Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Toddlers, Tiaras and Tea Partiers

by digby

I think this kid provides a real insight into conservatism: they are emotionally and intellectually stunted. This kid was smarter than most, so he was probably a little ahead of the curve. I would suppose that the usual conservative mental age is around 15:

Four years ago, at the age of 13, I gave a speech at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference). To be honest, I had no idea how big a deal it was to make a two-minute appearance on a B-list panel. But the speech blew up, and I became the child star of the right wing — like the conservative Macauley Culkin, except I’ve never had a drug problem or dated Mila Kunis, unfortunately.

My involvement at such a young age happened for manifold reasons: I always enjoyed writing (I had gotten my first paid writing gig when I was 9), I enjoyed politics (or at least the theory of politics), and I grew up in Georgia, where conservative ideologues dominated the radio and the populace. Mix those things with the naïveté of a kid and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a fresh, right-wing pundit. My star role worked out well for a while. I didn’t have to question any of the talking points I’d made in my speech, and I got to drone on and on about them at numerous Tea Parties and other conservative gatherings. I felt justified in my beliefs if for no other reason than no one actually told me I was wrong. Instead, men like Bill Bennett and Newt Gingrich hailed me as the voice for my generation and a hope for America.

But then, earlier this week, Politico released an interview in which I announced I wasn’t a conservative anymore — and the proverbial crap hit the fan. Since then, I have been treated by the political right with all the maturity of schoolyard bullies. The Daily Caller, for instance, wrote three articles about my shift, topping it off with an opinion piece in which they stated that I deserved criticism because I wear “thick-rimmed glasses” and I like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Why don’t they just call me “four-eyes”? These are not adults leveling serious criticism; these are scorned right-wingers showing all the maturity of a little boy. No wonder I fit in so well when I was 13…

Smart kid.

He’s currently in the mode of “a pox on both their houses” and perhaps he’ll stay that way. If I had just been through his experience I’d think that too. But at some point this smart kid is going to decide that some political things really do matter to him and he’ll look around and try to figure out the best way to make or preserve those things. And, like most of us, he’ll decide what political tools are available to achieve that goal. Without knowing how that will go, I think it’s fair to assume that tool will not be the Republican Party.

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It’s not personal, it’s strictly business

by digby

Yesterday I linked to a post by Jonathan Schwartz featuring a loony quote from a misanthropic billionaire and which fatured a quote from David Frum pointing out that one of the reasons billionaires are loony is because they watch Fox News too.

Not Entirely A Game For Suckers, But Quickly Getting There.

tristero

Organic. Big Food corporate consolidation, significant chemical processing, genetic engineering, and two square feet of living space per chicken. Sheesh!

Accountability is the best food for the confidence fairy

by David Atkins

The New York Times has yet another story about Iceland’s remarkable recovery in the wake of bailing out their people instead of their banks’ foreign creditors. We’ve heard this story in many ways and highlighted Iceland’s positive example of refusal to enact austerity before, but one of the most important features is also this:

Some Icelanders say they have been soothed, too, by the country’s bold decision to initiate an extensive criminal investigation into the financial debacle. Many members of the old banking elite have been identified as possible suspects, and some of their cases are beginning to come to trial; several people were convicted of financial crimes last month.

People in Reykjavik say that while things are hardly perfect, they are certainly better.

Chris Hayes’ book Twilight of the Elites shines a spotlight on the crisis of confidence in America’s major institutions. One of the many reasons that there has been this loss of confidence is the sense that the guilty are never truly punished; instead, the worst actors seem to fail upward in an endless stream of promotions, bailouts and golden parachutes.

People will regain more confidence in the economy itself when the economy’s bad actors are finally held accountable. As the JP Morgan and LIBOR scandals demonstrate, the sorts of regulatory and cultural changes that would need to take place in the financial sector have not even begun to be implemented. Criminal recklessness is still the name of the game, and will remain so until major bad actors are held to account and major regulation put in place.

Austerity won’t feed the confidence fairy. But accountability just might do the trick.

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Saturday Night at the Movies

Note: By coincidence, I happened to see the movie Dennis is reviewing this week as well and since I had such a different take I decided to write a short review of my own so that you can see the other side of the coin. It’s at the bottom of the post — digby

The story of O: Savages

By Dennis Hartley

“Just because I’m telling you this story,” cautions the narrator in the opening scene of Oliver Stone’s Savages, “…doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end of it.” While this may conjure up visions of William Holden floating face down in Gloria Swanson’s swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard, this isn’t Hollywood hack Joe Gillis’ voice we’re listening to; rather it’s a young woman named “O” (Blake Lively). Blonde, Laguna Beach tanned, and, erm, quite “fit”, O could have materialized directly from Brian Wilson’s libido. However, hers is not a happy story of sun and surf…it’s a darker tale about guns and turf.

No stranger to dark tales about guns and turf, Stone takes the ball that novelist Don Winslow tossed him with his 2010 pot trade noir, and not only runs with it, but ratchets it up six ways from any given Sunday; transforming it into Scarface 2.0 for Millennials, with a touch of Jules and Jim. Indeed, it’s only five minutes before he has someone revving up a chainsaw (and not to cut wood). The power tools star in an exclusive (and gruesome) webcast targeting O’s two lovers, Ben (Aaron Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch). Ben and Chon are 20-something BFFs who run a thriving business selling weed touted “the best cannabis in the world.” It seems a Tijuana drug cartel, led by a ruthless widow (and prolific widow-maker) named Elena (a scenery-chewing Salma Hayek), wants a piece of their action. Her message is very clear: Use your head, or lose your head.

That sounds like a plan to Ben. A Berkeley alum with a business degree, he’s the brains; idealistic, California mellow, never fired a shot in anger, we can work this out, etc. His bud Chon, an ex-Navy SEAL, is the brawn. Fuck these guys, I’ve already got one in the chamber, let’s rock’n’roll, etc. He is also an Afghanistan war vet, with a few issues. As O helpfully clarifies in the voiceover, she “…has orgasms,” (when Chon makes love to her) whilst he “…has wargasms.” (And they said Sniglets were dead). Chon wants to call their bluff. After a meeting with Elena’s negotiator (Demian Bichir) ends in a stalemate, she sends in her enforcer, Lado (Benicio Del Toro) to use more “persuasive” methods. Ben and Chon do some brainstorming and continue to play for time, until Lado and his henchmen take O as a hostage. From that point, our intrepid duo decides that when Kush comes to shove, they will not be intimidated; so they proceed to call in some favors from the likes of a crooked DEA agent (John Travolta) and a few of Chon’s ex-SEAL buddies.

In real life, one suspects that Ben and Chon would end up starring in one of Elena’s snuff videos somewhere around the end of the first act (I’m not even sure they could locate their car after a Phish concert). I know… “It’s only a movie!” But I still advise that you be prepared to suspend disbelief regarding what ensues in this rote (if slickly made and beautifully photographed) Elmore Leonard-esque wannabe of double-crosses, triple-crosses, and ultimately, a lot of white crosses (although to be fair, Stone’s body count in this outing isn’t quite as high as it was in Natural Born Killers). All the Stone trademarks are here, except for the passion (not in the sense that he’s required to provide a political subtext in every movie, but that this is uncharacteristically joyless filmmaking). The cast does its best with woefully underwritten parts, but by the muddled third act, everyone’s acting in a different film. Travolta and Del Toro, who usually liven up things, regardless of script quality (especially when playing heavies) look too bored to even go for camp. None of the characters are particularly likable (even our “heroine” is a whiney ditz). Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the All-Star Dutch Treat quality of Showtime’s Weeds and AMC’s Breaking Bad, but this narrative (independent entrepreneur outwits the big bad cartel) has been done to death…and frankly, with considerably more originality and élan.

Saturday Night at the Movies review archives

Savage twins

by digby

Let me say upfront that I’m a fan of Oliver Stone’s ouvre. I consider him to be one of the cinematic giants, so I go to all of his films with a sense of excited anticipation. This one didn’t let me down.

Dennis synopsized the plot in his review so I won’t take you through it again. Suffice to say that what he describes as a bit of plodding, not-even-good-enough-for-cable fluff, was to me a voluptuous, juicy slice of operatic pulp fiction with cinematic allusions galore, gorgeous people, beautiful scenery and a complex subtext about love, family and, of course, Stone’s favorite themes of duality and war.

Indeed, the film is about the drug war being a “real” war, and what that does to the people who are in it, particularly the men who fight it. It’s explicitly about the two sides of man’s nature and the constant battle between the saint and savior in all of us.(“O” even says of the two heroes, “together they are one man”) Revisiting once again the themes that animated his masterpiece Platoon, Stone delves into the perennial question: at what point do you fight? (Being an American liberal, it’s a question I often ask myself.) And once you go down that road, can you ever completely have yourself back?

The two female leads have a different duality, mother-daughter, youthful-aging, light and dark, hot and cool. As the film goes on, the black widow Drug “Queenpin” Hayek subtly becomes vulnerable, even idealistic, as the young beach goddess gets schooled in the ugly side of her idyllic, sun-soaked menage a trois. The two merge together in the desert, much as the two leading men do and become more human, more savage.

Mexican henchman Benicio Del Toro, oozing more than a touch of evil, and DEA agent John Travolta dripping with manipulative corruption are two sides of the same coin as well — mercenaries in the drug war, playing both sides. I thought both performances were as good as I’ve seen either of them play in years. Del Toro sports a magnificent pompadour contrasting (again) with Travolta’s bald pate and the two of them with equally riveting but wholly different eyes, relate to each other as old pals — the corrupt version of our two heroes, after the fall.

And then there’s the marijuana drug war — the most tragic duality of all. A benign herb that grows like a weed, never proven to cause harm, known to help people in pain, as the impetus for a form of bloody medieval violence that reflects, more often than is comfortable, our wars in the middle east. In the movie, the merging of the Iraq and Afghanistan tactics and the drug war in the southwestern desert was actually foreshadowed by the cartel’s beheadings, similar to the lurid Al Qaeda tapes and the killing of Daniel Pearl that horrified us after 9/11. Wars are wars. And the drug war is not a metaphor. It’s a real war, even more unnecessary and stupid than most.

Savages is beautifully filmed as Stone’s movies always are, but the editing was a bit more fluid, more classical than usual, even as the cinematography had the expected, and still exciting, melange of different stock, lighting and mood. It’s Oliver Stone’s signature and I would miss it if it weren’t there. Still, the film has a less frenetic feel than most of his work — a little touch of languid Bertolucci in the saturated, sunny look of the beach scenes and maybe a little homage to Welles in Benicio del Toro’s shadowy close-ups.

And keep in mind that all this is in the package of a beautiful, over-the-top, pulpy film noir in the Elmore Leonard vein — and despite all my film-schooly deconstruction above, this movie is just plain fun, which at this point in my jaded movie going life is a rare thing indeed.

So, here you have another duality. Dennis, with whom I learned to love film many years ago when we saw hundreds of movies together, thinks this one is boring and shallow. I think it’s one of the most entertaining and frankly, artistic, films I’ve seen in a long time. Waddaya gonna do?

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A GOP dilemma that isn’t a dilemma

by digby

I think the New York Times believes this is going to be some kind of problem for the Republicans, but I don’t understand why:

For much of the past year, Republicans assailed President Obama for resisting the Medicare spending reductions they say are needed to both preserve health benefits for older Americans and avert a Greek-style debt crisis. Representative Paul D. Ryan, the House Republicans’ point man on the budget, has called the president “gutless.”

Yet since the Supreme Court upheld the Democrats’ 2010 health care law, Republicans, led by Mitt Romney, have reversed tactics and attacked the president and Democrats in Congress by saying that Medicare will be cut too much as part of that law. Republicans plan to hold another vote to repeal the law in the House next week, though any such measure would die in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

“Obamacare cuts Medicare — cuts Medicare — by approximately $500 billion,” Mr. Romney has told audiences.

That is a reprise of Republicans’ mantra of the 2010 midterm elections, which gave them big gains at both the state and federal levels and a majority in the House. Yet the message conflicts not only with their past complaint that Democrats opposed reining in Medicare spending, but also with the fact that House Republicans have voted twice since 2010 for the same 10-year, $500 billion savings in supporting Mr. Ryan’s annual budgets.

The result is a messaging mess, even by the standards of each party’s usual election-year attacks that the other is being insufficiently supportive of older people’s benefits.

No it isn’t. Cognitive dissonance is a feature, not a bug. Paul Ryan has already figured out how to speak perfect gibberish on this topic in a way that will appeal to dumb people:

ABCNews’ “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos asked Ryan about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s contested claim that health care reform simultaneously cuts $500 billion from Medicare, hikes taxes by $500 billion and adds trillions to the deficit over a 10-year stretch.

“By that accounting,” Stephanopoulos said, “your own budget, which Gov. Romney has endorsed, would also have $500 billion in Medicare cuts.”

“Well our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency,” Ryan said. “What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare.”

Stephanopoulos was confused: “Congressman, correct me if I am wrong: I thought your Medicare savings were put toward deficit reduction, debt reduction.”

“Which extends the solvency of Medicare,” Ryan said. “What they do in Obamacare, they try to count this dollar twice. They claim that this helps Medicare solvency and, at the same time, they spend this money on creating Obamacare.

“The trustee report for Medicare, they say the same thing,” Ryan added. “You can’t count these dollars twice. In our budget we make sure all of these dollars from Medicare savings go toward extending the solvency of Medicare and don’t go toward spending new money on Obamacare.”

The Democrats will undoubtedly issue dozens of position papers explaining in minute technical detail why this isn’t true. And most people will throw up their hands and vote with the team they feel most comfortable with. It would probably be better if they just said, “Paul Ryan is a liar. Democrats have always been the protectors of medicare and always will be.” But they won’t.

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QOTD: David Atkins

by digby

Some people believe that if a bearded guy in the sky didn’t hand-fashion all living beings from dust, the world would lose its sense of wonder. As for me, knowing all my childhood and Hollywood conceptions of dinosaurs were wrong, and that my cockatiel and lovebird aren’t just feathered dinosaurs but more like actual dinosaurs with significant adaptions–that is a source of wonderment far greater than any monolithic supernatural entity could create.

Moi aussi.

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Good God these billionaires are twisted

by digby

Jonathan Schwartz flags an article in GQ which features interviews with a number of different people on the economic scale, one of whom is a major GOP billionaire donor named B. Wayne Hughes. Read what this privileged psycho has to say about his fellow Americans:

Wayne talked to me about “derelicts on welfare” who check themselves into the hospital because they’re “bored” and “want feeding,” and “we’re paying for all that activity.” He said too much tax money is spent on “guys going to chiropractors, guys getting massages! On us! Give me a break. Guys getting Viagra!” He talked about “Los Angeles bus drivers who are on permanent stress leave because someone spat on them when they got on the bus, and now they’re emotionally upside down. More than half the bus drivers are out on stress leave! Systems like that cannot work!” It seemed as if, for Wayne’s philosophy to work, he needed to believe that those who don’t make it deserve their ill fortune.

It’s hard to believe that jerk is real, he seems more like a caricature of a misanthropic asshole from a Victorian novel — Ebenezer Scrooge — that a real person. But he is real, as are many other of these billionaires just like him. Why do so many people who have so much become such miserly egomaniacs?

I think Jonathan gets this right:

the Prime Directive of everyone’s psyche is to believe they’re morally good. (As Hughes says in the GQ article, “I’ve lived my whole life doing what I thought was right.”) But there’s no rational way for any human being in history to believe it’s morally justified for them to have as much money and power as Hughes, Murdoch, etc. So people at the top must become crazy in this particular way. As my grandfather, a historian who focused on the Spanish conquest of the Western Hemisphere, always said:

The hostility of those who have power toward those who can be called inferior because they are different – because they are others, the strangers – has been a historical constant. Indeed, at times it seems to be the dominant theme in human history.

And it goes all the way down the scale to the absurd point at which lower middle class white people who should by all rights hate that hideous billionaire, turn their attention instead to the same “derelicts on welfare” and blame them for the fact that they aren’t billionaires themselves. It’s the only little bit of privilege they think they have.

Read the whole post. It’s got a lot more good stuff in it.

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Dave Johnson asks a good question

by digby

What if Romney wins the election by less than the number of people kept from voting by Republican anti-voting laws?

And I’m already hearing that political science types don’t think voter suppression makes any difference in election outcomes so it’s much ado about nothing. They’ll show their models to the establishment “proving” that based on past voting patterns or some such, that Romney would have won anyway, so there’s nothing to see here. The election would have to be close for this to happen, you see, and that means that the Great God of Polling would have been indeterminate going in. (Exit polls have already been somewhat discredited.) I’m fairly sure it will be dismissed as more sour grapes and people will, once again, be told to get over it.

But will they? Dave says:

This would be worse than the Supreme Court putting Bush in after Gore won. Partly because this time we’re not going to just shut up and take it.

Really? That’s being awfully optimistic. I just don’t see what mechanism makes that happen. Occupy — or whatever the mass demonstration impulse we have is called — is non-partisan and believe on a lot of levels that elections don’t matter. Democrats in general are beaten omega dogs who assume they are supposed to lose (or take that position for money — kind of like World Wide Wrestling.) Maybe the African American community might have the gumption to complain, but that would be dismissed as Obama loyalty and that would be that.

No, I am not going to count on a big epiphany or a strong response if this happens. Unfortunately.

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Chris Christy: statesman

by digby

David Ferguson reports on the latest from the great Republican hope:

In a scene that could have come from outtakes of MTV’s popular reality series “Jersey Shore,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) was caught by cameras bellowing and storming up the boardwalk in the popular vacation town Seaside Heights, NJ after a man in the crowd insulted him. The footage, shot with a phone camera and distributed by TMZ, shows Christie shouting angrily until a member of his entourage leads him away.

The video initially showed Christie standing athwart the flow of the crowd, yelling at a man off-camera.

“You’re a real big-shot!” shouted the governor, clutching an ice cream cone, “You’re a real big-shot, shooting your mouth off!”

“Nah, just take care of the teachers,” the man said before walking away.

“Yeah, keep walkin’ away,” Christie jeered at him, “Keep walkin’!”

At least he didn’t start screaming “stop raping people.” But it wouldn’t surprise me if he did.

And by the way, this was shot with a phone and it doesn’t look like there were very many people around, so this wasn’t for the cameras. He really is like this.

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