ Night of the Comet

Miracle Mile

The WMD: Nuclear exchange

Depending on your view of the “half-empty/half-full” paradox, this is either an “end of the world” film for romantics, or the Perfect Date Movie for fatalists. Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham both give winning performances as a musician and a waitress who Meet Cute at L.A.’s La Brea Tar Pits. But before they can hook up for their first hot date, the musician inadvertently stumbles onto a fairly reliable hot tip that Los Angeles is about to get hosed…in a major way. The resulting “ticking clock” scenario is a real nail-biter. This modestly budgeted, 90-minute sleeper offers more genuine heart-pounding excitement (and much more believable characters) than any bloated Hollywood disaster epic from the likes of a Michael Bay or a Roland Emmerich. Puzzlingly, writer-director Steve De Jarnatt stopped doing feature films after this 1988 gem (his only other film was the guilty pleasure Cherry 2000); opting instead for TV work (it probably pays better!).

Double Bill: w/ One Night Stand(1984)

Testament

The WMD: Nuclear fallout

Originally an “American Playhouse” presentation on PBS, the film was released to theatres and garnered a well-deserved Best Actress nomination for Jane Alexander (she lost to Shirley MacLaine). Director Lynne Littman takes a low key, deliberately paced approach, but pulls no punches. Alexander, her husband (William DeVane) and three kids live in sleepy Hamlin, California, where the afternoon cartoons are interrupted by a news flash that a number of nuclear explosions have occurred in New York. Then there is a flash of a whole different kind when nearby San Francisco (where DeVane has gone on a business trip) receives a direct strike. There is no exposition on the political climate that precipitates the attacks; a wise decision by the filmmakers because it helps us zero in on the essential humanistic message of the film. All of the post-nuke horrors ensue, but they are presented sans the histrionics and melodrama that informs many entries in the genre. The fact that the nightmarish scenario unfolds so deliberately, and amidst such everyday suburban banality, is what makes it all so believably horrifying and difficult to shake off.

Double bill: w/ On the Beach

The Quiet Earth

The WMD: Science gone awry (whoopsie!)

This 1985 New Zealand import has built up a cult following over the years. This is one of those films that are difficult to synopsize without risking spoilers, so I will tread lightly for the uninitiated. Bruno Lawrence (Smash Palace) delivers a tour de force performance; particularly in the first third of the film (basically a one-man show). He plays a scientist who may have had a hand in a government research project mishap that has apparently wiped out everyone on Earth except him. The plot thickens when he discovers that there are at least two other survivors-a man and a woman. The three-character dynamic is reminiscent of a 1959 nuclear holocaust tale called The World, the Flesh and the Devil, but it’s safe to say that the similarities end there. By the time you reach the mind-blowing finale, you’ll find yourself closer to Andrei Tartovsky territory (Solaris, The Mirror). Director Geoff Murphy never topped this effort; although his 1992 film Freejack is worth a peek (featuring Mick Jagger as a time-traveling bounty hunter!).

Double Bill: w/ The Omega Man

…or one from column “B”: The Last Man on Earth, I Am Legend)

The Andromeda Strain

The WMD: Bacteriological scourge

What’s the scariest monster of them all? It’s the one you cannot see. I’ve always considered this 1971 Robert Wise film to be the most faithful Michael Crichton book-to-screen adaptation. A team of scientists race the clock to save the world from a deadly virus from outer space that reproduces itself at an alarming speed. With its atmosphere of claustrophobic urgency (all the scientists are ostensibly trapped in a sealed underground laboratory until they can find a way to destroy the microbial “intruder”) it could be seen as a precursor to Alien. It’s a nail-biter from start to finish. Nelson Gidding adapted the script from Crichton’s novel. The 2008 TV movie version was a real snoozer, IMHO.

Double bill: w/ 28 Days Later

When Worlds Collide

The WMD: Another celestial body

There’s a brand new star in the sky, with its own orbiting planet! There’s good news and bad news regarding this exciting discovery. The good news: You don’t need a telescope in order to examine them in exquisite detail. The bad news: See “the good news”. That’s the premise of this involving 1951 sci-fi yarn about an imminent collision between said rogue sun and the Earth. The scientist who makes the discovery makes an earnest attempt to warn world leaders, but is ultimately dismissed as a Chicken Little. Undaunted, he undertakes a privately-funded project to build an escape craft that can only carry several dozen of the best and the brightest to safety. Recalling Hitchcock’s Lifeboat , the film examines the dichotomous conflict of human nature in extreme survival situations, which helps this one rise above the cheese of many other 1950s sci-fi flicks (with the possible exception of a clunky Noah’s Ark allusion). It sports pretty decent special effects for its time; especially depicting a flooded NYC (it was produced by the legendary George Pal).

Double Bill: w/ Deep Impact

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Scored Earth

by digby

One more example of the folly of allowing the deficit hawks to define the parameters of the debate:

On Saturday, the Congressional Budget Office said the proposal to give an independent panel the power to keep Medicare spending in check would only save about $2 billion over 10 years- a drop in the bucket compared to the bill’s $1 trillion price tag.

“In CBO’s judgment, the probability is high that no savings would be realized … but there is also a chance that substantial savings might be realized. Looking beyond the 10-year budget window, CBO expects that this proposal would generate larger but still modest savings on the same probabilistic basis,” CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf wrote in a letter to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Saturday.

I have to blame the Democrats for this. They spent the last 25 years bowing and scraping to the Republicans over balanced budgets like a bunch of 50s era housewives answering to a domineering husband (and then stood by idly as their husbands blew the family savings on gambling and hookers.) They are also to blame for failing to properly explain that the “savings” from health care reform was going to be seen in the system as a whole, not necessarily the government portion of it, which would likely be realized later. It’s complicated, but at the very least they should not have paid obeisance to all these fiscal scolds and deficit hawks the way they did. It’s a little self-defeating when you are proposing a new program that was always going to cost money in the early years. I don’t know how they ever hoped to finesse this.

Having said that, there are reasons to be skeptical of the CBO’s assessment.

The administration is a strong proponent of these reforms, but the challenge lies in pleasing the CBO — which finds savings by following Potter Stewart rule life: “I know it when I see it.” However, since the MedPAC-like proposal is predicated on the President accepting its recommendations and Congress not voting them down, (and MedPAC is only required to not “increase in the aggregate level of net expenditures under the Medicare program,”) the CBO — which rarely defines the criteria of savings — is unlikely to “see” savings.

The Bush administration basically told the CBO to take a hike when it came out with numbers they didn’t like. If this were the area where Obama decided to follow in its footsteps instead of indefinite detention and state secrets, we’d all be better off.

Obviously the deficit is a concern. But it’s a far greater concern to bond traders and other masters of the universe than it is to average citizens. The savings realized over the years by the reforms put in place today, plus higher taxes (which are not, contrary to popular myth, a sign of Armageddon) and lower premiums and out of pocket costs, would allow the US to convert to a system that delivers the kind of health care at the kind of cost that other industrialized nations have. Which is to say a much better system for less money overall.

But Pete Peterson doesn’t want that and he and his friends have created a sacred shibboleth of the term “deficit” which is used to elicit the same kind of fearful pavlovian response as the word “terrorism.” And as with terrorism, all the Republicans have to do is breathe the word and the Democrats start sputtering and running for cover.

The Big Money Boyz (who, contrary to certain cheap shot artists’ little gibes, I have been on to for oh, a few decades now) geared up their deficit talk as the Bush administration came to an end and they are now back to working comfortably in tandem with the conservative movement (which they own outright as opposed to the Democratic Party in which they only hold a controlling interest) to destroy even the slightest movement toward health care reform. The village, like a bunch of squealing little pigs in a puddle of mud are happy to help them by being willfully obtuse about the whole thing.

The sad truth is that the Democratic majority still rests on conservative propaganda and until somebody seriously challenges their ideology, we are going to be battling these fiscal phantoms. As dday elegantly put it the other day, America is worth paying for . Maybe somebody ought to start asking these so-called patriots why they don’t agree with that.

Update: White House responds:

Peter R. Orszag, Director

This morning, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed proposals to shift more decision-making out of politics and toward a body like the Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC) put forward by the Administration. CBO noted that this type of approach could lead to significant long-term savings in federal spending on health care and that the available evidence implies that a substantial share of spending on health care contributes little, if anything, to the overall health of the nation. This supports what President Obama has said all along: we can reduce waste and unnecessary spending without reducing quality of care and benefits.

In part because legislation under consideration already includes substantial savings in Medicare over the next decade, CBO found modest additional medium-term savings from this proposal — $2 billion over 10 years. The point of the proposal, however, was never to generate savings over the next decade. (Indeed, under the Administration’s approach, the IMAC system would not even begin to make recommendations until 2015.) Instead, the goal is to provide a mechanism for improving quality of care for beneficiaries and reducing costs over the long term. In other words, in the terminology of our belt-and-suspenders approach to a fiscally responsible health reform, the IMAC is a game changer not a scoreable offset.

With regard to the long-term impact, CBO suggested that the proposal, with several specific tweaks that would strengthen its operations, could generate significant savings. (The potential modifications included items such as providing mandatory funding for the council, rather than having the council rely on the annual appropriations cycle, and requiring independent verification of the expected reductions in program spending rather than relying only on the Medicare actuaries for such verification, along with other suggestions, such as including an across-the-board reduction in payments as a fallback mechanism if the council did not produce proposals that generated adequate savings.) And if you look back at recent history, one can see why an empowered advisory council would be useful. For example, for the better part of this decade, MedPAC has recommended reducing overpayments to insurance companies for Medicare Advantage plans – to equate those payments with the cost of covering the same beneficiary under traditional Medicare. Yet, nothing happened, costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. We can’t afford that type of inertia.

The bottom line is that it is very rare for CBO to conclude that a specific legislative proposal would generate significant long-term savings so it is noteworthy that, with some modifications, CBO reached such a conclusion with regard to the IMAC concept.

A final note is worth underscoring. As a former CBO director, I can attest that CBO is sometimes accused of a bias toward exaggerating costs and underestimating savings. Unfortunately, parts of today’s analysis from CBO could feed that perception. For example, and without specifying precisely how the various modifications would work, CBO somehow concluded that the council could “eventually achieve annual savings equal to several percent of Medicare spending…[which] would amount to tens of billions of dollars per year after 2019.” Such savings are welcome (and rare!), but it is also the case that (for good reason) CBO has restricted itself to qualitative, not quantitative, analyses of long-term effects from legislative proposals. In providing a quantitative estimate of long-term effects without any analytical basis for doing so, CBO seems to have overstepped.

They can’t ignore these headlines coming from places like Politico and try to just spin it out with verbiage. The Village doesn’t care about the details, they care about Chuck Todd’s “political reality” and they are getting very excited over the prospect of Obama’s Waterloo. The White House is going to have to fight that up front.

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