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Senator Tim Scott

During the summer 2011 debate over raising the U.S. debt ceiling, Scott supported the inclusion of a balanced-budget Constitutional amendment in the debt ceiling bill, and opposed legislation that did not include the amendment. Before voting against the final bill to raise the debt ceiling, Scott and other first-term conservatives prayed for guidance in a congressional chapel. Afterward, he said he had received divine inspiration for his vote, and joined the rest of the South Carolina congressional delegation in voting No.   Wiki

The New York Times columnists seem to think highly of Mr. Scott, if not as president, then as VP.

I don’t think much of anyone who has the unmitigated arrogance to declare that he has the ear of God and the authority to relate unto us mere peons what the will of the almighty is.  In this case, the stupid idea of compelling the national U.S. government to balance its books every year.  There are very sound economic reasons why this is a preposterously unfeasible way to manage the national budget.  Even more preposterous is the idea that the Republicans would not immediately break their own rule in order to increase the military budget without having to actually raise taxes in order to do it.

This is a man who has laid the theoretical foundation for making all abortions illegal, terminating Social Security and Medicare, and abandoning the United Nations.  God told me to.  And if I tell you that that is what God thinks, I am right you are wrong.  There can be no debate with God.  There can be no compromise.

Tim Scott appears to be a decent man– by Republican standards.  He is civil.  No personal scandals that I know of.  And here’s an oddity, like Lindsay Graham, he is unmarried.   Born in 1965, which makes him about 60, and unmarried.   What does that mean?  Does it mean what I think it means in regard to Lindsay Graham?  I feel free to speculate because there is nothing wrong with being gay, but he is opposed to homosexual marriage, which would raise a host of fabulous intricacies in the perception of his social values.

His Justice Reform Bill, which got 55 votes in the Senate (not enough to bypass the filibuster) is not all bad.  It’s not enough, but it’s a step in the right direction.  He wants to rescind the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something more anodyne to Republicans, a nod to the fact that the act has actually become pretty popular.  How to reduce the phenomenal growth of health care costs?  Tort reform.  It’s the “Mental Health” red herring for health care: something that will have virtually no impact on the problem it is supposed to solve but makes it sound like the Republicans are doing something about it.

He rather pathetically dodges reporters’ questions on the abortion issue but says he is against it but would sign a national 20-week ban if he was president.  That is really a very odd position.   He knows he desperately needs the votes of the most hypocritical demographic in the nation– evangelical “christians”– so he can’t be in favor of abortion rights, which makes a national ban at 20 weeks problematic.  So he says he defers to state governments on the issues, which is the very epitome of passing the buck, equivocating, and, frankly, lying.

We know how Republicans handle deficits.  When we have all the reigns of government (as they were in the first two years of the Trump Administration) they cut taxes which balloons the deficit and refuse to cut program spending because they know how unpopular that would make them.  So the deficit is suddenly not a problem.  (Trump added more to the deficit than any previous president).

It is only when the Democrats have the White House that their crocodile tears appear.  I don’t expect Scott to be any exception.  If he won, by some ridiculous sequence of events, like every other republican president in the past fifty years, he will do nothing about it.

 

 

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Rescue the Penguin

Saw a video today about animal rescues. A penguin being chased by orcas jumped into a zodiac boat, helped by the passengers. They patted him kindly and cheered. Heart-warming. An orca stranded on the rocks at low tide, were helped by other people who kept him wet until the tide returned and he could swim off. And eat the penguin.

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The $1,200 Hockey Stick

“Total bill: $42,156.50, covering emergency surgery, scans, laboratory testing, and three hours in a recovery room. His insurer has said it will pay him about $8,184 (7,260.40 in Swiss francs), which is double the procedure’s price in Switzerland. This left him to cover the remaining roughly $34,000.” NPR

Presidential Candidate Tim Scott says America has the greatest healthcare system in the world. Yet this same procedure would cost about 1/7th the price in Switzerland, which is not exactly a backwater. Wait– no, it’s 1/10th (the insurance company voluntarily paid double). This is Switzerland- not Thailand or the Philippines (not that there’s anything deficient about health care in those countries).

If you took anything produced in some other country and gave an American company 10 times what it cost in that country and said see if you can produce one that’s better, well, heck, yeah, I think they probably could. They could certainly equal it. So if an American company could produce, say, a hockey stick for $1,200, I guess they could say it was the greatest hockey stick in the world and they might be right. If you want hockey sticks to cost $1,200.

Does that make the American company “the greatest”? I would argue that if it cost that much to make a hockey stick when everyone else knows how to make one for 1/10 the cost, they might be the worst.

And I’ll bet those sticks would break just as quickly as the $120 Canadian sticks. In terms of health care results, that is demonstrably true (life expectancy in the U.S. is lower than most other developed countries, including Canada).

The most depressing part of the story is the long list of itemized charges on this guy’s bill. It’s like this giant mechanical octopus with 100 arms wrapping itself around you and sucking as much blood out of you as it can. You’ll live, but those suction cup marks will be around for a long time.

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The Indefinite Obscurely Described Effusively Vague President of the Television Political Drama

I’ve pretty well had it with TV dramas and their predictable, formulaic, antiseptic, generic piss-pot features.

I watched about ten minutes of the Netflix drama “The Diplomat”.   The first bad sign is also the most fatal: what political party does the President belong to?  The answer?  None.   Apparently, the biggest, most central, most essential dynamic of American politics is absent– like Barbie’s Ken’s penis– because the fucking makers of this show don’t want to offend the half of America that doesn’t like the other half’s political party.

Oh, the British prime-minister is identified as a Tory.  I presume that is so they can safely mock him.  But it makes it even more bizarre that Rayburn is not identified as a Democrat, which is obviously what the show’s creators intend Democrats to think.  Republicans will have to be content imagining that there could be an intelligent, ethical Republican president, and will be gratified to discover that Rayburn is not identified as otherwise in an obvious manner.  But everybody knows that an intelligent, rational, educated leader will be a Democrat or John McCain.

This has been a monumentally stupid component of American mass entertainment since the beginning of television time, right up to just before “The West Wing”, and immediately thereafter.  “The West Wing” brilliantly defied this convention and that’s why it is still regarded as one of the best Television dramas of all time (along with “The Wire”).

Go ahead and tell me if I missed anything.  Keri Russell, using her most anguished constipated oh-I-suffer-so face, plays Kate Wyler, a spunky but smart and competent American diplomat who doesn’t get the respect she deserves even though she is clearly way smarter and spunkier than President Rayburn and his fat, bald Secretary of State Miguel Sandoval, who disapproves when (sigh) Kate “goes rogue to get the job done”.

Kate is not only an overly familiar trope; she is a cliche.  Hers is probably the most familiar trope in entertainment right now: the supposedly tough, roguish, smart, feisty female who shows up all the privileged white men.  The female fans go, “oh — I’m like her. I’m smart and capable and feisty– and smoking hot!– and I don’t get the respect and admiration I deserve!”  This is the media’s form of masturbation.  There will almost certainly be a scene in which she is dragged kicking and screaming to some big event in a fabulous gown and high heels.  Because if she willingly dressed in a fabulous gown and high heels she would be revealed as a vain, superficial, poseur.

Having just watched “State of Play” (the terrific BBC version; not the lame movie with Russell Crowe and Helen Mirren), my taste in political drama has been corrupted.  I’ve watched extensive patches of the contrived “The Americans” and the tediously suffocating “Homeland”.   But after watching “State of Play”, I allowed myself to expect reasonably credible story lines, and I expect characters to be a little less transparently self-serving and narcissistic.

There is no way that any politician or executive with the privilege that they wield would put up with a self-righteous little snit like Kate Wyler telling them they are wrong and they should listen to her and do what she tells them.  Nobody in a position of power will tolerate it.  It’s an affront to their self-respect and egos.  Even if she’s right, they won’t keep her around.  Actually, especially if she’s right.  And in “The Diplomat” aside from the usual defensively scripted token “error” (her only fault was she cared too much), Kate is going to be right all the time, and the men around her are going to be wrong over and over again, and yet they will thrash that dynamic at you over and over again because it is so fucking gratifying to the quasi-feminist audiences out there they will just eat it up.

Incidentally, in some later episodes of “The West Wing”, the writers had Toby and Leo arguing vigorously with President Bartlett and telling him he was doing something unethical or stupid.  These were the weakest episodes of the series and betrayed the fundamental intelligence of the first four years under Aaron Sorkin who understood that no President, no matter how competent,  would tolerate an underling lecturing him on ethics — at least, not for any longer than it would take to have them hand in their resignation.

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The RIM Job

The makers of the film about the founding of RIM (Research In Motion) and inventors of the Blackberry heap contempt on the idea that the story should be even reasonably accurate.  “The Sound of Music” was not accurate, and it won eight Oscars, they say.

“The Sound of Music” was a piece of well-polished saccharine kitsch, and did you really mean to say that winning an Oscar proves anything but that your promotional machinery is working?

Maria Von Trapp, we know, did not actually love the Captain.

And Leonard Nimoy was not actually a Vulcan.

Seriously, what bothers me about the way Hollywood changes the facts is not that stories are edited but that the edits invariably cater to the cheesiest preferences and prejudices of mass audiences. If you want to make up a story, just make up a story. Yes, that requires talent and creativity and imagination. But if you are not just a generic pop factory and you want to claim your story is “based” on truth, you owe it to history to tell the truth with reasonable accuracy.  Oh, don’t pooh-pooh the idea that there is a social responsibility side to pop culture.  There is, and you are contemptible for ignoring it.

Audiences want to believe that their fantasies have a weird kind of “truthiness” as Stephen Colbert would describe it.  Like pornography.

It’s saccharine.

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Someone Who Will Die for You and More

Lightfoot had expressed regret and repentance for one of his greatest songs, “For Lovin’ Me”.
“I’ve got a hundred more like you / So don’t be blue;
I’ll have a thousand ‘fore I’m through.”

Wow. Two minutes and 35 seconds of “So long, sucker”.

But I think he’s wrong about the regret. It’s a vivid portrait of a type of person, a time and place, an era, and real attitudes and values, even if we don’t admire those attitudes today. (We probably didn’t admire them then either.) It’s like a drama about an unlikeable hero, and there’s value in encountering it in song or drama or literature. It’s like “King Lear”: the actor shouldn’t feel bad later that he brought the fool to life: it’s drama. It’s certainly real. And it’s a far more authentic song than “Sundown” which I always felt was not much more than a catchy riff. When you think about it, “Sundown” isn’t dissimilar in one way: the message is still “get lost”. It might even be to the same woman.

Other songs in kinship:
“Baby the Rain Must Fall”
“Freebird”
“Green Green”
“We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” (the rare female perspective)
“Heard it in a Love Song”

I find “Baby the Rain Must Fall” a classic in the category of making caddishness sound inspirational:

Baby, the rain must fall
Baby, the wind must blow,
Where-ever my heart leads me,
Baby I must go,
Baby I must go.

See? He’s not being a jerk. It’s the wind and the rain that compels him to dump the girl.

In contrast, Bob Dylan:

You say you’re looking for someone
Who will promise never to part
Someone to close his eyes for you
Someone to close his heart
Someone who will die for you and more
It aint me, babe.

And that’s why I still think Dylan is such a remarkable songwriter. And maybe the best. No disrespect for Lightfoot, who was brilliant, but Dylan takes the same situation to a higher, far more interesting level. And that line ending with “and more”!!

Anyway… just rambling about “love ’em and leave ’em” lyrics and Gord.

 

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Wide, Wide Awake

I keep hearing, about the banking defaults, that regulators were “asleep at the wheel”, and that’s why it happened. After hearing about Barney Frank’s role in dismembering his own regulatory legislation it has become clear that the authorities were not “asleep” at the wheel. They were actually wide, wide awake.

Frank, who helped craft the legislation imposing tighter regulations on banks after the 2008-09 crisis, was hired by– guess who– “Signature Bank” for two years for $2 million. In that role, he lobbied congress to emasculate his own “Dodds – Frank” package of regulations, which enabled Signature Bank to more than double in size with little regulatory oversight. A Republican congress passed the reforms and Trump signed it.

Nobody was asleep. They were wide, wide awake.

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Pope Francis’ Deficiencies

Ross Douthat writes as if there is a real core Catholic faith that is being smothered by Francis’ liberal leanings. But after decades of evangelicals proclaiming themselves to be the party of spirituality and faith and integrity and humility and all the other values derived from the example of Christ and then stampeding into the arms of the most repugnant narcissist to ever run for office, one might be forgiven for regarding Douthat’s tears about the state of the Catholic church as disingenuous as best. Thanks to this embrace of Trump, and the sexual abuse scandals, and the residential school scandals, and the Magdalene laundries scandals, and so on and so on, it is very, very hard to regard any religion as anything more than a charade, a club, an exclusive confederation of self-righteous hypocrites. I gaze at these pious individuals in wonder and ask myself, what do you really believe? Anything, other than gaining advantage for the members of your club? Francis should declare that the era of Big Church is over and leave every locality to indulge in their own preferred hypocrisies.

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Oh My God! We’re Getting More Anxious

Ross Douthat of the New York Times— the token conservative commentator on the opinion page– accepts the results of a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that show that teenagers today– especially–omygawd! girls– are more anxious, more depressed, and more unhappy than ever before.

By “social liberalism” I don’t mean the progressivism that took off in the Trump era — antiracism and diversity-equity-inclusion and #MeToo. I mean the more individualistic liberalism that emerged in the 1960s and experienced a second takeoff across the first decade of the 2000s. Its defining features were rapid secularization (the decline of Christian identification accelerated from the 1990s onward) and increasing social and sexual permissiveness — extending beyond support for same-sex marriage to beliefs about premarital sex, divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing, marijuana use and more.

And it’s all because of the liberals!  Douthat doesn’t think gun violence should depress anyone, or the cut-throat competitive nature of the U.S. economy, or the fear of being bankrupted by medical expenses, or the fact that a sexual predator and psychopath was elected president in 2016.  Oh no.  It’s the widespread availability of sex, gay or hetero, as a woman or a man or neither, and, of course, drug use.  Have we heard this before?

I have two points.  First of all, we hear about these studies all the time– and I mean ALL the time.  Sociologists and social scientists just love asking teenagers if they are happy.  Now, imagine for a moment you are a teenager.  And life is not great, but it’s not all bad either.  You’re kind of getting through it.  You have some hopes and dreams and know you might have to work hard to achieve them.  You have friends.  Then someone comes along and asks you if you are happy or depressed or anxious.  They ask you again an hour later.  They ask you again the next day, and the next, and the next.  You read articles in the New York Times or see pieces on CNN that tell you that a big problem today is that teenagers are not very happy.  You start to wonder.  Maybe I am unhappy.  Maybe I’m depressed.

I don’t deny that it might be true.  What I question is the assumption that these numbers represent a net change from previous eras, like the 1940’s, the 1950’s, and 1960’s.   How would we know?  It’s a great question to thoughtfully ask yourself: how would we know?

Nobody studied issues like this in the same comprehensive, systematic way in the 1950’s as we do now.  We didn’t have the internet, obviously, or social media, and even television and radio was completely different than they are today.  We didn’t have as many books or magazines or records or films.  We didn’t have as many family photographs or recordings, let alone video.  We had numerous wars around the world, and the U.S. itself was embroiled in Korea, and about to get embroiled in Viet Nam.

We had a lot of obvious racism, whites only schools, whites only restaurants and drinking fountains.  We had a lot of drunk driving and date-rape, both of which now are severely punished, but were not back then.  In fact, the consensus on rape seemed to be to not report it at all.  We had a lot of teen pregnancy, “shotgun” weddings, and groping and petting.  We had a society that blindly worshipped the military and the police.  (It is no coincidence that Douthat, a conservative, would harken back to an era of such “stellar” values even if he doesn’t make explicit those particular values).

I suspect that a big part of our perception of the 1950’s has been shaped by unrealistic media portrayals, most emblematically, in “Happy Days” and the movie “American Graffiti”.   Have a look at “The Last Picture Show”, “Diner”, “Rebel Without a Cause”, or “Badlands” for a corrective.

Secondly, Douthat clearly implies that enthusiastic membership in a church is a viable corrective.  If only we had a study that showed that teenagers who are active members of churches are happier, less depressed and less anxious,  and happier, than those who are not.   We have no such study.

What studies we do have that compare church-going folk with non-church-going folk seems to show that we are all largely the same, holy or profane, saved or damned.  We all indulge in porn.  We all cheat and lie.  (But only one side votes for Trump and loves guns and only one side believes you may have been born to the wrong gender and the world is warming.)

Even for Douthat, this column is unusually contrived in his desperation to find some way to blame liberals and progressives for the sad state of America.   Like all conservatives, he knows that his side, the side of regressive, low tax, deregulated economies, benefits by promoting a sense that we are on the brink of catastrophe.  Nothing new.  We’ve been on this brink according to the Douthats of the world since Elvis first gyrated his hips.

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Social Toxicity in Action: Your Cockatiel is Missing

CTV news had a story about a local woman who lost her pet cockatiel. I thought, well, I’m glad I live in a country where this is a news story. Beats the alternatives. Then I read the comments on the story. Some people actually expressed the wish that the bird would be killed and eaten. Others were dismayed that this story displaced more important stories about the earthquake or the new Russian offensive in Ukraine. There were comments by people who hated the first comments, and then by people who hated the second comments, and then by people who hated the people who made the hateful comments about the hateful comments. Humanity at its toxic worst.

The other night, PBS News had an interview with a Democratic governor, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, and a Republican governor, Spencer Cox, of Utah. The two men sat together, beside each other. They were civil, constructive, engaging, and respectful. They liked each other a lot, even though they had fundamental disagreements in many policy areas. They were working together on various important issues and trying to find common ground in areas where they disagreed. It was marvelous. It was inspiring. It was a powerful contrast to the toxic national political scene right now. It was reason for hope.

I’m not sure if that leaves me optimistic or pessimistic right now.

And yes, of course I wished the two of them would form a ticket for President and VP in 2024. And I am very sure that a majority of voters would love a team like that.

But it is a truism in American politics that you probably can’t win a nomination from your party right now if you don’t join the toxicity. The voters say they hate lying, compromised, attack-dog candidates but they vote for them. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

And now, let’s shoot down another ‘balloon’.