Month: January 2010

The Simple Answer

by digby

More Krugman:

Those who think that “too big to fail” is the essence of the problem have to explain why Canada, with basically just five banks, has avoided crisis. Those who blame the Fed for keeping interest rates too low too long have to explain why Canada, which basically had the same interest rate experience we did, didn’t have anything like the same problems.

So what’s Canada’s secret? Regulation, regulation, regulation. Much stricter limits on leverage, much stricter limits on unconventional mortgages, and an independent consumer protection agency for borrowers.

Barney Frank’s reform bill would move the United States a long way in Canada’s direction. And that may be the simplest way to explain why it’s a good thing, eh?

In a conversation last evening with some smart friends I idly mused that perhaps the Republicans would figure out a way to “support” some very watered down legislation so they could cop some of that populist cream in the election. But I suppose the question is whether or not the bankers will allow their employees to do that — and what is entailed in the bills. If it’s Canadian style banking regulation, I think I was wrong.  They cannot sign on to regulations. Indeed, I’m not entirely sure they can pass it in the House or get 51 votes in the Senate for that.

It’s too bad if that’s the case because the Democrats really need to place at least some of the blame for this mess on the big money boyz who gambled and lost.  And they need to use government to fix it unless they truly do want  the Republicans to reap the rewards by touting deregulation as the problem. Of course, that assumes they want to retain the majority, which they quite possibly do not. Governing is a pain.

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Ailes And “It”

by digby

The ABC round table got much more interesting today with the addition of Roger Ailes to the roundtable. (I suppose the right could characterize it as their answer to obama’s foray into the Republican Lion’s Den last Friday.)

KRUGMAN: If I can just — you know, what bothers me is not the nasty language. Glenn Beck doesn’t, you know, it’s not — what bothers me is the fact that people are not getting informed, that we are going through major debates on crucial policy issues; the public is not learning about them. And you know, you can say, well, they can read the New York Times, which will tell them what they need to know, but you know, most people don’t. They don’t read it thoroughly. They get — on this health care thing, I’m a little obsessed with it, because it’s a key issue for me. People did not know what was in the plan, and some of that was just poor reporting, some of it was deliberate misinformation. I have here in front of me when President Obama said, you know, why — he said rhetorically, why aren’t we going to do a health care plan like the Europeans have, with a government-run program, and then proceeds to explain whey he’s different. On Fox News, what appeared was a clipped quote, “why don’t we have a European-style health care plan?” Right, deliberate misinformation.

All of that has contributed to a situation where the public…

AILES: Wait a minute, wait a minute…

KRUGMAN: I can show you the clip, and you can…

AILES: The American people are not stupid…

KRUGMAN: No, they’re not stupid. They are uninformed.

AILES: If you say — if (inaudible) words are in the Constitution, if the founding fathers managed — they didn’t need 2,000 pages of lawyers to hide things, then tell, then tell…

KRUGMAN: Oh, come on. Legislation always is long.

AILES: … then tell people it’s an emergency that we get it, but it won’t go into effect for three years. So you don’t have time to read it, you…

KRUGMAN: People, again, this was a plan that is — it’s actually a Republican plan. It’s Mitt Romney’s health care plan. People were led to believe that it was socialism. That’s — and that was deliberate. That wasn’t just poor reporting.

HUFFINGTON: Well, Roger, it’s not a question of picking a fight. And aren’t you concerned about the language that Glenn Beck is using, which is, after all, inciting the American people? There is a lot of suffering out there, as you know, and when he talks about people being slaughtered, about who is going to be the next in the killing spree…

AILES: Well, he was talking about Hitler and Stalin slaughtering people. So I think he was probably accurate. Also, I’m a little….

HUFFINGTON: No, no, he was talking about this administration.

AILES: I don’t — I think he speaks English. I don’t know, but I mean, I don’t misinterpret any of his words. He did say one unfortunate thing, which he apologized for, but that happens in live television. So I don’t think it’s — I think if we start going around as the word police in this business, it will be…

HUFFINGTON: It’s not about the word police. It’s about something deeper. It’s about the fact that there is a tradition as the historian Richard Hofstetter said, in American politics, of the paranoid style. And the paranoid style is dangerous when there is real pain out there. I mean, with…

AILES: I agree with you. I read something on your blog that said I looked like J. Edgar Hoover, I had a face like a fist, and I was essentially a malignant tumor…

HUFFINGTON: Well, that’s…

AILES: And I thought — and then it got nasty after that…

HUFFINGTON: … that was never by anybody that we …

AILES: Then it really went nasty, and I thought, gee, maybe Arianna ought to cut this out, but…

Hofstadter would simply summon his inner Frenchman and say, “et voila.”

Taylor Marsh made a very  smart observation about Walters’ other sexy interview:

Scott Brown doesn’t even have a business card, but people are asking him about 2012. My favorite part of the Walters interview is that Brown has “no regrets” about his nude Cosmo spread.

Brown told Barbara Walters “you have to have a sense of humor about yourself,” and links the centerfold to many of his successes that came later in life. “If I hadn’t done that… I never would have been sitting here with you. It’s all connected,” Brown told Walters.

It’s a reminder of political symbolism that now exists, where resume and policy are puny substitutes for the “it” factor, especially when it meets the perfect moment in time.

The Republicans are especially adept at this kind of politics. They are the ones who turn movie stars into presidents, after all. But in what is probably a very astute reading of the zeitgeist, they have recently been focusing heavily on the sex symbol style: Schwarzenneger, Palin, Carrie Prejean, now Scott Brown. (It’s quite bold of them to go for the male centerfold, I admit, since that makes them feel all funny down there and all, but they can get away with things that Democrats can’t because they don’t have to worry about hypocrisy.)

Liberals usually have a leg up in popular culture, to be sure (except for the torture and violence porn that’s so beloved by Americans of all stripes.) But when it comes to American Idol politics, and even despite the star power of Obama and the first lady, the Republicans are way out ahead. They’ve completely  moved beyond talent, intelligence, skill or experience and are now strictly focused on crazy blowhards and unadulterated sex appeal. It worked for Fox.

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Too Little Too Late

by digby

Here’s an interesting story in today’s NY Times about the teabuggers. It discusses the interlocking relationships among the men an specifically notes the involvement of the Leadership Institute, which will be very familiar to longtime readers of this blog. Evidently, even Morton Blackwell eventually thought their “activism” was a bit much.

This story obviously wasn’t that difficult to unravel. But the press didn’t bother to do it until these guys were arrested on a federal offense. Instead, they flagellated themselves for failing to take the “reporters” as seriously as Fox news took them. Remember this?

ON Sept. 12, an Associated Press article inside The Times reported that the Census Bureau had severed its ties to Acorn, the community organizing group. Robert Groves, the census director, was quoted as saying that Acorn, one of thousands of unpaid organizations promoting the 2010 census, had become “a distraction.”

What the article didn’t say — but what followers of Fox News and conservative commentators already knew — was that a video sting had caught Acorn workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes. The young woman in streetwalker’s clothes and her companion were actually undercover conservative activists with a hidden camera.

It was an intriguing story: employees of a controversial outfit, long criticized by Republicans as corrupt, appearing to engage in outrageous, if not illegal, behavior. An Acorn worker in Baltimore was shown telling the “prostitute” that she could describe herself to tax authorities as an “independent artist” and claim 15-year-old prostitutes, supposedly illegal immigrants, as dependents.

But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

Some editors told me they were not immediately aware of the Acorn videos on Fox, YouTube and a new conservative Web site called BigGovernment.com. When the Senate voted to cut off all federal funds to Acorn, there was not a word in the newspaper, although a report in the Caucus blog that day covered the action. When the New York City Council froze all its funding for Acorn and the Brooklyn district attorney opened a criminal investigation, there was still nothing.

[…]

I thought politics was emphasized too much, at the expense of questions about an organization whose employees in city after city participated in outlandish conversations about illegal and immoral activities. (Acorn suggested some videos were doctored but fired or suspended many of the employees.)

[…]

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.

Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, said he has studied journalists for years, and though they are more liberal than the general population, he believes they are motivated by the desire to get good stories, not to help one particular side. Conservatives who believe The Times isn’t critical of Democrats forget that the paper broke damaging stories about the personal finances of Representative Charles Rangel and the hiring of prostitutes by Eliot Spitzer.

But Rosenstiel said The Times has a particular problem with conservatives, especially after its article last year suggesting that John McCain had an extramarital affair. And Republicans earlier this year charged that the paper killed a story about Acorn that would have been a “game changer” in the presidential election — a claim I found to be false.

“If you know you are a target, it requires extra vigilance,” Rosenstiel said. “Even the suspicion of a bias is a problem all by itself.”

A little extra vigilance might have been useful in the follow-up to the ACORN “revelations,” in which it was revealed that the tapes had been doctored. (It turns out that the O’Keefe gang had done a similar “expose” on Planned Parenthood, in which that organization had been forced to apologize to end the phony controversy, a fact which was also taken as an admission of guilt by the press.)Had they done that rather than fold under criticism by conservatives, they would known that all of this was done by acolytes of the Leadership Institute, run by the original dirty trickster, Morton Blackwell.

Instead, they promised to be more vigilant about following Fox News and talk radio’s lead so they wouldn’t miss out on these important “scoops” in the future. No wonder newspapers are dying.

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Mrs Borat

by digby

I just realized what the problem is. She speaks as if English is her second language:

All the extra words, many of which are only barely applicable, combined with her truly bizarre sing-song cadence really does sound like a foreign language. Foreign planet that is.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

CSI: Vaslui

By Dennis Hartley

Somebody’s watching me: Police, Adjective

“What do you think; would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky

I think most people would agree that Bullittand The French Connectionqualify as two of the most seminal and recognizable examples of the “cop thriller”. Although each film has garnered a reputation primarily based upon its respective Big Chase Scene, what makes them most fascinating to me is the attention to minutia in the more static (some might say “boring”) parts of the narrative. In Bullitt, it’s a scene where Steve McQueen’s title character comes home after a shift. He walks into a corner grocery and perfunctorily scoops up about a week’s worth of TV dinners, without discerning their contents, then retires to his modest apartment to basically zone out. It’s a protracted sequence, virtually wordless, that may at first glance appear superfluous, but speaks volumes about the character. A likeminded scene in The French Connection depicts police detective Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) shivering outside in the cold for hours, wolfing street vendor food and drinking bad coffee out of a Styrofoam cup as he stakes out his quarry (Fernando Rey), who is enjoying a leisurely gourmet meal in an upscale restaurant. Both films demonstrate how unglamorous and mundane police work actually is in practice. It’s an underlying reality that most filmmakers working within the genre these days generally choose to overlook; more often than not, they opt to just “cut to the chase”, as it were.

“Unglamorous and mundane” could be a good descriptive for Police, Adjective, the latest film from Romanian writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest). In fact, this is the type of film that requires any viewer weaned on typical Hollywood grist to first unlearn what they have previously learned about crime dramas. There are no foot chases, car chases, shootouts, takedowns or perp walks. There are no fast cuts or pulse-pounding musical cues rolled out to telegraph “Dramatic Tension Ahead!” In short, the viewer is forced to (gulp!) pay attention, to observe, to surveil…to “stake out” the characters and events, if you will. The devil is in the details (you know-like real detective work.) And your reward? Well, you may not solve a major crime, but you could reach a certain state of enlightenment via a 15-minute climax involving a Dostoevskian discourse on the dialectics of law, morality and conscience (What?! You mean nothing blows up?!).

You do get some ample time to, um, observe, especially since you are watching a plainclothes cop named Cristi (Dragos Bucur) as he surveils a teenage suspect who may or may not be a low-level pot dealer…pretty much in real time for the first half of the film. Then, as if we haven’t received an adequate taste of Cristi’s job-related tedium, Porumboiu appends each sequence with a static, several-minute long close-up of the officer’s handwritten report, annotating every detail of what we have just seen. It’s almost as if we’re reading the shooting script; which made me wonder if the director was impishly conveying an allusion to the relative tedium of the filmmaking process as well (if you’re a fidgety viewer with a short attention span- consider yourself duly warned). Based on my description so far, you may be saying to yourself “This movie sounds like a waste of time.” Funny thing is, that is exactly what Cristi is thinking about his stakeout. He is becoming increasingly chagrined that his boss (Vlad Ivonov, an actor I took special note of in my review of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) insists that he keeps digging until he finds cause to set up a sting, because he intuits that it’s merely a case of a few kids just “being kids”-hanging out and getting high together, as opposed to a major drug operation. Besides, Cristi feels in his heart of hearts that his country is on the verge of joining other European nations in lightening up the penalties for personal pot use (yes-the innate stupidity of most pot laws appears to be universal, and requires no translation).

Cristi’s boss, however, sees this subjective attitude toward his assignment as an opportunity to teach the young officer an object lesson about the meaning of “duty”; literally starting with the etymology of the word “police” (hence the film’s unusual title). I know that sounds as dull as dish water, and it’s really difficult to convey exactly what it is that makes this film work so well; but if you stick with it, you will find yourself entertained, despite the challenging pacing. It may sound like it has the makings of a sober, introspective drama, but there is actually a great deal of comedy throughout. It’s not “ha-ha” funny, but extremely wry and deadpan funny (think Jim Jarmusch). One scene in particular, in which Cristi and his school teacher wife (Irina Saulescu) spiritedly banter about the lyrics of a pop song (literal vs. metaphorical context) is a real gem. I thought the film was also a fascinating glimpse at a post-E.U. Romania, and the unenviable task of redefining “policing” in a formerly oppressive police state still gingerly feeling its way as a democracy. Besides-when is the last time you saw a cop thriller wherein the most formidable weapon brandished was…a Romanian dictionary?

Note: The film is available on PPV in some markets…which gives you the option of, y’know…zipping through those surveillance scenes (I mean, erm, that’s what I’ve heard).

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Reach Out

by digby

It would appear people are extremely happy that Obama hit it out of the park yesterday in his appearance at the Republican retreat yesterday, so I’m in a minority of those who think it wasn’t all that. It’s not that I don’t think he performed well. He always performs well. And he’s smart as can be, so I expect him to be able to parry lugubrious misrepresentations from idiots without any trouble at all. We liberals love that stuff.

Certainly, it is a welcome thing if he was able to please his supporters because they have been sorely disappointed lately and they deserved something to cheer about so I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade. Morale is important and if he made people feel charged up that’s all to the good.

However, I remain concerned that the message is not as clear to the rest of the country as his supporters think it was. (“Don’t mess with Obama.”) I watched Clinton do this type of thing over and over again and it didn’t change the dynamic at all. He was personally successful, but liberal ideology was degraded every time he conceded something like “I think we raised taxes too much” or “the era of big government is over.” People loved his ability to out talk his accusers (in his case it was a real high wire act) but the agenda suffered greatly from his ceaseless efforts to cajole a psychotically hostile opposition into working with him. It resulted in passage of center right policies and his own impeachment. But then he didn’t have a huge majority in congress either.

I suspect that average voters don’t see Obama being persecuted as Clinton was, or subject to non-stop calumny by a rabid Republican majority. The Republicans aren’t doing anything (and that’s the problem.) I think people see Obama conceding that he hasn’t been bipartisan enough and that he intends to keep trying. And that will never be a winner for our side because all the Republicans have to do is continue to obstruct to prove him a failure.

The Washington Post characterized the meeting in typical Goldilocks fashion:

Rarely has there been such an encounter between a president and the opposition party and certainly never on national television. It was the antithesis of the kind of snarling exchanges that often pass for political dialogue, whether between strategists in the two parties, candidates in the heat of a campaign or on the worst of cable television.

Nothing is likely to change overnight. “The main benefit is that greater interaction builds a measure of trust between the president and congressional Republicans,” said John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute. “Trust opens up possibilities for collaboration on some future issue with a more bipartisan character. It also builds trust, which might come in handy if there is a different future political dynamic, like narrower Democratic majorities after the midterm election, or even possibly GOP control of one house.”

In the short run, there was plenty of scorekeeping by partisans — and reason for both sides to feel good about what happened at the House GOP retreat in Baltimore.

For Obama, who is trying to reestablish his standing with the American people after a difficult first year in office, it was the opportunity to rebut his opponents’ criticisms while prodding them to abandon their rigid opposition to his major initiatives and begin to cooperate. White House officials were ecstatic with his performance.

For House Republicans, it meant having the president acknowledge on national television that they have ideas of their own. The office of House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) issued a release Saturday morning that said, in part, “The president himself helped put to rest once and for all baseless claims by members of his own administration that Republicans are the ‘party of no.’ “

Ultimately, the event may have been most beneficial for Obama, who badly needs a boost. He has emerged as the most polarizing first-year president in history. In that year, unemployment hit 10 percent, his health-care initiative failed to pass the Congress, his poll numbers eroded, independents deserted the Democrats in major statewide elections and some members of his party hit the panic button after Republican Scott Brown won the special Senate election in Massachusetts.

On Friday, however, Obama reminded his opponents of the singular power of the presidency, delivering a performance that easily eclipsed his State of the Union address. He was knowledgeable about GOP counterproposals. He was robust in his rebuttals without being peevish. He may not have won over his conservative critics, who snickered when he said he was not an ideologue, but he was able, repeatedly, to sound the call for bipartisanship and to challenge the opposition to help lower temperatures.

The Post saw the meeting as a welcome sign that the president was a powerful politician bent on using the bully pulpit to force bipartisanship. Unfortunately, they are not sure that Democrats have gotten their marching orders:

Obama’s performance cheered Democrats primarily because they believe he bested the Republicans, not because he advanced the cause of bipartisanship.

Given that, further efforts to reach across the aisle may prove elusive. Asked what other confidence building measures might be offered, a White House official demurred. “I don’t know the answer to that off the top of my head,” he said. “One of the most important things is to continue the dialogue. It’s hard to go beyond dialogue if you can’t even have dialogue.”

That will be the next test for Obama and congressional leaders in both parties.

If the dialog is the message then perhaps the Post is right — he’s using the bully pulpit to promote his bipartisan intentions. But given that there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that the Republicans would behave in a bipartisan manner even if Obama agreed to completely eliminate the capital gains tax, I’m not sure validating their good faith gets us anywhere.

If all this only means that Democrats will continue to move further right in order to reach across the aisle then I don’t suppose it hurts anything — they are already stretching themselves into pretzels to get there. But if the Republicans continue to successfully obstruct and then criticize Obama for failing to achieve his promise of bipartisanship, I think it exacerbates the problems we already have coming up in November. I suppose the American people may see through their ruse, but I think it might be just a little bit too complicated: they just see Obama unable to achieve bipartisan agreement with people he repeatedly portrays as rational actors. Therefore, he is weak and the Democratic agenda isn’t mainstream.

I’m happy to be wrong about this and hope fervently that this interaction really did create a whole new dynamic in Washington. At the very least, Obama got to answer his knuckle headed critics so there is some satisfaction in that. But my intuition tells me that it won’t change anything and could make things worse in the long run if Obama further backs himself into the bipartisan corner.

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What Happened?

by digby

Brian Beutler has compiled a list of probable reasons why health care reform is now on life support. It’s probably a little bit of all of them, but if I had to pick one thing it would be allowing Max Baucus to drag the damn thing out so long that everyone in the country was so appalled by the political process they couldn’t stand even thinking about it anymore. It’s a real mistake to squander public opinion. Once that’s gone, Democrats always run for the hills.

But what the hell is it about Democrats that compels them to prematurely celebrate and then take a vacation all the time? it’s proven to be a mistake over and over again.

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Just As Bad

by digby

Tony Blair proves that you don’t have to sound like a dribbling moron to be just as idiotic as George W. Bush.

* “This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It’s a decision. I had to take the decision. I believed, and in the end the Cabinet believed – so did Parliament incidentally – that we were right not to run that risk.”

* “The decision I took – and frankly would take again – was if there was any possibility that he could develop weapons of mass destruction we should stop him. That was my view then and that is my view now.”

* “This is a profoundly wicked, I would say almost psychopathic, man [Saddam Hussein]. We were obviously worried that after him his two sons seemed to be as bad, if not worse.”

* “The point about those acts in New York is that, had they been able to kill more people than the 3,000, they would have. My view was you can’t take risks with this issue.”

* “Supposing we had backed off this military action, supposing we had left Saddam and his sons who were going to follow him in charge of Iraq – he had used chemical weapons, caused the death of over a million people.”

* On his claim in the dossier that Iraq possessed WMD: “What I said in the foreword was that I believed I was beyond doubt. I did believe it and I did believe that it was beyond doubt.”

He went on to say “I have learned absolutely nothing and have no regrets whatsoever about being completely wrong about everything.”

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Nowhere To Say It

by digby

John at Crooks and Liars raises an interesting question about the probable results of the Citizens United case: what happens when all the expensive free speech is bought and there’s none left for the rest of us?

I’ve had some experience with trying to buy ad space during elections, and as the days creep closer to one, the ad space becomes more expensive, for the most part. At least in my experience.

My question is what happens when Big Corp decides to buy up the last month, or two or three, of available ad space on all major media outlets for a particular election? That would have an incredible impact on either an election or like we have in California, a proposition. We saw what happened when the Mormons bought up a ton of air time in California to oppose Prop. 8.

I suppose the standard answer to that will be that there are a lot of cable networks out there, and there’s the internet, so there’s nothing to worry about, but I think it really does set up a problem. In our virtual town square, where every person, community group and corporation has the same right to speak, there are varying degrees of space and time in which to do it. If the corporations are allowed to buy up all the rows in the front and all the time slots before the vote is taken, it’s pretty clear that the right to exercise free speech is being restricted. It seems to me that the right of free speech, particularly political speech, must contain the right to have your words heard as much as the right to speak them, or it doesn’t add up to much.

Anyway, on practical terms, the fact is that TV ads are very expensive and there are only so many of them to go around. In states like California they are virtually the only way people hear about elections since there is no political press and no coverage on the news. It’s always been a problem and is going to get worse with the ruling, as we get closer to the election and all the slots get bought out ahead of time. It’s not impossible to see a scenario in which wealthy interests could simply buy up all the TV time in advance and have an election in which most people only hear one side of the story.

I don’t have an answer for what to do about it except to advocate the standard progressive solution — publicly financed campaigns. It seems to be more remote than ever but we should keep trying.

Oh, and let’s try to impeach Roberts and Alito too. Just for fun.

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Educational Programs

by digby

My Angry Penis

MY PENIS IS ANGRY!!!!!!! You want to know what happened to my penis? Joan happened to my penis! There I was, sleeping peacefully when Joan stormed in and dragged me out for “an educational program.” I thought was going to see Mr. Rogers! But nooooooo! It turned out to be the “Whine-gina Monologues!”

Yeah, that’s weird and distasteful all right. Go read Emptywheel and Lindsay to find out just how weird and distasteful it really is.

Each new generation of wingnuts proves anew that the heart of their philosophy is a primal sexual insecurity.

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