Heartache with Hard Work

Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then

2009-11-20T21:54:00.000-08:00

The Cliffs of Insanity - Mark Knopfler (from the Princess Bridge soundtrack)

Today's winner in the 'huh, are you serious?' category is Jason Zengerle at The New Republic (who I normally quite like):

I was pretty shocked by this new poll that found that 52 percent of Republican voters think ACORN stole the 2008 presidential election for Obama. I wanted to get some perspective, though, so I looked for polls that assessed voters' feelings about the 2000 elections. I figured that, even with hanging chads and all, fewer Democratic voters would have considered Bush illegitimate back then than those Republicans who now feel that way about Obama. So I was pretty shocked to find this CBS Poll from January '01, which found that 76 percent of Democrats didn't consider Bush the legitimate winner of the 2000 election. Now, granted, this poll was taken only a few months after the Florida fiasco--which, unlike ACORN, was actually real, not to mention fresh--but still . . . 76 percent!

I'll only say two things about this.

First, Gore actually, you know, DID win the election. Not just in a 'he received substantially more votes' sense (although he did, of course) but also in the sense that he almost certainly received more votes in Florida. Add in the fact that a 'legitimate' winner to most people means that the process by which the winner was decided ought to be fair and objective (not de facto determined by a set of 9 un-elected people serving for life making a nakedly political decision), and I'm not sure how you could with a straight face argue that Bush was the 'legitimate winner of the 2000 election.'

Second, it's not just that they think Obama stole the election. It's not that they think he managed to rig hundreds of polls to all perfectly correlate with the eventual margin of victory. It's not even that they think he stole something on the order of seven million votes. It's that they think ACORN was the mechanism by which he did this. ACORN. I mean, ACORN.

I'm going to repeat it one more time, just to emphasize how absolutely insane this is. Fifty-two percent of polled Republicans...claimed that ACORN...stole the election. ACORN!

Sometimes I just don't even know what to say.

ACORN...

We were dancing in a minefield with a bottle of whiskey

2009-11-20T09:53:00.000-08:00

Dancing in a Minefield - Plushgun

There's a grand tradition of sleek electro-pop with a slightly overwrought sense of the emotional that was re-popularized by The Postal Service in the early part of the decade, but really has its roots back in the 80s.

Plushgun is yet another fine entry into that tradition. When everything works on their debut Pins and Panzers, you get delightful, airy, energetic pop hooks and a sense of good feeling about the world at large.

By far the best example is the opening track "Dancing in a Minefield" which glistens and shines like the very best of the genre. It's tough work to write a song about empowerment through dancing without veering into the utterly preposterous or the monumentally fey, but they pull it off.

It's the sort of song that you can't experience part way. If you try and hold onto your ironic distance, it'll come off all wrong. Because it asks you to forget your cynicism and well-learned life lessons and return to the place where you truly believed in endless possibility - when it seemed like the only thing you could do was simply stand up and shout 'no' at a world filled with people trying to impose their standards, their morality on you.

It's a reminder for all of us who learned over time that you have to be realistic and pick among bad options that buried within us remains that nobler, stupider, less wise but more vivacious self. And that there may still come times when we have to be willing to take stands even though we can't win, that empty symbolism is only empty because we let ourselves get defined by the world outside.

Elsewhere, "Let Me Kiss You Now (And I'll Fade Away)" is a rollicking good time, filled with handclaps and big goofy choruses and "ba da da da, da da da da"s. And then there's "Just Impolite" which is proably the closest they get to a Postal Service track. It's big and bold and cute all at the same time - the sort of song that sounds just a tad too precious on the first go-round but you end up going back because it's just so insistently catchy. And by the fourth or fifth time, you just give in and enjoy the moment for its own sake.

So those are the major successes. But what happens when things don't work out as well? Answer: pretty much the same, except moreso. The weaker songs still have that same sound (if a bit plinkier and less engaging), but really get into trouble with the lyrics. What sounded heartfelt and gloriously excitable on the better songs loses its luster and you're left realizing that you're listening to an adult getting all googly-eyed about high school.

To some extent, I'm okay with that. Music doesn't have to be about who makes it - it's also about who engages with it. And this is the sort of stuff that's designed to be heard by an earlier generation. Even more, there's a fine line between projection - a kind of simpering desire to simply re-engage in the sort of hysterical world-making that we all do when we're 16 but quickly grow out of - and a far less self-conscious kind of nostalgia. In the latter, you aren't trying to simply go back, you are trying to keep that part of you alive at least in memory.

You can honor and respect the vivacity of youth without lionizing it. See, for example, the classic John Huges films. At times, that's precisely the spot that Plushgun finds. In those moments, they are vibrant, cognizant of a sort of deep absurdity in youth but joyful nonetheless.

If they could find that balance on every track, this would be a truly great album. Unfortunately, they don't, and we're left instead with an extremely enjoyable, occasionally poignant, and often exhilirating record that is also flawed in some deep ways.

"A Crush to Pass the Time" is, I think, the perfect representation of both of these forces. It's the median point between schlocky-hyper-sentimentalization and luminous-nostalgia. It's potentially the most deliberately "80s sounding" of the tracks (even tossing in a Talking Heads name-check), and to fine effect. And yet...you can't help but imagine the lyrics as the poetry written in a journal by some nerdy guy in high school about a crush he was too nervous to act on.

Pins and Panzers is a good album, and they clearly have the potential in them to make a great album. In order to do so, they probably need to find a way to make music that's more mature, that deviates from the one-note attitude of commerating youth - but to do so without giving up on their intensity and exuberance.

If you had the luck of the Irish

2009-11-19T13:35:00.000-08:00

Luck Of The Irish (Live) - John Lennon (from the Anthology set which, BTW is totally awesome and an essential purchase for any serious Lennon fan)

Perhaps this will be the thing to finally convince people that the lack of video replay in the game is a relic of past ages and a massive dis-service to the players who invest years of their lives in the game, and the supporters who live and die with their national team.

Sure, France had a legitimate shout for a penalty a few minutes earlier. And of course we don't know that Ireland would have won in the penalty shootout. But we ought to have been given the chance to find out, don't you think?

I'm a luddite on a lot of things. I get the general aesthetic rejection of video replay. But c'mon. There are ways to incorporate technology in limited ways to improve the quality of the game. When everyone in the world knows that it's a handball except for the four referees, it's a travesty and a mockery of the idea that we're watching a fair and legitimate game.

A lot of people have been calling for Henry's head. I can understand the sentiment but don't agree. It's not his fault the system is so broken. And while it would have been a monumentally impressive act of sportsmanship for him to own up, there's not actually all that much he could have done. Reports conflict about whether he told the ref he handled the ball - I suppose he could have jumped up and down about it - but if the ref is insistent that it's a valid goal, there is literally no one who can fix things. You can't even decide as France to give Ireland a free goal. Thanks to the away goals rule, as soon as France put a 1 on the board penalties were off the table.

For me, this is a situation where the system is broken. And it doesn't do any good to complain about individual failures when it all happens in the backdrop of a structure that doesn't work. The focus should be on actually fixing the real problem, not searching for villains.

Sort of like how I feel about the Senate.

Deep thought for the day

2009-11-18T16:29:00.000-08:00

If "taxpayers should not have to pay for a procedure they believe is tantamount to murder" then why have we spent $700 billion dollars fighting a war in Iraq?

Remember the winters that we slept in the car

2009-11-16T20:24:00.000-08:00

A New Holiday (November 16th) - Carissa's Wierd

Yes it's that fateful day once again. But since I just posted about Carissa's Wierd, I'll leave off talking about them anymore.

Instead, a brief television interlude. It's important to state before I begin that I don't actually have a TV - so I only watch things online.

Anyways, last year, I was commenting pretty regularly on the first season of Dollhouse. Not because it was great, but because it was a new Joss Whedon show and it (occasionally) showed some signs of serious potential. And surprisingly, it got renewed. So I figured I'd write some more this year.

Well, it turns out, not so much. I found all four episodes of season two to be so atrocious that I couldn't even be bothered to complain about them. I never thought the premise was that great to start with and things severely declined as time went on. Unsurprisingly, it's now been cancelled.

Honestly, I can't say I'm going to miss it. In fact, I'm increasingly starting to wonder whether the version of Joss responsible for Angel, Dollhouse, and the final two seasons of Buffy is the real Joss - and the brilliance of the rest of Buffy and Firefly is the rare exception.

Elsewhere in the TV world, I've been enjoying the latest season of Top Chef. The quality of cooking this time around is clearly a major step up from past years (particularly the previous season). That said, the inability to send Robin home was a never-ending nightmare, every single scene with Mike Isabella made me want to throw things at him, and I could seriously do without another word about the sibling rivalry. I really like Jenn - though she really nees to pull it together - and Kevin, so I'm hoping they both make the final.

The Office has declined quite a bit from where it was in seasons 2 and 3, but is still solid. 30 Rock has been good but not great this year.

But the real welcome surprise is another NBC Thursday night show: Community. I really want to like this one because the main character is played by Joel McHale, who I was introduced to back in the 90s on the classic Seattle show Almost Live! (a local version of SNL, basically) It was probably my favorite show as a kid (Billy Quan, The Lame List, Roscoe's Oriental Rug Emporium, Uncle Fran...the list goes on), but when McHale came on the show he struck me immediately as someone who had a big future. He stole every skit he was in.

So I've always hoped he'd make it big and it's cool to see him on a major show now. Of course, his character is actually one of the least interesting. The real magic is with Abed - who is easily my favorite new character in years. The Abed-Troy Spanish rap is what convinced me the show had serious potential. And he also has one of the single best lines in TV history: "9-11 was pretty much the 9-11 of the falafel industry." Oh man, good stuff.

I haven't watched any of the new Stargate series. I'm expecting it to be bad, but I've read a couple reasonably positive reviews, so I'll probably give it a shot.

Oh, and the new Doctor Who special FINALLY aired yesterday. I haven't seen it yet, but am pretty excited. It's really a shame, though, that David Tennant's final episodes are also going to be RTD's final episodes. I have a feeling the Tenth Doctor is not going to be allowed to exit with the class and dignity he deserves.

Grand Archives and S - concert review

2009-11-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

Oslo Novelist - Grand Archives
I Love You, Too - S

Carissa's Wierd are no more, but this is just about the next best thing. Grand Archives probably will never make my heart race in quite the same way that it did when I first heard You Should Be At Home Here, but they are a mighty fine band. Add in an opening performance from Jenn Ghetto as S, and you've got almost the whole gang back together.

Ghetto has two records - the first of which Sadstyle is a lo-fi classic that thankfully has just been re-issued by Aviation Records - but most of the set was new material, which sounded great. I talked to her briefly after the show and she said a new record is in the works, release date indeterminate. Which is super exciting. Her guitar-playing is as good as ever and her voice is even more amazing - at times pure and deep, but at crucial moments catching and breaking with the kind of pathos that puts your heart in your throat.

The Grand Archives part of the show was also fantastic. Where Carissa's Wierd sometimes translated a bit awkwardly into a live environment (particularly if the audience wasn't as rapt as me), Grand Archives are the opposite. All of my minor complaints about the most recent album - that it is a little languid and too low-key for its own good - were absolutely wiped away by the live show. The vitality of the songs was laid bare, the deep emotion and the joyfullness made clear.

Coming through headphones and speakers, some of these songs can feel a little bit distant. But having the band rocking out just a few feet in front of me gave everything a piercing beauty and intense closeness. When they got to that huge, explosive moment in "Torn Blue Foam Couch" it was almost theological.

If you have any doubts about this band, check them out live. You won't regret it.

Old posts about S, Grand Archives, and Carissa's Wierd.

Conflict and politics

2009-11-12T16:17:00.000-08:00

The liberal blags have been taking potshots Robert Kaplan for this recent remark:

But America is much too alone in taking on this work. Europe, having been liberated from nuclear terror at the conclusion of the Cold War, proved unable to muster the gumption to deal with Yugoslavia on its own, or, as the case of Afghanistan shows, to demonstrate much enthusiasm for any great collective effort. Which leads to the question: What does the European Union truly stand for besides a cradle-to-grave social welfare system? For without something to struggle for, there can be no civil society—only decadence.
Thus, with their patriotism dissipated, European governments can no longer ask for sacrifices from their populations when it comes to questions of peace and war. Ironically, we may have gained victory in the Cold War, but lost Europe in the process.

Now, I think Kaplan is wrong here. He's wrong on the substance and he's wrong on the subtext ("stupid, lazy, good-for-nothing Europeans with their baguettes and stinky cheese and universal health care"). That said, I don't think it's as risible a remark as everyone else.

Maybe it's just because I've been reading a lot of Schmitt lately, but I really do think there's something to the idea of conflict as a necessary driving force in meaningful life. He would certainly have found a more elegant and incisive way of saying it, but I'd have to imagine that if he were still around he'd make much the same point as Kaplan. The neutralization of politics that has gone into the development of a liberal European polity has some troubling byproducts.

It's not about losing 'civil society' though - in fact it's precisely the opposite. A life lived without the sense of politics as conflict is a life lived entirely IN civil society, in the depolicitized world of vocation and idle play. The problem of modern liberalism is the ease with which we simply take for granted the laundering of our basic struggles through the lens of boring insitutions and (relatively) meaningless choices.

Of course, as I said, I don't AGREE with Kaplan's argument. For one thing, I think there's a strong case that European democracy (in particular) has a lot more of the flavor of conflict in it than this sort of critique assumes. My academic work right now is on precisely this question of whether liberalism is really a project of minimizing the scope of the political, and I come down pretty strongly on the side of it as a far more vital enterprise than is traditionally credited. Along those lines, I think it's a rather gross overstatement to imply that the only way to inculcate a meaningful sense of struggle and conflict in a polity is to imagine existential threats where none exist.

If anything, the war-mongerers, the unrepenetant Cold Warriors in search of another Great Enemy, they are the ones far more susceptible to a Schmittian critique. They presuppose precisely the liberal milieu that they criticize - indeed the premise that our enemies seek to not just threaten us but also to threaten freedom as such is precisely the mechanism by which they transform war from a necessity into a crusade. It's the false sense that you have identified the 'just war' which truly imperils the world.

So I agree with folks like Yglesias when they point out that the neo-cons are a problem. But I disagree with the implication that there is nothing to the argument in favor of politics as necessarily conflictual. We don't have to believe everything Schmitt says, but I think it's a mistake to not at least take him seriously. If we don't, we run the risk of advocating for a milquetoast and anodyne sense of politics that helps put folks like Wolfowitz and Cheney and Bush into positions of power and arms them with a sense of legitimacy.

Struggle matters, but it should be genuine struggle over politics. There's plenty of space for that within a liberal political structure but it's not something we can just take for granted.

Health care passes the House

2009-11-09T19:33:00.000-08:00

Take It Serious - Mika Miko (who broke up a few weeks ago. Drag)

So health care passed the House. On one hand, this is an absolutely historic occasion. Health care reform has never (literally never) gotten this far along the path toward enactment. And while the House obviously functions with a lot less roadblocks (see my complaints about out Madisonian veto-ridden system elsewhere), it's still not exactly a cakewalk.

My thoughts:

First, I completely agree with the litany of folks who have argued that the final margin (220-215) makes it look a lot closer than it might actually be. Pelosi is pretty good at this sort of thing and presumably was not going to force the folks in the middle to come down on the 'yea' side and be forced to support the more 'liberal' bill. I'd wager that a fair number of the Democrats who fell on the other side of this vote will end up voting yes on the more watered down bill that comes out of conference when it all comes down. They may not want to get tarred with x, y, or z provision if it's just going to get stripped out later but I think they also may want to be on the right side of history.

Second, now we get to see what the world's greatest deliberative body can do with this. The idea that the fate of literally millions of people rests in the gnarly hands of people like Lieberman and Ben Nelson is pretty depressing. But what are you going to do, eh?

Third, the Stupak amendment. This is one of the more infuriating elements of the whole health care process so far. Bear in mind that the bill was ALREADY loaded up with a 'compromise' position on abortion which mirrors the Medicaid one. Which means that even if it had passed without this amendment, it would have been pretty crappy as far as reproductive rights go. Now, the version with this amendment will not merely fail to expand coverage it will actually DECREASE it by preventing any private insurance firms who offer coverage to those who are subsidized from covering abortion. It's just horrible.

Of course, as is always the case with abortion, it's important to remember that the single biggest driver of public policy on this subject is the idea that POOR people don't deserve reproductive rights. It's the invetiable 'compromise' position between one side trying to ban abortion and another side who wants rich white folks to have safe and easy access but doesn't care much about anyone else. As Ezra Klein points out, even while this amendment reduces abortion access for those who are relatively poor and need subsidies, it does absolutely nothing to the massive subsidy for employer-provided coverage:

That money, however, subsidizes the insurance of 157 million Americans, many of them quite affluent. Imagine if Stupak had attempted to expand his amendment to their coverage. It would, after all, have been the same principle: Federal policy should not subsidize insurance that offers abortion coverage. But it would have failed in an instant. That group is too large, and too affluent, and too politically powerful for Congress to dare to touch their access to reproductive services.

I know I spend a lot of time cautioning people against drawing lines in the sand. Even if no public option is included, I say, it's still a very good bill overall and worth supporting. And I still think that's true in this case.

But it makes me feel oily to even think about it. I didn't expect health care to also take on the utter injustice of the Hyde Amendment - that's a battle for another day - but the idea that it's going to accentuate the imbalance in reproductive health coverage is really offensive.

There's a part of me that thinks some enterprising Senator on the left should actually propose an amendment to do precisely what Klein says above: remove the tax exxemption for employer-provided coverage that pays for abortions. Just to see how people will vote.

As for William Saletan: surprise, surprise, he's saying that Democrats need to be willing to sell out reproductive rights:

There's something poignant about the last-minute outrage of the pro-choice groups. The complaints they're leveling—that people had more choices in the private market, that the House bill radically upsets this market, and that it violates Obama's promise not to deprive anyone of their existing coverage—are hardly novel. Republicans have issued such warnings all year. But liberals didn't pay attention until the coverage in jeopardy was abortion.

There's an intuitive appeal to that argument. But it fades when you ask yourself what precisely this bill was going to force on people that is remotely equivalent to being forced by the state to carry a fetus inside their body for nine months, suffering the accompanying health complications, and then having to pass the baby out of their uterus. Oh, and costing their insurance company a LOT more than it would have cost to have an abortion in the process.

Apart from that, the situations are pretty similar I guess.

It might be you're just too kind

2009-11-08T19:14:00.000-08:00

With Rainer Maria not around any more, and with Caithlin De Marrais making much less hysterical records these days, there's a little bit of a hole in my life. Don't get me wrong, I prefer the older, wiser Caithlin. Still, every now and then you just want a track where it sounds like the singer is teetering on the brink of total collapse.

Signs - LoveLikeFire

This track, from San Francisco's LoveLikeFire is precisely such a song. It rages against the dying of the light, screams, hectors, crackles and bursts like pine needles tossed into a roaring fire. It's a call to war, to collapse, to chaos.

The album is called Tear Ourselves Away, and I have yet to hear the whole thing, but have just been digging this track too much today to wait for posting.

It's also worth mentioning that they've got a fun cover of one of my favorite Magnetic Fields songs "Abigail, Belle of Kilronan" available here.

Five things I do not want to be forced to listen to again

2009-11-06T16:36:00.001-08:00

1. "The problem with gay marriage is unelected courts trying to impose their will on the people. Our problem isn't with the content of the decision, it's with the process by which it was made."

The bigots won their vote in Maine, so can we lay this one to rest for good now? The reason people have a problem with gay marriage is that they have a problem with gay people. That's all there is to it.

2. "The results on Tuesday mean that x is true for 2010."

The results, at most, might suggest some general things for future elections. They don't mean that the public repudiated Obama or his agenda. They don't mean that the conservatives have officially destroyed the Republican Party. Corzine has been at negative favorability for something like two years. People like that tend to lose elections. Hoffman lost in part because he was a terrible candidate and there's every chance that he (or an actual Republican) will win the race 12 months from now. And so on. It was like 10 elections total. It's nothing.

The underlying trends which helped drive these few elections in some interesting directions may hold firm for a while longer. So NY-23 may be a sign of coming fights. But that has basically nothing to do with the results of the election.

If the economy is still crappy in 9 months the Democrats are going to lose a lot of seats. If it's not, maybe they won't. If they can't pass a health care bill, they're going to get slaughtered. If they do pass a health care bill, maybe they won't. That's about it.

3. "When the economy’s not strong there’s a lot of interest in controlling spending."

Ben Nelson has really gotten on my nerves this year.

4. Anything about the Yankees that's not this post from Joe Posnanski.

Seriously, I hate the Yankees.

5. The new Amy Millan album

How did someone involved in "Elevator Love Letter" make something so bland? Sigh.

You don't understand, you just steal my plan

2009-11-02T14:29:00.000-08:00

Not So Fast - The Lodger

The Financial Times reports:

Republicans complain they are being forced into an artificial timetable that is reducing the chances of agreement. People on both sides of the committee, chaired by Chris Dodd, the Democratic senator, say the chances of the law being passed by the year-end, as planned by the administration, are slight.
“The more time we [take], the more intelligent regulatory process we’ll have . . . and I hope we’ll take until the first quarter of 2010 to actually put something into law,” said Mr Corker.

Tim Fernholz responds:

What in the world does he want to talk about? It's not like Corker is pushing some specific agenda or has offered any major ideas, at least publicly. These issues have been at the forefront of the policy debate for a year now, and certainly have been bubbling underneath for a long time. If he doesn't have any specific concerns, its hard to conceive of this as anything but a delaying tactic that simply substitutes vague delays for substantive engagement.

The 'too fast' complaint is a constant annoyance for me. The important thing you have to remember is that "too fast" is almost without fail simply code for "I don't want this to happen." There was an argument that something like TARP or the PATRIOT act were done too quickly and with not enough oversight. Those were bills where the perception (fair or not) of imminent threats got people mobilized to act quickly.

But 99% of the time, the one complaint you CAN'T leverage against Congress is that it moves too slowly. It's an institution designed for a world where communication took place by horse or sailboat transposed into a time of cell phones and twitter and the blagosphere.

Take health care. After 2+ years of presidential campaigns where it was one of the two or three central issues. After almost a full year since a president and huge Democratic majority were elected on the back of a mandate to fix it. After 40 years since the last major reform to health care. After all that, you've still got GOP senators complaining about how fast this is all moving. If only there had been just a little bit longer to talk, then maybe something could have been worked out.

Of course, this is not helped at all by a media that absolutely adores the 'too fast' meme. It allows you to run a process story that SOUNDS like it contains meaningful content but does not actually require any digging. 'Too fast' itself serves as the complaint - no one ever demands that you articulate what precisely it is that ought to have been included. In general, there appears to be extremely little interest in questioning the motives of those making such complaints. And it's understandable why. To identify this possibility would be tantamount to accusing them of making claims in bad faith, which is dangerously close to the l-word which must never be spoken.

I've talked before about the tension between my belief that there is value in discourse and the material reality of 'discourse' as performed in modern politics. So I don't want to say that we should toss the ideal overboard, but at least in the case of this 'too fast' meme I do wish there was an expectation that those advancing it actually be prepared to discuss the content rather than form of their argument. To borrow a metaphor, we should trust but verify. Starting from the assumption that your opponent is speaking bad faith is a poor way to engage in public reason. But I don't think it's too much to ask that they actually uphold a good faith argument rather than mouthing platitudes.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum says basically exactly the same thing as me, literally while I was writing this. Though he also notes that Afghanistan is the one area where taking time to consider options is absolutely unforgivable: "Then it's "dithering" and "playing Hamlet."

UPDATE 2: Ezra Klein, too. Is there a run on making this point today??

More on NY-23

2009-11-02T14:24:00.000-08:00

One more thought on the NY-23 election. Or rather, the same thought on NY-23 but coming at it from a slightly different angle.

I think Jon Chait makes a fair point:

Rich paints Scozzafava's heresies as minor. But suppose this was a solidly Democratic district, and party bosses put forward an anti-stimulus, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights nominee. Would Rich really oppose a liberal campaign to elect a more like-minded representative? Would he employ such virtiolic metaphors? There's a lesson here about making a moral cause out of a procedural argument you're not prepared to back in opposite circumstances.

I do think it's a little weird that the people chortling to themselves about the insanity of the conservatives shooting themselves in the foot on this are a lot of the same folks who are all in favor of pursuing primaries to bump out moderate Democrats. In particular, they're the folks who are right now (correctly, of course) pointing out how much better things would be if Ned Lamont was sitting in the CT-Sen seat.

Now, I agree with them on the content. I'd rather have a Congress full of Lamonts than Hoffmans. But accusing conservatives of being naive and stupid politically for attempting to push aside people who don't actually embody the core values of their side doesn't gel very well with holding a variation on the same attitude toward moderates on your own side.

I think the really powerful innovation in Democratic campaigning that distinguishes the Clinton years from the Obama ones is the way that folks like Howard Dean managed to put together a new coalition. One where folks in 'safe' Democratic seats are expected to act like it, while those in more marginal ones are given a bit more freedom.

Yes, it does cause endless frustration with your Nelsons and Bayhs and Landrieus. But the problems are, I think, much more about the institutional structure than they are about the failure of this particular political strategy. There simply is no way that we're going to end up with 60 strong progressives votes in the Senate. It's fantasy to expect it. Given the electoral and procedural constraints of the Senate, you have to be willing to make deals somewhere along the way.

You absolutely do need folks on the wings attempting to pull the party outward, but you also need a strong concern for the center as a mechanism for generating some sense of balance. The problem for the Republicans right now is that things fell apart - the center couldn't hold and now they're a rump party: run almost entirely out of the CAPS-lock wing.

That's why the scary thought is the possibility that such a rump party might actually manage to return to a significant degree of power without any of the restraining elements. It's a lot harder to do things that way, but oh the havoc you can wreak if it does work out.

Your tainted heart, my tainted love

2009-11-02T13:40:00.000-08:00

23 - Blonde Redhead

A friend asks:

"Is this NY23 thing a big deal? Perhaps more importantly, do we want it to be (I can't tell whether I want the Republicans to implode after a long season of infighting or return to the middle so that elections can be about more reasonable things again, assuming they ever were)?"

These are fair questions. I think the best take I've seen so far is from Jonathan Bernstein here and here. The takeaway is that the race does matter, sort of. And the dynamics of it are almost certainly bad for Republicans, but they're not necessarily that great for Democrats either. This race has clarified something that was already pretty obvious: 'mainstream' Republicans are simply not welcome in modern conservatism.

That will certainly make it harder to recruit the sort of moderate candidates who might be necessary to take back a lot of the more vulnerable seats that the Blue team won in 06 and 08.

At the same time, Hoffman has a pretty good chance of winning this thing - despite being a Glenn Beck-ite, which can't be very comforting for Democrats. Sure, NY-23 is a traditionally Republican seat, but Obama won it and it "shares a frontier with Vermont and Canada." Running against a fringe candidate should have made this a solid chance for a pickup.

Of course, while every seat matters, a swing of two votes in the House right now is pretty irrelevant. The real question is what effect this has on 2010 and 2012. And there it's all about the gamble. If there is a major sea change in attitude and the Republicans can manage a ton of pick-ups despite running candidates like Hoffman it could spell serious damage for Obama, the Democrats in general, and the idea of a sustainable new progressive majority.

On the other hand, if those gains fail to materialize, we could end up with an increasingly apocalyptic minority that spirals down the drain for another few cycles before they get things back together.

My take: Hoffman could very well win, though in a race with so many crazy twists and turns prediction is probably futile. In the longer term, I think the gamble isn't going to pay off. Districts that can support candidates like Hoffman already have them - they're the 40% of districts the Democrats haven't been able to pick off in two landslide elections. Unless there's some major external problem (scandal, crisis, or most likely a dragging economy that shows no noticeable improvements for the next 12 months), the GOP has a much better shot of putting a dent in the Democratic ruling majority by running RINOs (and then having to put up with their occasional apostasies).

But Jeebus save us all if this pays off. We could seriously end up with the same kind of united, categorical opposition from a party with enough power to literally shut down the government for a few years.

And either way, I think we're in trouble for awhile re: the goal of having elections be reasonable. Regardless of who wins, it's going to be close, and that's going to be enough to make this a template for a lot of other elections driven by Sarah Palin endorsements, breathless coverage, and total ridiculousness.

A case for majoritarianism? - part I

2009-10-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

Frank Luntz, GOP strategist, says the following:

The Democratic Party controls a 77 seat majority in the House and almost 20 seats in the Senate, along with the White House. If they cannot get a bill passed with such overwhelming control of Washington, it says there's something wrong with the legislation. Rather than forcing a bill through with only limited support, they should keep working until they can get a bill that represents the opinions of most Americans.

Now, it goes without saying that his statements have to be read with an eye on the clear political goals. What he says isn't meant to analyze; it's an attempt to persuade. But there's still a limit (or should be). In this case, it's the idea that people who might be on the fence here are going to be persuaded by the argument that the legislation must be bad if they can't get it done despite those majorities. Now, let's think about this for a second.

First, the idea that they "cannot get a bill passed." It's a little early for that isn't it? After all, the entire point of his memo is to convince people not to pass a bill. Will he admit that it WAS popular after all if it does happen? Also remember that the GOP has consistently complained about the speed with which this legislation has moved through the process. "Just slow things down a little bit so we can consider more." Whatever you think about that request, it's a little hard to take it seriously when it runs concurrently with arguments which suggest that the test for whether a bill is acceptable is if it passes quickly.

Then there's the way that huge Democratic majorities are treated as unrelated to the rest of the question. The tone clearly suggests that Democrats were just randomly gifted with big majorities. Never mind that a lot of those people won contested elections where health care was a pretty big campaign issue. Usually it's not a very compelling argument for your position that 60% of the races went against it.

What does Occam's Razor tell us? What we've got is a health care bill which has strong support from well over 50% of elected officials and (most likely) the public. Which is more likely: that there's somethign wrong with the legislation or that there's something wrong the legislative process?

Really, this is a jumping-off place for some broader thoughts I've been having recently. I've been reading a lot in the past couple weeks about variations in democracy: in particular, the differences that come with a majoritarian, parliamentary system compared to the Madisonian republic that we've got going on here in the US. There's a lot to be said for a system of checks and balances but situations like this do not put it in a very good light.

Even if you support checks and balances, there's a pretty strong argument against the multitude of veto points that we've set up. Perhaps some are essential, and maybe we dig the idea of bicameralism in general. But it does seem like we've got to a bit of an extreme here. Five committees, each of which have to pass a bill. Two houses of Congress which then have to pass a combined bill. And then those bills have to get blended. And then each house has to pass the blended bill. And the whole time, if it ever looks (even for a short period) like you don't have a clear path to your preposterous 60 vote majority needed to beat that filibuster the whole thing teeters on the brink of political oblivion.

Maybe it made sense to make it this hard for Congress to pass things back in the days of the Federalist Papers when our main fear was legislative tyranny or things moving too quickly and getting out of hand. But our institutions have only gotten more sludge-filled even while society has sped up about 700 million percent.

It's time for a change. The question mark in the title signifies my general confusion about how far we want to take things. The filibuster (in its current form at least) has got to go. But how much further should it go? Do we want to risk tyrannies of the majority? Sure, majoritarianism sounds good to me now when health care and global warming are on the line, but how will I feel when Jeb Bush is in office?

These are tough questions and I don't have a firm answer. But in part II we'll see if there's a compelling case for majoritarianism as fundamentally progressive, even accounting for these problems.

That thesis has been rendered invalid

2009-10-30T14:26:00.000-07:00

In my life, I have attended four truly excellent shows. Lots of good, even great ones - but only four that were transcendent.

1. Carissa's Wierd, Valentine's Day, 2003. The Decemberists opened and it was the first time I had ever heard them. So that was a wonderful surprise. But it's really all about my favorite band at the time playing an absolutely beautiful set.

2. Bruce Springsteen, November 18, 2007. I can only imagine what it would have been like to see him back in the 70s.

3. Okkervil River, September 25, 2007. It was almost religious.

4. They Might Be Giants, Bumbershoot, so long ago that I honestly don't know what year it was. 1998, probably.

The thing that was so amazing about the TMBG show was the absolute control they had over the crowd. You have to understand that Bumbershoot is this massive 4-day long festival in Seattle over Labor Day weekend with about 7 million different shows, arts and crafts, food, and an almost unbelievable number of people. Basically all the shows are free - you just pay a general admission to get into Seattle Center. The result is that you get a LOT of folks at shows who aren't really fans of the band per se. Or haven't even heard of the band perhaps.

For this show, they were in the old Mercer Arena - which is a seriously big space for a band like TMBG. Just to offer some perspective, it's the same place I had seen the Smashing Pumpkins a few years earlier on their Mellon Collie tour. So it had all the makings of a crowd that was not going to be terribly receptive to the John's unique style.

Which is why it was such a wonderful experience. A few songs in people were up and dancing and cheering like crazy. A bit later they had what had to have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people up doing a conga line. And when they did roll out an "Istanbul" or "Particle Man" that people were familiar with the entire place was singing along.

I bring all this up partly to reminisce but also as a way of pointing out that TMBG are still around - and if they have never managed to put together an album that matches up to their work of the 80s and early 90s, they still know how to put together a great song now and then. What's more, they are clearly still enjoying what they do, experimenting with styles, subjects, and the like.

Meet the Elements - They Might Be Giants

Hence, the new album Here Comes Science, which follows their recent kid-friendly albums but in a more explicitly educational context. Effectively, it's the most fun album you'll ever here that includes lines like "Chlorophyll cells take in carbon dioxide" or "Plants, bugs, birds, fish, bacteria and men / Are mostly carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen." Admittedly, I'm a bit of a nerd about this sort of thing, but honestly who can turn down a band this earnest about actually trying to communicate legitimate science?

The absolute best part of it is the problem of their long-played standard, a cover of the 60s-era song "Why Does the Sun Shine?" It's a great song and they've been playing it so long that it clearly needed to be included. But, as often happens with science, the theories of past eras need to be reformed based on new evidence.

When they were fact-checking this one, they ran headfirst into a pretty big problem. The hook for the song is, of course, "the sun is a mass of incanescent gas." But, it turns out, that's not what the sun actually is. As we all know these days, the sun is actually composed mostly of plasma. So what's an enterprising band to do? Write an answer song of course. The result is back-to-back variations on "Why Does the Sun Shine?" the latter of which closes with an emphatic: "Forget that song, They got it wrong, That thesis has been rendered invalid."

The other big highlights are "Meet the Elements" which is as exuberant as anything they've done, "Roy G. Biv" which, of course, helps us to remember the color spectrum, and "Cells" which tells us why some things turn into kangaroos and others turn into Dwight D. Eisenhower.

They've got videos for the songs, too, which you should definitely check out.

You don't know what to do, so you do anything you like

2009-10-29T12:50:00.000-07:00

Change - Lightning Seeds

Health care is dead because of the town halls. No wait, it’s totally revitalized because of Obama’s big speech. And in fact, it’s basically inevitable because Olympia Snowe voted for it out of committee. And look, not only is health care inevitable, but the public option is going to pass because Harry Reid grew a backbone. Or, it turns out, it’s dead because Lieberman and Nelson and Landrieu and company are against it.

My general feeling about all this is there’s a lot of fuss about the swings because we all love a news cycle, but that the underlying fundamentals haven’t changed all that much. All year I’ve assumed that health care had a strong chance of passing, but that what actually made it to Obama’s desk would be a lot weaker than the folks on the blue team would have wanted. In short, I haven’t varied too much in my best guess that odds were probably 2:1 in favor of passage, but that a public option was extremely unlikely (unless in one of its most diluted variations) and that subsidies were not going to be as high as they really needed to be.

That’s what I thought in January, in May, in August. And it’s more or less what I think now.

Perhaps the biggest real change has been the revived potential for the public option. This, I think, was genuine news. The underlying dynamics started to shift over the summer with a massive liberal pushback on this issue and the willingness of the House and Senate leadership to really work for it.

That said, I still don’t think things have tilted THAT much. It’s not that I really think any of these ‘moderates’ would be willing to take responsibility for filibustering a health care bill because it contains a generally popular program that will reduce costs and – in the worst case scenario – will simply fail to displace a meaningful portion of the private insurance market. When push finally comes to shove and there’s an actual bill that needs to pass, these folks are probably going to vote for it regardless of disagreements at the margins.

The reason why I still don’t expect a strong public option is that even if we can be reasonably sure Evan Bayh is not going to derail the single most important piece of progressive legislation since LBJ over something so trivial, we can’t be sure. And more importantly, the White House and Democratic leadership can’t be sure. They all want a public option, of course, but they simply want a bill more.

What could be very interesting is the deals that take place assuming the stronger opt-out version does actually end up in the bill. How long will the supporters fight for it? How hard? Are they willing to play chicken on this? As things drag on, are they going to keep together the votes needed to shoot down GOP amendments as they pile up and up and up?

My guess is no. At some point, the leadership is going to loosen the reins, tell the wavering members that it’s okay to kill the opt-out. And the best case scenario will be that all of the fighting on this will have shifted opinion about where the ‘center’ is on this question sufficiently that the other side will take a trigger option that isn’t totally pointless (i.e. – that has meaningful targets).

Recent twists and turns might have changed things a bit, but I’d still wager that health care reform will pass before 2010, and that whatever variation on the public option that it includes will be so watered down as to be (relatively) meaningless.

Until things change again in a few hours.

You're smart enough to make the numbers appear

2009-10-28T18:23:00.000-07:00

Idiot Son - Loud Family

More health care posting coming tomorrow (hopefully). But for right now, a few thoughts on Joe Lieberman (#@%$#&%, CT):

At this point it is clear that he is a massive tool and I completely take back all the things I ever said about making nice with him. I get a fair number of predictions right - and tend to consider myself a fairly astute judge of political stuff - but good lord did I get this one wrong. My theory was that he would want to win another term in 2012, would see the value of tacking back left, and would deliver a solid vote on domestic issues (which were going to be the things most in need of filibuster-busting). It turns out that he apparently is only interested in lashing out like a petulant, spoiled child.

Now, I don't take his posturing on this all that seriously, and I don't think it spells doom for health care reform writ large or even necessarily this variation on the public option. But Jesus H. Christ he is ridiculous. That someone who can demonstrate such utter lack of character or empathy can exercise such influence over the political process is only a sign of how broken our system is.

And don't even get me started on the fact that this guy was one Supreme Court pang of conscience away from the Vice Presidency

Going off the deep end

2009-10-28T17:01:00.000-07:00

Alan Grayson was briefly a hero in the progresso-sphere, as a sort of liberal counterpart to Michelle Bachmann. Except, as people loved pointing out, while he was uncivil he was actually (more or less) stating things how they actually were. People loved him for that, and that was all well and fine. But there was always danger in trying to set up a liberal equivalent to Michelle Bachmann...namely that he would quickly steer into bomb-throwing for the sheer sake of it. Which may very well be what's happening.

All of which only solidifies my belief that the truly progresssive response to lunatics like Bachmann and Glenn Beck and the like is reasoned discourse. We can't out-shout them, and the more we try the more we're adopting a form of rhetorical engagement which plays into their hands.

There's the old Clinton line: "if one candidate's trying to scare you and the other's trying to get you to think...you better vote for the person who wants you to think."

Well, he's right. All other things equal, the more that people think the more we win. Which isn't to say there's no rational argument for a conservative position, obviously. It's just to say that on balance conservativism is an attitude of disengagement. Vitriol, screaming, and general nuttiness aren't intrinsically conservative, but the type of communicative process they embody certainly trends that way.

Tired of feeling cold and alone

2009-10-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

The Odds - Saybia (from Eyes on the Highway)

I don't even care about basketball, but I can't help but point out the breakdown in logic in this recent post by Matt Yglesias. Taking issue with Bill Simmons' prediction that the Trailblazers will go 41-41 he says:

To merely go 54-28 again would require the team to regress somewhat. To win 41 games would involve a regression as big as the step forward that would be require to win 75 games and become the greatest team of all time.

Yikes.

What is missing in this analysis is a recognition of the importance of 'regressing to the mean.' Put simply, on balance any performance is substantially more likely to revert to the mean performance of the pool from which it is drawn than it is to go further toward the extreme.

In this case, the pool is professional NBA teams and the mean is (obviously) .500. All else being equal, we'd assume that any team who wins more than 41 games is going to do worse in the next year, and vice versa. And the further away from the mean, the harder it will be sustain their performance. And it will be particularly difficult to improve.

Like I said, I don't care about basketball, but the principle is pretty important for a lot of areas. It's the general idea which helps us remember that exceptional economic performances are...well...exceptional, and thus unlikely to be sustained or improved upon. It's what reminds us that if we gamble and win, it was still a gamble. And if we try again, the odds are much closer to 50% than they are to 100%.

In short, it's a principle which we very easily lose track, meaning that we end up making extremely important decisions based on a false sense of security derived from a relatively small sample size. Forgetting to regress to the mean, and failing to gather a significant enough amount of data to minimize the effect this causes, is a deadly combination: whether it's for sports predictions or the global economy.

It's not too late to be with me again

2009-10-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

Looking through the archives, it seems like I never got around to posting about Ravens and Chimes a couple years back when they had a very nice little indie-pop record called Reichenbach Falls, in particular the jaunty and emphatic "General Lafayette! You Are Not Alone." Oh well. Consider this a much belated recommendation.

But in blog-world two years is a lifetime, so obviously the only reason I bring this up now is that the band is back with another perfect little slice of quirky and melodic guitar pop.

Hearts of Palm - Ravens and Chimes

I'm sure this reference isn't going to help many people, but I can't help but hear them as a slightly more sunny variation on Hefner.

"Hearts of Palm" is scheduled for release on their as-yet-untitled second album. Given that it doesn't even have a name yet, I'm guessing mid-2010 before we'll actually be hearing anything. But in the meantime, enjoy this one and maybe pick up their debut.

I'm sorry, but I'm not allowed to argue anymore

2009-10-23T20:33:00.001-07:00

Let's play a game of "I totally was going to say it when I had time, but someone already got around to it, and said it better anyways." In this case, it's Daniel at Crooked Timber, on the Super-Freakonomics climate denialist bust-up that happened this week:

The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people. Now opinions may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do – I think it’s fantastic – but if annoying people is what you’re trying to do, then you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do. If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you’re in a fight. It’s the definition of passive-aggression and really quite unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your standards of a calm and rational debate. If Superfreakonomics wanted a calm and rational debate, this chapter would have been called something like: “Geoengineering: Issues in Relative Cost Estimation of SO2 Shielding”, and the book would have sold about five copies.

Yep, that's about the size of it. For me, the big story here isn't that the new Freakonomics book has a bunch of stuff in it that wasn't particularly well researched and is there more for shock value than strong evidence. I've been reading the Freakonomics blog for a while now and the mixture of smug economic rational choice contortionism and smarmy contrarian dodginess is pretty common there. It's worth putting up with because about one in four posts are actually pretty fascinating, but that's precisely the stuff that was least likely to go into the new book.

No, the real story is the way it demonstrates the general ridiculousness which is contrarianism these days.

It's a little rich to act like you're telling truth to power and bucking trends when the crux of your argument is that we should just go on doing exactly what major economic movers and shakers want. And then there's the Slate thing where you act like you're a rebel because you brazenly accuse both sides of every single issue of being misleading. The subtext, of course, is that since the truth is always at the precise midpoint between any two positions, we should probably just keep on doing what we're doing.

I'm exaggerating of course, but it does sometimes seem like there are only two types of argument that are allowed to appear on a public stage these days: 1) deliberate exaggeration of things that most people already wish were true in order to confirm what we expect, but in such a radical, cool way that it seems edgy. 2) a 'pox on both houses' style that suggests the impossibility of making actual firm judgments about important issues.

(I don't even want to get into the recent Slate article suggesting that Creed is actually a good band. I have a friend who declared them the kings of suck-core back when they were big in the 90s and nothing since then has changed my opinion one iota. I'm far more willing to listen to the "Sarah Palin punched Putin's big head when he rose over Alaska and thus is qualified to have her own personal nuclear arsenal" theory than an apology for Creed.)

Anyways, what is truly aggravating about all this is the way that those who make purely political arguments (made in a particular way in clear-eyed awareness of the way that subtext and connotations will help them sell, sell, sell) immediately fall back into this sense of victimhood - where the true villain is the 'tone' of arguments.

I'm not saying tone doesn't matter. When you have people arguing in good faith, there are few things more damaging to legitimate debate than the intrusion of an antagonistic and angry tone. But when you have people attempting to manipulate other people to make a buck...

[End rambling]

While I'm on the subject of argument though (and given the 40th anniversary of Monty Python's Flying Circus), how about a nice video for a palate cleanser:

The malleability of public opinion

2009-10-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum both talk about a recent poll on the question of mandated insurance. In the poll, 56% said they support requiring people to get health insurance, and 41% were against it. But...if you tell the opposers that low-income families will get subsidies to help them pay, then a third of them switch.

Klein says “In other words, a solid majority supports the individual mandate. And a third of the opponents become supporters if they learn that there will be subsidies for people who can't afford insurance.”

However, I think that’s a misleading way of characterizing it. Or, if misleading is a bit too strong, it’s at least incomplete. Because what’s left out of that analysis is a deeper effect, which Drum points to, namely that “when you add some additional detail you always get a certain number of people to flip sides.”

He wonders about this in a general sense: whether work has been done to quantify just how big of a swing is usual in these sorts of circumstances.

But I think it also reminds us that you can’t uncritically add the original 56% and one-third of 41% to get 70% support for mandates. Because we don’t know how many of the supporters could be just as easily convinced to change their mind. Perhaps if they knew subsidies were being offered, they’d stop supporting it. They like the idea of forcing everyone to participate but don’t like the idea of their tax dollars going to support it. That’s not a completely insane position to have.

The point being that it's very easy to take these sort of polling numbers and extrapolate a general sense of where the society is at. But ultimately, the numbers are so fluid and unstable that it's really hard to draw meaningful conclusions at all. Even the idea that 97% of people are remotely close to having a formed opinion on this question is laughable.

That doesn't mean polls like this are useless. They definitely help to clarify a general sense of attitudes and give us a window into what sorts of arguments might be useful. But we really should strive to remind ourselves that they are at best rough indicators and certainly are not dispositive.

The cost of living

2009-10-19T09:41:00.000-07:00

Bruno's Torso - Death Vessel (from Nothing is Precious Enough For Us)

Two things about the cost-of-living bonuses and social security.

Background: Social Security has an automatic cost-of-living increase that has taken effect every since since the adjustments were instituted in 1975. This year, however, since there was no inflation (and in fact there was deflation) no increase will happen. This creates a problem because people assume those increases will happen and if they don't, they get angry. So, in lieu of the cost of living increase, the administration is proposing simply cutting them all a $250 check.

The first point to make about this is well stated by Kevin Drum:

this does go to show the power that sustained inflation holds on our imaginations. Technical arguments about CPI calculations aside, the fact is that seniors haven't gotten a benefit increase for decades. It's just not the way the program works. But the fact that their checks keep going up makes it seem like they have. So now, despite the fact that the huge benefit increase of last January combined with the deflation of the past 12 months means seniors really are getting higher benefits for the first time in recent memory, it doesn't seem like it.

This is a larger problem of how we talk about money in our society. We all understand in a general sense that inflation means things are always going to cost more over time. And yet when it comes to specific instances it's hard to keep track of that. And that's nowhere more apparent than something like this.

Given this, there is a general sense of outrage about this. And at first glance it makes sense. 'Look how ridiculous our system is!'

But in reality this is an excellent problem to have at this particular moment. We should be spending a lot MORE in stimulus than we are, but the political winds made it impossible to get the extra several hundred billion dollars. Situations like this, where an immensely powerful sub-group expresses a sense of entitlement to extra cash, are perfect in this context.

Even though it's a stupid reason for the policy, the underlying dynamic is perfectly rational. Build in a cost of living increase and any time when that doesn't kick in is, by definition, going to be a time when it's a good idea to get extra money into the hands of folks who will be somewhat inclined to spend it.

It's a much smaller microcosm of some pretty serious public engineering issues. Medicaid, for example, is a policy that could potentially serve this same effect. It's a counter-cyclical program. When the economy falls, more people need it, but that's precisely when state budgets are smaller and less capable of covering the cost. The result: cuts in spending when they are most needed. Which may be a good argument for putting it under exclusive federal control. As a federal entitlement, it would enable more money to go to those who needed thanks to the federal government's ability to deficit spend.

Of course, it's easy to take this kind of thing too far. As much as I'd love a well-constructed liberal-socialist state that took on WAY MORE entitlements, we do not have such a state. And as such, trying to graft in too many of these sort of entitlement-fixes into the structurally unbalanced system we've got risks political backlash that could eviscerate some major elements of the social safety net.

So you've got to calibrate this stuff. But a few billion of extra stimulus in the disguise of a check to compensate the lack of a cost of living increase...that's easy business that helps everyone.

Raise a little family on Schlitz and Mickey Mouse

2009-10-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

Optimist Vs. The Silent Alarm (When The Saints Go Marching In) - Casiotone for the Painfully Alone

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone has been around for years and years, occasionally putting out a track that I enjoyed but mostly losing me in the meanders of the uber-lo-fi tones. In 2009, though, Owen Ashworth finally emerges in the cool light of day, with real instruments and everything on Vs. Children - without a doubt his most accomplished effort. The most notable change is the powerful presence of organs, pianos, keyboards and the like. The old Casiotone has been swapped on many of these tracks for big old fashioned gospel romps.

The highlight of these is "Optimist Vs. The Silent Alarm (When The Saints Go Marching In)" - which carries all the urgency and presence of a great escape, combined with the the wild sentiment and urgent dreams of somone on the run. And nothing could feel more appropirate than the final 20 seconds, when the theme of "When the Saints Go Marching In" takes over. It's the most insistent song he's produced to date - you can almost feel the stolen bills fluttering out the back of the car as it tears down the road.

Shortly after comes "Traveling Salesman's Young Wife Home Alone On Christmas in Montpelier, VT" which offers another dose of acute longing. Here the delicate balance of intricacy and simplicity is carefully negotiated.

There are too many tracks that never quite launch for this to work perfectly for me as an album. But the highs are superb.

Right wing, left wing, chicken wing

2009-10-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum talks about the currently growing brand of right-wing lunacy, talking in particular about John Shadegg (R-Arizona), who described the current bills on health care reform as "Soviet-style gulag health care":

it's a good example of what I mean when I suggest that today's right-wing lunacy is different from left-wing lunacy of the Bush years. Sure, there were lefty bloggers who went over the top about Amerika and how the NSA was bringing 1984 to life and so forth, but for the most part you didn't have members of Congress taking to the House floor and joining in. They largely managed to keep a slightly more even keel. But on the Republican side, after a mere few months of Obama, this kind of stuff has become routine. They've joined the Caps Lock crowd feet first.

I would posit that any significantly large set of people contains an extreme wing - not just extreme in the content of their beliefs but also in the form that they use to express those ideas. As Drum calls it: the CAPS-lock wing of the group.

I tend to be skeptical of all the lefty hand-wringing about the 'tone' of things these days, and consider the youtubization of politics that enables all the crazies who have been around forever to suddenly have an easy route for public consumption. That said, I do think there's something going with the "CAPS-lock theory of right wing politics."

Which is not to accuse every - or even a significant percentage - of Republicans of going ALLCAPS on us. There are always going to be nuts in any crowd. It's just to say that it's striking how easy and comfortable the respectable parts of the right-wing seem to be jostling elbows with the nuts.