The University of New Hampshire is pleased to welcome Vice President
Biden to campus Monday, April 4, 2011, at 11:30 a.m. in the Memorial
Union Building's Granite State Room. This is a small ticketed event for
university students and other guests; it is not open to the public and
invitations will go out via e-mail Thursday, March 31, 2011.
My invitation was sent at 1pm, and invited an RSVP at a website.
By the time I clicked over at 1:07, the event was full. A waiting
list was offered and (why not) I entered my name thereupon.
Vice President Biden will be appearing with Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan, speaking on the topic of violence against women on campus.
Fearless predictions: (a) they'll both be against it, and (b) they'll
assert that Your Federal Government has some sort of shiny new role to play
in decreasing it.
While I'm at it, the announcement page has some amusement:
UNH also has a nationally and internationally recognized Bringing in the
Bystander™ program, which has two components: A Prevention Workshop
for Establishing a Community of Responsibility™ in-person program and
the Know-Your-Power™ social marketing campaign.
Yes, that's three trademark symbols in a single sentence. Woe
betide the foolish feminist tempted to filch these phrases for her own
use!
NH Senator Jeanne Shaheen has been keeping a pretty
low profile, but occasionally sticks her head up a bit
so that
Drew
Cline can play Whac-A-Mole:
Gasoline and crude oil prices are up, which means Jeanne Shaheen is back
to bashing speculators again.
Blaming speculators for high prices is much like blaming wet streets
for rain. As always, it's difficult to pick which is worse: whether
Senator Shaheen actually believes the nonsense she's spouting,
or whether she doesn't.
'Twas brilliant when it was mere text. But if you're one
of those tl;dr
folks, Bill Whittle put Iowahawk to video:
We're headed for fiscal disaster, but that's no reason not to grab chuckles
where and when you can.
This is really two movies: a funny, clever one about
an unlikely romantic
relationship and tolerance. But about halfway through
it turns into a dreadfully sentimental and manipulative
melodrama. I can't remember the last time a movie whipsawed
me like this. Maybe never.
Khan is a Muslim from India, immigrating to the US after the death
of his beloved, protecting mother. He has Asperger's syndrome,
but (nevertheless) manages to function reasonably well in a job
set up by his brother: selling
women's beauty products to salons in the San Francisco area.
One day he meets the lovely Mandira, a Hindu single mom, and
is smitten. Romance develops, and then…
Well, 9/11 happens. Khan and Mandira, and Mandira's son,
are soon subjected to the true face of American bigotry
and xenophobia, culminating in a shocking act of violence
that drives Khan and Mandira apart. Which sets Khan on a quest—I am not
making this up—to confront President George W. Bush
and tell him that he (Khan) is not a terrorist.
This could have worked. But the red flags start going up
when a skinny black kid starts singing, uninvited, "We Shall Overcome"
when Khan speaks in the church of a poor African American
community in the deep south. From then on, every time
you think the movie can't possibly
contrive to get any more sentimental,
you get hit in the face with yet another setup of
artificial mawkishness.
I gather Ms. Chua is a total bitch with her children, making them
finish homework before it's assigned, practice violin and piano 25 hours
a day, maintain a grade point average higher than Obama budget numbers,
and forbidding them from doing anything they might enjoy, such as
exhale.
But being a male parent with a typical dad-like involvement in my
children's lives--I know all of their names--I thought Battle
Hymn was great. That is, I thought it made me look great.
Not that I read the dreadful book, but I did buy each of my children a
copy and inscribed it, "So you think you've got it bad?" What
with three editions lying around because my kids would rather fool with
the Wii than read, I admit I gave in to the temptation to skim.
… you'll want to Read The Whole Thing.
In preparation for writing this year's Damn Big Check to My Federal
Government, it's always cheering to read something like this:
Congress has again failed to rid a temporary spending bill of language
forcing NASA to waste $1.4 million a day on its defunct Constellation
moon program.
The original culprit is a Republican, Senator Shelby of Alabama.
But he has way too many co-conspirators.
In related news, the great Kevin Williamson opines
on the tax code that has me writing that DBC mentioned above, while
(as a recent New York Times story revealed)
the General Electric corporation managed to pay zippo. Nada. Squat.
I'm the farthest thing imaginable from an eat-the-rich populist,
but c'mon. Williamson's conclusion:
The upside of the fiscal crisis that our country insists on
marching toward is that it will give us the opportunity to enact
radical reform of some of our most important institutions, and
the tax code should be high on the list. A federal/state/local
system that produces a $3.2 billion tax benefit for G.E. but
taxes the pants off of poor people to fund useless schools that
do their children very little good (and a great measure of harm,
in many cases) is an unbearable burden. It has to go.
That should be cut out and stuck to your refrigerator door. And
also to the foreheads of every Senator and CongressCritter.
If you never heard about the GE tax thing, by the way, it's probably because
your TV is stuck on stupidNBC
News. You should get that fixed.
I saw this book by Christopher Snowdon
favorably mentioned out there in one of the right-wing fever
swamps that I routinely visit. Since I knew that the library of the
University Near Here owned The Spirit Level (TSL from here
on), I suggested via
their online form that they pick this up as well. In order, primarily,
to give our local scholars a shot at seeing both sides of the inequality
debate.
Somewhat surprisingly, the library purchased it at my suggestion.
So I felt obligated to also read TSL
(which I would not ordinarily have bothered to do); if you missed
them, my TSL comments are here.
Summary: I wasn't impressed. Although I read Snowdon's book in parallel
with TSL, I tried to restrict myself to criticisms
I came up with independently.
Snowdon's book deals primarily with fact-checking (and mostly refuting)
many of TSL's arguments, although other works in
the same genre with similar theses are mentioned. Snowdon accuses TSL authors, Wilkinson and Pickett,
of assuming their conclusion (inequality causes
all sorts of bad stuff), then cherry-picking data that seem
to bear that out.
For example: when doing comparisons and correlations between "rich" nations,
Wilkinson and Pickett include Portugal (which isn't particularly rich),
but exclude Slovenia, Hong Kong, and Singapore (which are). Their
justification seems weak, and it just so happens that different
selections of countries can weaken or eliminate
a number of TSL's strong correlations between inequality and
various dysfunctions.
Similarly, in some cases, so-called "outliers" cause TSL
to conclude cause-and-effect. They graph homicide rate vs. inequality
and (no surprise), they spy a strong correlation. But this conclusion
relies heavily on the inclusion of Portugal and (unfortunately) the USA.
If you remove these two countries from the mix, the correlation
goes away, as does TSL's conclusion. It's not robust.
Some of the refutations don't require any heavy statistical lifting
whatsoever. For example, TSL correlated inequality
against the percentage of waste recycled; they use the resulting
regression
line to "demonstrate" that more-equal societies are more civic-minded.
But Snowdon argues (convincingly) that this just shows there are
two kinds of countries: those whose governments have set up
mandatory recycling laws, and those who haven't. People
aren't recycling more because they look around and don't see
a lot of income disparities; they recycle more because
they get fined if they get caught doing otherwise.
So I had a higher opinion of Snowdon's book than TSL, not
surprising given my general ideological slant. Readers should feel
free to make up their own minds, not that readers need me to tell them
to do that. If you don't want to shell out the bucks for one or both
books, you can get the flavor of the (ongoing) argument from duelling
websites: The Equality Trust from
Wilkinson/Pickett, and The Spirit Level
Delusion from Snowdown. Particularly interesting is Snowdon's
"Chapter 10", a freely-available PDF
addon to this book, a discussion of Wilkinson and Pickett's response
to criticisms of TSL.
Although I've been a Raymond Chandler fan since I was a kid, I've
been hit-or-miss on seeing movies based on his works. This 1944 effort
stars Dick Powell as Chandler's classic private eye character, Philip Marlowe.
The action starts when Moose Malloy, a dumb hulk just out of the
slammer, engages Marlowe to look for his pre-imprisonment sweetie,
Velma. An initial foray into the bar where Velma used to work ends
badly, but Marlowe tracks down the widow of the bar's previous
owner, who clearly has something to hide.
Seemingly (but of course, totally un-) coincidentally, a fop named
Mariott hires
Marlowe to accompany him on a payoff, attempting to buy back some
stolen jewelry for a lady friend. This also goes poorly, with
Marlowe getting knocked out and Mariott winding up dead.
Marlowe needs to solve this murder in order to avoid taking the
fall himself.
The plot is twisty, straying quite a bit from what I remember of the
book.
Dick Powell is pretty good with Chandlerian narrative. Example:
"It was a nice little front yard. Cozy, okay for the average family.
Only you'd need a compass to go to the mailbox. The house was all right,
too, but it wasn't as big as Buckingham Palace." Ah, I love that stuff.
But Marlowe
always struck me as an unflappable sort; Powell is too often flapped.
I caught something amusing at Amazon: Murder, My Sweet
is currently #31 on their bestselling list of "Child
Safety & First Aid" DVDs. (It's got a way to go before
beating On The Town with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, which is
#5 as I type.) Gee, I think some self-amused Amazonian might be gaming
that list…
Once in a blue moon, I try to read something out of my ideological
comfort zone. Gosh, hope I don't get converted! There was no danger
of that here, though.
The Spirit Level purports to show that high levels
of inequality make societies, and the individuals in them, worse
off. The authors (Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett)
allege that there is virtually no social problem that inequality
can't make worse. Inequality decreases life expectancy, increases infant
mortality, and (for those still
alive) causes all sorts of physical and mental maladies. It also causes
various types of social dysfunction: crime, teen pregnancy, bullying,
etc. People living in unequal societies tend to trust their
fellow citizens less, are less happy, and are less likely to improve
their lot. And on, and on.
These assertions are supported with many graphs showing the tight
correlation of social ills with an increasing Gini
coefficient. Country-by-country comparisons bear out the
authors' thesis; within the US, state-by-state statistics do the same.
If you click over to the Amazon page, you can read blurb after glowing
blurb about the wonderousness of this book. Customer reviews are also
very good.
And yet, The Spirit Level
was entirely unconvincing for me. It's hard to see how
it would be convincing to anyone who brings any healthy skepticism
to the table.
The major stumbling block was the book's handling of what I considered
to be an obvious question: is it inequality
causing these social woes, or is it (instead) poverty? This is not
a subtle issue. It shouldn't
be any surprise that being poor sucks in a major way, and poverty is
also (of course) well-associated with a raft of other
dysfunctionalities.
The book at least pretends to
deal with this objection early: Chapter 2 is titled
"Poverty or inequality?" The authors present a scatter plot
of an "Index of health and Social Problems" versus income inequality.
As expected, it shows a decent positive correlation.
So then they plot their "index" against some measure of
the poverty rate, correct?
No they do not. They plot their "index"
against "average income". And (surprise, surprise)
no evident correlation there.
But waaaaiit a minute….
It's not that the authors were unable to look at how
social ills and poverty are correlated. Those statistics
are pretty easy to find. There's even a site (www.cdnic.org) where
you can do some of these correlations between US states
yourself. And you'll find
that (for example) there is:
a strong negative correlation between
poverty rate and life expectancy;
a moderate positive correlation
between poverty rate and diabetes rate;
a moderate positive correlation
between poverty rate and adult obesity;
a moderate positive correlation
between poverty rate and infant mortality;
a moderate positive
correlation
between poverty rate and births to unmarried mothers;
a strong
positive correlation between poverty rate and teen-mother
birthrates;
a moderate positive correlation between poverty rate and
murder/manslaughter rate.
In other words, at least for US states, a lot of the ills described in
The Spirit Level are moderately-to-strongly correlated with
poverty.
(Aside: I should point out that "CDNIC" in the link above stands for
"Correlation Does Not Imply Causation", a good saying for everyone
to take to heart. Wikipedia has a page
devoted to this concept.)
So: does income inequality explain social ills better than poverty?
Or worse? I don't
know. But Wilkinson and Pickett don't dispose of that issue in their
Chapter 2, despite its title. That obvious
failure haunts the rest of the book.
There are a number of other problems, but I don't want to yammer on
forever. I'll just mention a few that stuck out:
There are a couple chapters devoted to crime and punishment.
Unsurprisingly, inequality is fingered as a culprit.
But—again, waitaminnit—US violent crime rates have been
on a long-term downward trend since 1993,
during which period (we're told) income
inequality increased significantly. That would appear to indicate
that the actual effect of inequality on crime, if any, is dwarfed by
other factors.
After building their case, the authors are noticeably flaky on any
actual reforms. They argue that any lasting changes
must be something that incoming legislatures can't undo. (After all,
you can make it legal to loot the rich, but it's just as easy
to make it illegal again.) They devote many pages to employee
stock-ownership schemes, trying to argue that it's a superior
form of business operation. And they would never let the CEO
be paid a zillion times more than the custodians, would they?
So problem solved!
Anyone who even skims the business news will recognize the
weakness of the employee-ownership argument. Do employee-owned firms outcompete
their peers? Evidence is (to put it mildly) weak; if they
did, wouldn't there be a lot more of them?
And their examples of employee-owned firms aren't persuasive.
The biggest US example is probably Hy-Vee, a Midwest supermarket
chain with about 55,000 employees. A couple of their
other examples are less successful: United Airlines, which
terminated its employee-ownership plan years ago, just before
falling into bankruptcy, leaving the "employee-owners" with a lot
of near-worthless stock. And Polaroid, whose employee ownership
did not prevent its woes either.
Finally: The authors combine their argument with
some standard environmental doomcrying
to argue for a "steady-state" economy. They ignore the massive statism
that would be required to pull something like that off, and handwave
away any possible negative effects.
But, notably, they do find one country that "manages to combine acceptable
living standards with a sustainable economy." This country "proves
it can be done."
Friends, I am not making this up: that country held up by Wilkinson
and Pickett as a shining
example is Cuba.
The Fighter got seven Oscar nominations (including Best Picture)
and won the two Best Supporting Actor awards. And, yes, it's very
good.
It's the based-on-actual-events story of boxer Micky Ward, and how
he duked his way into success out of
the mean streets of scenic Lowell, MA. Along the way he has to
escape the well-meaning but suffocating clutches of his manager/mother
and his trainer/half-brother, Dicky.
If you think you've seen this movie about eleventy times before,
you're probably right. Plot originality is not its strong point;
the actors make it seem fresh, though.
Christian Bale is pretty amazing as Dicky, a crack-addicted screwup.
I kept pointing out (to Mrs. Salad's chagrin): this is the same
guy who played Batman. You can't think of two characters more
opposite.
Also good, just not quite as amazing as Bale, is Amy Adams, playing
Micky's (eventual) girlfriend Charlene, who has a pivotal role in
getting Micky to turn his life around. Just like I kept recalling
Bale as Batman, Ms. Adams' foulmouthed little-spitfire role here
made me remember she was also Giselle in Enchanted.
Intrade
shows no candidates either dropping below or rising above our arbitrary
4% threshold this week. All candidates showed healthy increases
in their phony hit counts, and Tim Pawlenty got a big enough
bounce to move him up two spots, ahead of Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour.
Congratulations!
The candidate under the phony microscope this week is Newt Gingrich,
spurred by what nearly everyone agrees was a total
180°
flip-flop on Libya policy,
with a double phony twist. His recommended action on March 7:
Exercise a no-fly zone this evening, communicate to the Libyan
military that Gadhafi was gone and that the sooner they switch sides,
the more like they were to survive, provided help to the rebels to
replace him.
But on March 23:
I would not have intervened. I think there were a lot of other ways to
affect Qaddafi. I think there are a lot of other allies in the region we
could have worked with. I would not have used American and European
forces.
Longer quotes and video at the link.
The only unifying theme was: oppose whatever President Obama happens
to be doing at the time.
You can read Newt's attempt at reconciliation over
on Facebook. To his credit, he doesn't say:
You see, on March 7, Greta van Susteren was asking me about
Gadhafi. While on March 23, Matt Lauer was pestering me about
Qaddafi. Honestly, I always thought those were two different
guys.
But see if you're convinced by what he does say.
Not that it matters, but Pun Salad has decided to adopt "Qdaffy"
as its Official Spelling of That Guy There, following
the Worthing/Iowahawk stylebook.
A measure of The Newt's genuineness can be seen on [the
newtexplore2012.com] website. It
features Newt and his lovely third wife, Callista, smiling at the camera
while a large crowd of very happy, flag-waving Americans stands in the
background, beaming at the couple. The crowd is a picture-perfect mix of
white, black, Latino, and Asian-American citizens - as though they're
right out of central casting.
They are. It's a stock photo dubbed "Large Crowd of People
Holding Stars and Stripes Flags." Newt simply bought the right
to use this shot of "supporters," as have several other
politicians, groups, and businesses. That's Newt for you - a
fake picture in support of a fake campaign by a fake
candidate.
Hightower is correct. Here is the Getty Images link.
Jon Huntsman is currently at 3.9% at Intrade, so doesn't make our list.
But (nevertheless),
at her Washingtion Post blog, Jen
Rubin asks: Why is Jon Huntsman running for president?
The word "delusional" is used.
A John Sununu interview
at Real Clear Politics is quoted:
"Huntsman won't play well here. Huntsman won't play well anywhere,
because Huntsman's only barely a Republican," Sununu said in a lengthy
interview Wednesday afternoon.
"Huntsman's too liberal, comes with the tarnish of having accepted
the appointment from Obama. He's never said anything really conservative
in his life. How's he going to win in a conservative primary? He can't.
Huntsman is, in my opinion, a non-player," he said.
In the same RCP article, however,
another NH GOP old-timer (and Huntsman supporter), Peter Spaulding, is
also quoted:
"It sounds like the warm and cuddly John Sununu we know."
But the biggest fish in the phony barrel is, as always, Barack Obama.
Captain Ed Morrissey of the SS Hot Airnotes
the words of October 2007 candidate Obama:
Conventional thinking in Washington says that Social Security is the
third rail of American politics. It says you should hedge, dodge, and
spin, but at all costs don’t answer. I reject that notion. I think
that on issues as fundamental as how to protect Social Security a
candidate for president owes it to the American people to tell us where
they stand. Because you’re not ready to lead if you can’t tell
us where you’re going.
Compare and contrast with President Obama, version 2011.03,
as reported at the lefty site, Talking
Points Memo:
The White House will not prominently inject itself into congressional
negotiations on Social Security reform until after key legislators in
both the House and Senate unveil their plans to reduce projected
long-term deficits, according to administration officials.
[…]
The White House's reticence has been characterized by some as a symptom
of a rift between Obama's economic and political advisers. Some, like
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, do in fact believe that a
bipartisan deal on Social Security would result in real economic
benefits, while others argue that Obama shouldn't embrace any plan that
substantially cuts benefits at all.
Gosh, another critical favorite I thought was just barely OK.
But this 1947 movie
has Robert Young, way before he was the Father who Knew Best.
Also Robert Mitchum. And Robert Ryan. And someone not named Robert,
the endlessly watchable Gloria Grahame. Directed by Edward
Dmytryk. So the pieces were in place, enough of them for it to be nominated
for five Oscars. But…
Young plays a jaded police detective investigating a brutal homicide of a
Jewish civilian;
Suspicion falls on a group of soldiers,
eventually settling on a hapless youngster who can't account for
his activities. But Mitchum is skeptical, and eventually so
is Young. Helping them along is the occasional antisemitic outburst
from Ryan. This causes Young to become less jaded, and he switches from
smoking a ubiquitous pipe to ubiquitous cigarettes.
It eventually drops into a preachy and unsubtle
melodrama about antisemitism. (Not that antisemitism's a bad thing
to be preachy about, probably even more so in 1947.) Interestingly,
according to Wikipedia:
In the novel [on which the movie was based], the victim was homosexual. As told in the film The
Celluloid Closet and in the documentary included on the DVD edition of
the Crossfire film, the Hollywood Hays Code prohibited any mention of
homosexuality because it was seen as a sexual perversion. Hence, the
book's theme of homophobia was changed to one about racism and
antisemitism.
It would be a few more years before Hollywood considered it to be
safe to produce a movie
taking a brave stand against murdering homosexuals.
The ninth, and probably the last, novel written by the late, great,
Robert B. Parker
in his Jesse Stone series. (But not the last in the series, apparently.
See below.)
A thug's body is found in the trunk of his Cadillac Escalade on the
scenic causeway in Paradise, Massachusetts (a thinly disgusied
Marblehead).
Jesse's task here is to discover the perpetrator; he's immediately
drawn to the thug's employer, organized crime boss Reggie Galen,
who lives in a nice house out on the neck. Coincidentally, Galen
lives right next door to another crime boss, Knocko Moynihan.
Even more coincidentally (and what might be deemed far-fetched),
Knocko and Reggie are married to identical beautiful
twin sisters. If you already smell something sordid going on, you're
right.
In a parallel case, Boston female PI Sunny Randall has been
hired by concerned parents
to locate their wayward daughter; she's taken up with a bunch of
cultists in Paradise. This naturally involves Jesse as well, and
gives them a chance to rekindle their romantic relations from previous
books. Cool!
So is this the end for Jesse? Apparently not: Amazon has a page up for
Robert
B. Parker's Killing the Blues,
authored by Michael Brandman, to be released
in September of this year. A little poking
around reveals that Brandman is a TV writer/producer, most recently
for the Jesse Stone series of made-for-TV movies starring Tom Selleck
as Jesse.
I'm not sure how I feel about that! Generally, I frown on cynical
attempts to squeeze more money from book-buying rubes based on their
auto-purchasing affection
for a suddenly (um) nonprolific author.
On the other hand, I'd kind of like to know what happens next to Jesse,
Sunny, and the various supporting characters.
On the third hand, is it really "what happens next", if it's not Parker
telling the story? Hm…
My rating guidelines say one star means "bad with few redeeming
features." There's just one redeeming feature here: a seventeen-year-old
Jackie Chan, with occasional glimpses of the genius-to-be. (In fact,
IMDB claims
this is Jackie's first starring role.) But
otherwise, this is only for people who have a lifetime mission
to watch every Jackie Chan
movie ever made.
And it was slightly better than the other movie in this
Wal-Mart remainder-bin two-pack, Fantasy
Mission Force.
The general idea, I think: Jackie undergoes surreptitious
Kung Fu training from a wizened wizard. A number of fights
happen. His father gets killed at some point, and Jackie
eventually gets vengeance for that. The end.
Oh, I'm sorry: spoiler alert.
It's kind of a mess. I'll quote the amusing Wikipedia
"Background" section:
The film was concocted using footage from other films, primarily from
a little-seen independent 1973 film entitled Little Tiger of Canton (aka
The Cub Tiger From Kwang Tung) which featured a teenage Chan in
one of his earliest roles. After Chan had become famous through films
like Snake in the
Eagle's Shadow and Drunken
Master in the late 1970s, the footage was re-edited. Additional
material from the Drunken Master era and new footage of Dean Shek and Yuen Siu Tien (in another appearance of his beggar character),
was tacked on. A rather obvious Jackie Chan double was also hired and
fought blind-folded in an attempt to hide the doubling from the viewers.
In 1981, the poorly edited and assembled footage was acquired by Dick Randall, who named it Master with Cracked Fingers and dubbed it into
English. This version has also been released under the title Snake
Fist Fighter.
Consumer note:
I got paper mail from the "Domain Registry of America" urging me
to send them money for domain renewal services. Looks very much
like a bill. (Amusingly, it was addressed to "NONE PAUL SAND",
based a bit too literally on punsalad.com's whois data.)
The
Wikipedia
page for "Domain Registry of America"
shows the company is hovering on the edge of illegality, and has been
doing so for many years,
so if you get a similar notice… well, as one guy put it:
that's why they make shredders.
And I want to make it clear, and I'll make it clear to the President:
that if he takes this nation to war in Iran, without Congressional
approval, I will make it my business to impeach him.
But (as we've said before): that was then, this is now. Ed points
out not only the phoniness, but also more than a bit of stupidity:
Biden, being
a Senator at the time, had no input into even
a theoretical impeachment, that being the responsibility of the House.
At Language Log, Mark Liberman puzzles over
the utterances of Diane Sawyer on ABC World News last night:
And it is hard to imagine
or to underestimate or overestimate
what it took in those heart-pounding moments when the pilots had to
eject
the incredible velocity of that
Why yes, this is my second Kevin Corrigan movie in a row. Good catch.
He's a railroad safety expert here, while in The Next Three Days
he had a brief but critical role as a sleazeball drug dealer. He's
utterly believable in both roles. Somebody give him an Oscar, OK?
The story: up in northern Pennsylvania, an idiot railroad employee
(Ethan Suplee) cuts one too many corners in his effort to get a freight
train on the correct track, and sends it hurtling southward,
unchaperoned,
with a load of toxic molten phenol. Meanwhile, down south, a newbie
conductor (Chris Pine, the new Captain Kirk) gets teamed up with
a grizzled train veteran (Denzel Washington) as his engineer.
As luck would have it, Chris and Denzel are the only people who can
stop the train from visiting death and destruction when
it—literally—hits the small city of Stanton, PA.
This sounds clichéd, and it is. Are the young guy and the old
dude initially at odds, but then develop a grudging respect for each
other? You betcha. Are pictures of
children shown? Yup. Are the efforts to save the day hampered by a bunch
of clueless, arrogant railroad company executives, full of bad ideas
and too concerned with the company's bottom line? Yes indeed. (And
is the CEO shown on a sunny golf course, making his imperious poor judgment
in a hasty cell phone call? Sure.)
Is there a plucky and competent
young woman of color helping our heroes out at the
risk of her job? Affirmative: played by Rosario Dawson.
And yet, it all works wonderfully well. Most of it due to Denzel-magic,
I think; he's a lot of fun to watch. It was nominated for a Best Sound
Editing Oscar, but I enjoyed it even though my crappy-sounding TV.
Mediocre reviews, but I thought this was very good.
Things are going just swimmingly for John Brennan (played by
Mr. Russell Crowe): he has a beautiful, if somewhat short-tempered,
wife (played by Elizabeth Banks), and
a sweet kid. Unfortunately, that's all tossed into the air when
the Mrs. gets arrested for murder. The evidence against
her is damning. Over the course of a few years,
she's tried, convicted, and loses appeal after appeal.
Desperate, John concludes his only course is to break his wife
out of the slammer. (I assured Mrs. Salad I'd do the same for her.)
But how? Except for being Russell Crowe, he's otherwise
the very stereotype of ineffectiveness: his day job, for example,
is teaching literature at the local community college. So part
of the charm of the movie shows him gradually educating himself
in the methods of the covert outlaw. To enhance credibility,
his initial attempts are
badly bungled, but they're learning experiences. And as he gets
more desperate, he's forced to the dark side…
Eventually, the escape attempt is set in motion, and the movie
becomes an edge-of-seat cat-and-mouse game between John and the
cops. And just behind all the action is a big question mark
about Mrs. Brennan: is she guilty or not?
Written and directed by Paul Haggis, who also wrote Casino Royale
and Quantum of Solace, which makes him very OK in my book.
Originally published in 1957,
this is the second of Isaac Asimov's robot-mystery novels. It marked the
beginning of a hiatus in his output of adult science fiction novels, as
he turned his primary writing efforts into non-fiction for awhile.
It's an odd future. Although interstellar travel has been invented,
it's restricted to the Spacers, who have control of 50 planets.
They maintain a semi-hostile relationship with Earth. But a murder
of a "fetologist"
on the planet Solaria causes the humanoid robot detective, R. Daneel
Olivaw, to arrange for his old Earthman partner, Elijah Baley, to
join the investigation.
Asimov does a fine job of world-building. Earthmen have adapted
to a completely enclosed urban existence, most never even seeing the
outdoors, let alone venturing there; the very notion gives them
the creepy crawlies.
Solaria has developed a different set of phobias. Humans are vastly
outnumbered by robots, who do nearly all the work. The human population
is strictly capped at 20,000; nobody can be born unless someone dies.
And the Solarians lead a totally isolated existence, to the point that
physical proximity to another human makes them uncomfortable, even
frantic. Baley's efforts to track down the perpetrator are
hampered by his total unfamiliarity with Solarian society. But
eventually, he determines the culprit, and rough justice is delivered.
Daneel is unfortunately absent through much of the book;
when he shows up, he's relatively passive. I would have enjoyed
more Daneel, but it's tough to argue with a book that's sold bajillions
of copies.
From the title, Another Thin Man, you might think that the
filmmakers were getting a little tired of their creation.
Would anyone today do that? Another Indiana Jones? Another
Transformers?
But it's only the third entry in the series, and they went on to make
three more. And this one is pretty good. To keep things interesting,
Nick and Nora have had a (human) baby, Nickie Junior, and he's
peripherally involved in the plot.
Nick and Nora are called out to the Long Island estate of wealthy
Colonel Burr MacFay, played by professional Pompous Old Fart, C. Aubrey
Smith. He announces that someone's out to kill him, but it's masked
by other paranoid ravings and general obnoxiousness, irritating everyone.
He might as well be wearing a nametag: "Hi! I'm
this movie's
victim!"
As usual, there's a dizzying array of suspects, hoods, socialites,
and servants. This was one of the first movies with the immortal
Sheldon Leonard, and (unsurprisingly) he's one of the hoods. Also
as usual, Nick navigates half-sloshed through the detecting process
and unerringly comes up with the correct culprit.
Shemp Howard has a bit part! "Hey, is that
Shemp? I think that's Shemp!"
Intrade
shows that Haley Barbour has snuck back above our arbitrary
4% threshold for inclusion in the phony poll; his appearance comes
at the expense of Jon Huntsman, to whom we bid adieu (for now). And despite
not knowing exactly where that rude bridge
that arched the flood was,
Michele Bachmann remains alive:
Speaking of Congresswoman Bachmann, she Facebooked
about her Granite State flub:
So I misplaced the battles Concord and Lexington by saying they were in
New Hampshire. It was my mistake, Massachusetts is where they happened.
New Hampshire is where they are still proud of it!
Not bad, if you're trying to suck up to New Hampshire voters. If you
seriously want to be President of all fifty states, maybe not so good.
Congresswoman Bachmann has a way to go, however, before she
reaches major league phoniness. For example, try to guess which
Presidential candidate said this:
The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally
authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve
stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and
defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President
would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising
Congress or seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again,
however, that military action is most successful when it is authorized
and supported by the Legislative branch. It is always preferable to have
the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action.
Obviously, some racist blowhard Republican trying to undermine
President Obama's efforts in Libya, right?
Well, no. That was then-candidate Barack Obama, December 20, 2007
in a written response to a Boston Globe questionnaire.
Original link via non-phony left-winger Glenn
Greenwald in Salon. But it's not just left-wing kooks
that are disturbed; here's
a read-the-whole-thing column from Andrew McCarthy at National
Review. His conclusion:
If the president and proponents of intervention cannot win congressional
approval, that is a reason to refrain from going to war, not a reason to
refrain from asking for approval. I used to think we all agreed about
that. I hope we still do.
Candidate Obama seemed to agree back in 2007:
Any President takes an oath to, “preserve, protect and defend the
Constitution of the United States." The American people need to know
where we stand on these issues before they entrust us with this
responsibility – particularly at a time when our laws, our
traditions, and our Constitution have been repeatedly challenged by this
[George W. Bush]
Administration.
That was then, this is now. And it's worth pointing out that
Dubya did ask for, and received, Congressional approval pre-Afghanistan
and pre-Iraq.
The mysterious semi-Southern accent developed by Tim Pawlenty
for a speech before social conservatives in Iowa continues to
draw comment. The Minnesota
subcell of Commie Radio did a story on it, including audio samples
so you can judge for yourself. A professor at the University Near Here is
quoted:
But University of New Hampshire political scientist Dante Scala said
candidates need to be careful to avoid presenting too many different
faces as they travel the nation looking for support.
"You have to be who you are," Scala said. "You never want to become a
laughing stock, of course, but you don't want to be seen as
inauthentic."
You and I usually don't face that choice every day. "Gee, should I
be a laughingstock or a phony?" But if Professor Scala asserts that's
the sort of coin-flip politicians continually need to make, who am I
to disagree with an expert?
[Language Log has more on this
issue, with science.]
You Just Kinda Wasted My Precious Time. Also Money.
My local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat offered a tasty
headline yesterday, concerning goings-on up in Rochester, New
Hampshire:
Rochester forges ahead with 'tremendous waste' of money: Uses federal
funds to rehab houses, sell for far less
The lead paragraph:
Despite a general consensus the city would be taking advantage of "a
tremendous waste of federal government money," the City Council agreed
Tuesday night to move forward with an application for the next round of
Neighborhood Stabilization Program funding.
The idea of the Neighborhood
Stabilization Program is to buy and renovate
foreclosed and abandoned homes in troubled neighborhoods. Overall, it's
authorized to
shell out
a cool $3.9
billion. But according to City Councilor David Walker:
"You're spending $500,000 [per house], and then you turn around and sell it for
$120,000 or $140,000. That's unbelievably wasteful," he said.
No fooling. But I encourage you to read the whole article; it's a nice
little example of the dysfunctional incentives involved with such
programs.
A Portsmouth "nonprofit" company will handle the application process
for Rochester. All they're asking is for 15% off the top of any
incoming Federal money.
The deputy mayor views it as a "very inefficient way to invest in the
city."
Another councilor notes that their previous involvement with
NSP had "no results".
Still another councilor observes, well, what the hell: "If this is one
of the ways the federal government is sending back money, I don't think
it's beneficial for Rochester to turn it down and let it go someplace
else."
Another
points out that there is nothing to stop them
from abetting the Federal Government's foolish wastefulness:
"I'm against pork and I'm against earmarks. But if there's a
program and it's going to be earmarks, I want us to get our share of
it."
Or: Pigs have no incentive to decline more slop at their trough.
Another councilor, after the vote: "I wouldn't want my family to live in
that neighborhood. Look what you have for neighbors up there
after you've rehabbed those homes. Who wants a beer bottle behind your
head every time you get out of your car?"
But, once more: they're "forging ahead."
At least the Rochester folks are being for-a-politician
"honest". If not admirable. Multiply this
waste by hundreds and thousands of other localities throughout
our fair land.
If I was forced to play a
science fiction version of David Lodge's "Humiliation"
game, I think my entry would be this:
Even though I own decades-old paperbacks
of Ursula K. Le Guin's acknowledged classics
The Left Hand of Darkness
and The Dispossessed, they're unread.
Nevertheless, I had high hopes about seeing this: I loved other
movies from the Japanese animation
wizards Studio Ghibli, and Netflix predicted I'd like this
too. But … eh. IMDB claims that Ms. Le Guin
was also disappointed, so I'm in good company.
Briefly, things are falling apart in the fantasy land of Earthsea.
Crops are failing, dragons sighted near land, fighting with each other.
And the young peoples' music—it's just noise! What's going on?
Enter Prince Arren, who immediately fails to grab our sympathies:
he stabs his dad. (If they explained why he did that, I missed it.)
On the lam, he meets up with Sparrowhawk, a wise
old wizard who's trying to diagnose the ills besetting Earthsea.
They run into all sorts of problems, but eventually figure out that
it's a plot set in motion by evil and creepy wizard Cob.
Good news: this movie is beautiful to watch. Bad news: I was
unable to make a lot of sense of it. In fact, I kept nodding
off, and eventually gave up backing up the DVD to figure out what
I missed. There was a climactic battle, and it was sort of cool.
True: I kept trying to figure out who was doing the voice for
Sparrowhawk. Could it be… Sean Connery? Sounds like him! Irony of ironies,
when I looked it up, it turned out to be … Timothy Dalton.
"The name is Hawk. Sparrow Hawk."
Other voices include Willem Dafoe as the evil wizard,
and—honest—Cheech Marin as a thug.
Iowahawk just gets more awesome as time goes by. His recent
article is in the E.J.
Dionne/Michael
Moore vein, describing how
Your Federal Government
is nuh-uh, not either broke. Why, by squeezing a mere
$10 billion per day from the rich, we can cut that deficit down to
size, starting on…
12:01 AM, January 1 Let's start the year out right
by going after some evil corporations and their obscene profits. And who
is more evil than those twin spawns of Lucifer himself, Exxon Mobil and
Walmart? Together these two largest American industrial behemoths raked
in, between them, $34 billion in 2010 global profits. Let's teach 'em
both a lesson and confiscate it for the public good. This will get us
through...
9:52 AM January 4 Okay, maybe I
underestimated our take. […]
A masterpiece.
But if you want a lot fewer laughs with your fiscal reality check,
there's Kevin
Williamson:
When it comes to the Scrooge McDuck set, the problem isn't that they're
not rich enough, it's that there aren't enough rich -- not enough to do
what liberals want to do, anyway, which is to balance the budget by
increasing taxes on them.
The headline on Dionne's fantasy is "What if we're not broke?" Which is
a lot like saying, "What if there was a million-dollar bill in my
pants?" Only it's much worse-the consequences of this dream not coming
true are truly terrible […] And
the defiant can-kicking by Democratic dead-enders is only tacking a
premium onto our future pain.
Whatever happened to the reality-based community anyway?
Owsley Stanley
died a few days back, as a result of a car crash in Australia.
His Wikipedia page notes that he "was a former underground LSD cook, the
first private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD." As
might be expected, he was also involved with the Grateful Dead.
What might not be expected: he lived to be 76. Not all of his buddies
managed that feat.
The Steely Dan song "Kid Charlemagne"
was loosely based on Stanley. I like this story from the song's
Wikipedia entry:
According to an infamous story recounted by [Steely Dan's]
Walter Becker on VH1's
Storytellers, Becker once informed a taxi cab driver in New York City
that he was with the band Steely Dan. The cab driver remarked "Steely
Dan - they had the stupidest lyric I ever heard in any song that ever
has been written." Becker replied "You're kidding - what was that?" The
cab driver responded with "Is there gas in the car? Yes, there's gas in
the car".
Although I've never taken LSD,
I always sing those lyrics when they come up on the car's iPod, to the
consternation of Mrs. Salad.
Usually when I go against the Critical Consensus, it's when I'm
not impressed by a movie that everyone else loved. This is the
opposite: it had mediocre rankings from critics and IMDBers, but
I liked it quite a bit.
It is (more or less) a sequel to Lewis Carroll's works. Alice is
a young lady, and is surprised by a marriage proposal from
an upper-class twit. Bewildered about what to do, she falls
back down the rabbit hole, and …
It's live action, with plenty of CGI to illustrate the
denizens of Wonderland. Carroll was content to let Alice
wander around and experience all the bizarreness and off-kilter
wordplay. It's quite different here: the filmmakers decided
to make Alice an action hero. This worked for me, but I can
understand how purists might object.
Mia Wasikowska is wonderful as Alice, who gradually finds
her proper role in the goings-on. Also on hand is Johnny Depp
as the Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter as the evil "Red Queen",
Anne Hathaway as the good "White Queen", and a host of others.
There are plenty of jokes and sight gags, but (on the other hand)
the good guys are in actual peril, and Alice is the only person
who can save the day.
Even as we speak, hundreds of apple pies are being readied for delivery
to math and science teachers at public middle and high schools located
within a 3.14-mile radius of Raytheon Co. headquarters in Waltham.
The geek in me points out: that circle is π3 square miles
in area.
The New Scientist has a pretty obvious suggestion:
celebrate by eating… oh, I can't bring myself to type
it.
After last week's inclusion in our phony poll,
Haley Barbour dipped below our arbitrary 4% threshold at Intrade,
and so we'll bid him farewell for now.
But he's replaced by Michele Bachmann, who popped up to 4.2% at
Intrade this week. And the Google hits say she's already ahead
of Mitt Romney!
Does Congresswoman Bachmann deserve her high debut in our table?
Well, she visited
our fair state yesterday, and…
Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann's visit to the first-in-the-nation
primary state of New Hampshire got off to a rocky start on Saturday
morning when she misstated a key fact about the American Revolution in a
speech to a group of local conservative activists and students.
"What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our
extreme love for liberty," the potential GOP presidential candidate
said. "You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in
Lexington and Concord. And you put a marker in the ground and paid with
the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to
make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals
of man in 5,000 years of recorded history."
… if anything, her ranking is too low.
Despite his low hit-count standing, Mitt Romney manages to make
the phony news. Latest is from Michael Kinsley
in the LA Times:
We're all for transparency these days, and if anything is transparently
clear about American politics, it is that Mitt Romney will do or say
anything to become president. The best guess is that at heart he is an
old-fashioned moderate, business-oriented Republican (just about the
last one standing). But there's no knowing for sure. He may have no
sincere beliefs at all.
There was a piece about Romney on the front page of the New York Times
on Sunday, and what amazes me is the deadpan frankness with which the
article exposed him as a phony, and then went on to discuss what Romney
might do to solve this problem.
Kinsley feels that Romney's phoniness makes him "ethically unqualified
to be entrusted with the presidency." Really. I continue to be
unconvinced that Romney is uniquely phony.
Brendan Nyhan is a liberal, but he occasionally drops the partisan
blinders to make a good point, or at least one worth considering.
He catches a whiff of campaigns past in today's
coverage of Romney:
The media's coverage of Mitt Romney is showing signs of the
pathologies that afflicted its coverage of Al Gore in the early stages
of the 2000 presidential campaign.
In 1999 and 2000, the press pummeled Gore, the presumed
Democratic presidential nominee, with absurdly trivial and hostile
reporting and commentary on the number of buttons
on his suits, his cowboy boots,
and the color of his
attire, which were framed as evidence that Gore was a phony who was
reinventing himself to get elected. These factually dubious claims were
used to manufacture a narrative of Gore as a calculating liar that may
have contributed to his
puzzling underperformance in the 2000 election. While any politician
changes and evolves over the course of their career, Gore's trajectory
was framed as a
series of phony
personas (a sample from Howard Fineman: "By my count we're on about
the fifth or sixth Al Gore now").
Nyhan goes on to describe today's eerily similar narrative about
Romney, and why such things happen.
Worth reading, but I think he discounts the most obvious similarity
between Romney and Gore: they're pretty good-looking smooth
talkers. Decades of pop culture have taught us, however unfairly,
to especially suspect people like that.
We haven't mentioned Tim Pawlenty much, but
Dana
Milbank of the Washington Post detects phoniness there:
On paper, Tim Pawlenty may be the most formidable Republican challenger
to President Obama in 2012. Too bad he's running as somebody else.
Oh oh. What's the problem?
But now Pawlenty is campaigning as if he's some sort of Southern
preacher. At the Faith & Freedom event, he was dropping g's all over the
place, using "ain't" instead of "isn't," and adding a syrup to his
vowels not indigenous to Minnesota. He didn't utter the word "jobs,"
made only passing reference to economic woes, and instead gave the
assembled religious conservatives a fiery speech about God, gays and
gynecology.
Milbank gets a lot of column-mileage from speculatin' on whether
Pawlenty adopted a phony cornpone accent for the event.
One problem with this narrative: the event was "down South" in
Iowa. I might buy that a southern accent could sway a few
votes in Georgia, but Iowa?
Milbank could have (but didn't) point out that this sort of thing
is not unheard of on the campaign trail. From 2007:
Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday she
sees her sometimes Southern accent as a virtue.
"I think America is ready for a multilingual president," Clinton said
during a campaign stop at a charter school in Greenville, S.C.
What do Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, and
John Edwards have in common? They've all been criticized for the way
they speak — charged with affecting or suppressing or exaggering
[sic] an
accent so voters will identify with them.
Gee, if you can't trust the way a candidate talks, what can you trust?
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the House Republicans' proposed
cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget would hurt
biomedical research's "biblical power to cure."
Statism
is a religion, and Nancy is a high priestess.
Compare and contrast the latest
column of the New York Times
Official Food Nag, Mark Bittman:
The oldest and most common dig against organic agriculture is that it
cannot feed the
world's citizens; this, however, is a supposition, not a fact.
Bittman hangs his article on a recent report entitled "Agro-ecology and
the Right to Food" developed under the auspices of the United Nations;
it advocates agricultural practices that are "more environmentally
sustainable and socially just."
McWilliams, on the other hand, bases his discussion on USDA research
on the actual yields from organic farms.
You can read both and decide for yourself who's reality-based. But
I'd tend to bet
against the folks who slant their food production recommendations
toward what's "environmentally sustainable and socially just". That
sounds like a real good way to starve more people.
Fans of minimum wage laws will recoil in horror from this calculation:
So, in percentage terms of the change in total employment level from
2006 to 2010, jobs affected by the federal minimum wage hikes of 2007,
2008 and 2009 account for 41.8% of the total reduction in jobs seen
since 2006.
Hey, liberals?
If you want to show true compassion for the less well-off, make it legal
for them to take any job they're willing to take, even if it pays
less
than the wage you think should be "minimum."
For a treat, I urge you to check out Gene Weingarten's
proposed new national anthem. It summarizes the Bill of Rights, and
is sung to the tune of the William Tell Overture. If you find
that hard to imagine, Christine Lavin performs:
[HTML5-unfriendly embed of the WaPo's original
video replaced with Ms. Lavin's live YouTubed performance.]
A bit of a departure for me, I picked up this book of short humor
pieces awhile back, and finally got around to reading it. I guess
I needed some cheering up?
And… well, I was slightly disappointed. It's not that
there's not some funny stuff here. Dave Barry has a couple
of articles. P. J. O'Rourke has one. And a few other authors
made me chuckle as well. The editor, Michael J. Rosen, seems
to be a pleasant enough guy; he wrote this in association with
the Thurber
House in Columbus, Ohio. Which actually has a unicorn
in its garden. Although if you acknowledge its existence, they take you to the
booby hatch.
But way too many of the articles were clever without being
funny. Or inventively bizarre, while being too sophisticated
to actually be caught telling a joke. Perhaps there were some
ingenious parodies. But if so, they were
unfortunately of works I'd never heard of.
But, hey, you might like it. The low price at Amazon,
as I type, is $0.01, plus shipping. And 99 cents for a Kindle version.
I think I get a cut of that
if you order from the link!
But very few critics can claim an actual cowboy poet as
a relative, as I can.
Although I'm unaware of any federal subsidies
received by my distant cousin, being a free-market
guy, I can only urge you to get over there to his
website and buy some stuff.
Folks who still maintain a childlike faith in the ability of the
Federal legislative process to "reform" the health care system
should take a gander at this
WSJ article that describes how ObamaCare came to include
a provision to outlaw paying for over-the-counter medication
with a Flexible Spending Account, in the absence of a doctor's
prescription. This misfeature came into being via a chance remark
by William Pewen, senior health-policy adviser to Maine Republican Sen.
Olympia Snowe. And of course:
Only after the president's signature was dry did the American Medical
Association realize what had happened and send a letter to the
government warning of unintended consequences, including more office
visits and extra paperwork.
Sure enough, when the change took effect Jan. 1, patients began bringing
lists of over-the-counter drugs to office visits and also requesting
over-the-counter prescriptions by phone, doctors says [sic].
And (not that it matters but) according to Your Federal Government,
Hispanics
can be any race, and (in fact), about half of Hispanics self-report
as being white.
What does matter, of course, is that accusations shouldn't be
dismissed (or, on the flip side, pursued)
based on the race/ethnicity of the accused.
A nice little movie set in 1930s Tennessee.
It got some Oscar buzz—because this is just
the kind of quirky, semi-sentimental
movie that Oscar loves—but was skunked in the nominations.
It revolves around the hermit Felix Bush, played impeccably by
Robert Duvall. He lives outside of a small town where nasty rumors
fly about him. The only person who's remotely sympathetic
toward him is Mattie, played by Sissy Spacek, who knew him
back in his pre-hermit days.
One day Bush takes it into his head to have a funeral party
for himself, but while he's still alive to enjoy it. He's rebuffed
by the local preacher, but the avaricious funeral home director,
(Bill Murray), is only too happy to take his money.
As it turns out, Bush has ulterior motives related to relationships
and events
hidden in his deep dark past. His redemption lies in the revelation
of these secrets.
So: it's pretty good. Robert Duvall is great, as always, so are Sissy
Spacek and Bill Murray. The supporting cast is good too.
Quibbles: Sissy Spacek is too young to play Robert Duvall's
ex-girlfriend.
The New York Times Official Food
Nag, Mark Bittman, continues to entertain. His latest
column looks at federal agricultural subsidies, and finds them
dreadful.
Agreed!
Unfortunately the title of Bittman's column is "Don't End
Agricultural Subsidies, Fix Them". Sounding like a very bad fourth
verse of that dreadful John Lennon song:
Imagine support designed to encourage a resurgence of small- and
medium-size farms producing not corn syrup and animal-feed but food we
can touch, see, buy and eat -- like apples and carrots -- while
diminishing handouts to agribusiness and its political cronies.
You may say he's a dreamer, but he's not the only one.
To his credit, Bittman does a half-decent job describing
some of the problems with the current subsidy program. But
you can get a completely-decent description of those problems
and more from Cato's
Downsizing Government site. Summary:
Subsidies do a reverse-Robin Hood wealth
redistribution from Joe and Jane Average Taxpayer to relatively
wealthy farmowners.
Subsidies damage the economy by eliminating or decreasing
the price signals present in a free-market system.
Subsidies are corruption-prone.
Subsidies damage the effort to liberalize trade, hurting both consumers
and producers in the US and other countries.
Subsidies encourage environmental damage.
Subsidies are an unnecessary relic hanging on from the Great Depression;
there's no evidence they're necessary to maintain a thriving
agricultural
sector.
"Other than that, though, they're fine."
It sounds unforgivably condescending, but it's tough to characterize
Bittman's attitude as anything less that
a childlike faith in statist theology, a True Believer.
Even though he admits multiple malfunctions and dysfunctions
in the current subsidy system, he can't bring himself to
the obvious response: just stop it..
As I've noted before: when confronted with three tons of government
money going down a rathole to ill effect, the statist response is:
let's make it four tons, and toss it down this rathole,
of slightly different shape,
instead.
Sallie James, also at Downsizing Government says it pretty
well:
If Americans decide to eat
more fruit and vegetables, you can be sure that farmers here or abroad
(and it does not matter which) will be happy to provide them.
The solution lies not in tinkering with the program in the hope that
finally, this time, bureaucrats in Washington will get it
right, but in freeing the farmers from government interference totally,
and letting the market decide which foods are grown.
That's heresy to folks like Bittman who (for whatever reason) find
it difficult to "imagine".
A lot of famous
movie-making names in this 1940 movie: William "Ben Hur" Wyler
directed, the screenplay was by Howard "Casablanca" Koch, and
the music was by Max "Also Casablanca" Steiner. And it had
the incomparable Bette Davis. And it was nominated for seven
Oscars, including Best Picture.
And yet, I didn't care for it at all. Not sure what's going on there.
Ms Davis plays Mrs. Crosbie, the wife of the manager of a
British rubber plantation in the Malay peninsula.
The movie opens with her emptying
a revolver into the back of one Geoffrey Hammond, who has
(for some reason) worn out his welcome at the Crosbie's bungalow,
while Mr. Crosbie is out of town.
The remainder of the movie involves Mrs. Crosbie's efforts to
not hang for this offense, despite the fact that what happened
is bleedingly obvious to everyone save Mr. Crosbie.
Unfortunately her exoneration is cast into doubt by (guess what)
"The Letter"
she sent to Hammond, which is now in the hands of Hammond's
Eurasian "wife", the very pissed-off Gale Sondergaard.
It's 95 minutes, but seems to be much, much longer. We keep seeing
shots of the moon getting obscured by clouds, and more shots of
the moon getting
revealed again.
I think this may be Symbolism.
Mrs. Salad did not appreciate me pointing out "She's got Bette Davis
eyes." Maybe because I did it about 20 times.
Haley Barbour cracked our (arbitrary) 4% barrier at
at Intrade
this week, so he debuts in our Phony list today, already
ahead of Huntsman and My Man Mitch Daniels:
The two leading phony GOP males got their hats handed to them by
George
F'n Will for buying into silly (albeit non-birther) fantasies
about Barack Obama's Kenyan ideological roots. Read the whole
thing, but here's the summary.
Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican
presidents on the horizon - Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov.
Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China
Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota
governor Tim Pawlenty.
So the Republican winnowing process is far advanced. But the nominee may
emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with
careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom
the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand,
much less nuclear weapons.
If you noticed that Sarah Palin is also missing from Will's plausible
list, good
eye. Pun Salad shares the Instapundit
reaction,
which I will quote in full:
I would vote for a syphilitic camel over Barack Obama in 2012, so
therefore I would even vote for Huckabee or Gingrich. But I might try to
talk the camel into running one more time.
Among Romney's biggest challenges: explaining to GOP primary voters why
he signed a law that became the foundation for Obama's national
overhaul. Passed by Congress last year, Obama's health care law has
enraged conservatives who view it as a costly government expansion and
intrusion into their lives because it mandates insurance for most
Americans.
The AP also notes the delicious phoniness of Democrats praising
RomneyCare. This is similar to Democrats praising McCain for his
maverickness four years ago—right up until he became the
GOP nominee, and he instantly became a Dubya clone.
In the National Journal, Beth Reinhard is upfront
about Romney's Other Big Problem:
In 2008, it wasn’t until onetime front-runner John McCain was down
and nearly out that he sealed the deal with the GOP faithful. In
contrast, the well-heeled Romney never broke through. A moderate
Republican who thrived in the true-blue state of Massachusetts, Romney
tried to remake himself as a conservative crusader and came off as a
phony.
And I had to look twice to make sure
that this
was not the exact same article, but it's from Paul West of the LA
Times:
One of his biggest problems is "a suspicion that [Romney] is not as authentic
as voters would like and he doesn't connect as well with voters as they
would like," said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster not aligned with any
candidate. "Politicians who are viewed as authentic have a much easier
time connecting with the voters they are wooing. People like Ronald
Reagan and [New Jersey Gov.] Chris Christie seem to have no trouble
connecting, in part because they seem so comfortable in their skin."
The problem has been fed by the fact that, in each of his runs for
public office, Romney has remade himself. Last time out, he shed his
moderate social views on abortion and gay rights, then struggled to
convince primary voters of his conservative bona fides. A perception
grew that the handsome candidate, with his almost-too-perfect hair and
teeth and seemingly scripted answers to every question, would say
anything to get elected.
It's dreadfully unfair: Romney's actual phoniness is probably
not significantly different than his peers, but
his good looks and smooth manner tend to magnify it.
Or, to repeat once more Jonah Goldberg's wonderful
quip: if you hit the "mute" button while Romney is speaking,
he seems to be saying "what do I have to do to put you in this BMW
today?"
Although it's dog-bites-man territory by now, fairness
demands that we slag President Obama. Providing ammo on that front
is Richard M. Salsman at Forbes:
Since his party’s failure in the mid-term elections, President
Barack Obama has been posing as “pro-business” and a
“centrist.” There’s not a single reason to believe it. Obama
is a phony — on this and many other issues — just as he was
during his 2008 campaign. If Obama is “pro-business” in any way,
like most politicians today he claims to be so only to extract tax
revenues and campaign funding. That’s the sole extent of it.
Business is a mere host to his political parasitism.
Ooops, I cut that off one sentence too soon. For Mr. Salsman
continues:
Yet his hostile attitude isn’t much different from that seen in the
GOP.
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