Someone Needs a Tissue

I'm a huge fan of Free Speech. I believe it should be as robust and inclusive as possible. It should protect a foreign corporation advocating the violent genocide of a racial AND religious minority and the overthrow of the internet!

Folks who want to nibble out little exceptions to free speech, in cases where folks say ugly things or talk about violence, get no sympathy from me. But, if you wanted to propose that cowardly politicians who won't stand for eloquently articulated principles for fear they will lose a few percentage points of popularity or some far-off election can't ever invoke the names of men who literally put their lives on the line taking unpopular positions for no other reason than they were convinced it was the right thing to do... Well, I'd give you ten minutes.

"Matt Damon Will Make His Next 3 Flicks for Typical Teacher's Salary" Reports No One Cuz it's Not True

This video has been making the rounds on facebook and the interwebs (and I'm told TMZ) mainly on the buzz supplied by teachers and pro-teacher-minded individuals thinking that Matt Damon makes some amazing point here. I find this notion totally off-base.

First, let me say that I think what Damon says, as a factual matter, is likely pretty true: many people become teachers because they have a passion or overwhelming desire to do so. And, within reason, "shitty salaries" will not cause them to choose a different career path. Fine, great. But even accepting this as true, it is quite a leap to say that financial issues create no incentives whatsoever, and/or that those who are driven to teach no matter what the salary are thusly and by definition good teachers.

I happen to believe that teachers should be paid a lot more than they are currently. The main reason I believe this is that higher pay will attract more people to the teaching profession, and that will in turn raise the quality of teachers we're putting in front of our children. I feel as though the world is full of anecdotal evidence of people who might like to teach or have taught but are also skilled at and passionate about science, or writing, or business and they end up pursuing careers in those fields instead. Higher salaries would entice some of those folks to become teachers, or stay in the teaching profession. And yes, I believe that nearly everyone considers salary as a meaningful factor when picking a career path, whether or not it is the most important one.

So, if I believe all of those things, I don't really see how I can agree with Matt Damon at all. I'm almost waiting for some talking head idiot to appear on Fox News and cite this video as reasons why we should be paying teachers less as a way to save government money. Because Matt Damon says they will work for any amount of money!

None of this is to say that Matt Damon sounds particularly dumb here (I actually agree with his larger argument about less standardized tests, and more teacher autonomy). He's been put on the spot, and he's really pushing back against a larger argument of using free market principles generally to improve teachers' performance, a much murkier and complicated set of issues beyond just salaries. But based on the words that actually come out of his mouth, this one minute video, the argument he makes isn't all that pro-teacher.

That brings us back to my confusion. Teachers and pro-teacher folks seem to love this video, but, assuming they think teachers deserve higher salaries, what exactly is their case for why? Whatever it is, it certainly can't involve the notion that paying teachers more will improve the quality of teaching. At least not according to Matt Damon.

Debt Ceiling Deal: Lose-Lose-Lose, but it Still May Work Out

While many have rightfully decried the debt ceiling deal as the epitome of DC Kabuki theater, and avoiding our biggest problems under the guise of superficial "problem solving" meant only to look good politically, I believe it was likely an absolute disaster-stroke for Obama and his political fortunes.

On the surface and out of the box, the deal plays poorly for Obama as it makes him look like a weak-kneed capitulator. Indeed, almost no one believes he should have given up more and the dissatisfaction with his base is getting awfully loud. On substantive grounds, the deal doesn't come across as all that serious or "adult" since $1 trillion over ten years in reduced projected spending a) isn't all that much b) doesn't actually cut spending c) doesn't start until 2014 and d) can easily be undone by the five or six Congresses yet to come that can simply vote to say "yeah, no" anytime they feel like it. So, that leaves Barry with the victory of avoiding default and being the most adult in terms of decorum and compromise. That's not nothing, but untethered to results and leadership, it's not all that great.

Looking ahead, the aftermath of this deal makes things worse for winning a second term. The most conventional of all wisdoms says that re-election of a President is closely correlated with the economy. Jobs are a major issue that, left unaddressed, could create conditions whereby Americans elected a pig wearing a monacle just to kick out the sitting President. Yet, Obama has tied his own hands by conducting the debt ceiling debate on Republican terms: that the debt is serious and impacting our economy. This means a $1 trillion dollar tax cut/stimulus plan like the one passed in December '10 can't be taken seriously anymore after all this dire talk of debt andf spending cuts. It means a job program that involves spending on infrastructure or clean energy will be smothered in its crib for fear of an inability to sell it short-term. And, even if you could sell it short term, and get it passed that crazy Congress, you then hit the problem of having way too short of a long-term to see results. In other words, any seriously expensive jobs program has to have results by the first Tuesday in November 2012 or the President will get creamed for it. That all means you probably don't even start down the road of rolling out such a plan. (Did I mention that Congress is crazy?)

This may set up a somewhat inverted pyramid effect where Obama is in the reverse roll he played in the 2008 election. Back then, many Democratic candidates for Congress rode Obama's coat tails and benefitted from the starry-eyed first-time voters that were energized by Obama's soaring rhetoric and earth-shifting charisma. Now, Democrats in Congress can paint themselves as the alternative on job creation, desperate to take government money and stuff it into the overall pockets of America's working class if only these wacky Tea-Party goons would let them. Roll out a few hypothetical, pie-in-the-sky job programs with projections to create 45 bazillion new jobs in six hours, really flesh out the details and put it up for a vote and let the Republicans crush/ignore it. See how that plays.

Let Obama wax that of course he'd love to see any legislation that projects to create jobs but the Congress has to get one to him, and then use that as a hammer against the Republicans who vote against it. Top that off with the looming Bush tax cuts and how they need to expire because.. wait for it.. now again debt is serious (ignore the dissonance and hypocrisy here) and tax cuts don't create jobs evidently. Boom! You may have enough people excited to vote for their congress-critter! And hey, I mean, I guess this Obama guy is better than Romney, so I'll check the box for him too.

Things in Nutshells

The Obama administration has decided in the very same week that they will be prosecuting absolutely none of the assholes who ordered, OK'd and carried out the tortured helpless human beings until many (like 100) of them died, except for like three low-level scapegoats who apparently did those things extra bad AND that people who sell marijuana for medicinal use in jurisdictions where the law says that's OK will be cracked down upon because they are still breaking federal law.

Words really can't capture how insulting and infuriating this is - seriously, if I actually get to thinking about this, my heartbeat literally starts to increase and my eyes water a little bit - or how cartoonishly, absurdly unrecognizable the Obama Adminsitration has gone astray from the Obama Campaign that sired it.

If one were to write a novel with a magnanimous and principled main character caught up in a world based entirely on the actual facts and goings-on of this adminsitration, it would read like a slightly more subtle mash-up of the Lord of the Rings and 1984 with the allegorical narrative more tightly focused on the silly charade that is our electoral politics, and not as heavy on the corrupting influence of power or secrecy and information control.

I just have no idea how we got here. How did things go so wrong? When does Ashton Kutcher come out? What's a word that means soul-crushing disappointment mixed with stab-your-eye-with-a-fork anger?

Damn!

Glenn Greenwald absolutely slaughters the Obama administration and Harold Koh on its absurd positions on Libya and the War Powers Act. The only appropriate analogies that spring to mind are one-sided rap battles (like that scene at the end of 8 Mile) or ferocious basketball rejections (Koh went awfully weak to the hole). "Open and shut" doesn't do it justice. Damn.

And how exactly did Greenwald dismantle the absurd bullshit spewing from Obama and his minions? Did it involve some primer course on an obscure Constitutional Law concept and citations to 60 year old case law? Nope. It simply involved taking things government officials said in the very recent past, and comparing it to what they say and do now - including and especially things they said on the campaign trail. Though you've probably forgot, this is a practice usually referred to as "journalism."

Indeed, it wasn't so much Greenwald and his amazing, unique skill as much as it was Obama and Koh saying and doing things that were so radically inconsistent with the principles and views they had previously expressed. That's what makes the dismantling of their flip-floppity bullshit so thorough and so easy: All one has to do is put "before and after" statements by these clowns side-by-side on a page and let the reader do the math. Of course nearly every major voice in the media, even when taking critical approaches towards this issue, fails to do this.

Don't be a Partisan Dick

Here's an interesting interview with Senator John Kerry about Libya (go to about the 7:30 mark) and the War Powers Act. Let's set aside the stupidity of Kerry and Dean's statements, about how the WPA only applies when there are troops on the ground, and/or 50k men are dead and/or when a certain definition of "introducing into" is met. (Like Kerry would have gone along with not authorizing Iraq beecause initial projections made it seem brief and non-costly. Please.)

Instead, I'd just want to focus on the cost partisn loyalty has on our national discussion as exemplified in that clip. On this issue, the Republicans are being partisan or "playing politics", as Kerry astutely observes, and... they are also totally correct. Moreover, they are bringing up an important issue that should (must) be debated by the Congress: The United states is using force in a foreign country and causing the deaths of people, including women and children and this has been going on for 3 months. Our directly elected representatives need to weigh in, regardless of whether a statute and the Constitution require their authorization.

So really, Kerry's position amounts to essentially opposing democracy, and not for any legitimate reasons. (Indeed Kerry seems to place the burden on those opposing foreign interventions with having to prove their costly and violent enough to even be debated by our Congress.) But relies mainly on the fact that the Republicans are just acting all partisan and shit, and then Howard Dean (who made his name critizing the War in Iraq and apparently loves irony) says something stupid like "you don't play politics with American troops." And all that crap sorta flies as an actual argument.

So there you have it. When you (in this case the Republicans) come down in favor of debate, representation and democracy when it comes to major issues of life and death, your naked partisanship will be your undoing, and provide the best ammunition for your opponents, who otherwise couldn't formulate real arguments. This is the cost of being a blatantly partisan douche bag and doing things like supported shit you don't like because you like the politician doing it. You fuck up democracy. Way to go!

Jon Stewart/Chris Wallace: My Thoughts

There's not a word Stewart spokes in that much-discussed conversation with Chris Wallace that I would disagree with, when it comes to bias in the media. Wallace, and really anyone else who tries to make the "Liberal Media Bias" argument, seems desperate in pointing to a Diane Sawyer lead-in to a controversial story, or some request to go through Palin's emails. Really?

To be fair, if you gave him all day, Wallace could probably come up with 100 decent examples, and then he would argue that, together, they paint an overall picture that supports his thesis. But that still wouldn't fly. It's a high burden to prove that every major media outlet is biased in one direction, across the board, nearly all the time. And, the evidence against this position is significant and substantial. So much so that Wallace's best 5,000 examples still wouldn't put the preponderence of the evidence on his side.

We know the media isn't biased toward liberalism because we saw the coverage in the lead up to the War in Iraq, we watched the glossing over of Bush's illegal spying program, we saw the supposedly liberal media swallow whole on newly-minted, orwellianian lingo to describe what had always plainly been known as torture to protect the legacy of a conservative President committing rather un-liberal acts. Interestingly, the penultimate "liberal rag" the New York Times was centrally involved in all of those instances and was a huge help to Bush and Cheney. Those are arguably the most significant news stories of the decade (the War in Iraq and torture will surely be included in any and every history book 50-100 years from now, with footnotes about the abject media failure in each case) and should be weighted as such in this argument. But, even Stewart pulls a good example out of the salacious tabloid pile in pointing to Anthony Weiner.

Doubtless, had the media taken the high road and not put this story front and center for one week citing "more pressing issues" (or whatever), Wallace would complain that this was a conspiracy to let Weiner off the hook. Weiner is a bona fide liberal, after all. Of course, the media was relentless and ruthless towards Weiner, and the story seemed to have a life and energy that was greater than stories involving Republican legislators actually having sex with other not-their-wife people.

The media is sensational, and very lazy, and this makes them inaccurate, misleading and highly prone to over-simplification. They are anything but consistent. On the whole, the media is devastatingly shitty and it's a completely open question as to whether or not they even perform the proper function of a free press in a democratic society. All of this, as Stewart points out, is the true media bias. Any example of media shittiness that appears to help liberals and/or harm conservatives, can always - every single time - be explained, not as ideological bias, but as vapid, point-missing, sensationalistic incompetence.