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“You Know That One Star Player You Had? Well, Funny Thing…”

[ 41 ] April 24, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

Lame ducks don’t get much lamer than Rex Ryan.

If you’re going to tank, you should tank right — MORE TEBOW. I think this year they should really try to revolutionize the NFL by making Tebow the starter and having Sanchez and two other terrible QBs line up as wideouts on every play. And as an alternative variation, they could extra-revolutionize the NFL by having Tebow line up as a tight end and bring in another QB to run the offense — Marty Mornhinweg might be able to use his connections to bring Joey Harrington into the fold.

In fairness, while Revis is a Hall of Fame-quality player, he is coming off an injury, so I can understand if the Jets didn’t want to be stuck with an A-Rod like albatross if it turned out…

If that play was at least good for a laugh, there’s nothing remotely funny about this. Revis scored $96 million from the Bucs over six years, but not a penny of it is guaranteed. Woody Johnson could’ve had virtually the same deal and cut his man as soon as it was warranted without owing him anything.

In conclusion, I hope that the Republican Party recognizes Woody Johnson’s potential and gives him an even bigger role in 2016.

Christoph Waltz Unchained

[ 211 ] April 24, 2013 | bspencer

Quickie review of “Django Unchained…” (Please bear in mind that I watch all movies nowadays with one eye on a toddler, so everything I write should be taken with a 33-lb. grain of bouncing salt.)

I’m not sure I like the trajectory of Quentin Tarantino’s latest offerings. I can’t tell if he’s interested in making satisfying semi-serious revenge flicks or goofy grindhouse satires. In both “Inglorious Basterds” and “Django Unchained,” I feel like a quarter of the way into the film Tarantino said “Fuck it, I’m just making a normal film.” Which would be fine if it weren’t so jarring. Besides, I don’t watch Tarantino films for “normal;” I want to be cringing or laughing or saying “That’s so goddamn clever.” I really do think Tarantino needs to maintain some sort of focus on the feel of his films. Otherwise, his stuff starts to feel like a cinematic patchwork quilt. That’s not a satisfying movie-watching experience for me.

That’s not to say that “Django Unchained” has nothing to recommend it. It has lots of stuff to recommend it. It’s visually-arresting, it’s occasionally emotionally-wrenching, and the performances of all actors were terrific.

I do have a problem with the title, however. I’m not sure how it came to be named “Django Unchained,” since the focus of the film seems to be a snarky Christoph Waltz. I really do think a more appropriate title for the film would have been something like “Impish German Bounty Hunter Unchained (Oh, Also There’s this Freed Slave There Too).” Now, I’m all for unchaining ChristophWaltz, who is 57,000 kinds of awesome…but when the film is called “Django Unchained,” I kinda wanna see Jaime Foxx strutting his stuff. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable expectation.

I also think the film also veers into “…And a white man shall lead them” territory. I mean, I recognize that the film takes place when Waltz’ character would have had considerably more agency than Django, so he’s more free to act the badass. But I’m not sure a Quentin Tarantino revenge flick is the time and place for strict historical accuracy. And, ya know what? Don’t call it “Django Unchained” when a more accurate title would have been “Dr. Shultz Gets all the Best Lines.”

I’m also unsure as to how to feel about Samuel L. Jackson’s “house negro.” He was one of the movie’s most repellant villains…and he’s black (obviously). He was a “go along to get along” character, an oppressed minority ready to stomp on the necks of other oppressed people to aggrandize and garner power for himself.  I find these characters fascinating because these sorts of people are very much still with us today in the form of people like Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, and Allen West. These are all people would happily screw people like themselves into order to get praise and validation from the people at the top of what they see as an order-keeping hierarchy. So his character is a brilliantly-realized success. I’m just not sure how I feel about his being such a major of component of a film that’s presumably about the horrors of slavery.

I really think that, like “Inglorious Basterds,” “Django Unchained” has a lot to recommend it. I think it’s worth seeing. I just found it disappointing–on several levels–ultimately.

[The First] Cape Fear and National Security

[ 22 ] April 24, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

Rick argues that today, the idea that the hero could attack the bag guy without cutting corners is hard to imagine:

Andrew Sullivan has recently pointed out the absurdity of the national pants-pooping that’s been going on after the Boston attacks. Citing the libertarian writer Ronald Bailey, he notes calculations that the “the chances of an American being killed in a terrorist attack over the past five years is one in twenty million. The risk of being struck by lightning is one in five million. The risk of dying in a car accident is one in 19,000. More strikingly, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism found that the number of terror attacks in the US in the decade before 9/11 was forty-one a year. Since 9/11, it has been nineteen a year.” He adds, by way of contrast, veterans are committing suicide now at a rate of twenty-two per day. And yet somehow none of us has seen fit to overturn the Constitution because of any of that.

Instead, the nation has surrendered to an inherently right-wing idea, one that I’ve written of here in the context of the gun control debate: the notion that the world is easily parsed into god guys and bad guys, never the twain should meet—and the corollary notion, which I’ve also written about recently, that once the world has been so divided, vanquishing the bad guys licenses any procedural abuse.

Indeed it is now hard for Americans to imagine the world working any other way. If someone tried to make a Cape Fear today, in the same basic way it was made in 1962, ask yourself this: would Gregory Peck even be conceivable as a hero?


Exhibit A: Mr. John Yoo. I must have missed Yoo’s outrage over Eric Rudolph not being declared an enemy combatant.

The Barnyard Brat

[ 4 ] April 23, 2013 | Erik Loomis

Quiet evening here, seems like a good time to embed a Dave Flesicher cartoon. From 1939, this is The Barnyard Brat. This is part of his Hunky and Spunky series, which doesn’t have the power of some of his more socially oriented work, but is by and large a pretty entertaining series about a baby donkey and his mother.

I’m totally not embedding this because it reminds me of a lot of children I have seen. Nope, not at all.

Mad Men, Season 6

[ 45 ] April 23, 2013 | Erik Loomis

Potential spoiler alerts ahead.

Let me more or less agree with Coates’ view on season 6 of Mad Men, or at least the first few episodes, which can be summed up by the fact that Draper’s latest affair is not very interesting.

Except he’s lost something. Don is a beautiful philandering stud. That was always there but it was wrapped in so much more–his role as father to a young daughter (gone thus far), his role as a kind of father to Peggy (gone by necessity of plot), his relationship with Roger as some future image of himself (also gone), his relationship with Anna (gone to the grave), his fear of unmasking (seemingly also gone.) What’s left is a dude who makes adultery look beautiful. My impulse is to say that this Don Draper is lot less interesting. But I wonder if this Don Draper is all of what we actually came for. Did most of always think of the literature as gift-wrapping for the style?

Who knows. But I’d rather see the camera shift, and Don Draper give some scenes away to those characters who really are changing, not just relapsing. It’s true that in real life, real people relapse all the time. But stories are not real life. They have beginnings and ends chosen by their creators.

The season’s high points thus far have come when it has focused on the non-Don characters. Betty entering into hippiedom to find that runaway girl. Harry being a massive jerk in the last episode, especially toward Joan who is dealing with the fallout of her choice to prostitute herself for the company and her own personal advancement. Roger’s sessions with the psychiatrist. But Matthew Weiner continues to hold the focus of his show on Don and I don’t think it’s working very well right now. Cheating again makes perfect sense–a depressed serial cheater is very believable. But that doesn’t mean it is all that interesting season after season.

After a time, Deadwood moved away from Seth Bullock as the show’s central character. The Wire did the same with Jimmy McNaulty. Don Draper is far more compelling than either Bullock or McNaulty, but after 5+ seasons of focusing on Draper, there may not be that much else to say. Reading discussions of the great secrecy behind the premier of the show, it seems that the one secret Weiner really wanted to keep most hidden was Don’s new affair, suggesting that was Weiner’s big move for the season. But I think that was probably misguided and might be creating a trap for the show more difficult to get out of than Draper’s season-long depression in the 4th season that seemed to drag things along for awhile.

I’m still watching a well-crafted show with good writing, but so far I’m not watching a very compelling season of that show.

Of course, there’s still 9 episodes to go.

One Half Cheer For Max Baucus

[ 45 ] April 23, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

The sad thing is that, on health care, while Baucus wasn’t good he was a little better than the generic conservative Democrat, and that little bit allowed the PPACA to pass:

Most people think of Baucus as the guy who cut all those awful deals with lobbyists for the health care industry—and who let negotiations in the Finance Committee bog down in the summer of 2009, exposing the effort to a political backlash that very nearly killed the entire enterprise. I think there’s a lot to those critiques, although neither one is as clear-cut as it might seem. At least some of those deals were necessary in order to get legislation through Congress. The pharmaceutical lobby could have killed health care reform all by itself, if it had chosen to do so. It didn’t.1 As for the Finance Committee negotiations, Baucus was naïve to think he ever had a shot at winning over Republicans like Charles Grassley, the ranking minority member. But the painstaking effort to win over Republicans gave cover to more conservative Democrats who ended up supporting the bill.

But Baucus’ key contribution to health care reform was the one almost nobody remembers. In 2008, Baucus issued a lengthy white paper outlining a health reform plan similar to what other Democrats, including then-nominee Obama, had proposed. The details of the plan weren’t that important. The signal it sent was. In 1993 and 1994, the previous attempt at health care reform, the chairman of the Finance Committee was the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He had little interest in, or patience with, health care reform—and that ambivalence (some would say it was more like hostility) was a major obstacle to enactment. With that 2008 white paper, Baucus put down a clear marker: He was in. Whatever his reasons—a desire to serve the public, a determination to protect his turf—that decision made possible everything that happened afterwards.

For obvious reasons this pretty much exhausts anything good I have to say about Max Baucus, but it’s something.

I’m open to being persuaded that I’m missing something, but wasn’t Moynihan (in the context of his constituency) a pretty terrible senator? I’m guessing that his WAR might have been even lower than Feinstein’s.

Recaps of West, Texas

[ 96 ] April 23, 2013 | Erik Loomis

A few key pieces as the West, Texas disaster settles down.

Mike Elk has an editorial at the Post really getting after the media for its nonexistent coverage of the disaster. Asking the fundamental question of why the media focused almost exclusively on Boston and completely ignored West, despite the fact that far more people died in West, Elk writes:

So why is it that the media choose to cover around the clock a terrorist bombing that killed fewer people and is extremely rare, while all but ignoring an industrial explosion that killed more people, is far more common and is far easier to prevent? Aaron Albright, who worked on failed mine safety legislation in the wake of the Upper Big Branch mine as an aide to Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), joked on Twitter that the media opted to focus almost exclusively on the Boston bombings because the two stories were like “CSI/Mission Impossible vs.[a] PBS documentary.” The story of alleged terrorists with Chechen links seems far more exotic and threatening than the story of a workplace disaster that would have been preventable if the company followed the rules.

Also very much worth noting is this:

Yet, death in the workplace is a much more real possibility for almost all Americans than death at the hands of a terrorist. In 2011, 4,609 Americans were killed in workplace accidents while only 17 Americans died at the hands of terrorists — about the same number as were crushed to death by their televisions or furniture. One could argue that terrorists get more attention because they intentionally aim to kill people, but disasters like at Upper Big Branch are also the result of companies violating workplace safety laws.

Again, when workers die because of massive negligence by owners, those owners need to be charged with some form of a murder crime, perhaps equivalent to a fatal drunk-driving charge. Instead, the owners themselves are often seen as victims, including at West.

John Protevi has a piece along the same lines as Elk, thinking about the deeper cultural and economic reasons behind the disparity in coverage. A few of his points:

1. The affective charge of “random murder” trumps that of bad luck. The Boston bombings were deliberate, while the Texas explosion and the roadway deaths were accidents.

1a. It increases the horror of Boston to know that the victims weren’t chosen. They had a kind of bad luck, but the cause of the death was deliberate, not accidental. So they were victims of “random murder.” When this is called “terrorism,” it is ripe for political exploitation.

2a. The victims of Boston were of the right type — middle class spectators of an athletic event — as opposed to the multiple everyday murder victims who never make the national news. Why not? Well, for one thing, some of the victims can be dismissed as gang bangers. Secondly, there’s just nothing new any more about an everday dispute, domestic or neighborhood, that escalates to murder.
3. To return to the Texas explosion, of course there are factors that influence the probability of accidents; the explosion was an event that crystallized a network of multi-scale factors. But the complexities of multiple and dispersed decisions concerning zoning, right-to-work, and regulatory capture / weakening made over decades that increased the probability — and bad effects — of the Texas explosion doesn’t fit a simple narrative, nor does it have the affective charge of random murder. So there’s an effect of normalization here, such that shoulders are shrugged and we mutter “industrial accidents happen.”

3a. We also can’t overlook the geography of wealth factors here. Poor folks live next to fertilizer plants in West, Texas but middle-class folk go watch the finish of the Boston Marathon. So there’s class identification at work here, both in the news producers of the cable networks, and in their target viewerships.

I think this gets at some pretty important issues behind how we as a society rationalize and think about violence.

The Reserve Clause, Public Funding, and Social Cohesion

[ 105 ] April 23, 2013 | Robert Farley

The following is a long discussion between myself and Ted McClelland, spurred by his Slate article on baseball player salaries and social cohesion. Mr. McClelland graciously offered to conduct an e-mail debate on the question, and to allow me to post the results of this debate on the blog. My initial questions are in bold; his responses and counter-questions are italicized.

Read more…

You Just Move Over, Fred Barnes!

[ 133 ] April 23, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

Shorter Designated Republican Stenographer Jennifer Rubin:  “George Bush was the greatest.  With notably rare exceptions, there were no terrorist attacks on the American homeland when George W. Bush was president.  And hundreds of thousands dead and trillions of dollars spent attacking a country that posed no threat whatsoever to the United States is nothing compared to the horrors of the deficit.  And don’t kid yourself, George W. Bush hated deficits.  You think there would be unfunded wars or corporate boondoggles* with him in the White House?  Please.”

*Verbatim Jen Rubin: “He is responsible for one of the most popular and fiscally sober entitlement plans, Medicare Part D.”  I swear.   This is performance art, right?  Almost every line could be a “verbatim” bit.

…a prebuttal.

Baucus

[ 45 ] April 23, 2013 | Erik Loomis

Max Baucus, the Democratic Party’s most annoying senator, is retiring at the end of his term. While like any Democrat, I worry about holding the seat, if Brian Schweitzer runs, he will be tough to beat, even if Denny Rehberg decides to try again. More importantly, a Ron Wyden-led Senate Finance Committee is going to be about 100 times less annoying to progressives than it is under Baucus.

….Trash Ruckus does seem appropriate.

Even when he’s right, he’s wrong

[ 59 ] April 23, 2013 | SEK

Via the comments in the previous post, we glean some real insight into Rand Paul’s principled objection to intrusive government surveillance:

But it’s different if they want to come fly over your hot tub, or your yard just because they want to do surveillance on everyone, and they want to watch your activities.

If someone says “police state” and your first concern is that Big Brother’s going to figure out what you’ve been up to in your hot tub, maybe you should reconsider whatever it is you’re doing in your hot tub.

I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

Rand Paul, M.D., America’s Most Fraudulent Alleged Champion Of Civil Liberties

[ 128 ] April 23, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

Is Rand Paul planning to urge the Obama administration to read Tsarnaev his Miranda rights? Or to defend the decision not to declare Tsarnaev an enemy combatant against the opponents of the rule of law in his conference?* I hope, at this late date, that you know the answer:

A little over a month ago, Rand Paul embarked on an epic thirteen-hour filibuster over his concerns that an American president might one day use drones to kill an American citizen suspected of terrorist activities rather than provide him with the due process guarantees enshrined in the Constitution. And yet, as his colleagues have called on President Obama to commit a glaring act of executive overreach in the Tsarnaev case, Paul has been silent.

Or take a look at Texas senator John Cornyn. Last month, he made an appearance on the Senate floor during Paul’s filibuster to proclaim that “there isn’t any more delicate and important matter than the limitations placed on the government when it comes to dealing with our own citizens.” Today, Cornyn told Fox News that the Obama administration is stuck in a “pre-9/11 mentality” if it thinks Tsarnaev should enjoy the Constitutional protections afforded to any other American citizen charged with a crime.

A drone strike on an American terrorist sitting at a café in Houston was a hypothetical that will almost certainly never come to pass. The Tsarnaev case is happening, right now, and any Republican who purports to care about the Constitution and its limits on executive power should be speaking up now just as loudly as they were during the drone debate last month.

Again, the problem with Rand Paul isn’t that he’s a champion of civil liberties who has appalling positions on a variety of other issues. I’m the last person to demand purity from people making useful contributions.  The problem with Rand Paul is that his reputation as a champion of civil liberties is a transparent con, a vacuous mix of partisan posturing and irrelevant opposition to various implausible hypotheticals. It’s just reactionary identity politics, not any kind of civil libertarianism.

…John Ashcroft calls for Tsarnaev to be declared an enemy combatant. If only enough liberals had voted for Gary Johnson, we could have had a real champion of civil liberties like him in the Attorney General’s office again!

*To his credit, I was wrong about this: albeit after the fact, he did defend Obama against Graham and McCain.

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