Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Movie/record Industry Rep Says That You Shouldn't Expect to be Able to Play Your Media for as Long as You Own it
BY Cory Doctorow
29 July 2009
Glyn sez, "Buying DRMed content, then having that content stop working later is fair writes Steven Metalitz, the lawyer who represents the MPAA, RIAA in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office.
"We reject the view," he writes in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office, "that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so."
This is, of course, true, but that doesn't make it any less weird. The only reason that such tracks are crippled after authentication servers go down is because of a system that was demanded by content owners and imposed on companies like Wal-Mart and Apple; buyers who grudgingly bought tracks online because it was easy accepted, but never desired the DRM. To simply say that they are "out of luck" because they used a system that the rightsholders demanded is the height of callousness to one's customers. While computers and electronics devices do break down over time, these music tracks were crippled by design.
I've got 78RPM records from my grandparents' basement that play just fine today -- and I've got Logo programs I wrote in 1979 that I can run today. I own a piano roll from 1903 that I can play back if I can clear the space for a player piano. I've got books printed in the 17th century that can still be read -- and if they can't be read, they can be scanned and the scans can be read. This is what an open format means.
It's hilarious that the same yahoos who argue for perpetual copyright (implying that copyrighted works have value forever) also argue for time-limited ownership (implying that people who buy copyrighted works should be content to enjoy them for a few weeks or years until the DRM stops working).
Remember: when you buy DRM, you really rent, until such time as the DRM company goes bust or changes its mind. When you buy DRM-free, you get something your great-grandkids can enjoy.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/29/movierecord-industry.html
29 July 2009
Glyn sez, "Buying DRMed content, then having that content stop working later is fair writes Steven Metalitz, the lawyer who represents the MPAA, RIAA in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office.
"We reject the view," he writes in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office, "that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so."
This is, of course, true, but that doesn't make it any less weird. The only reason that such tracks are crippled after authentication servers go down is because of a system that was demanded by content owners and imposed on companies like Wal-Mart and Apple; buyers who grudgingly bought tracks online because it was easy accepted, but never desired the DRM. To simply say that they are "out of luck" because they used a system that the rightsholders demanded is the height of callousness to one's customers. While computers and electronics devices do break down over time, these music tracks were crippled by design.
I've got 78RPM records from my grandparents' basement that play just fine today -- and I've got Logo programs I wrote in 1979 that I can run today. I own a piano roll from 1903 that I can play back if I can clear the space for a player piano. I've got books printed in the 17th century that can still be read -- and if they can't be read, they can be scanned and the scans can be read. This is what an open format means.
It's hilarious that the same yahoos who argue for perpetual copyright (implying that copyrighted works have value forever) also argue for time-limited ownership (implying that people who buy copyrighted works should be content to enjoy them for a few weeks or years until the DRM stops working).
Remember: when you buy DRM, you really rent, until such time as the DRM company goes bust or changes its mind. When you buy DRM-free, you get something your great-grandkids can enjoy.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/29/movierecord-industry.html
Maybe we can Thank Lou Dobbs
Maybe we can thank Lous Dobbs for something---that idiot racist TV bloviator. This birther nonsense shows what happens when these idiot conservatives are simply confronted with the facts. Facts are the blood enemy of conservatives.
by Eric Boehnert
Have you noticed Limbaugh's deafening silence about the birthers since July 20th? Have you noticed how the birther movement was in the news virtually every day last week, how the mainstream press was debunking it and calling out the right-wing nonsense, how NBC's Nightly News referred to Limbaugh in its birther report, yet Limbaugh remained mum? Rather than step forward in his natural role as a birther defender and attacker of all things Obama, Limbaugh has sat out the birther controversy and watched its members get mowed down in the press.
Limbaugh's scared to talk about the birthers and won't defend them because he has seen how Dobbs and the movement got manhandled by the press -- including by conservative commentators. Limbaugh saw how the press was sticking to the birth certificate facts and wasn't shy about knocking down high-paid radio hosts who tried to traffic in that nonsense.
And guess what? If Limbaugh won't back the birthers, that means most right-wing AM hosts won't either. Because that business is built upon a very simple (lemming) rule: Do whatever Rush does. And if Limbaugh won't line up on the side of the birthers, than means most AM talkers won't either, which means the birthers are going to be pushed back to the fringes where they belong.
And for that, we have Lou Dobbs to thank.
by Eric Boehnert
Have you noticed Limbaugh's deafening silence about the birthers since July 20th? Have you noticed how the birther movement was in the news virtually every day last week, how the mainstream press was debunking it and calling out the right-wing nonsense, how NBC's Nightly News referred to Limbaugh in its birther report, yet Limbaugh remained mum? Rather than step forward in his natural role as a birther defender and attacker of all things Obama, Limbaugh has sat out the birther controversy and watched its members get mowed down in the press.
Limbaugh's scared to talk about the birthers and won't defend them because he has seen how Dobbs and the movement got manhandled by the press -- including by conservative commentators. Limbaugh saw how the press was sticking to the birth certificate facts and wasn't shy about knocking down high-paid radio hosts who tried to traffic in that nonsense.
And guess what? If Limbaugh won't back the birthers, that means most right-wing AM hosts won't either. Because that business is built upon a very simple (lemming) rule: Do whatever Rush does. And if Limbaugh won't line up on the side of the birthers, than means most AM talkers won't either, which means the birthers are going to be pushed back to the fringes where they belong.
And for that, we have Lou Dobbs to thank.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
If You Are a Republican
Here is a clever little piece from Andrew Sullivan. If you are a Republican, you believe in magic. Reality has no place in the Republican world.
From Andrew Sullivan
If you're a Republican, a lot of things are logical: the entire debt began the moment Obama took office; Bush and Cheney never tortured anyone, but Obama is about to; the WMDs really are in Iraq; the president has the constitutional power to send tanks into the streets to arrest any American without charges; deficits don't matter; Obama is a Kenyan Muslim impostor; and Sarah Palin was qualified to be president of the United States at a moment's notice.
Politics as magical realism.
From Andrew Sullivan
If you're a Republican, a lot of things are logical: the entire debt began the moment Obama took office; Bush and Cheney never tortured anyone, but Obama is about to; the WMDs really are in Iraq; the president has the constitutional power to send tanks into the streets to arrest any American without charges; deficits don't matter; Obama is a Kenyan Muslim impostor; and Sarah Palin was qualified to be president of the United States at a moment's notice.
Politics as magical realism.
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
This book is about the relationship between Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. It begins with Bella moving to Forks, Washington, and wishing she were still living in Phoenix instead. However, things change when she meets Edward, whom she falls in love with.
The only issue is that Edward is a vampire and is intensely attracted to the scent of her blood. This puts both Bella and Edward, along with his family of vampies, in danger. The plot plays out from there.
I think this concept is interesting, but the book was not engaging enough. It was usually too slow of a read. Also, Bella is a very irritating character. I am rarely annoyed by a character in a book, but she is just too much. Bella is overly dramatic and emotional. Her mood swings wildly and irrationally all the time. Plus, her relationship with Edward is presented as some great love, but they hardly know each other and she is only a teenager. Sheesh!
The only issue is that Edward is a vampire and is intensely attracted to the scent of her blood. This puts both Bella and Edward, along with his family of vampies, in danger. The plot plays out from there.
I think this concept is interesting, but the book was not engaging enough. It was usually too slow of a read. Also, Bella is a very irritating character. I am rarely annoyed by a character in a book, but she is just too much. Bella is overly dramatic and emotional. Her mood swings wildly and irrationally all the time. Plus, her relationship with Edward is presented as some great love, but they hardly know each other and she is only a teenager. Sheesh!
Garry Wills - James Madison (2)
I made quick work of this little biography but learned lots about James Madison, appropriately called The Father of the Constitution. Indeed, according to Wills, the 3 indispensable Founding Fathers were Washington, Franklin, & Madison, without whom we might not have had the Constitution as the country as we know it. Madison not only was the driving force behind the Constitution (along with the presence of Washington during the deliberations), he was also a driving force behind the ratification of the document both in Virginia and in the writing of the famous Federalist Papers which were very influential in the state of New York.
Madison's talents were greatest as a legislator. He was less successful as an executive although Wills gives him passing marks as President. Historians generally consider Madison an adequate chief executive but not a great President.
I had forgotten that during the War of 1812, which ended ambiguously, Madison and the US invaded Canada. Madison thought, in error, that Canada was there for the taking with Great Britain preoccupied with Napoleon. Anyone who thinks the United States is not historically an imperial country need only consider this part of our history.
Madison started out as a nationalist and ended up a Jeffersonian Republican. How his thinking drifted over the years I don't quite understand. Madison was inconsistent in this thinking, but so what: all great people are inconsistent.
At the Constitutional Convention, Madison fought for federal veto over all state laws. How the country would have been different had this idea been enacted!
This country evolved as it has. We should always remember that history is not determined. The structure and evolution of the U.S. could have been different in many ways. What if we HAD conquered Canada?
Madison's talents were greatest as a legislator. He was less successful as an executive although Wills gives him passing marks as President. Historians generally consider Madison an adequate chief executive but not a great President.
I had forgotten that during the War of 1812, which ended ambiguously, Madison and the US invaded Canada. Madison thought, in error, that Canada was there for the taking with Great Britain preoccupied with Napoleon. Anyone who thinks the United States is not historically an imperial country need only consider this part of our history.
Madison started out as a nationalist and ended up a Jeffersonian Republican. How his thinking drifted over the years I don't quite understand. Madison was inconsistent in this thinking, but so what: all great people are inconsistent.
At the Constitutional Convention, Madison fought for federal veto over all state laws. How the country would have been different had this idea been enacted!
This country evolved as it has. We should always remember that history is not determined. The structure and evolution of the U.S. could have been different in many ways. What if we HAD conquered Canada?
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Garry Wills - James Madison
I am enjoying this neat little biography of our nation's 4th President. Madison is a MOST interesting person.
Why "Free Market" Solutions Don't Work in Healthcare
From Paul Krugman
July 25, 2009, 5:07 pm — Updated: 5:07 pm -->
Why markets can’t cure healthcare
Judging both from comments on this blog and from some of my mail, a significant number of Americans believe that the answer to our health care problems — indeed, the only answer — is to rely on the free market. Quite a few seem to believe that this view reflects the lessons of economic theory.
Not so. One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow’s Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care, which demonstrated — decisively, I and many others believe — that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs. Let me offer my own version of Arrow’s argument.
There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. One is that you don’t know when or whether you’ll need care — but if you do, the care can be extremely expensive. The big bucks are in triple coronary bypass surgery, not routine visits to the doctor’s office; and very, very few people can afford to pay major medical costs out of pocket.
This tells you right away that health care can’t be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance. And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense when it comes to health care. And you can’t just trust insurance companies either — they’re not in business for their health, or yours.
This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers’ point of view — they actually refer to it as “medical costs.” This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care. Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems. And since there’s a widespread sense that our fellow citizens should get the care we need — not everyone agrees, but most do — this means that private insurance basically spends a lot of money on socially destructive activities.
The second thing about health care is that it’s complicated, and you can’t rely on experience or comparison shopping. (”I hear they’ve got a real deal on stents over at St. Mary’s!”) That’s why doctors are supposed to follow an ethical code, why we expect more from them than from bakers or grocery store owners.
You could rely on a health maintenance organization to make the hard choices and do the cost management, and to some extent we do. But HMOs have been highly limited in their ability to achieve cost-effectiveness because people don’t trust them — they’re profit-making institutions, and your treatment is their cost.
Between those two factors, health care just doesn’t work as a standard market story.
All of this doesn’t necessarily mean that socialized medicine, or even single-payer, is the only way to go. There are a number of successful health-care systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence.
July 25, 2009, 5:07 pm — Updated: 5:07 pm -->
Why markets can’t cure healthcare
Judging both from comments on this blog and from some of my mail, a significant number of Americans believe that the answer to our health care problems — indeed, the only answer — is to rely on the free market. Quite a few seem to believe that this view reflects the lessons of economic theory.
Not so. One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow’s Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care, which demonstrated — decisively, I and many others believe — that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs. Let me offer my own version of Arrow’s argument.
There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. One is that you don’t know when or whether you’ll need care — but if you do, the care can be extremely expensive. The big bucks are in triple coronary bypass surgery, not routine visits to the doctor’s office; and very, very few people can afford to pay major medical costs out of pocket.
This tells you right away that health care can’t be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance. And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense when it comes to health care. And you can’t just trust insurance companies either — they’re not in business for their health, or yours.
This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers’ point of view — they actually refer to it as “medical costs.” This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care. Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems. And since there’s a widespread sense that our fellow citizens should get the care we need — not everyone agrees, but most do — this means that private insurance basically spends a lot of money on socially destructive activities.
The second thing about health care is that it’s complicated, and you can’t rely on experience or comparison shopping. (”I hear they’ve got a real deal on stents over at St. Mary’s!”) That’s why doctors are supposed to follow an ethical code, why we expect more from them than from bakers or grocery store owners.
You could rely on a health maintenance organization to make the hard choices and do the cost management, and to some extent we do. But HMOs have been highly limited in their ability to achieve cost-effectiveness because people don’t trust them — they’re profit-making institutions, and your treatment is their cost.
Between those two factors, health care just doesn’t work as a standard market story.
All of this doesn’t necessarily mean that socialized medicine, or even single-payer, is the only way to go. There are a number of successful health-care systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Prove it!
by John Ridley
Who knew the black man to get the most press post-Michael Jackson would be a Harvard professor? But the story of Henry Louis Gates Jr. is making for hot copy; Gates getting busted in his own home for being "tumultuous," "secretly reading," and for "general uppitiness".
Why? Why all this interest -- besides the curiosity as to whether or not the arresting officer had ever once in his life previously used the word "tumultuous" in a sentence? I think it's 'cause the professor was putting into action what a whole lot of us were thinking: nun-uh. We're sick and tired of having to prove things to the self-righteous reactionary fringe which looks at life as one, big racial profiling traffic stop: Step out of the car Mr. President and show me your birth certificate. Ma'am, could you show me how being a "wise Latina" isn't going to infringe on my male whiteliness? This despite the fact the reactionary fringe is the one with the history of duplicity and infringing.
Culturally this "prove it" mindset dates back to the passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act which put the burden on Freedmen to prove they were in fact not slaves.
You can imagine how the bulk of those cases went down in the 18th century.
Since then, people of color have had to be mindful of walking in too-nice of a neighborhood, browsing in too-swank of a store or simply taking a drive on a too-sunny day lest we have to suddenly prove civil rights which are supposed to be inalienable.
I have, however, just checked the calendar. It's not 1793 anymore.
To that end, how refreshing was it during his presser to hear the president say that the arresting officer in the Gates case acted "stupidly?" Now that that's officially out there, it's not for Gates to prove he was in the right. Let Sgt. James Crowley prove in this instance he wasn't stupid for placing a 58-year-old professor in cuffs in the middle of the day.
No, radical fringe. We're not going to prove anything to you anymore because we can show you our collective drivers licenses and birth certificates and our 17-year judicial records and any other documents or accomplishments and you'd just come up with another freak reason to deny, deny, deny.
Though you'll insist the black copters and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion real.
So, go on: collect in your basements and bomb shelters and fear chambers. Go gather your own birth certificates in plastic baggies and wave them around at your legislators. Listen to AM Radio so that the Masters of Yesterday's Technology can tell you what to think. The rest of us are above ground living in the daylight. You're welcome to join us.
Assuming you can prove you deserve to.
Who knew the black man to get the most press post-Michael Jackson would be a Harvard professor? But the story of Henry Louis Gates Jr. is making for hot copy; Gates getting busted in his own home for being "tumultuous," "secretly reading," and for "general uppitiness".
Why? Why all this interest -- besides the curiosity as to whether or not the arresting officer had ever once in his life previously used the word "tumultuous" in a sentence? I think it's 'cause the professor was putting into action what a whole lot of us were thinking: nun-uh. We're sick and tired of having to prove things to the self-righteous reactionary fringe which looks at life as one, big racial profiling traffic stop: Step out of the car Mr. President and show me your birth certificate. Ma'am, could you show me how being a "wise Latina" isn't going to infringe on my male whiteliness? This despite the fact the reactionary fringe is the one with the history of duplicity and infringing.
Culturally this "prove it" mindset dates back to the passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act which put the burden on Freedmen to prove they were in fact not slaves.
You can imagine how the bulk of those cases went down in the 18th century.
Since then, people of color have had to be mindful of walking in too-nice of a neighborhood, browsing in too-swank of a store or simply taking a drive on a too-sunny day lest we have to suddenly prove civil rights which are supposed to be inalienable.
I have, however, just checked the calendar. It's not 1793 anymore.
To that end, how refreshing was it during his presser to hear the president say that the arresting officer in the Gates case acted "stupidly?" Now that that's officially out there, it's not for Gates to prove he was in the right. Let Sgt. James Crowley prove in this instance he wasn't stupid for placing a 58-year-old professor in cuffs in the middle of the day.
No, radical fringe. We're not going to prove anything to you anymore because we can show you our collective drivers licenses and birth certificates and our 17-year judicial records and any other documents or accomplishments and you'd just come up with another freak reason to deny, deny, deny.
Though you'll insist the black copters and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion real.
So, go on: collect in your basements and bomb shelters and fear chambers. Go gather your own birth certificates in plastic baggies and wave them around at your legislators. Listen to AM Radio so that the Masters of Yesterday's Technology can tell you what to think. The rest of us are above ground living in the daylight. You're welcome to join us.
Assuming you can prove you deserve to.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Paul Krugman on the The Idiot Obama Haters
New York Times Blog
July 23, 2009, 2:43 pm — Updated: 2:45 pm -->
DeMinted Republicans
It’s no secret that the reaction of a significant number of Republicans to the presidency of Barack Obama has been a bit, well, insane. And don’t start making false equivalences by talking about some video someone once posted on MoveOn’s web site, or some comment someone once posted at Daily Kos. Did any U.S. Senators compare the Bush administration to Germany on the eve of World War II? I don’t think so.
So what’s going on? Is it the fact that Obama is black? Actually, I don’t think so: there was a comparable level of craziness in 1993 — Bill Clinton is a drug smuggler, Hillary murdered Vince Foster. What’s basically going on is that a significant part of the modern GOP can’t accept the idea of a Democratic president.
Why? I think part of it is that, in the minds of quite a few, it’s a betrayal of a promise. They gave their loyalty to the GOP and the conservative movement in return for the expectation of being part of a permanent ruling party. It’s just wrong, as they see it, a perversion of the way things ought to be, to have the other party sitting in the White House. In short, IT'S INCONCEIVABLE!
The "Birther Movement"
We live in strange times. Despite the media that allow us to keep up with events more than at any time in history (there is no excuse for anyone not being informed), we are awash in misinformation and utter nonsense that passes for accurate information for some people. Some of the stupid and juvenile emails I receive from people whom I THINK are intelligent people do make me wonder. How can seemingly reasonable people believe utter nonsense? The only answer I can come up with is that they WANT to believe and facts and evidence don't matter. I do not respect such people. Idiot Obama Haters will believe ANYTHING. We need constructive and patriotic criticism as we do for every administration. However, these idiots are beyond the pale.
From Jon Stewart
In a lengthy opening segment, Jon Stewart took on "birthers" last night, mocking their internal leadership and the media figures and politicians who support them. If you don't know by now (which is totally possible as a rational adult who does not engage with the lunatic fringe) "birthers" think that our president is not an American citizen, but instead a citizen of Kenya, who, through a massive government and familial conspiracy, tricked the American people into electing him.
Despite OVERWHELMING evidence that Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen, "birthers" have created a media frenzy of late that has prompted conservative representatives to introduced the so called "birther bill" that would call for presidential candidates to provide their birth certificates before running. There has been some very responsible reporting on the subject, if you can ever call engaging crazy people responsible, by Rick Sanchez, Chris Matthews and others who called these people crazy and showed copies of the president's birth certificate amongst other documents proving he was born in Hawaii.
Still, the subject hasn't really been delved into with the amount of scrutiny it deserves until the "Daily Show" does a segment on it.
From Jon Stewart
In a lengthy opening segment, Jon Stewart took on "birthers" last night, mocking their internal leadership and the media figures and politicians who support them. If you don't know by now (which is totally possible as a rational adult who does not engage with the lunatic fringe) "birthers" think that our president is not an American citizen, but instead a citizen of Kenya, who, through a massive government and familial conspiracy, tricked the American people into electing him.
Despite OVERWHELMING evidence that Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen, "birthers" have created a media frenzy of late that has prompted conservative representatives to introduced the so called "birther bill" that would call for presidential candidates to provide their birth certificates before running. There has been some very responsible reporting on the subject, if you can ever call engaging crazy people responsible, by Rick Sanchez, Chris Matthews and others who called these people crazy and showed copies of the president's birth certificate amongst other documents proving he was born in Hawaii.
Still, the subject hasn't really been delved into with the amount of scrutiny it deserves until the "Daily Show" does a segment on it.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
On Walter Cronkite
On February 27, 1968, the "most trusted man in America" told his country on the CBS Evening News that the Viet Nam War was a mistake. If only Lyndon Johnson and his cohorts had listened. This was Walter Cronkite's finest public hour.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Fred with Senator George McGovern
Fred and Senator McGovern at the Capitol Bookstore in Montgomery June 5, 2009. The Senator signs his new biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Senator McGovern was the 1972 Democratic candidate for President. He ran on a platform of terminating our involvement in the Viet Nam war. Had he won, heaven only knows how many American and Viet Namese lives would have been saved. Nixon was reelected instead, and thousands MORE young Americans died in vain and the country went on to endure the Watergate debacle. The Viet Nam war is the central event that determined my political views. The tragedy of this immoral and senseless war in which 58,000 Americans perished will stain our country's history forever. The heroism and valor of those who fought should be cherished; the politicians who sent them 10,000 miles to a senseless slaughter will always live in infamy. History has vindicated Senator McGovern.
Senator McGovern has a Phd in history from Northwestern and is a decorated World War II bomber pilot. In his 80s, he divides his time between Washington D.C. and St. Augustine, Florida.
He is a GREAT American. The turnout at this event was overwhelming.
Bipartisanship is for Suckers
Joe Conason says what I've saying all along; bipartisanship is for suckers. Republicans will fight any health care reform. They do not care about the mounting health care crisis of cost and coverage. They only wish to obstruct.
Bipartisanship is for suckers
Hey, Democrats -- Republicans have no intention of addressing America's healthcare ills. Any reform is up to you
By Joe Conason
A flow chart released by Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, pictured, purports to show the daunting bureaucracy of the Democratic healthcare reform proposal.
July 17, 2009 Whatever hopes the Democrats in Congress and the White House may still cherish about bipartisan cooperation on healthcare reform, the Republicans are sparing no effort to mock them. Rather than expend much energy on seeking compromise or creating solutions of their own, the minority party appears wholly preoccupied with spreading propaganda against reform through all their reliable stooges, outlets and devices.
If the Republican leadership in either the Senate or the House of Representatives had conceived an alternative plan for reform -- confronting the twin crises of coverage and cost -- they could promote such ideas on all the media platforms available to them, from Fox News and Drudge to the mainstream media.
Instead, however, the Republican noise machine offers only noise, in the hope of frustrating the Democrats and blocking change. Although they understand very well that the public is demanding reform, if only because pollster and strategist Frank Luntz told them so, they don't seem to care.
The latest example of conservative clowning on this deeply serious subject debuted over the past few days via the usual channels: a "chart," released by the House Republican leadership, that purports to show the daunting bureaucratic maze of agencies, mandates and taxes that will result should a Democratic health bill become law.
Supposedly depicting how a new system would be organized, this drawing shows more than 50 multicolored boxes, circles and cartoon pictures, connected by red and blue arrow vectors. According to Rep. Kevin Brady, the Texas Republican who distributed it, the chart displays the "new levels of bureaucracy, agencies, organization and programs [that] will all be put directly between the patient and their healthcare."
That is simply a lie, as Brady surely knows, since none of the Obama ad
ministration's proposals or the Democratic bills would interpose any federal agency between patients and doctors -- or between consumers and insurers -- for those who are satisfied with their current plans.
Examined closely, most of the items on the chart, including several Cabinet departments and federal agencies, as well as "the States" and "Consumers" and "Private Insurers," already exist, of course. It is hard to say what the GOP drawing can actually be said to show except that American healthcare is already complicated. Much more complicated than systems in other countries, such as France, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Japan, that rely on public as well as private insurance plans to achieve universal coverage.
Omitted from the Republican schematic of healthcare hell are the truly nightmarish complications of the current system, most of which can be attributed to the machinations of insurance companies (an appalling labyrinth, well known to anyone who has been seriously ill, thoughtfully sketched by the New Republic's Jonathan Cohn here). On Brady's chart, there is merely a happy little box marked "Traditional Health Insurance Plans," as if they involved none of the corporate bureaucratic snares that deprive consumers of needed care.
For anyone with a working memory, moreover, it is remarkable to listen to the Republicans complain about the "baffling" complexity of a plan to provide new healthcare benefits (or the cost). When the Republicans controlled Congress and the White House, they passed Medicare Part D, the impossibly confusing prescription drug benefit plan that they rammed through, despite immense flaws, in order to win older voters suffering from exorbitant drug prices. The insane complications of Part D, which required many hours and expert assistance to decipher, were necessary for one reason alone -- to protect the private insurers, pharmaceutical interests and lobbyists who stood to profit from that wasteful scheme.
Individual Republicans in both the House and the Senate may well share the concerns of Democrats about the rising costs and diminishing accessibility of health insurance, but as a matter of policy, their party is bluntly opposed to any real reform. Last month, Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, put out a four-page press release, dubbed the Republican healthcare plan, that was so vague and devoid of required detail that his members could hardly endorse it without laughing. The next Republican non-plan will be unveiled on Monday at the National Press Club in Washington, where RNC chairman Michael Steele promises to announce a "unifying set of core Republican principles for healthcare reform." Still no actual bill, but maybe Steele will recite the core principles in rapping rhyme.
Listening to Republicans and their pet pundits on Fox News, CNBC and talk radio, it quickly becomes clear that the conservative objective is not to fashion a solution acceptable to both parties, but to obstruct. The question they ponder daily is not how to reduce costs and provide healthcare to all; no, the question they repeatedly ask is whether and how they can "stop whatever comes out, healthcare-bill wise, from the Democrats."
So much for bipartisanship, a vanishingly rare commodity that is of no value to the Republicans, who know that voters will credit the Democratic majority for reform whether the minority offers support or not. What the Democrats need to understand is that there can be no cooperation without sincere partners. Among the opposition on Capitol Hill there are no such partners. There is only a cabal of legislative saboteurs, egged on by the right-wing media. The Republicans are pursuing the plan laid out by their strategist Luntz that is designed to kill reform -- and it is now time for the Democrats to recognize that grim reality.
Bipartisanship is for suckers
Hey, Democrats -- Republicans have no intention of addressing America's healthcare ills. Any reform is up to you
By Joe Conason
A flow chart released by Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, pictured, purports to show the daunting bureaucracy of the Democratic healthcare reform proposal.
July 17, 2009 Whatever hopes the Democrats in Congress and the White House may still cherish about bipartisan cooperation on healthcare reform, the Republicans are sparing no effort to mock them. Rather than expend much energy on seeking compromise or creating solutions of their own, the minority party appears wholly preoccupied with spreading propaganda against reform through all their reliable stooges, outlets and devices.
If the Republican leadership in either the Senate or the House of Representatives had conceived an alternative plan for reform -- confronting the twin crises of coverage and cost -- they could promote such ideas on all the media platforms available to them, from Fox News and Drudge to the mainstream media.
Instead, however, the Republican noise machine offers only noise, in the hope of frustrating the Democrats and blocking change. Although they understand very well that the public is demanding reform, if only because pollster and strategist Frank Luntz told them so, they don't seem to care.
The latest example of conservative clowning on this deeply serious subject debuted over the past few days via the usual channels: a "chart," released by the House Republican leadership, that purports to show the daunting bureaucratic maze of agencies, mandates and taxes that will result should a Democratic health bill become law.
Supposedly depicting how a new system would be organized, this drawing shows more than 50 multicolored boxes, circles and cartoon pictures, connected by red and blue arrow vectors. According to Rep. Kevin Brady, the Texas Republican who distributed it, the chart displays the "new levels of bureaucracy, agencies, organization and programs [that] will all be put directly between the patient and their healthcare."
That is simply a lie, as Brady surely knows, since none of the Obama ad
ministration's proposals or the Democratic bills would interpose any federal agency between patients and doctors -- or between consumers and insurers -- for those who are satisfied with their current plans.
Examined closely, most of the items on the chart, including several Cabinet departments and federal agencies, as well as "the States" and "Consumers" and "Private Insurers," already exist, of course. It is hard to say what the GOP drawing can actually be said to show except that American healthcare is already complicated. Much more complicated than systems in other countries, such as France, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Japan, that rely on public as well as private insurance plans to achieve universal coverage.
Omitted from the Republican schematic of healthcare hell are the truly nightmarish complications of the current system, most of which can be attributed to the machinations of insurance companies (an appalling labyrinth, well known to anyone who has been seriously ill, thoughtfully sketched by the New Republic's Jonathan Cohn here). On Brady's chart, there is merely a happy little box marked "Traditional Health Insurance Plans," as if they involved none of the corporate bureaucratic snares that deprive consumers of needed care.
For anyone with a working memory, moreover, it is remarkable to listen to the Republicans complain about the "baffling" complexity of a plan to provide new healthcare benefits (or the cost). When the Republicans controlled Congress and the White House, they passed Medicare Part D, the impossibly confusing prescription drug benefit plan that they rammed through, despite immense flaws, in order to win older voters suffering from exorbitant drug prices. The insane complications of Part D, which required many hours and expert assistance to decipher, were necessary for one reason alone -- to protect the private insurers, pharmaceutical interests and lobbyists who stood to profit from that wasteful scheme.
Individual Republicans in both the House and the Senate may well share the concerns of Democrats about the rising costs and diminishing accessibility of health insurance, but as a matter of policy, their party is bluntly opposed to any real reform. Last month, Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, put out a four-page press release, dubbed the Republican healthcare plan, that was so vague and devoid of required detail that his members could hardly endorse it without laughing. The next Republican non-plan will be unveiled on Monday at the National Press Club in Washington, where RNC chairman Michael Steele promises to announce a "unifying set of core Republican principles for healthcare reform." Still no actual bill, but maybe Steele will recite the core principles in rapping rhyme.
Listening to Republicans and their pet pundits on Fox News, CNBC and talk radio, it quickly becomes clear that the conservative objective is not to fashion a solution acceptable to both parties, but to obstruct. The question they ponder daily is not how to reduce costs and provide healthcare to all; no, the question they repeatedly ask is whether and how they can "stop whatever comes out, healthcare-bill wise, from the Democrats."
So much for bipartisanship, a vanishingly rare commodity that is of no value to the Republicans, who know that voters will credit the Democratic majority for reform whether the minority offers support or not. What the Democrats need to understand is that there can be no cooperation without sincere partners. Among the opposition on Capitol Hill there are no such partners. There is only a cabal of legislative saboteurs, egged on by the right-wing media. The Republicans are pursuing the plan laid out by their strategist Luntz that is designed to kill reform -- and it is now time for the Democrats to recognize that grim reality.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others
This comes from Pogue's Post, the New York Times technology blog by David Pogue:
This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.
This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.
As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.
You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?
The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”
Scary.
This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.
This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.
As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.
You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?
The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”
Scary.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
John Keegan - Winston Churchill
Sometimes I wish to read a short biography just to get the feel of a person's life. This 192 page Penguin bio by the well-know military historian John Keegan is perfect. I have no need for the scores of tomes written about Sir Winston: this book will suffice for my purposes.
My purpose was to understand the broad outline of Churchill's life. I wanted to understand the man in context. My understanding now after reading this book is good enough.
I learned that Churchill outwardly at least adored his father, Randolph, even though his father was a difficult man and he constantly disparaged his son. Randolph seemingly died a failure. Churchill named his own son Randolph.
Intensely ambitious and desiring to experience all that life had to offer, Churchill started his career as a British Conservative, switched to the Liberal Party in the teens, and then switched back to the Conservatives by the time he was named Prime Minister in 1940. According to the author, Churchill was an early advocate of the British welfare state which took shape rapidly after the conclusion of World War II. I certainly did not expect this.
I've always wondered how Churchill was voted out of office immediately after the war. It's so shocking. This book doesn't really make me understand how this could have happened, but it did happen.
Churchill is rightly known primarily as his country's wartime leader during World War II. He deserves the title statesman and all of the accolades you can think of for his leadership along with FDR. His wartime speeches to his countrymen are stirring even today.
When Great Britain stood alone against Hitler before the US entered the war, he declared that Britain would never give up. He famously he had to offer his people only blood, sweat, and tears. Better to die on the ground choking from our own blood than yield to Hitler. Stirring stuff, indeed.
There is a cult of Churchill. I am not one of its members, but I do understand its appeal based on his wartime leadership and speeches. He was a great man.
My purpose was to understand the broad outline of Churchill's life. I wanted to understand the man in context. My understanding now after reading this book is good enough.
I learned that Churchill outwardly at least adored his father, Randolph, even though his father was a difficult man and he constantly disparaged his son. Randolph seemingly died a failure. Churchill named his own son Randolph.
Intensely ambitious and desiring to experience all that life had to offer, Churchill started his career as a British Conservative, switched to the Liberal Party in the teens, and then switched back to the Conservatives by the time he was named Prime Minister in 1940. According to the author, Churchill was an early advocate of the British welfare state which took shape rapidly after the conclusion of World War II. I certainly did not expect this.
I've always wondered how Churchill was voted out of office immediately after the war. It's so shocking. This book doesn't really make me understand how this could have happened, but it did happen.
Churchill is rightly known primarily as his country's wartime leader during World War II. He deserves the title statesman and all of the accolades you can think of for his leadership along with FDR. His wartime speeches to his countrymen are stirring even today.
When Great Britain stood alone against Hitler before the US entered the war, he declared that Britain would never give up. He famously he had to offer his people only blood, sweat, and tears. Better to die on the ground choking from our own blood than yield to Hitler. Stirring stuff, indeed.
There is a cult of Churchill. I am not one of its members, but I do understand its appeal based on his wartime leadership and speeches. He was a great man.
The Republicans - Old White Men's Last Stand
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 14, 2009
Despite the best efforts of Republicans to root out any sign that Sonia Sotomayor has emotions that color her views on the law, the Bronx Bomber kept a robotic mask in place.
A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not know that a gaggle of white Republican men afraid of extinction are out to trip her up.
After all, these guys have never needed to speak inspirational words to others like them, as Sotomayor has done. They’ve had codes, handshakes and clubs to do that.
So when Republican Senator Jon Kyl, without so much as a howdy-do, went at Sotomayor, and soon was asking her if she agreed with Barack Obama’s contention, when he voted against John Roberts, that a judge’s heart is important, the would-be justice was as adroit as her idol Nancy Drew.
“No, sir,” she said, indicating that the only bleeding-heart thing about her was the co
lor of her jacket. She added that “it’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the law.”
President Obama wants Sotomayor, naturally, to bring a fresh perspective to the court. It was a disgrace that W. appointed two white men to a court stocked with white men. And Sotomayor made it clear that she provides some spicy seasoning to a bench when she said in a speech: “I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging, but I accept there will be some based on gender and my Latina heritage.”
The judge’s full retreat from the notion that a different life experience is valuable was more than necessary and somewhat disappointing. But, as any clever job applicant knows, you must obscure as well as reveal, so she sidestepped the dreaded empathy questions — even though that’s why the president wants her.
“We apply law to facts,” she told Kyl. “We don’t apply feelings to facts.”
She even used a flat tone when talking about the “horrific tragedy” of 9/11, when she was living near the World Trade Center. And she was mechanical in explaining to a grumpy Senator Orrin Hatch that banning nunchaku sticks did not dent the Second Amendment because the martial-arts weapons’ swing “can bust someone’s skull.”
Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer gamely tried to make the judge seem even more coldhearted. Recalling the sad plight of poor families from the Bronx who sued T.W.A. after a jet crashed off Long Island in 1996, he quoted the Bronx jurist’s dispassionate dissent: “The appropriate remedial scheme for deaths occurring off the United States coast is clearly a legislative policy choice, which should not be made by the courts.”
Schumer also cited the case of an African-American woman who filed suit after being denied a home-equity loan, even after the loan application was conditionally approved based on her credit report.
Sonia Legree ruled that the woman’s claim was filed too late, the same argument that the Supremes used on Lilly Ledbetter when she belatedly learned that her male coworkers were much better paid. President Obama has cited the Ledbetter decision as a reason the court needs a more “common touch.”
“The law requires some finality,” Sotomayor explained about her case, with an iciness that must have sent a chill up the conservative leg of Alabama’s Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, even as it left Obama hanging out on an empathy limb.
Republican Lindsey Graham read Sotomayor some anonymous comments made by lawyers about her, complaining that she was “temperamental,” “nasty,” “a bit of a bully.” Then he patronizingly lectured her about how this was the moment for “self-reflection.” Maybe Graham thinks Nino Scalia has those traits covered.
But the barbed adjectives didn’t match the muted performance on display before the Judiciary Committee. Like the president who picked her, Sotomayor has been a model of professorial rationality. Besides, it’s delicious watching Republicans go after Democrats for being too emotional and irrational given the G.O.P. shame spiral.
W. and Dick Cheney made all their bad decisions about Iraq, W.M.D.’s, domestic surveillance, torture, rendition and secret hit squads from the gut, based on false intuitions, fear, paranoia and revenge.
Sarah Palin is the definition of irrational, a volatile and scattered country-music queen without the music. Her Republican fans defend her lack of application and intellect, happy to settle for her emotional electricity.
Senator Graham said Sotomayor would be confirmed unless she had “a meltdown” — a word applied mostly to women and toddlers until Mark Sanford proudly took ownership of it when he was judged about the wisdom of his Latina woman.
And then there’s the Supreme Court, of course, which gave up its claim to rational neutrality when the justices appointed by Republican presidents — including Bush Sr. — ignored what was fair to make a sentimental choice and throw the 2000 election to W.
Faced with that warped case of supreme empathy, no wonder Sotomayor is so eager to follow the law.
Published: July 14, 2009
Despite the best efforts of Republicans to root out any sign that Sonia Sotomayor has emotions that color her views on the law, the Bronx Bomber kept a robotic mask in place.
A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not know that a gaggle of white Republican men afraid of extinction are out to trip her up.
After all, these guys have never needed to speak inspirational words to others like them, as Sotomayor has done. They’ve had codes, handshakes and clubs to do that.
So when Republican Senator Jon Kyl, without so much as a howdy-do, went at Sotomayor, and soon was asking her if she agreed with Barack Obama’s contention, when he voted against John Roberts, that a judge’s heart is important, the would-be justice was as adroit as her idol Nancy Drew.
“No, sir,” she said, indicating that the only bleeding-heart thing about her was the co
lor of her jacket. She added that “it’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the law.”
President Obama wants Sotomayor, naturally, to bring a fresh perspective to the court. It was a disgrace that W. appointed two white men to a court stocked with white men. And Sotomayor made it clear that she provides some spicy seasoning to a bench when she said in a speech: “I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging, but I accept there will be some based on gender and my Latina heritage.”
The judge’s full retreat from the notion that a different life experience is valuable was more than necessary and somewhat disappointing. But, as any clever job applicant knows, you must obscure as well as reveal, so she sidestepped the dreaded empathy questions — even though that’s why the president wants her.
“We apply law to facts,” she told Kyl. “We don’t apply feelings to facts.”
She even used a flat tone when talking about the “horrific tragedy” of 9/11, when she was living near the World Trade Center. And she was mechanical in explaining to a grumpy Senator Orrin Hatch that banning nunchaku sticks did not dent the Second Amendment because the martial-arts weapons’ swing “can bust someone’s skull.”
Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer gamely tried to make the judge seem even more coldhearted. Recalling the sad plight of poor families from the Bronx who sued T.W.A. after a jet crashed off Long Island in 1996, he quoted the Bronx jurist’s dispassionate dissent: “The appropriate remedial scheme for deaths occurring off the United States coast is clearly a legislative policy choice, which should not be made by the courts.”
Schumer also cited the case of an African-American woman who filed suit after being denied a home-equity loan, even after the loan application was conditionally approved based on her credit report.
Sonia Legree ruled that the woman’s claim was filed too late, the same argument that the Supremes used on Lilly Ledbetter when she belatedly learned that her male coworkers were much better paid. President Obama has cited the Ledbetter decision as a reason the court needs a more “common touch.”
“The law requires some finality,” Sotomayor explained about her case, with an iciness that must have sent a chill up the conservative leg of Alabama’s Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, even as it left Obama hanging out on an empathy limb.
Republican Lindsey Graham read Sotomayor some anonymous comments made by lawyers about her, complaining that she was “temperamental,” “nasty,” “a bit of a bully.” Then he patronizingly lectured her about how this was the moment for “self-reflection.” Maybe Graham thinks Nino Scalia has those traits covered.
But the barbed adjectives didn’t match the muted performance on display before the Judiciary Committee. Like the president who picked her, Sotomayor has been a model of professorial rationality. Besides, it’s delicious watching Republicans go after Democrats for being too emotional and irrational given the G.O.P. shame spiral.
W. and Dick Cheney made all their bad decisions about Iraq, W.M.D.’s, domestic surveillance, torture, rendition and secret hit squads from the gut, based on false intuitions, fear, paranoia and revenge.
Sarah Palin is the definition of irrational, a volatile and scattered country-music queen without the music. Her Republican fans defend her lack of application and intellect, happy to settle for her emotional electricity.
Senator Graham said Sotomayor would be confirmed unless she had “a meltdown” — a word applied mostly to women and toddlers until Mark Sanford proudly took ownership of it when he was judged about the wisdom of his Latina woman.
And then there’s the Supreme Court, of course, which gave up its claim to rational neutrality when the justices appointed by Republican presidents — including Bush Sr. — ignored what was fair to make a sentimental choice and throw the 2000 election to W.
Faced with that warped case of supreme empathy, no wonder Sotomayor is so eager to follow the law.
Frank McCourt
NEW YORK — Frank McCourt is gravely ill with meningitis and is unlikely to survive, the author's brother said Thursday.
Malachy McCourt said that his 78-year-old brother, best known for the million-selling "Angela's Ashes," is in a New York hospice, "his faculties shutting down."
"He is not expected to live," said McCourt, himself an author and performer.
Frank McCourt was recently treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, but his brother says he had been doing well until about two weeks ago, when he contracted meningitis.
"He was out and about, being active, doing talks and so forth," Malachy McCourt said.
Malachy McCourt said that his 78-year-old brother, best known for the million-selling "Angela's Ashes," is in a New York hospice, "his faculties shutting down."
"He is not expected to live," said McCourt, himself an author and performer.
Frank McCourt was recently treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, but his brother says he had been doing well until about two weeks ago, when he contracted meningitis.
"He was out and about, being active, doing talks and so forth," Malachy McCourt said.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Jeffrey Toobin on Chief Justice Roberts
Jeffrey Toobin offers a chilling summary of the actions of Chief Justice Roberts and summarizes as follows. Roberts is the most dangerous man in this country as tries to move the country to the hard right. This is what Republicanism leads to: favoring the state over the individual, favoring the powerful over the less powerful, speeding up executions, always favoring the advantaged over the disadvantaged. This is the Republican Party in judicial action.
Roberts’s hard-edged performance at oral argument offers more than just a rhetorical contrast to the rendering of himself that he presented at his confirmation hearing. “Judges are like umpires,” Roberts said at the time. “Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.” His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.
Roberts’s hard-edged performance at oral argument offers more than just a rhetorical contrast to the rendering of himself that he presented at his confirmation hearing. “Judges are like umpires,” Roberts said at the time. “Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.” His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.
From Paul Krugman
July 14, 2009, 7:53 pm — Updated: 7:53 pm -->
A $1 trillion bargain
OK, so the CBO score for the 3-committee House health care plan is in: $1 trillion over the next decade for 97 percent coverage of legal residents.
That’s a bargain: the catastrophe of being ill without insurance, the fear of losing insurance, all ended — for much less than the Bush administration’s useless $1.35 trillion first tax cut, quickly followed by another $350 billion.
And that’s just the budget cost, which the House proposes covering partly with savings elsewhere, partly with higher taxes on very high incomes. As Jon Cohn points out, the overall effect of expanded coverage will probably be lower health care costs for America as a whole.
There is now absolutely no excuse for Congress to balk at doing the right thing.
A $1 trillion bargain
OK, so the CBO score for the 3-committee House health care plan is in: $1 trillion over the next decade for 97 percent coverage of legal residents.
That’s a bargain: the catastrophe of being ill without insurance, the fear of losing insurance, all ended — for much less than the Bush administration’s useless $1.35 trillion first tax cut, quickly followed by another $350 billion.
And that’s just the budget cost, which the House proposes covering partly with savings elsewhere, partly with higher taxes on very high incomes. As Jon Cohn points out, the overall effect of expanded coverage will probably be lower health care costs for America as a whole.
There is now absolutely no excuse for Congress to balk at doing the right thing.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Jeffrey Beauragard Sessions
Named after a Confederate general, our embarassing Senator Jeff Sessions is showing his true colors (no pun intended) and he makes a bare-knuckled racial attack on Judge Sotomayor. As I have always said, RACE (white supremacy) is the heart of the Republican Party.
Sessions Becomes The Subject Of Sotomayor Hearings
digg Huffpost - Sessions Becomes The Subject Of Sotomayor Hearings stumble reddit del.ico.us
The confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor have become, in a small but significant way, a referendum on the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who took over the post from Pennsylvania Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter, is under intense pressure to land blows on Sotomayor without offending Hispanic voters. It's a tough task, made all the more difficult by Sessions' history of racially insensitive positions and statements.
So far the results have been mixed. Over at Fox News, host Chris Wallace and his co-panelist applauded the Alabaman for his questioning of Sotomayor, in which he honed in on her past statements about race and her role in Ricci v. DeStefano (the New Haven firefighter case). While other GOPers (notably Utah Sen. Orin Hatch) got stuck in the legal weeds, Sessions tried to draw blood, the Fox panel argued.
But Democrats both in and out of government say that is exactly the ty
pe of posture they want.
"Sessions spent 30 minutes talking about lines in speeches taken out of context, instead of her 17 years on the bench," said one Democratic operative working on the Sotomayor confirmation. "When Judge Sotomayor tried to reference her work as a judge and her fidelity to the law in her more than 3000 judicial opinions, Sen. Sessions ignored her answers. In fact, in his 30 minutes of questioning, after spending weeks supposedly reviewing her judicial record, Sen. Sessions could only manage to mention one of her actual decisions as a judge."
Certainly, the image of a white southern senator pressing a Hispanic judge on topics of affirmative action carries racial implications that progressives don't mind addressing. Ian Millhiser, a Legal Research Analyst with the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund, told the Huffington Post that he was "flabbergasted that conservatives picked someone with a long history of race-based attacks as their point person on the Sotomayor hearing."
In some respects, Sessions' questioning has already become the defining feature of Tuesday's hearing. As CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin argued on air: "What's worth noting about what Jeff Sessions -- the line of questioning, was that being a white man, that's normal. Everybody else has biases and prejudices ... but the white man, they don't have any ethnicity, they don't have any gender, they're just like the normal folks, and I thought that was a little jarring."
Sessions Becomes The Subject Of Sotomayor Hearings
digg Huffpost - Sessions Becomes The Subject Of Sotomayor Hearings stumble reddit del.ico.us
The confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor have become, in a small but significant way, a referendum on the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who took over the post from Pennsylvania Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter, is under intense pressure to land blows on Sotomayor without offending Hispanic voters. It's a tough task, made all the more difficult by Sessions' history of racially insensitive positions and statements.
So far the results have been mixed. Over at Fox News, host Chris Wallace and his co-panelist applauded the Alabaman for his questioning of Sotomayor, in which he honed in on her past statements about race and her role in Ricci v. DeStefano (the New Haven firefighter case). While other GOPers (notably Utah Sen. Orin Hatch) got stuck in the legal weeds, Sessions tried to draw blood, the Fox panel argued.
But Democrats both in and out of government say that is exactly the ty
pe of posture they want.
"Sessions spent 30 minutes talking about lines in speeches taken out of context, instead of her 17 years on the bench," said one Democratic operative working on the Sotomayor confirmation. "When Judge Sotomayor tried to reference her work as a judge and her fidelity to the law in her more than 3000 judicial opinions, Sen. Sessions ignored her answers. In fact, in his 30 minutes of questioning, after spending weeks supposedly reviewing her judicial record, Sen. Sessions could only manage to mention one of her actual decisions as a judge."
Certainly, the image of a white southern senator pressing a Hispanic judge on topics of affirmative action carries racial implications that progressives don't mind addressing. Ian Millhiser, a Legal Research Analyst with the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund, told the Huffington Post that he was "flabbergasted that conservatives picked someone with a long history of race-based attacks as their point person on the Sotomayor hearing."
In some respects, Sessions' questioning has already become the defining feature of Tuesday's hearing. As CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin argued on air: "What's worth noting about what Jeff Sessions -- the line of questioning, was that being a white man, that's normal. Everybody else has biases and prejudices ... but the white man, they don't have any ethnicity, they don't have any gender, they're just like the normal folks, and I thought that was a little jarring."
Monday, July 13, 2009
From Senator Leahy
Sen. Leahy opened up the hearings this morning with a terrific little recitation of how our Constitution has been improved over the past 200 years, illustrating the central difference between progressives and conservatives about the meaning of the Constitution. Conservatives tend to slight the amendments in their interpretation of the Constitution. Here's what he said:
Each generation of Americans has sought to bend that arc a little further toward justice. We have improved upon the foundation of our Constitution through the Bill of Rights, the Civil War amendments, the 19th Amendment's expansion of the right to vote to women, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 26th Amendment's extension of the right to vote to young people. These actions have marked progress toward our more perfect union. This nomination can be another step along that path.
FRED HUDSON SHOUTS "AMEN!"
Each generation of Americans has sought to bend that arc a little further toward justice. We have improved upon the foundation of our Constitution through the Bill of Rights, the Civil War amendments, the 19th Amendment's expansion of the right to vote to women, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 26th Amendment's extension of the right to vote to young people. These actions have marked progress toward our more perfect union. This nomination can be another step along that path.
FRED HUDSON SHOUTS "AMEN!"
What the Sotomayor hearings mean
E.J. Dionne puts the hearings in context. The Republicans cannot defeat her and so they are engaging in a framing exercise in their efforts to change jurisprudence in this country to the hard right with the Bill of Rights at stake. The real radicals and court activists are Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and company.
The Washington Post Writers GroupThose Who Live in Glass Courthouses by E.J. Dionne, Jr.The real radicals are those who hold a majority on the Supreme Court.Post Date July 13, 2009
WASHINGTON--This week's hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court represent the opening skirmish in a long-term struggle to challenge the escalating activism of an increasingly conservative judiciary.
The Senate's Republican minority does not expect to derail Sotomayor, who would be the first Hispanic and only the third woman to serve on the court, and they realize that their attack lines against her have failed to ignite public attention, or even much interest.
Her restrained record as a lower court judge has made it impossible to cast her credibly as a liberal judicial activist. "They haven't laid a glove on her," said Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., her leading Senate supporter.
Yet none of this diminishes the importance of the Senate drama that opens on Monday because the argument over the political and philosophical direction of the judiciary that began 40 years ago has reached a critical moment. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, conservatives have finally established a majority on the court that is beginning to work its will.
Republican Senators know that Sotomayor's accession to the court will not change this, since she is replacing Justice David Souter, a member of the court's liberal minority. But they want to use the hearings to paint the moderately liberal Sotomayor as, at best, the outer limit of what is acceptable on the bench in order to justify the new conservative activism that is about to become the rule.
"They have more or less given up on defeating her, so they are going to engage in a framing exercise," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview. "They're trying to define a Republican worldview imported into the judiciary as the judicial norm for the country."
Sponsored By:
The goal, Whitehouse added, "is to define the political ideology" of the new conservative judiciary as "representing the mainstream, and to tarnish any judges who are outside that mark."
If you wonder what judicial activism looks like, consider one of the court's final moves in its spring term.
The justices had before them a simple case that could have been disposed of on narrow grounds, involving a group called Citizens United. The organization had asked to be exempt from the restrictions embodied in the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law for a movie critical of Hillary Clinton that it produced during last year's presidential campaign.
Citizens United says it should not have to disclose who paid for the film.
Rather than decide the case before it, the court engaged in a remarkable exercise of judicial overreach. It postponed its decision, called for new briefs and scheduled a hearing this September on the broader question of whether corporations should be allowed to spend money to elect or defeat particular candidates.
What the court was saying is that it wanted to revisit a 19-year old precedent that barred such corporate interference in the electoral process. That 1990 ruling upheld what has been the law of the land since 1947, when the Taft-Hartley law banned independent expenditures by both corporations and labor unions.
To get a sense of just how extreme (and, yes, activist) such an approach would be, consider that laws restricting corporate activity in elections go all the way back to the Tillman Act of 1907, which prohibited corporations from giving directly to political campaigns.
It is truly frightening that a conservative Supreme Court is seriously considering overturning a century-old tradition at the very moment when the financial crisis has brought home the terrible effects of excessive corporate influence on politics.
In the deregulatory wave of the 1980s and '90s, Congress was clearly too solicitous to the demands of finance. Why take a step now that would give corporations even more opportunity to buy influence? With the political winds shifting, do conservatives on the court see an opportunity to fight the trends against their side by altering the very rules of the electoral game?
Such an "appalling" ruling, Schumer said in an interview, "would have more political significance than any case since Bush v. Gore." He added: "It would dramatically change America at a time when people are feeling that the special interests have too much influence and the middle class doesn't have enough. It would exacerbate both of these conditions."
So when conservatives try to paint Sotomayor as some sort of radical, consider that the real radicals are those who now hold a majority on the Supreme Court. In this battle, it is she, not her critics, who represents moderation and judicial restraint.
The Washington Post Writers GroupThose Who Live in Glass Courthouses by E.J. Dionne, Jr.The real radicals are those who hold a majority on the Supreme Court.Post Date July 13, 2009
WASHINGTON--This week's hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court represent the opening skirmish in a long-term struggle to challenge the escalating activism of an increasingly conservative judiciary.
The Senate's Republican minority does not expect to derail Sotomayor, who would be the first Hispanic and only the third woman to serve on the court, and they realize that their attack lines against her have failed to ignite public attention, or even much interest.
Her restrained record as a lower court judge has made it impossible to cast her credibly as a liberal judicial activist. "They haven't laid a glove on her," said Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., her leading Senate supporter.
Yet none of this diminishes the importance of the Senate drama that opens on Monday because the argument over the political and philosophical direction of the judiciary that began 40 years ago has reached a critical moment. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, conservatives have finally established a majority on the court that is beginning to work its will.
Republican Senators know that Sotomayor's accession to the court will not change this, since she is replacing Justice David Souter, a member of the court's liberal minority. But they want to use the hearings to paint the moderately liberal Sotomayor as, at best, the outer limit of what is acceptable on the bench in order to justify the new conservative activism that is about to become the rule.
"They have more or less given up on defeating her, so they are going to engage in a framing exercise," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview. "They're trying to define a Republican worldview imported into the judiciary as the judicial norm for the country."
Sponsored By:
The goal, Whitehouse added, "is to define the political ideology" of the new conservative judiciary as "representing the mainstream, and to tarnish any judges who are outside that mark."
If you wonder what judicial activism looks like, consider one of the court's final moves in its spring term.
The justices had before them a simple case that could have been disposed of on narrow grounds, involving a group called Citizens United. The organization had asked to be exempt from the restrictions embodied in the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law for a movie critical of Hillary Clinton that it produced during last year's presidential campaign.
Citizens United says it should not have to disclose who paid for the film.
Rather than decide the case before it, the court engaged in a remarkable exercise of judicial overreach. It postponed its decision, called for new briefs and scheduled a hearing this September on the broader question of whether corporations should be allowed to spend money to elect or defeat particular candidates.
What the court was saying is that it wanted to revisit a 19-year old precedent that barred such corporate interference in the electoral process. That 1990 ruling upheld what has been the law of the land since 1947, when the Taft-Hartley law banned independent expenditures by both corporations and labor unions.
To get a sense of just how extreme (and, yes, activist) such an approach would be, consider that laws restricting corporate activity in elections go all the way back to the Tillman Act of 1907, which prohibited corporations from giving directly to political campaigns.
It is truly frightening that a conservative Supreme Court is seriously considering overturning a century-old tradition at the very moment when the financial crisis has brought home the terrible effects of excessive corporate influence on politics.
In the deregulatory wave of the 1980s and '90s, Congress was clearly too solicitous to the demands of finance. Why take a step now that would give corporations even more opportunity to buy influence? With the political winds shifting, do conservatives on the court see an opportunity to fight the trends against their side by altering the very rules of the electoral game?
Such an "appalling" ruling, Schumer said in an interview, "would have more political significance than any case since Bush v. Gore." He added: "It would dramatically change America at a time when people are feeling that the special interests have too much influence and the middle class doesn't have enough. It would exacerbate both of these conditions."
So when conservatives try to paint Sotomayor as some sort of radical, consider that the real radicals are those who now hold a majority on the Supreme Court. In this battle, it is she, not her critics, who represents moderation and judicial restraint.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
A New Laptop
Fred Hudson is in the market for a home laptop computer. He is looking at a Dell 17" screen model and an HP 16.5" model. The issue is Dell vs. HP. Does anyone have an opinion?
About Those Old Songs
Every time I hear “Sylvia’s Mother” by Dr. Hook it’s all I can do not to cry. PLEASE MRS. AVERY—LET HIM TALK TO SYLVIA. HE’LL ONLY KEEP HER A WHILE. I KNOW YOU DON’T WANT SYLVIA TO START CRYING AGAIN AND SHE’S MARRYING A MAN DOWN GALVESTON WAY, BUT PLEASE PLEASE DEAR GOD MRS. AVERY LET HIM TALK TO HER. But no matter how many times I hear the song, the result is the same: Mrs. Avery refuses to let him talk to Sylvia (she's too busy to come to the phone), and the operator keeps wanting more money put into the pay phone (40 cents more for the next 3 minutes). Bad, bad MEAN mother.
Then there’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” I’ve read numerous commentaries on this song and I still haven’t come to any firm conclusions about its meaning. There was a girl in high school who told me the song reminded her of me. She told me this as we happened to walk out of chemistry class together. I don’t recall ever speaking to her again, and she left town the next summer. I’ve often wondered if there’s a connection. Maybe I broke her heart when I never spoke to her again. I don’t know whether this incident or the song itself is more peculiar.
Every time I hear “Elinor Rigby” I get goose bumps thinking about Father McKenzie wiping his hands as he walks from the grave (no one was saved). All the lonely people. I’ve always thought that Father McKenzie and Elinor had something illicit going but then something bad happened. If I ever meet Paul McCartney I mean to ask him.
Then there’s “Honey” by Bobby Goldsboro. I was told by another girl in high school that Honey didn’t die; she just went away. I’ve gone with that interpretation for 40 years now.
I hear Mick Jagger sing “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need,” and I agree.
Then there’s that immortal question of why Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge. And what were he and the girl throwing off the bridge? I’ve always thought he jumped because he got cut from the football team. You know how Southerners are about football.
I admit I play the music too loud in my car. The windows vibrate and I’m sure I’m heard a mile away even with the windows rolled up. At least I don’t do rap. But I do sometimes start crying uncontrollably. If not “Sylvia’s Mother” then maybe “Last Kiss” or “Last Date” or “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose it’s Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight.” The answer is YES: it does lose its flavor.
Then there’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” I’ve read numerous commentaries on this song and I still haven’t come to any firm conclusions about its meaning. There was a girl in high school who told me the song reminded her of me. She told me this as we happened to walk out of chemistry class together. I don’t recall ever speaking to her again, and she left town the next summer. I’ve often wondered if there’s a connection. Maybe I broke her heart when I never spoke to her again. I don’t know whether this incident or the song itself is more peculiar.
Every time I hear “Elinor Rigby” I get goose bumps thinking about Father McKenzie wiping his hands as he walks from the grave (no one was saved). All the lonely people. I’ve always thought that Father McKenzie and Elinor had something illicit going but then something bad happened. If I ever meet Paul McCartney I mean to ask him.
Then there’s “Honey” by Bobby Goldsboro. I was told by another girl in high school that Honey didn’t die; she just went away. I’ve gone with that interpretation for 40 years now.
I hear Mick Jagger sing “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need,” and I agree.
Then there’s that immortal question of why Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge. And what were he and the girl throwing off the bridge? I’ve always thought he jumped because he got cut from the football team. You know how Southerners are about football.
I admit I play the music too loud in my car. The windows vibrate and I’m sure I’m heard a mile away even with the windows rolled up. At least I don’t do rap. But I do sometimes start crying uncontrollably. If not “Sylvia’s Mother” then maybe “Last Kiss” or “Last Date” or “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose it’s Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight.” The answer is YES: it does lose its flavor.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Those good family values Republicans
Now come stunning revelations about Republican Sen. John Ensign of Nevada. Don't you just love those family values Republicans! The Republican Party is ROTTEN TO THE CORE.
The Truth about Palin will Eventually Surface
from Andrew Sullivan
09 Jul 2009 12:17 am
It Has Nothing To Do With Legal Expenses
Like we didn't know that already. First Palin lied by talking about millions of legal expenses incurred by the state; now she's lying by pretending that the salaries of state lawyers wouldn't be paid anyway; and she lied about the major lawsuit costs, which she initiated. At some point, the real reason for her abrupt departure will emerge. But not after the usual avalanche of disprovable lies that she routinely provides.
On the reporting front, I'm doing what I can to prod MSM journalists to actually do their jobs. But they refused all last fall and it's uphill work now. It may require a real news organization, like TMZ or the Daily Show. If Palin were a Democrat, the Drudge Report would have cracked this open last September. So we wait
09 Jul 2009 12:17 am
It Has Nothing To Do With Legal Expenses
Like we didn't know that already. First Palin lied by talking about millions of legal expenses incurred by the state; now she's lying by pretending that the salaries of state lawyers wouldn't be paid anyway; and she lied about the major lawsuit costs, which she initiated. At some point, the real reason for her abrupt departure will emerge. But not after the usual avalanche of disprovable lies that she routinely provides.
On the reporting front, I'm doing what I can to prod MSM journalists to actually do their jobs. But they refused all last fall and it's uphill work now. It may require a real news organization, like TMZ or the Daily Show. If Palin were a Democrat, the Drudge Report would have cracked this open last September. So we wait
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Ron Rash - Chemistry and Other Stories
I continue my Ron Rash (Serena) reading with this collection of his short stories. After reading John Updike's last collection I've been into short fiction these days.
Rash writes of the Applachian region of the South, not much different from Alabama. The people and issues seem much the same. He writes mainly of average poor people struggling within the confines of their situations.
We're talking about people who hunt and go fishing, who live in trailers, and who deal with issues carried on from both their personal and collective past: people who have one foot in the present trying to dealing with modernity but whose minds are usually somewhere in the past.
This is a nifty short story collection for readers of Southern literature, and that is certainly me.
Rash writes of the Applachian region of the South, not much different from Alabama. The people and issues seem much the same. He writes mainly of average poor people struggling within the confines of their situations.
We're talking about people who hunt and go fishing, who live in trailers, and who deal with issues carried on from both their personal and collective past: people who have one foot in the present trying to dealing with modernity but whose minds are usually somewhere in the past.
This is a nifty short story collection for readers of Southern literature, and that is certainly me.
Monday, July 6, 2009
A Statement of Progressivism
July 6, 2009
by Michael Lux
As I have written before, nothing makes me happier in politics than being attacked, because you know by the reaction you are getting that you have hit paydirt with what you are doing. When Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) took the ideas from my book The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be and used them in a floor speech in Congress, and the reaction from far-right-wing Congressman Steve King from Iowa was a bitter, rambling tirade about socialism, I knew we were winning the argument. And yesterday, when my post about the July 4th holiday being the embodiment of the progressive values of equality and democracy, three different conservative bloggers (here, here and here) saw fit to attack. That's a very good sign.
What bothers these conservatives so much is the idea that progressive values are at the heart of the American idea. They love wrapping themselves in the flag, and going on and on about the founding fathers, and really hate the idea that anyone else might lay claim to that history. Their arguments- that the issues were very different then, that classical liberalism has a different definition than modern liberalism, that American revolutionaries must have hated big government because they hated King George, etc.- mask the fact that the fault lines in American history, from 1776 on, have always been about expanding equality and democracy, and that progressive-minded thinkers have always been for that, and conservatives have always been against it.
Conservatives have always argued that tradition should be revered and change should be feared. They have always argued that too much democracy is a dangerous thing. They have always opposed expanding the idea of equality- to blacks and women and the poor, to immigrants and migrant workers, now to GLBT individuals. They have always argued these things, and they still do. And progressives from Jefferson and Paine to those of today have always fought for more democracy, more equality of opportunity, more investment in regular people as opposed to giving everything to the elite and letting them run things.
When Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, he argued that this nation was "dedicated o the proposition that all men are created equal" and that our government was founded on the idea that it should be "of the people, by the people, for the people." His speech stirred great controversy at the time with conservatives outraged at the idea that, as the Chicago Times editorialized, Lincoln "misstated the cause for which they died and libel the statesmen who founded the government." Those ideas of equality before the law and equality of opportunity for all of us, of government of, by, and for the people instead of government of, by, and for the wealthy elites have always been progressive ideals, and will always be opposed by conservatives.
by Michael Lux
As I have written before, nothing makes me happier in politics than being attacked, because you know by the reaction you are getting that you have hit paydirt with what you are doing. When Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) took the ideas from my book The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be and used them in a floor speech in Congress, and the reaction from far-right-wing Congressman Steve King from Iowa was a bitter, rambling tirade about socialism, I knew we were winning the argument. And yesterday, when my post about the July 4th holiday being the embodiment of the progressive values of equality and democracy, three different conservative bloggers (here, here and here) saw fit to attack. That's a very good sign.
What bothers these conservatives so much is the idea that progressive values are at the heart of the American idea. They love wrapping themselves in the flag, and going on and on about the founding fathers, and really hate the idea that anyone else might lay claim to that history. Their arguments- that the issues were very different then, that classical liberalism has a different definition than modern liberalism, that American revolutionaries must have hated big government because they hated King George, etc.- mask the fact that the fault lines in American history, from 1776 on, have always been about expanding equality and democracy, and that progressive-minded thinkers have always been for that, and conservatives have always been against it.
Conservatives have always argued that tradition should be revered and change should be feared. They have always argued that too much democracy is a dangerous thing. They have always opposed expanding the idea of equality- to blacks and women and the poor, to immigrants and migrant workers, now to GLBT individuals. They have always argued these things, and they still do. And progressives from Jefferson and Paine to those of today have always fought for more democracy, more equality of opportunity, more investment in regular people as opposed to giving everything to the elite and letting them run things.
When Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, he argued that this nation was "dedicated o the proposition that all men are created equal" and that our government was founded on the idea that it should be "of the people, by the people, for the people." His speech stirred great controversy at the time with conservatives outraged at the idea that, as the Chicago Times editorialized, Lincoln "misstated the cause for which they died and libel the statesmen who founded the government." Those ideas of equality before the law and equality of opportunity for all of us, of government of, by, and for the people instead of government of, by, and for the wealthy elites have always been progressive ideals, and will always be opposed by conservatives.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Another Take on the Movie
Here is another take on the movie. As a history major, I am always interested in the historicity of a film like this. Despite the historical liberties taken in the movie, I liked it!
HOME / life and art: What really happened.
The Real John DillingerIs Public Enemies historically accurate?By Elliott J. GornPosted Wednesday, July 1, 2009, at 7:38 PM ET
Johnny Depp as John Dillinger in Public EnemiesDid FBI agents shoot and kill John Dillinger on the streets of Chicago on July 22, 1934? Or was it the cops from East Chicago who fired the fatal rounds, the very officers who later received the reward money? Did the famous bank robber pull his gun at the last moment, as the feds maintained? Or were the eyewitnesses, who said they saw no weapon, telling the truth? Did he die with a mere $7 in his pocket, proof of J. Edgar Hoover's mantra that crime does not pay? Or was he wearing a very full money belt and an expensive ruby ring, as the Indiana bandit's sister claimed as long as she lived?
Much of the Dillinger story is simply unknowable. To this day, some maintain that it wasn't John Dillinger but a look-alike who died on that steamy night in Chicago. Which is why it's something of a fool's errand to ask whether Michael Mann's Public Enemies, the new movie about John Dillinger, is true-to-life. But ask I will. Did Johnny D. portray Johnnie D. accurately? Is the action flick historically accurate?
The surfaces look good. Cars, clothes, guns, and buildings all appear to be of the right vintage, if a little clean and shiny for the worst year of the Great Depression. Chicago's Lincoln Avenue, where Dillinger died, was well-restored to 1934, and Mann filmed the outlaw's famous breakout from the Crown Point Indiana jail in that very building, which remains remarkably unchanged.
But then a lot of details are wrong. For example, the film opens on a bright, sunny day in 1933, with Dillinger blasting his friends out of the Indiana state penitentiary. Actually, it was cool and rainy for September, few shots were fired, and Dillinger wasn't there. (He managed to get guns smuggled in, but then his buddies were on their own.)
There are also larger problems with Public Enemies. In order to show Dillinger isolated and alone by the end of the movie, his accomplices—like Baby Face Nelson and Homer Van Meter—are killed too early. (Both actually died after Dillinger.) In fact, there is generally too much killing here. Dillinger's gang is responsible for the deaths of a dozen people, but the film makes it seem like many multiples of that number. During the entire yearlong spree between the summer of 1933 and summer 1934, Dillinger himself probably murdered just one man, but in Public Enemies, he is a killing machine.
Good historical movies can't be entirely accurate (though Hollywood publicists constantly invite us to hold them to that standard, hoping that we'll mistake verisimilitude for history). This particular film had two hours to tell a story that unfolded over the course of a
Public Enemies is so locked into its plot of a dedicated lawman (Special Agent Melvin Purvis, FBI, played by Christian Bale) pursuing a supercriminal that much is lost. We get a sense of the Bureau's methods, especially wiretaps and stakeouts, but not of how great sophistication in law-enforcement techniques went hand in hand with remarkable bungling.
At one critical moment in April 1934, for instance, officials failed to put up roadblocks around the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin, allowing the Dillinger gang to escape. This was not merely poor judgment, as Public Enemies implies. Wanting all of the credit and glory for his own organization, J. Edgar Hoover made it a policy to cooperate as little as possible with other law enforcement agencies. Lacking enough manpower of his own, Melvin Purvis could easily have asked local constabularies to guard the crossroads, but he knew that doing so meant crossing his boss.
And it is just plain wrong to have Purvis asking Hoover, as he does in the movie, to bring in several tough cops from Oklahoma and Texas to nail Dillinger. Hoover made that decision on his own because he questioned Purvis' competence. Although Purvis nominally remained in charge of the Chicago office, it was actually G-man Samuel Cowley who took the Dillinger investigation in hand during the final months and brought the Hoosier outlaw down.
Ultimately, Mann fails to capture the essence of the Dillinger story because Public Enemies is a gangster movie. The clothes the men wear, the scenes they inhabit, and the language they speak all resonate with that genre. Most of the action takes place in director Michael Mann's hometown, Chicago, and Mann again and again makes references to other gangster films. One can't look at his scenes shot in the lobby of Union Station or at the old financial district on La Salle Street and not think of The Untouchables.
In fact, Americans understood Dillinger, applauded him, and cheered for him because they saw him less as a gangster than as an outlaw—a social bandit of the Great Depression who turned his guns against the banks. Newspapermen in 1934 compared him to Jesse James, not Al Capone, and certainly not to mobster Frank Nitti, who makes strange, gratuitous appearances in Public Enemies. At one especially telling point in the movie, Purvis tells Dillinger that he is about to extradite him to Indiana. Dillinger thinks about it and says coolly, "Why? I have absolutely nothing I want to do in Indiana." It's a great scene, but the spirit of it is dead wrong. Not only is it wholly made up—the two never met—but Dillinger, a scrappy heartland renegade, would never have dismissed his home state.
Whether Public Enemies is a good film or not is for others to decide. And it certainly gives us a new spin on the old Dillinger legend. But I felt much more at home in the scruffy, low-budget 1973 movie Dillinger, directed by John Milius and starring Warren Oates. That movie was certainly less showy than this latest Hollywood version, but it made me feel in my gut that I understood something of the man, his legend, and his times.
HOME / life and art: What really happened.
The Real John DillingerIs Public Enemies historically accurate?By Elliott J. GornPosted Wednesday, July 1, 2009, at 7:38 PM ET
Johnny Depp as John Dillinger in Public EnemiesDid FBI agents shoot and kill John Dillinger on the streets of Chicago on July 22, 1934? Or was it the cops from East Chicago who fired the fatal rounds, the very officers who later received the reward money? Did the famous bank robber pull his gun at the last moment, as the feds maintained? Or were the eyewitnesses, who said they saw no weapon, telling the truth? Did he die with a mere $7 in his pocket, proof of J. Edgar Hoover's mantra that crime does not pay? Or was he wearing a very full money belt and an expensive ruby ring, as the Indiana bandit's sister claimed as long as she lived?
Much of the Dillinger story is simply unknowable. To this day, some maintain that it wasn't John Dillinger but a look-alike who died on that steamy night in Chicago. Which is why it's something of a fool's errand to ask whether Michael Mann's Public Enemies, the new movie about John Dillinger, is true-to-life. But ask I will. Did Johnny D. portray Johnnie D. accurately? Is the action flick historically accurate?
The surfaces look good. Cars, clothes, guns, and buildings all appear to be of the right vintage, if a little clean and shiny for the worst year of the Great Depression. Chicago's Lincoln Avenue, where Dillinger died, was well-restored to 1934, and Mann filmed the outlaw's famous breakout from the Crown Point Indiana jail in that very building, which remains remarkably unchanged.
But then a lot of details are wrong. For example, the film opens on a bright, sunny day in 1933, with Dillinger blasting his friends out of the Indiana state penitentiary. Actually, it was cool and rainy for September, few shots were fired, and Dillinger wasn't there. (He managed to get guns smuggled in, but then his buddies were on their own.)
There are also larger problems with Public Enemies. In order to show Dillinger isolated and alone by the end of the movie, his accomplices—like Baby Face Nelson and Homer Van Meter—are killed too early. (Both actually died after Dillinger.) In fact, there is generally too much killing here. Dillinger's gang is responsible for the deaths of a dozen people, but the film makes it seem like many multiples of that number. During the entire yearlong spree between the summer of 1933 and summer 1934, Dillinger himself probably murdered just one man, but in Public Enemies, he is a killing machine.
Good historical movies can't be entirely accurate (though Hollywood publicists constantly invite us to hold them to that standard, hoping that we'll mistake verisimilitude for history). This particular film had two hours to tell a story that unfolded over the course of a
Public Enemies is so locked into its plot of a dedicated lawman (Special Agent Melvin Purvis, FBI, played by Christian Bale) pursuing a supercriminal that much is lost. We get a sense of the Bureau's methods, especially wiretaps and stakeouts, but not of how great sophistication in law-enforcement techniques went hand in hand with remarkable bungling.
At one critical moment in April 1934, for instance, officials failed to put up roadblocks around the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin, allowing the Dillinger gang to escape. This was not merely poor judgment, as Public Enemies implies. Wanting all of the credit and glory for his own organization, J. Edgar Hoover made it a policy to cooperate as little as possible with other law enforcement agencies. Lacking enough manpower of his own, Melvin Purvis could easily have asked local constabularies to guard the crossroads, but he knew that doing so meant crossing his boss.
And it is just plain wrong to have Purvis asking Hoover, as he does in the movie, to bring in several tough cops from Oklahoma and Texas to nail Dillinger. Hoover made that decision on his own because he questioned Purvis' competence. Although Purvis nominally remained in charge of the Chicago office, it was actually G-man Samuel Cowley who took the Dillinger investigation in hand during the final months and brought the Hoosier outlaw down.
Ultimately, Mann fails to capture the essence of the Dillinger story because Public Enemies is a gangster movie. The clothes the men wear, the scenes they inhabit, and the language they speak all resonate with that genre. Most of the action takes place in director Michael Mann's hometown, Chicago, and Mann again and again makes references to other gangster films. One can't look at his scenes shot in the lobby of Union Station or at the old financial district on La Salle Street and not think of The Untouchables.
In fact, Americans understood Dillinger, applauded him, and cheered for him because they saw him less as a gangster than as an outlaw—a social bandit of the Great Depression who turned his guns against the banks. Newspapermen in 1934 compared him to Jesse James, not Al Capone, and certainly not to mobster Frank Nitti, who makes strange, gratuitous appearances in Public Enemies. At one especially telling point in the movie, Purvis tells Dillinger that he is about to extradite him to Indiana. Dillinger thinks about it and says coolly, "Why? I have absolutely nothing I want to do in Indiana." It's a great scene, but the spirit of it is dead wrong. Not only is it wholly made up—the two never met—but Dillinger, a scrappy heartland renegade, would never have dismissed his home state.
Whether Public Enemies is a good film or not is for others to decide. And it certainly gives us a new spin on the old Dillinger legend. But I felt much more at home in the scruffy, low-budget 1973 movie Dillinger, directed by John Milius and starring Warren Oates. That movie was certainly less showy than this latest Hollywood version, but it made me feel in my gut that I understood something of the man, his legend, and his times.
A Review of Public Enemies
Here is a fine review of the movie from the New Republic, a political site and not normally a movie review site. It addresses some of my historical questions.
'Public Enemies': Johnny Depp Is Magnetic As John Dillinger, But Will You Care When The Lights Come Back On?by Christopher Orr
It's taken countless hours of TV crime-drama ("Crime Story," "Miami Vice") and nearly a dozen feature films (Heat, Collateral, Miami Vice again), but in John Dillinger, Michael Mann may finally have found an ideal vessel for his particular vision of masculine cool: stylish, charismatic, unflappable, adept at violence but not hungry for it.
After spending nine years in prison for his rookie robbery (a grocery-store heist that allegedly netted him $50), Dillinger emerged in May 1933 to launch perhaps the most storied crime spree in American history. Over the subsequent 14 months, he was involved in three daring prison breaks, dozens of bank robberies, the theft of weaponry from multiple police stations, and the deaths of several law enforcement agents. In 1934, the FBI reportedly spent a third of its entire budget trying to apprehend him. He was as famous as FDR and Charles Lindbergh--and, by most accounts, more popular than either. If John Dillinger had not existed, in other words, Michael Mann would have had to invent him.
Loosely based on Bryan Burrough's book, Mann's Public Enemies takes plenty of historical liberties. The prison break that opens the film is an amalgam of two separate escapes, for instance, and while contemporaries Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum) and Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) pre-decease Dillinger (Johnny Depp) in the film, in reality the FBI ushered him to the other side before it did them. But the bones of the story are all here, and Mann buffs them to a characteristic polish.
Depp is sly and magnetic, playing Dillinger as a man of casual irony in an era not yet accustomed to it. When his squeeze-to-be Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) reveals her Native-American ancestry, noting that "most men don't like it," Dillinger is succinct: "I'm not most men." Later, when she protests she doesn't know him, he explains, "I like baseball, movies, nice clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you. What else do you need to know?" His grandiose boasts are also self-deprecations: He knows he's a showoff, and he needs her to know that he knows.
In classic form, though, Dillinger's true life partner is not Billie, but the G-man sworn to hunt him down, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the yang to his yin. Though characteristically closed off, Bale's performance is nonetheless effective. For once he does not try to overwhelm us with the intensity of his craft but instead allows the film to come to him. In contrast to the exuberant Dillinger, we're given no sign that Purvis enjoys his life outside of work, or, indeed, that he has one. Instead, he boasts of the FBI's modern, "scientific" techniques as he rallies the embryonic army of J. Edgar Hoover behind him. Having earlier this summer played last-hope-for-humanity John Connor in Terminator: Salvation, Bale finds himself this time on the side of the Machine--and frankly it suits him.
If Depp and Bale provide enough masculine good looks for a spring catalogue, it may be a lucky thing. The rest of the cast is made up mostly of men with thick faces and big hands, a Midwestern menagerie of the swollen and surly. One of the best scenes in the film takes place after Purvis informs Hoover (Billy Crudup, feigning jowls) that the handsome young college graduates whom the latter favors for the Bureau are not up to the task of apprehending killers. In response, Hoover sends him, from Texas and Oklahoma, a handful of hardened mugs, in the most literal sense of the term. We see them arrive on a train, and it's scarcely an exaggeration to note that their faces could have stopped it. (Among them is Agent Winstead, played by Actor's Studio co-artistic director Stephen Lang, who mesmerizes in the small but crucial role.)
Sponsored By:
The robbers and the cops hopscotch their way across flyover country--Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, South Dakota--with brief jaunts to Miami and Tucson. They cross paths frequently, and when they do, the encounters inevitably prove lethal. Mann's direction of these sequences is crisp, fluid, and blessedly devoid of the ADHD editing so much in vogue these days. If there is a complaint to be made, it is that the film provides too much of a good thing: Gunfire is exchanged on daylight streets and in moonlit forests, from doorways and second-floor windows, between careening automobiles. By its conclusion, Public Enemies may have exhausted not only your appetite for the rat-a-tat-tat of Tommy Guns, but also for anything even resembling that staccato beat: corn popping, tap dancing, you name it. I, at least, could have done with one fewer shootout--but then, so, too, could have John Dillinger.
A deeper problem is depth--or, rather, the lack of it. Mann is an exceptional surveyor of surfaces--the glinting chrome of getaway cars, the dark steel of the Thompson, the smart suits and period sunglasses and Deppish cheekbones--but he declines to pry beneath. His Dillinger has no backstory, no subtext, no real psychology, and while this is in some ways a relief (we're spared, for instance, the tedious Freudian lessons about absent parents that characterized The Aviator), it is also a limitation. What happened to Dillinger in prison that turned a petty thief into perhaps the most famous criminal of the century? Where is the avowed bitterness and rage that drove him to his deadly exploits? In another movie, evidently. In this one, he is merely the Dillinger of popular myth, the handsome charmer out to have a good time--and, while baseball and movies may be affordable, those nice clothes and fast cars require the kind of money you can only find in a bank.
Other themes, as well, are glossed without being enriched. Now would have been an interesting moment, for instance, to unpack Dillinger the Depression-era folk hero, whose popularity owed much to the fact that his most conspicuous victims were the very institutions that were busily foreclosing on homes and farms across the country. But apart from an onscreen announcement at the opening of the film, Mann offers very little sign that the Depression has even taken place.
The director merely hints, too, at the idea that Dillinger and his ilk were squeezed out by the rise in his chosen profession of economies of scale, his anarchic criminal individualism caught between the expanding reach of the mob syndicates and the growing power of the Feds. But Mann is not by temperament a philosophical, or even psychological, director: He doesn't much care why Dillinger did what he did, or what it meant for the country, as long as he looked good while doing it.
In accordance with this appreciation of the cinematic, the one thread that Mann does repeatedly tug is the link between the celebrity criminals and their Hollywood cousins. Early on, when one of Dillinger's hoods tells a bank teller they've taken hostage, "You know, when I'm not doing this, I'm a scout for the movies," she believes him. And why not? These "public enemies" are also public stars. In one scene, Dillinger is at the movies when the opening newsreel flashes his portrait and instructs audience members to scan the theater to make sure the wanted man isn't present--a personal transcendence of onscreen and off. And, of course, there is that final night, at the Biograph Theater, when one of the last things his living eyes behold is the Clark Gable gangster flick Manhattan Melodrama, a film whose parallels with Dillinger's own story Mann is not shy to highlight. (In their very next movie, The Thin Man, released just weeks later, stars William Powell and Myrna Loy and director W.S. Van Dyke would team again to domesticate the world of crime, offering the cool without the carnage.)
Moments after the curtains fall at the Biograph, it's curtains, too, for Dillinger: What better way to conclude a movie about outlaw glamour? Public Enemies is a sharp, diverting entertainment but it is not, in the end, a particularly rich or memorable one. It's more than enough, though, for these hazy days of summer. Or, as Dillinger himself reminds a fretting gang member, "We're having a good time today. We ain't thinking about the future."
'Public Enemies': Johnny Depp Is Magnetic As John Dillinger, But Will You Care When The Lights Come Back On?by Christopher Orr
It's taken countless hours of TV crime-drama ("Crime Story," "Miami Vice") and nearly a dozen feature films (Heat, Collateral, Miami Vice again), but in John Dillinger, Michael Mann may finally have found an ideal vessel for his particular vision of masculine cool: stylish, charismatic, unflappable, adept at violence but not hungry for it.
After spending nine years in prison for his rookie robbery (a grocery-store heist that allegedly netted him $50), Dillinger emerged in May 1933 to launch perhaps the most storied crime spree in American history. Over the subsequent 14 months, he was involved in three daring prison breaks, dozens of bank robberies, the theft of weaponry from multiple police stations, and the deaths of several law enforcement agents. In 1934, the FBI reportedly spent a third of its entire budget trying to apprehend him. He was as famous as FDR and Charles Lindbergh--and, by most accounts, more popular than either. If John Dillinger had not existed, in other words, Michael Mann would have had to invent him.
Loosely based on Bryan Burrough's book, Mann's Public Enemies takes plenty of historical liberties. The prison break that opens the film is an amalgam of two separate escapes, for instance, and while contemporaries Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum) and Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) pre-decease Dillinger (Johnny Depp) in the film, in reality the FBI ushered him to the other side before it did them. But the bones of the story are all here, and Mann buffs them to a characteristic polish.
Depp is sly and magnetic, playing Dillinger as a man of casual irony in an era not yet accustomed to it. When his squeeze-to-be Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) reveals her Native-American ancestry, noting that "most men don't like it," Dillinger is succinct: "I'm not most men." Later, when she protests she doesn't know him, he explains, "I like baseball, movies, nice clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you. What else do you need to know?" His grandiose boasts are also self-deprecations: He knows he's a showoff, and he needs her to know that he knows.
In classic form, though, Dillinger's true life partner is not Billie, but the G-man sworn to hunt him down, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the yang to his yin. Though characteristically closed off, Bale's performance is nonetheless effective. For once he does not try to overwhelm us with the intensity of his craft but instead allows the film to come to him. In contrast to the exuberant Dillinger, we're given no sign that Purvis enjoys his life outside of work, or, indeed, that he has one. Instead, he boasts of the FBI's modern, "scientific" techniques as he rallies the embryonic army of J. Edgar Hoover behind him. Having earlier this summer played last-hope-for-humanity John Connor in Terminator: Salvation, Bale finds himself this time on the side of the Machine--and frankly it suits him.
If Depp and Bale provide enough masculine good looks for a spring catalogue, it may be a lucky thing. The rest of the cast is made up mostly of men with thick faces and big hands, a Midwestern menagerie of the swollen and surly. One of the best scenes in the film takes place after Purvis informs Hoover (Billy Crudup, feigning jowls) that the handsome young college graduates whom the latter favors for the Bureau are not up to the task of apprehending killers. In response, Hoover sends him, from Texas and Oklahoma, a handful of hardened mugs, in the most literal sense of the term. We see them arrive on a train, and it's scarcely an exaggeration to note that their faces could have stopped it. (Among them is Agent Winstead, played by Actor's Studio co-artistic director Stephen Lang, who mesmerizes in the small but crucial role.)
Sponsored By:
The robbers and the cops hopscotch their way across flyover country--Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, South Dakota--with brief jaunts to Miami and Tucson. They cross paths frequently, and when they do, the encounters inevitably prove lethal. Mann's direction of these sequences is crisp, fluid, and blessedly devoid of the ADHD editing so much in vogue these days. If there is a complaint to be made, it is that the film provides too much of a good thing: Gunfire is exchanged on daylight streets and in moonlit forests, from doorways and second-floor windows, between careening automobiles. By its conclusion, Public Enemies may have exhausted not only your appetite for the rat-a-tat-tat of Tommy Guns, but also for anything even resembling that staccato beat: corn popping, tap dancing, you name it. I, at least, could have done with one fewer shootout--but then, so, too, could have John Dillinger.
A deeper problem is depth--or, rather, the lack of it. Mann is an exceptional surveyor of surfaces--the glinting chrome of getaway cars, the dark steel of the Thompson, the smart suits and period sunglasses and Deppish cheekbones--but he declines to pry beneath. His Dillinger has no backstory, no subtext, no real psychology, and while this is in some ways a relief (we're spared, for instance, the tedious Freudian lessons about absent parents that characterized The Aviator), it is also a limitation. What happened to Dillinger in prison that turned a petty thief into perhaps the most famous criminal of the century? Where is the avowed bitterness and rage that drove him to his deadly exploits? In another movie, evidently. In this one, he is merely the Dillinger of popular myth, the handsome charmer out to have a good time--and, while baseball and movies may be affordable, those nice clothes and fast cars require the kind of money you can only find in a bank.
Other themes, as well, are glossed without being enriched. Now would have been an interesting moment, for instance, to unpack Dillinger the Depression-era folk hero, whose popularity owed much to the fact that his most conspicuous victims were the very institutions that were busily foreclosing on homes and farms across the country. But apart from an onscreen announcement at the opening of the film, Mann offers very little sign that the Depression has even taken place.
The director merely hints, too, at the idea that Dillinger and his ilk were squeezed out by the rise in his chosen profession of economies of scale, his anarchic criminal individualism caught between the expanding reach of the mob syndicates and the growing power of the Feds. But Mann is not by temperament a philosophical, or even psychological, director: He doesn't much care why Dillinger did what he did, or what it meant for the country, as long as he looked good while doing it.
In accordance with this appreciation of the cinematic, the one thread that Mann does repeatedly tug is the link between the celebrity criminals and their Hollywood cousins. Early on, when one of Dillinger's hoods tells a bank teller they've taken hostage, "You know, when I'm not doing this, I'm a scout for the movies," she believes him. And why not? These "public enemies" are also public stars. In one scene, Dillinger is at the movies when the opening newsreel flashes his portrait and instructs audience members to scan the theater to make sure the wanted man isn't present--a personal transcendence of onscreen and off. And, of course, there is that final night, at the Biograph Theater, when one of the last things his living eyes behold is the Clark Gable gangster flick Manhattan Melodrama, a film whose parallels with Dillinger's own story Mann is not shy to highlight. (In their very next movie, The Thin Man, released just weeks later, stars William Powell and Myrna Loy and director W.S. Van Dyke would team again to domesticate the world of crime, offering the cool without the carnage.)
Moments after the curtains fall at the Biograph, it's curtains, too, for Dillinger: What better way to conclude a movie about outlaw glamour? Public Enemies is a sharp, diverting entertainment but it is not, in the end, a particularly rich or memorable one. It's more than enough, though, for these hazy days of summer. Or, as Dillinger himself reminds a fretting gang member, "We're having a good time today. We ain't thinking about the future."
Public Enemies
It's a good movie---certainly an entertaining summer movie. It will not make movie history, but I was entertained for 2 1/2 hours. What more do you want in July?
I never know how historical these movies are. The basic facts are correct I'm sure, but I don't know about all of the details.
Did the jail breaks really happen? Did most of his Dillinger's friends get killed before he did? What about his dying words?
One thing about this movie is that we all know how it's going to end---a sure matter of history. So there is no suspense here. Maybe that's why they had to add his supposed dying words.
The best acting performace is not Johnny Depp, but the guy who plays Agent Melvin Purvis. If there is an acting Academy Award nomination, he should get it.
See it to be pleasantly entertained and that's all.
I never know how historical these movies are. The basic facts are correct I'm sure, but I don't know about all of the details.
Did the jail breaks really happen? Did most of his Dillinger's friends get killed before he did? What about his dying words?
One thing about this movie is that we all know how it's going to end---a sure matter of history. So there is no suspense here. Maybe that's why they had to add his supposed dying words.
The best acting performace is not Johnny Depp, but the guy who plays Agent Melvin Purvis. If there is an acting Academy Award nomination, he should get it.
See it to be pleasantly entertained and that's all.
Nut Cases
It is the season of nut cases. Say what you will about Michael Jackson and his musical talent, the man was a weird nut case, and that is as nice as I can put it. My theory is that MJ remained juvenile all his life because he could never face reality as an adult. The same is true of Sarah Palin. The resigning Alaska Governor has her following and I say that the element of the Republican world that is infatuated with her are just as crazy as she is. Both Palin and Jackson are/were divorced from reality. Ultimately in this life reality eventually wins out every time. It happened with Jackson with his untimely end, and it will eventually happen to Caribou Barbie too unless she fools enough people to do real damage to the country as she has already done damage to her state.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
We Will Know Soon
Is Sarah Palin really as stupid as she comes across? Apparently so. Why did she resign? According to Paul Begala, we will eventually know the real reason, and probably very soon.
by Paul Begala
I wish Hunter S. Thompson had lived to see this.
As Hunter said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Sarah Palin makes Mark Foley, the congressman who sent filthy emails to pages look almost normal. She makes David Vitter, the senator who was hanging out with hookers, look almost boring. She makes Larry Craig, caught hitting on a cop in a men's room, look almost stable. She makes John Ensign, the senator who was having an affair with a staffer, look almost humdrum (and compared to the rest of the GOP whack-jobs, he is). And she makes Mark Sanford, the governor with the Latin lover, look positively predictable.
It was an almost impossible mission, but in resigning from office with 17 months to go in her first term, Sarah Palin has made herself the bull goose loony of the GOP.
Let's stipulate that if there is some heretofore unknown personal, medical or family crisis, this was the right move. But Gov. Palin didn't say anything like that. Her statement was incoherent, bizarre and juvenile. The text, as posted on Gov. Palin's official website (here), uses 2,549 words and 18 exclamation points. Lincoln freed the slaves with 719 words and nary an exclamation; Mr. Jefferson declared our independence in 1,322 words and, again, no exclamation points. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1,796 words -- still no exclamation points. Gov. Palin capitalized words at random - whole words, like "TO," "HELP," and "AND," and the first letter of "Troops."
Gov. Palin's official announcement that she is resigning as chief executive of the great state of Alaska had all the depth and gravitas of a 13-year-old's review of the Jonas Brothers' album on Facebook. She even quoted her parents' refrigerator magnet. (Note to self: if one of my kids becomes governor, throw away the refrigerator magnet that says: "Murray's Oyster Bar: We Shuck Em, You Suck Em!") She put her son's name in quotations marks. Why? Who knows. She writes, "I promised efficiencies and effectiveness!?" Was she exclaiming or questioning? I get it: both! And I don't even know what to make of a sentence that reads:
*((Gotta put First Things First))*
Ponder the fact that Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins publishing house is paying this, umm, writer $11 million for a book. Ponder that and say a prayer for Ms. Palin's editor.
I'm no latter-day Strunk & White, just a guy who was struck by Palin's spectacularly rambling and infantile prose. It bespeaks a rambling and infantile mind. But perhaps not. Perhaps this is all a ruse. Perhaps Gov. Palin wants us to believe she's an intellectual featherweight who is slightly shallower than an actor on High School Musical. Maybe she's trying to throw us off the trail.
Naah. A lot of people thought that about George W. Bush. He couldn't be so block-headed, they said. He couldn't be as childish and churlish as he came off. Oh yes he could. And so, too, might Ms. Palin be as vapid and puerile as her inane statement suggests.
We will know. In the fullness of time (and I predict, not much time) we will know. Again and again in her statement, Gov. Palin returned to the nettlesome ethics inquiries that have been visited upon her since she signed on to be John McCain's running mate. No doubt they are annoying. But does anyone believe that's why she's resigning? No, there's more to this story. And Ms. Palin's resignation only increases the chances that we will all know the rest of the story soon. Or, as she might put it:
We will all KNOW the "rest of the Story" *((SOON!))*
by Paul Begala
I wish Hunter S. Thompson had lived to see this.
As Hunter said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Sarah Palin makes Mark Foley, the congressman who sent filthy emails to pages look almost normal. She makes David Vitter, the senator who was hanging out with hookers, look almost boring. She makes Larry Craig, caught hitting on a cop in a men's room, look almost stable. She makes John Ensign, the senator who was having an affair with a staffer, look almost humdrum (and compared to the rest of the GOP whack-jobs, he is). And she makes Mark Sanford, the governor with the Latin lover, look positively predictable.
It was an almost impossible mission, but in resigning from office with 17 months to go in her first term, Sarah Palin has made herself the bull goose loony of the GOP.
Let's stipulate that if there is some heretofore unknown personal, medical or family crisis, this was the right move. But Gov. Palin didn't say anything like that. Her statement was incoherent, bizarre and juvenile. The text, as posted on Gov. Palin's official website (here), uses 2,549 words and 18 exclamation points. Lincoln freed the slaves with 719 words and nary an exclamation; Mr. Jefferson declared our independence in 1,322 words and, again, no exclamation points. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1,796 words -- still no exclamation points. Gov. Palin capitalized words at random - whole words, like "TO," "HELP," and "AND," and the first letter of "Troops."
Gov. Palin's official announcement that she is resigning as chief executive of the great state of Alaska had all the depth and gravitas of a 13-year-old's review of the Jonas Brothers' album on Facebook. She even quoted her parents' refrigerator magnet. (Note to self: if one of my kids becomes governor, throw away the refrigerator magnet that says: "Murray's Oyster Bar: We Shuck Em, You Suck Em!") She put her son's name in quotations marks. Why? Who knows. She writes, "I promised efficiencies and effectiveness!?" Was she exclaiming or questioning? I get it: both! And I don't even know what to make of a sentence that reads:
*((Gotta put First Things First))*
Ponder the fact that Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins publishing house is paying this, umm, writer $11 million for a book. Ponder that and say a prayer for Ms. Palin's editor.
I'm no latter-day Strunk & White, just a guy who was struck by Palin's spectacularly rambling and infantile prose. It bespeaks a rambling and infantile mind. But perhaps not. Perhaps this is all a ruse. Perhaps Gov. Palin wants us to believe she's an intellectual featherweight who is slightly shallower than an actor on High School Musical. Maybe she's trying to throw us off the trail.
Naah. A lot of people thought that about George W. Bush. He couldn't be so block-headed, they said. He couldn't be as childish and churlish as he came off. Oh yes he could. And so, too, might Ms. Palin be as vapid and puerile as her inane statement suggests.
We will know. In the fullness of time (and I predict, not much time) we will know. Again and again in her statement, Gov. Palin returned to the nettlesome ethics inquiries that have been visited upon her since she signed on to be John McCain's running mate. No doubt they are annoying. But does anyone believe that's why she's resigning? No, there's more to this story. And Ms. Palin's resignation only increases the chances that we will all know the rest of the story soon. Or, as she might put it:
We will all KNOW the "rest of the Story" *((SOON!))*
Friday, July 3, 2009
About Palin
Here is the real deal. This Sarah Palin is the touchstone as far as I am concerned. I DESPISE and LOATHE this woman. If you agree with me, then we are on the same page. If you disagree, then you and I have NOTHING to talk about. If you love Palin, then don't bother me ever again.
Palin
I just heard that Palin resigned as Governor of Alaska. What scandal is she running from? Or is it that she's just not fit to even be a governor much less VP (as John McCain recklessly tried to foist on us). Here is what Andrew Sullivan has to say.
The Miniseries Ends
I guessed right, which I suppose reflects just how much time I've spent trying to figure what goes on in her head. I think the simple truth is that, as even Alaskan Republicans told us last September, she was far from able to be governor of Alaska, let alone vice-president of the United States. Once the klieglights hit, it was only a matter of time before she imploded or exploded or some gruesome combination of the two. The librul media will be blamed for everything on her inexorable path to becoming a Fox News celebrity. Maybe a reality show?
Someone hire her for The View!
In the end, I think, the one thing to say is that the Republican party is in such a total state of collapse and incoherence that it actually believed she could be a future president; and that John McCain was so reckless, so cynical and so cavalier that he was prepared to rest the national security of this country on her shoulders if he, in his seventies, were to become unable to fulfill his duties or die. In some ways, this is a moment to reflect on McCain, and his irresponsibility, not Palin and her drama.
I'm too stunned to say anything else, to tell you the truth. And yet not surprised at all.
The Miniseries Ends
I guessed right, which I suppose reflects just how much time I've spent trying to figure what goes on in her head. I think the simple truth is that, as even Alaskan Republicans told us last September, she was far from able to be governor of Alaska, let alone vice-president of the United States. Once the klieglights hit, it was only a matter of time before she imploded or exploded or some gruesome combination of the two. The librul media will be blamed for everything on her inexorable path to becoming a Fox News celebrity. Maybe a reality show?
Someone hire her for The View!
In the end, I think, the one thing to say is that the Republican party is in such a total state of collapse and incoherence that it actually believed she could be a future president; and that John McCain was so reckless, so cynical and so cavalier that he was prepared to rest the national security of this country on her shoulders if he, in his seventies, were to become unable to fulfill his duties or die. In some ways, this is a moment to reflect on McCain, and his irresponsibility, not Palin and her drama.
I'm too stunned to say anything else, to tell you the truth. And yet not surprised at all.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
David Denby on Faulkner
June 22, 2009
Books, Interrupted: David Denby Stares Down Faulkner
The fourth offering in an ongoing series on failed reading projects.
I like difficult modernist fictions—late Henry James, Joyce, Proust. But I have never been able to read Faulkner, whose difficulties wear me out before capturing my imagination. How can one understand the first section of “The Sound and the Fury”—an odd, fragmented narrative told from the point of view of the retarded Benjy—without reading the rest of the novel? You almost have to read it backward in order to read it forward, and I don’t have the interest to make that journey, or to get into “Light in August,” which my wife, Susan Rieger, tells me goes easily and well once one overcomes the initial strangeness. So: A clear reading failure. Part of the reason for it, I admit, is regional prejudice: I’m not much held, as a subject, by the collapsing morale of formerly “aristocratic” slave-holding families in Mississippi.
But now, a minor redemption: Last weekend, in order to prove to myself that I couldn’t read Faulkner, I read some Faulkner. I read the celebrated short novel, ‘The Bear,’ from the collection “Go Down, Moses,” and it’s obvious, from the first rhapsodic pages, that “The Bear” is a great work. Yes, there are passages of inflationary rant, propelled by Faulkner’s patented repetitions and sonorous echoes—“the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules” What are “immitigable rules,” anyway? Still, there’s amazement enough in the evocation of what a young boy has to do truly to possess the wilderness; the re-creation of dogs, a snake, the great bear itself; the alarming, encrusted vividness of old hunters, cooks, alcoholic roughnecks. So, a great writer—I guess. Perhaps I should try “As I Lay Dying” again.
Books, Interrupted: David Denby Stares Down Faulkner
The fourth offering in an ongoing series on failed reading projects.
I like difficult modernist fictions—late Henry James, Joyce, Proust. But I have never been able to read Faulkner, whose difficulties wear me out before capturing my imagination. How can one understand the first section of “The Sound and the Fury”—an odd, fragmented narrative told from the point of view of the retarded Benjy—without reading the rest of the novel? You almost have to read it backward in order to read it forward, and I don’t have the interest to make that journey, or to get into “Light in August,” which my wife, Susan Rieger, tells me goes easily and well once one overcomes the initial strangeness. So: A clear reading failure. Part of the reason for it, I admit, is regional prejudice: I’m not much held, as a subject, by the collapsing morale of formerly “aristocratic” slave-holding families in Mississippi.
But now, a minor redemption: Last weekend, in order to prove to myself that I couldn’t read Faulkner, I read some Faulkner. I read the celebrated short novel, ‘The Bear,’ from the collection “Go Down, Moses,” and it’s obvious, from the first rhapsodic pages, that “The Bear” is a great work. Yes, there are passages of inflationary rant, propelled by Faulkner’s patented repetitions and sonorous echoes—“the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules” What are “immitigable rules,” anyway? Still, there’s amazement enough in the evocation of what a young boy has to do truly to possess the wilderness; the re-creation of dogs, a snake, the great bear itself; the alarming, encrusted vividness of old hunters, cooks, alcoholic roughnecks. So, a great writer—I guess. Perhaps I should try “As I Lay Dying” again.
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