Milk as biopic?
Obviously I couldn't bring myself to completely ignore my computer over vacation, and I did, in fact, spent a few hours looking for things I might be able to blog about when vacation ended. So now vacation's ended and I might as well blog about all of them.
On that note, Matt Yglesias spent Christmas watching Milk and wrote:
I think the problem may actually be that on some level Harvey Milk’s story isn’t that interesting. If he’d succeeded at winning an at-large council seat or getting into the State Assembly, that would have been something. But exactly as you’d expect, he lost those races. And when he did win it was, as the film makes clear, all thanks to the change in San Francisco electoral procedures — the decision to move to geography-based constituencies and to draw a very Milk-friendly district. It seems to me that there’s probably a fascinating story about how and why that switch was made, but Milk doesn’t tell the story, possibly because Milk wasn’t a central player.
Kevin Drum piled on:
This is an underappreciated phenomenon. When it comes to fiction, everyone understands that an uninteresting story is a death knell. But when it comes to stories based on real people, filmmakers too often seem to think that just because a person has done something of note, it means that this person's life story is inherently interesting. But it's not. Harvey Milk did worthwhile things and his life ended in a dramatic way, but his life story is actually fairly ordinary. The same can be said for the subjects of a disturbingly large number of biopics.
On general principle I think I agree. As much as I enjoyed films like Ray and Walk The Line, to name just two, they suffered badly because they ignored their heroes' relationships to their own gifts. Watch both films, and you'll walk away with the very clear sense that Ray Charles and Johnny Cash were extremely talented, influential musicians who also had troubled personal lives but overcame adversity. But so what. We already knew that. What most of us don't already know, however, is what it's like to have that kind of ability. Where does the spark come from? How does it manifest? What's the creative process like for people like Ray Charles and how does it affect, for instance, their relationships with other artists? Amadeus was more successful on this score, but imagine that film without its central character--the tortured, obsessed, but fictionalized Salieri--and you lose most of what made that movie so spectacular.
But Milk isn't meant to be a movie like those others. It's not supposed to be the story of a man who succeeds against the odds on the strength of his raw abilities. It's about how extraordinary circumstances turned an otherwise ordinary, and in some ways conservative, man into a tireless activist for a seemingly hopeless cause.
That contrast isn't perfect--it might not even be very good. But I think it's important. In fact, buried in Matt's objection to the movie is the reason I liked it so much. Harvey Milk wasn't the most talented politician in the world. On the contrary, he lost over and over again. And if, after he finally lucked his way into office, he'd accomplished nothing, he would most likely never have been lionized in a major motion picture. But he did accomplish something--something he wouldn't have been able to do if he hadn't single-mindedly dedicated himself, however successfully, to getting elected in the first place.
In some ways, I'd say his tenaciousness and his failures make his story more interesting than it would have been if, like a gay Barack Obama, he'd been a polished member in good standing of the gay establishment and waited for the political climate to warm to him. That he bucked the status quo and actually came up with something to show for it makes his story interesting.
Hopefully we all agree, though, that The Belligerently Boring Biography Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not a good film at all.
An unorthodox choice
Obama is apparently set to pick Leon Panetta to head the CIA. It's an unorthodox choice, and I won't say much about it. Spooks like their own, and Panetta isn't a spook. Perhaps that's evidence that Obama found it impossible to pick someone competent and well-liked from within the CIA's ranks who wasn't also tainted by the torture regime. Or, perhaps Obama just decided it was time to buck the orthodoxy.
Either way, it looks like he'll be reporting to Dennis Blair, who's set to replace Mike McConnell as Director of National Intelligence.
Too little, too late?
With the world coming apart at the seams, President Bush has finally decided to get into the game.
Fox News, now anti-typo
This is old news by now but just before Christmas, Nate Silver wrote a post called "Fox News Finds Typo, Blames Liberal Conspiracy". Either they're hypocrites, or episodes like this don't happen accidentally.
Your moment of Zen
To mandate, or to legislate?
Here's an interesting article in the Times about the benefits and drawbacks to the Democrats' potential approaches to Federal funding of stem cell research. It seems to me that the right course is for Obama to sign an executive order, get the money flowing, and for Democrats to codify it way down the line at a less fraught political moment.
Hopefully my only post on Gaza
In the course of trying not to compare the Israeli incursion in Gaza to America's decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Jon Chait goes right ahead and makes that very comparison.
orld War II examples are beyond cliche, but they're useful because it's a familiar case about which most people agree. The United States killed millions of Japanese civilians, while Japan killed very few American civilians. Indeed, the United States killed civilians intentionally. The lived experience of the Japanese people was not that of an agressor [sic] but as a victim at the hands of a cruel American military. The United States bloodied its hands in all sorts of ways worse than Israel's misguided and wrong settlements (which, in any case, are not an attempt to destroy Palestinians but an attempt to tilt the borders of a two-state settlement into more favorable terms.)The point here is not to draw an equation with World War II. Any conflict has compromised behavior on both sides and civilians in each camp who feel like victims of the enemy. Judging the morality of the conflict without taking into account the intentions and aims of the two parties is just moral blindness.
I count two incorrect assumptions here: 1). That America's superior aims in the world should in some way cleanse the blood on its hands for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 2). That a guiding rationale for the Americans was an analysis of the intentions and aims of the Empire of Japan. It's obviously a complicated historical issue, but the bigger concern for U.S. leaders was, of course, how costly and deadly the alternatives would be--at the time, they argued that, on that score, going nuclear was the better course for America's national security.
That decision can be (and is) debated ad infinitum but it is not remotely like the debate Jon wants to have about Israel in Gaza. If there's a case to be made that the incursion can permanently halt Palestinian rocket fire into Israel and lower the risk that Palestinians will resort to deadlier acts of war in the future, then, perhaps, Jon's is a proper analogy.
But that's not really what's going on here. Jon ultimately concedes these points: "The difference in intentions and aims does not justify any Israeli actions whatsoever, and, again, there's certainly reason to doubt Israel's current campaign. But you can concede all these things without veering into moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas." Fair enough. But take that to its conclusion and it means that, for people safely typing away about the conflict here in the United States, the argument becomes a rather subjective question of priorities. For Jon the key point to bring to light is that Hamas's stated intentions are more nefarious than are Israel's. For me and others it's that Israel's campaign is deadly and ineffective, and, as such, the stated intentions of a hapless organization like Hamas are beside the point. There's surely a counterargument to this, but it's not that those of us on this side of the fight are drawing moral equivalences, or that this situation has anything in common with World War II.
A come-to-Jesus moment
It's nice to see that John Yoo and John Bolton have suddenly rediscovered Congress's checks on presidential power and the importance of those restraints. Although I suppose if combating global warming involved huge 'splosions on foreign lands, they'd be singing a different tune.
Morning 80s breakdown
More Congressional procedure
In case you haven't had enough yet, read Kevin Drum on the motion to recommit. The rules of the House are, to my understanding, pretty neutral, or at least much more neutral than are the rules of the Senate. But untrained freshmen legislators don't always know the rules, or know how to react when the rules are used as blunt weapons, and, sometimes, they get snowed.
On that note, it seems to me that Democrats ought to set up something like the equivalent of the Floor Action Team, and also to train its Freshmen not to fear striking down a motion to recommit promptly even if that means voting against puppies. They may have some explaining to do to their puppy-loving constituents at election time, but voters will probably catch on eventually, and House leadership can, if necessary, bring a stand-alone puppy-loving bill to the floor at a later date, if such theatrics prove to be necessary.
Should Burris have turned Blago down?
Conventional wisdom suggests yes.
But, as laid out below, there's a real moral cost to leaving the seat vacant that goes beyond the egos of Roland Burris and Rod Blagojevich. Not that I think Burris is acting saintly. For all I know of the man he's motivated by an unalloyed lust for power. Maybe he sees this as his only chance to ascend to higher office and he's unwilling to let it slip through his fingers.
But, of course, even the most self-absorbed Democrat in the Senate serves a real public function, and Burris, it just so happens, is poised to serve a very big one. Even if you think he's handled this situation utterly amorally, you should probably evaluate it in context, recognizing that he can soon serve several different, potentially very positive, moral purposes.
And, while I'm at it, I'm not so sure his grab for power--if that's what it was--is all that appalling. To draw a so-so comparison, if tomorrow morning Gawker revealed that Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and Steve Benen had all tried to buy their way on to the staff of the New Yorker and if, as a parting jab at his disgruntled staff, David Remnick offered the job to me, a writer untainted by the pay-to-play scandal, I would accept it reluctantly enthusiastically. Yes, I'd try as hard as possible to smooth things over with my (rightly) angry colleagues, but ultimately I'd forget them, repent for all my other sins, and do my best to fulfill my responsibility to my readers. And, if years later I still had the job, it would probably be a sign that I'd done it satisfactorily, and that, for all the problems with the process, the pick itself wasn't really all that bad.
Burris, Franken, and cloture
The math is probably familiar to you by now, but in case it's not, I highly recommend you bare down and read this very boring report by Richard Beth and Stanley Bach. It will probably answer any questions you may have about cloture votes and filibusters (and I'm sure you have tons).
Here's why I think this is important now. When, as is normally the case, the Senate has 100 seated members, the cloture number is, of course, 60 (i.e., three-fifths of those "elected and sworn"). But when that number drops to 99, or even 98, the cloture number drops, too. Now, obviously, without committing a gruesome crime, there's no such thing as three-fifths of 99 (or 98) people and maybe you imagine that this simple mathematical curiosity might have caused the geniuses on Capitol Hill to reconsider the cloture process altogether.
But you'd be wrong.
When there are 99 seated members, the cloture number drops to 59. And when there are 98 seated members the cloture number... remains 59. Which is to say that if Roland Burris gets seated right away, but Al Franken does not, Democrats will be one vote shy of having their over-touted "filibuster proof majority". And since Burris would presumably be a reliably progressive vote, there would be almost no operational difference for the Democrats between a 99 seat Senate, with Franken all tied up, and a 100 seat Senate with Franken sworn in--after all, as soon as Franken becomes official, the cloture number will go up by one.
But if the Senate blocks Burris as well, that effectively means Democrats will have to scour the ranks of the GOP for an additional cloture vote on every major piece of legislation that hits the floor between day one and the day Burris (or somebody less objectionable) is sworn in. If you don't think that's a big deal, go back and look at the cloture votes in the 110th Congress, and count up the times 41 or more Republicans voted to obstruct.
Obviously this isn't all on the Democrats. It's perfectly likely that if Burris had the full support of his caucus, the Republicans would still filibuster his swearing in, and the whole thing would go to court anyhow. But in that case he'd be better served by having Harry Reid on his back, not firing at him.
Reid obviously disagrees--but he should be clear: There's more at stake in blocking Burris than upholding the principle that a shady man making shady headlines shouldn't be able to fulfill his constitutional obligations as governor of a state.
Settling back in...
...ahhhh that's better.
Now let's see. While I was gone:
- There was a coal ash disaster and nobody realllly seemed to care.
- Blago appointed Roland Burris to the Senate and Burris accepted*--I, and perhaps a few other people reluctantly decided this was probably for the best, and that Washington Dems were strategically and morally wrong to oppose his confirmation.
- Al Franken won the recount in Minnesota. Coleman vows to appeal. Republicans vow to filibuster any attempt on the part of Democrats to fill the seat. Depending on the Burris outcome, Dems will have 57 or 58 seats in the Senate on day one of the 111th Congress.
- Israelis and Palestinians, back at it. I hesitate to comment.
That's about it, yeah? Now back to it.
*=More soon on why Burris's decision to accept this seat was also not as bad as everyone says.
Blago's Burris gambit
Just one quick note, too, on the Blago front. The big news today, obviously, is that, against the wishes of every Democrat in Washington, the Governor of Illinois went ahead and appointed someone to succeed Barack Obama in the Senate. Now, everyone's all aghast. Harry Reid and Barack Obama are decrying the move, and Reid is threatening not to seat Burris, notwithstanding his years of public service and distance from the pay-to-play scandal.
I've been as hard on Blago as anybody, and was, I think, pretty much all alone in my belief that if Obama knew in any way about the sale of his seat, and did nothing to stop it, he betrayed his own movement. But that's because Blago is pretty clearly corrupt. Burris, by contrast, is not. And the more I think about this, the more convinced I become that Reid and Obama are doing the wrong thing here.
Blago may be a creep, and his attempt to race bait the Senate into confirming his appointee is gross, but if he had resigned when the scandal broke and his successor had picked Burris, I don't think anybody would've objected. Maybe I'm being too amoral here, but I don't think the good served by denying a corrupt governor his right to appoint a successor (or by keeping that successor free of suspicion for two years) is really great enough to offset the damage done by denying Illinoisans representation for weeks or months. Or by denying Democrats everywhere their 58th vote in the Senate, particularly at this moment of crisis.
Politically, then, the question is: Would it really look SO bad for Dems to say something like "While we regret that Gov. Blagojevich flouted the will of Senate Democrats, we are chastened by the fact that he's selected a decorated public servant who has no ties to the scandal hanging over the Illinois statehouse. We assume Roland Burris will serve his constituents well, and, if he fails, voters will have the final say in two years."? I don't really think it would. But Harry Reid seems to disagree.
Then there are questions of due process and constitutional powers, and on those, I'm a big more agnostic. It's worth pointing out though, that Blago's still an innocent man and as long as he's governor, filling that seat is his prerogative. It would be a much different story if he'd gone ahead and selected somebody widely believed to have entertained the notion of buying the seat. But that's not what happened. None of which is to say I don't understand everyone's concerns, but they do seem a bit overblown to me.
And, of course, Senate Democrats may not have as easy a time blocking Burris's appointment as they hope to. I'm out of my element examining the constitutional arguments, but unless Reid et al feel they really have their position squared away, they should really dispense with all the bluster, lest they find themselves forced to accept Burris over their own objections.
What a WEIRDO!
Dennis Prager isn't getting laid these days*, and he's taken to the Internets (where he'd be better off Googling around for some porn) to wage a campaign of terror against prudes everywhere.
[T]here has been an idealization of women and their feelings. So, if a husband is in the mood for sex and the wife is not, her feelings are deemed of greater significance -- because women's feelings are of more importance than men's. One proof is that even if the roles are reversed -- she is in the mood for sex and he is not -- our sympathies again go to the woman and her feelings.
I think I speak for all men when I say it's hard on us blokes when women are in the mood, gettin' all randy, and we feel put upon by society to perform. It's the WORST.
Furthermore: "As one bright and attractive woman in her 50s ruefully said to me, "Had I known this while I was married, he would never have divorced me.""
Apparently Prager is, surprise!, twice divorced himself. No word on who initiated either of those proceedings, but if we ever wake up to a headline like "Prager arrested for rape, assault and battery," this article, as well as his previous missive on the topic, might well serve as grounds for a not guilty plea, for reasons of insanity.
Read Spencer and Jesse for more.
(*=if there's any justice in the world)
In other news I'm just getting settled in from vacation, and, as noted previously, will resume a regular posting schedule immediately after the New Year. When that happens, and if I have anything semi-original to say, I'll try to offer quick thoughts on the non-Prager things (the coal ash spill, Blago's Burris pick, etc.) that have happened in my absence. In the meantime, keep enjoying the holiday.
Sunday moment of Zen
Motivated to torture
It's the day before Christmas Eve, so I figure what better way to kick off the morning (at least here on the West Coast) than by writing about war crimes.
Specifically, everyone should read Ross Douthat's earnest and admirable post grappling with the moral question of torture and Glenn Greenwald's interesting corrective. Ross struggles with the idea that high level Bush officials should be punished or judged for their crimes because, perhaps, those crimes were committed out of a genuine belief that they would prevent other, worse atrocities. Glenn responds,
The laws of war aren't applicable only in times of peace, to be waived away in times of war or crisis. To the contrary, they exist precisely because the factors Douthat cites to explain and mitigate what our leaders did always exist, especially when countries perceive themselves at war. To cite those factors to explain away war crimes -- or to render them morally ambiguous -- is to deny the very validity of the concept itself.The pressures and allegedly selfless motivations being cited on behalf of Bush officials who ordered torture and other crimes -- even if accurate -- aren't unique to American leaders. They are extremely common. They don't mitigate war crimes. They are what typically motivate war crimes, and they're the reason such crimes are banned by international agreement in the first place -- to deter leaders, through the force of law, from succumbing to those exact temptations. What determines whether a political leader is good or evil isn't their nationality. It's their conduct. And leaders who violate the laws of war and commit war crimes, by definition, aren't good, even if they are American.
Some of the most vicious war crimes of the last half century or so have gone unpunished for reasons exactly like this--they were perpetrated by people who justified their actions by highlighting moral ambiguities and who remained (for that, and other reasons) too popular among the elite in their home countries to make prosecutions a viable political option. Nobody falls from power and freely admits to being one of history's greatest monsters.
And this invites one corollary to what Glenn's written. It's not unusual for people of all stripes to want to forgive crimes committed in the name of national security. Sometimes, as in Ross's case, the appeal to leniency is sincere. Other times it's rooted in anger at people like Glenn. But, whatever the motivations, that groundswell really ought to be ignored. Even tyrants can play sympathetic, after all, sometimes convincingly--that's why the laws exist to begin with. And if, as a result, we forgive them, and grant them protection from the courts, we assure that future, and perhaps viler, tyrants won't be deterred from flouting the law as well.
Back...
Just in to California from Hawaii (my first trip there in 10 years) with two important observations:
- Hawaii is much more fun when you're of legal Mai Tai age, and
- While I was away, In These Times published my review of James Bamford's new book, The Shadow Factory. Give it a read
Somewhat more regular posting will begin tomorrow. Fully regular posting will resume after the holidays.
Your moment of Zen
Getting ahead of ourselves?
Ezra Klein writes:
Next month, Obama becomes president, and Democrats emerge from the elections with either 58 or 59 votes. At that point, they can basically build whatever [auto company bailout] bill they want. The only way that doesn't happen is if the deal falls apart and the auto companies collapse before late-January
But is that really true? Remember, if everyone's present, it takes 41 votes to assure a filibuster. This time around, with 12 senators not voting the opposition got 35 nays. Seven of those 12 were Republicans.
Let's assume, for the sake of being generous, that Obama's seat will be filled, and that Franken will beat Coleman and be seated (and bailout friendly) if and when the next Congress considers another bailout. That brings the "no" total down to 34. Let's further assume that Jeanne Shaheen and Jeff Merkley (replacing John Sununu and Gordon Smith, respectively) will a). show up and b). vote yes. No help for Republicans there. But by the same token, let's assume that the Republicans replacing Chuck Hagel and Larry Craig (Mike Johanns and Jim Risch, respectively) will show up and vote no. That makes 36.
Now assume that everyone who wasn't there this time (except Biden) shows up next time. Kennedy, Kerry, and Wyden will probably vote yes. But Alexander, Cornyn, and Graham will probably vote no. That's 39. With a vote this close, the parties' whip operations will be in full swing. Can Republican leadership get two more votes? Hard to say, of course. Snowe, Collins, and Specter are probably pretty safe. Maybe Lugar, too. But is Bond? Can the Democrats count on Begich? Or will he follow his Democratic colleagues from Montana and vote no?
It's hard to know for sure, but this is all a very, very long way of saying that votes on major legislation will still be very, very tough. I personally have mixed feelings about bailing out Detroit, but it'd be a mistake for Democrats and liberals who fully support it to proceed under the illusion that, with a 58 or 59 member caucus, Reid can build whatever bill he wants and assume the votes will be there.
Abortion agonistes
Ross Douthat is outraged at that virtually non-existent faction of critics who say abortion cost Republicans the 2008 election, and he's taken to the pages of the New York Times to vent. But for Ross, "more frustrating than the blame game is the equally familiar advice that has accompanied it."
Most abortion opponents can recite the litany by heart. Their movement should focus on changing hearts and minds, rather than the law. It should be more consistently pro-life, by helping human beings outside the womb as well as those within it. It should cease trying to roll back the sexual revolution and standing athwart science yelling “stop!” And above all, it should be less absolutist, and more amenable to compromise.
It's not that Ross thinks this is all bad advice--just that the movement has already taken much of it to heart, and since pro-life rhetoric has become just a weeee bit gentler, can't we pretty please overturn Roe and Casey yet? And just like that, we're back at the same impasse, where pro-life conservatives say the starting point for compromise is overturning those two cases, and pro-choice liberals resist, saying "we're no fools."
Abortion isn't really my fight, so I'm probably the wrong person to sound off on this, but it rings pretty hollow to me. The idea behind compromise, after all, isn't that all parties involved pretend not to want the things they want until relations thaw and the truth is revealed at the negotiating table. And to the extent that the Christie Todd Whitman's of the world still complain, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that the abortion endgame for the right remains a drastic curtailment of reproductive rights--but this is a systemic critique, not a suggestion that voters flocked to the polls to vote for Democrats in 2008 because they finally figured out what the GOP stands for.
On an unrelated note, I thought this was weird. "[W]e’re coming off a decade in which pro-lifers responded to the embryonic stem-cell controversy by becoming better versed in the relevant science than their miracle-cure-promising opponents."
This may be true in the mostly irrelevant sense that scientifically illiterate demagogues in the pro-life movement have become better able to back up an ideological point using scientific findings and jargon than have their counterparts in the pro-choice movement. But it doesn't really do much to explain the existence of all these actual scientists who know the science better than anybody, and still think it's a worthwhile field of inquiry--all despite the fact that being 'well-versed' in the science of stem cells means understanding that the progeny of stem cells can, as the result of environmental pressures, change into things that are not stem cells. And though cells aren't evolving in a Darwinian sense when they change type, we would all be E. coli if they didn't, and pro-life movement has by and large been hostile to ideas like this.
The crunch hits New York
A friend sends this along:
I am a female in my mid 60's and I am looking for a room mate. Times are tight and I need some extra money.I am willing to rent out my bathroom in my 1 bedroom east village home.
My bathroom is large. You can easily put a twin air mattress in there. I only ask that when I need to use the bathroom, you or your air mattress are not in it.
I do ask that when you are in the apartment, you confine yourself to the bathroom. I do not feel comfortable with a stranger walking around my living room. This might change as I get to know you better.
You may have guest over as long as they are cnfined to the bathroom as well. This might seem a bit odd but please remember the rent is $400 and the bathroom is large.
Chapter 11
Doesn't look like any auto companies will be declaring bankruptcy imminently, but for what it's worth (and I think it's worth a lot) Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks that's the right way to go.
Bailout hijinx
As you've probably heard by now, Senate Republicans blocked the Detroit bailout bill. As a procedural move, Harry Reid also voted for the filibuster, which preserves his right to bring the bill back to the floor. But that might not be necessary. In response to this rare act of disobedience, President Bush has dropped his objection to bailing out the big three with TARP funds. Presumably, in the spirit of TARP, none of the agreed-upon auto-company concessions will any longer apply.