Watching the very, very slooow Rand Paul lecture Paul Krugman about economics is too much for me on a hot Sunday morning. “Roads don’t create business success” Oy vey …
And Cokie, Cokie … Has there ever been a bigger font of conventional wisdom, much of it pressed into the conversation as a non-sequitor?
But this made it worth sitting through:
BOOKER: I want to attack this idea, the certainty for small businesses. This is a president who has cut taxes on small businesses 18 different times. He’s done enough to target incentives to small businesses, everything, to hire our men and women coming home in addition to the fact to giving them breaks for investment. So I disagree with that on small business. But I think it’s more important, and I really want to call the question that Paul Ryan left wide open, is, how can you call for $5 trillion worth of tax cuts, give us no specifics? This is Paul Ryan who used to be a man of substance, who put up plans, I may disagree with some of them, but with great levels of specificity. Now they’ve said they’re going to cut $5 trillion in taxes, increase spending in the military, and somehow not dig us into a deeper deficit budget… deficit.
ROBERTS: This is Bill Clinton and arithmetic. That was a good one.
KRUGMAN: I’m going to disagree, respectfully, he was never a man of substance. This is who he always was. That was always an illusion.
Scahill is very likely to be right, I think. In Obama’s next term we’ll be moving to what he dubbed a Clintonian “cruise missile liberalism” where there will be few to no big deployments but an increase in these precision air wars in God knows how many countries.
This isn’t being discussed in the campaign of course. But if history were to repeat itself we’d see the Republicans become downright dovish in response to such a policy. Not out of any real dovishness, of course. They’re naturally bloodthirsty. They take the stance for partisan advantage and a preference for traditional warfare.
Scahill points out that the Republican convention erupted in cheers when Clint Eastwood said that we should get out of Afghanistan immediately and I think that’s mostly a reflexive opposition to anything Obama does. But it’s also a sign that they could be going back to their stance under Clinton. That will present some very interesting short term tactical possibilities for the anti-war left.
There’s been a great deal of kvetching–or morbid celebrating, depending on one’s side of American political aisle–about the supposedly dramatic impact that jobs and unemployment will have on the election. Pundits across the spectrum are convinced that the entire election will hinge on the economic numbers and their revisions for the remaining months of the campaign.
But belief in that theory requires belief in two things: 1) that economic tallies that were basically irrelevant in shifting presidential poll numbers through the rest of this year will suddenly become relevant now, despite an extremely static and seemingly immobile electorate so far; and 2) that both the Obama and Romney campaigns and their allies are filled at the top levels with political incompetents who can’t take the pulse of the American people.
Let’s take a brief look at the ads the Republicans are running. The first one ends with:
“He tried. You tried. It’s OK to make a change.” That’s interesting. The second is stranger:
“Tell us why you’re breaking up with President Obama.”
More tellingly, the entire RNC Convention was designed almost as a dating profile for Mitt Romney, extolling his supposed virtues as a human being, a family man, a responsible businessperson, and so on. It wasn’t so much a political convention as a first date introduction.
And what of President Obama? A careful listener can hear the same message, but in reverse:
So you see, the election four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you. My fellow citizens — you were the change…
If you turn away now — if you turn away now, if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible, well, change will not happen. If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void, the lobbyists and special interests, the people with the $10 million checks who are trying to buy this election and those who are trying to make it harder for you to vote, Washington politicians who want to decide who you can marry or control health care choices that women should be making for themselves. (Cheers, applause.) Only you can make sure that doesn’t happen. Only you have the power to move us forward.
You know, I recognize that times have changed since I first spoke to this convention. Times have changed, and so have I. I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the president.
That isn’t so much the speech of a man seeking election to higher office as the speech of a man asking the American people to focus not on him, so much as on their relationship and the future that they committed to, if only they will persevere in the relationship.
Trained focus group moderators have enough experience taking answers in focus groups and crafting nuanced messaging conclusions from them that it’s not difficult for us to watch advertisements and work backward from them to guess what respondents had said in the research environment.
In this case it barely takes training. It’s quite clear that both campaigns understand that this election isn’t being driven by facts, figures or economic data. The American people understand that the economy is doing poorly for most working people. Another set of poor numbers won’t change that any more than a set of good numbers will.
Especially for persuadable voters in swing states, both campaigns know that this is a purely emotional moment for voters. Voters like the President on a personal level more than they like the job he’s doing. They understand that the bad economy is much more George Bush’s fault than Obama’s. Voters feel like they made a commitment to the President to see things through to recovery. They’re irritated by the slow pace of progress and change, but feel guilty for thinking of throwing away the commitment they’ve made. And they wonder if the other suitor is worth leaving Obama for, and the heartbreak that would entail.
The Romney campaign understands this: it cannot hit the President too hard, or voters who like Obama personally and still feel this “relationship” with him will themselves be insulted. That’s why the campaign itself and Karl Rove are softpedaling their attacks. But they can’t control their surrogates and the angry hysteria of their conservative media empire and its rabid base. That in turn is damaging Mitt Romney’s chances of wooing persuadable voters. More than that, Mitt Romney’s message of “you’re on your own” isn’t exactly a warm, fuzzy or likeable start for a man attempting to win the heart of a person in a teetering but committed relationship. It’s a trap from which Romney and his team have a difficult time escaping, and it shows.
The Obama campaign, meanwhile, knows that to preserve the President’s station requires reminding the American people of the commitment they have made not just to him but to one another. It’s a message that ties in naturally with progressive economic and social values, and it’s a message that unites and binds voters against the predation of the other side’s heartless Lotharios.
None of this has much at all to do with specific policies or tidbits on the news.
All elections are driven more by emotion than by reason. They are almost always about values, likeability and relationships. This one just happens to be very personal. On Facebook it might be called “complicated.” But that complexity has little to do with to do with facts and figures.
Though the Christian view of the world has paled for many people, the symbolic treasure-rooms of the East are still full of marvels that can nourish for a long time to come the passion for show and new clothes. What is more, these images — be they Christian or Buddhist or what you will — are lovely, mysterious, and richly intuitive.-Carl Jung
In 1982, an innovative, genre-defying film called Koyaanisqatsi quietly made its way around the art house circuit. The piece (directed by Godfrey Reggio, photographed by Ron Fricke and scored by Philip Glass) was generally received as a transcendent experience by admirers and dismissed as New Age hokum by detractors. The title is taken from the ancient Hopi language, and describes a state of “life out of balance”. There are likely as many interpretations of what it’s “about” as there are people who have viewed it; if I had to make a generalization, I’d say it’s about technology vs. nature. Reggio followed up in 1988 with Powaqqatsi (a more political entry illustrating Third/First World disparity) and the slick yet curiously uninvolving Naqoyqatsi in 2002.
Cinematographer Fricke has since become a director in his own right; most notably with his 1985 IMAX short Chronos , and the 1992 theatrical length feature Baraka. The latter film is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Koyannisqatsi; while it shares some themes and (obviously) a very similar visual aesthetic, Baraka stands on its own. The title is a Sufi term that roughly translates to “a blessing”, and indeed, this globe-trotting cultural/anthropological journey was more pan-spiritual in nature than Reggio’s film; proving that Fricke had his own unique vision. Taken as a whole, all of the aforementioned films form a subgenre I have dubbed the “Jungian travelogue”; a narrative-free collage of mesmerizing and thought-provoking imagery (natural and man-made) that jacks the viewer directly into humankind’s collective unconscious (or…not).
For those familiar with the director’s oeuvre, Fricke’s latest film, Samsara (currently in limited release) may initially unfold like a “greatest hits” collection of somewhat familiar imagery. Languidly paced scenes of Buddhist rituals? Check. Joshua trees silhouetted against a time-lapsed night sky? Check. Hyper-accelerated time-lapse sequences mirroring the dizzying pace of a mindless consumerist society going nowhere fast? Check. And so on. The title is a Sanskrit term signifying “the ever turning wheel of life”. And appropriately, Fricke plays “pick up stix” with the spokes (in a manner of speaking), leaving it up to each individual viewer to reinvent their own wheel, as it were. In other words, if you just “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream” (as a great English poet advised) there is as much here for a thinking person to ponder as there is to savor.
Or, if you prefer to enjoy it on aesthetic terms, I think the film (much like its predecessors) works just fine as pure cinema; a visual tone poem that intoxicates all the senses. Be forewarned, however, that it isn’t all soothing images (animal lovers in particular should be advised that there are scenes filmed in a Chinese poultry processing plant that are potentially upsetting). If you have an opportunity to catch it on the big screen, I would highly recommend you do so; this is one of the most beautiful looking films of 2012. Interestingly, it was shot in 70mm, but the 65mm negative was scanned to DCP, enabling exhibitors to project it in a hi-res 4k format. The results are quite stunning.
And again, don’t feel pressured to “connect the dots”, because there will not be a pop quiz afterwards. At the end of the day, whether you interpret the film as a deep treatise on the cyclic nature of the Omniverse, or see it merely as an assemblage of pretty pictures, doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. I think the director drops us a clue early on in the film, as we observe a group of Buddhist monks painstakingly creating a sand mandala (it must take days to complete). At the very end of the film, we revisit the artists, who now sit in silent contemplation of their lovely creation. This (literal) Moment of Zen turns out to be the preface to the monks’ next project-the ritualistic de-construction of the painting (which I assume must take an equal amount of time). And yes, it is a very simple metaphor for the transitory nature of beauty, life, the universe and everything. But, as they say, there’s beauty in simplicity. Take the wheel, for example…
Ed Kilgore gets to something I had only vaguely understood about this election. Both sides are making essentially populist appeals: the Republicans are blaming the all-powerful government for our woes and the Democrats are blaming the rapacious 1%. Kilgore discusses the strategic thinking of both sides in depth, which basically comes down to appealing to white working class voters.
But I think this is even more interesting:
Beyond these fairly obvious if sometimes underestimated aspects of the general election campaign, there’s something about the competing appeals to the middle class that’s more of a simple identity test: it gets to competing understandings of who created the economic mess in the first place.
By that I don’t just mean “Barack Obama” or “George W. Bush,” but the people they are thought to represent. Because it is axiomatic to progressives that the housing and financial crises and the Great Recession that ensued were mainly the product of an underregulated Wall Street drunk on debt and greed, they sometimes fail to understand or remember that to most of the conservative movement, it’s equally axiomatic that those people abetted by socialist politicians and government-dependent, rent-seeking bankers were at fault.
This was, lest we forget, the master narrative at the heart of the Tea Party Movement from the very beginning (as dramatized by its original cri de couer, the Santelli Rant): the Alinsky Coalition of irresponsible poor and minority folk, given official advantages by the Community Reinvestment Act and egged on by ACORN and Freddie/Fannie, created a housing bubble that predictably burst and then demanded “relief” in the form of government bailouts and handouts coming right out of the pockets of virtuous white folk (many older people with paid-off mortgages) who saw their wealth dissipating, their tax liabilities (it’s a myth, but many believe it fiercely) going up, and their children and grandchildren losing opportunity. The fact that many serious conservatives are willing to apportion part of the blame to George W. Bush and/or to the banks saved by TARP shouldn’t obscure the fact that the main blame is fixed on those people and their political representatives. Indeed, Bush and the banks are objects of right-wing fury precisely because they cooperated with the poor/minority/socialist shakedown game, or at least did little to fight it.
So the “kick down” efforts of the GOP are not just based on mischaracterizations of Obama’s record as part of the obsessive drive to make the election a “referendum” on the last four years, but also on the powerful beliefs of conservative activists about the period prior to 2009. Because these beliefs are not that widely shared beyond Tea Folk circles, Republicans are vulnerable to the very counter-argument Democrats are seeking to make: we know wealthy predators like Romney and the people financing his campaign are to be feared and avoided because they got us into this mess in the first place. And so the GOP appeal to “kick-down” class resentment has had to get cruder and more racial as the campaign has proceeded, with Obamacare and “gutting welfare reform” presented as a new threat to white middle-class families, even as they represent continuations of the assault on America building for years to the “base.” That’s one reason GOP efforts to half-heartedly suggest they think Obama is feckless rather than evil are not very convincing: to big elements of “the base,” the terrible things he’s done since taking office are exactly what they expected, and will be read into everything he says and does whether or not it makes sense to the non-initiated.
I think he’s right. There are a lot of people who may want to believe that the economic crisis wasn’t caused by those nice rich bankers in New York but rather those dangerous you-know-whats buying houses and then getting on welfare. But there aren’t enough of them. Not even in America.
The Republicans made a mistake with their “job creators” nonsense. Yes, it’s a way to excuse their throwback policies so maybe they had no choice. But in an epic economic downturn only the stupidest people would believe that rich people are the victims. If Obama weren’t the first black president, they wouldn’t even be in contention with that ridiculous argument.
On the surface, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan was just the kind of dynamic new priest that any Roman Catholic bishop would have been happy to put in a parish. He rode a motorcycle, organized summer mission trips to Guatemala and joined Bishop Robert W. Finn and dozens of students on a bus trek to Washington for the “March for Life,” a big annual anti-abortion rally.
But in December 2010, Bishop Finn got some disturbing news: Father Ratigan had just tried to commit suicide by running his motorcycle in a closed garage. The day before, a computer technician had discovered sexually explicit photographs of young girls on Father Ratigan’s laptop, including one of a toddler with her diaper pulled away to expose her genitals.
The decisions that Bishop Finn and his second-in-command in the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Msgr. Robert Murphy, made about Father Ratigan over the next five months ultimately led to the conviction of the bishop in circuit court on Thursday on one misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child abuse. It was the first time a Catholic bishop in the United States had been held accountable in criminal court in the nearly three decades since the priest sexual abuse scandals first came to light.
Look at those three paragraphs. The depraved irony of some pedophile organizing a student “march for life” is too much to bear. In the next paragraph we find out that the priest was molesting babies, which makes his anti-abortion stance even more depraved. And then finally we find out that the church authority covered it up, which is even more depraved.
I just don’t know what to say about this anymore. Whenever I see the Catholic Church hierarchy strong arming the government and issuing moral edicts, I just want to scream.
President Barack Obama can beat rival Mitt Romney as a television draw, but can’t eclipse his old self.
The Nielsen company said 35.7 million people watched the final night of the Democratic convention on Thursday between 10 and 11 p.m. Eastern time. That’s when the president delivered his nomination acceptance speech.
Last week, Mitt Romney had 30.3 million viewers for his speech at the GOP convention, with an assist from Clint Eastwood.
I guess none of that matters if the bully pulpit and soapbox are irrelevant to policy and elections. But something tells me the people who say that are wrong.
If you don’t lay claim to the constitution, they will:
Last week, the Republican Party released a party platform which treats the Constitution as if it were a manifesto composed by Paul Ryan himself. The GOP platform would declare Medicaid unconstitutional. It inflates the Second Amendment into a license to obtain weapons of mass murder. It lavishes love on Citizens United, hates on Roe v. Wade, and tells gay Americans they can forget about that whole “equal protection of the laws” thing. Oh, and just in case there are any judges out there who can tell the difference between the Constitution and a Tea Party pamphlet, the GOP platform floats impeachment as the solution. Altogether, the GOP platform devotes six pages to its abomination of the Constitution.
The Democratic platform, by contrast, mentions the Constitution by name just five times — once to endorse a constitutional amendment permitting campaign finance reform, twice to tout the party’s support of faith-based initiatives, once to promise judicial appointees who show “faithfulness to our law and our Constitution,” and once to state that our homeland security policy “must always be in line with our Constitution.”
Where the GOP platform lays out a comprehensive rewrite of America’s most important document, casting aside the founders’ vision for a meaner society in which powerful interest groups can flourish, the Democratic platform barely mentions the document at all — and when it does it normally only does so in passing.
That’s not good. I don’t much care if they failed to drop God’s name all over the place since that’s really not appropriate for civic life, but like it or not, the constitution is our secular “sacred” text and if the Democrats don’t tie their values and their principles to it, the other side will. And since they’ve already got the Bible and Atlas Shrugged they’ll hit the trifecta.
It’s nice that we have “This Land is Your Land” and George Clooney. But we should at least grab the Bill of Rights. After all, liberals tend to want to protect all it, not just the 2nd Amendment.
