Better on the Small Screen?

BETTER ON THE SMALL SCREEN?....Last month, after emailing to taunt me about getting schooled by Ta-Nehisi Coates for my primitive esthetic sensibilities, Scott Eric Kaufman regaled me with some weird theory he had about why The Dark Knight is actually better on a TV set than on the big screen. Over the weekend he explained this theory on his blog:

Watching the film on a small screen — one on which a bug of a Batman glides between five-inch tall skyscrapers while Heath Ledger's Joker licks human-sized lips and establishes human-sized eye-contact — it's impossible to deny that this supposedly epic performance is better suited to the televisual medium.

"Impossible to deny" is a mighty strong claim, but I just rented Dark Knight on my way back from the market and plan to put this theory to the test sometime soon. Anybody else have an opinion on this vital question?

And Then What?

AND THEN WHAT?....Marc Lynch went to a lecture this morning given by Israel's Ambassador to the United States, Sallai Meridor:

It was a profoundly dismaying experience. Because if Ambassador Meridor is taken at his word, then Israel has no strategy in Gaza.

Asked three times by audience members, Meridor simply could not offer any plausible explanation as to how its military campaign in Gaza would achieve its stated goals....As to a political strategy tied to the military campaign, nothing. No guidance as to whether Israel would re-occupy Gaza, or on what terms it would accept a cease-fire. No thoughts as to whether the campaign would cause Hamas to fall from power or help the Palestinian Authority regain political power.

....In short, Meridor quite literally offered no strategy beyond hitting Gaza hard and hoping for the best. "In terms of creating damage we are certainly on the right path," noted the Ambassador. Few would disagree with that assessment, at least. But some might hope that the bloody, battered path might actually be leading somewhere.

To be honest, this seems to be true of most wars these days: hit 'em hard and hope that something shakes loose. But while that may have been a plausible strategy in colonial wars a hundred years ago, it doesn't seem to work so well anymore. I doubt very much that it's going to work for Israel this time around either.

Media Destruction Watch

MEDIA DESTRUCTION WATCH....Felix Salmon reports that the latest auction of defaulted Tribune Company bonds produced dismal results:

Much more startling is the price on the senior secured loans: just 23.75 cents on the dollar. I checked in with Nishul Saperia at Markit, and he said that it was the lowest recovery rate he'd ever seen for a secured loan....

I should imagine that today's news has been greeted with a shudder at the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and other Tribune properties: clearly no one on Wall Street thinks they're worth much even without the huge pile of debt that Sam Zell loaded onto their fragile shoulders. Is David Geffen still interested in buying an uneconomic trophy property? He could turn out to be many employees' final hope.

I wonder how much longer I'll be getting a newspaper delivered to my driveway each morning?

Public Service Announcement

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT....Apparently "PEBO" is the latest shorthand for "President-Elect Barack Obama." Just thought you'd like to know.

Money For Main Street

MONEY FOR MAIN STREET....Currently, businesses that lose money are allowed to use those losses to offset profits from the past two years. The result in some cases is a refund against past taxes. Part of Barack Obama's stimulus bill is a plan to increase this period to five years, which apparently would provide businesses with about $25 billion in additional tax refunds this year. Matt Yglesias isn't impressed:

As stimulus, this doesn’t work. Businesses spend money based on calculations of the likely returns on spending. Insofar as it’s profitable to expand operations, businesses will spend money on expanding operations. Insofar as it’s not profitable to expand, businesses won’t expand. Transferring lump sums of money to existing firms doesn’t alter the profit-loss calculus. A firm with no expansion opportunities it sees as profitable will just pocket the lump sum and consider itself fortunate. And a firm with expansion opportunities it sees as profitable will only be very marginally impacted by an infusion of cash.

I'd be curious to hear from other folks on this. Technically, this sounds right, but I think the reality might be a little different. Lots of things in the business world are sticky, and jobs are one of them. Corporations generally don't like to lay off employees, partly for business reasons (they don't want to lose good workers that they might not be able to rehire later), partly for ordinary human reasons (most bosses really don't enjoy laying people off), and partly just because of inertia. So it's possible that a tax refund that eased the P&L a bit might prompt them to keep on more workers than pure hard-hearted economic calculations might dictate. It would probably be a fairly small effect at the margins, but it might still be noticeable. Especially if the rest of the stimulus package gives business owners hope that the downturn might be short-lived.

Besides, all this does is change the tax timing anyway. Corporations that booked big losses in 2008 will be able to carry them forward against future profits regardless, which will decrease their taxes in the future. But maybe we're better off letting them get their refunds now, rather than two years from now when the economy has picked up again?

Alternatively, this is just another big corporate giveaway. Any nice liberal economists care to weigh in on this?

UPDATE: Via Jon Cohn, Dean Baker shreds the tax write-off proposal:

The break that allows businesses to write-off losses against taxes paid 4-5 years ago (as opposed to 2 years in current law) is simply a give-away to the financial industry and homebuilders. These are likely to be the only businesses that will have losses so large that they can't fully deduct them from earnings over the last two years.

This tax cut has nothing to do with stimulus. It is difficult to imagine that this sort of tax break would even be considered if it were not for the political power of the financial industry.

More from Jon about the stimulus package here.

Geoghegan Running for Congress

GEOGHEGAN RUNNING FOR CONGRESS....Via Jim Fallows and others, I see that Tom Geoghegan (pronounced Gay-gan) is running for the House seat vacated by Rahm Emanuel. I can't say that I've read a huge number of Geoghegan's books and essays, but I've read enough to be pretty impressed. I guess this comes from two sources:

• He has a fascinating writing style. I don't really have the vocabulary or esthetic sensibility to describe it properly, and if I did it would almost certainly seem like it shouldn't work. But it's sort of the writing equivalent of the bumblebee: it shouldn't be able to fly, but it does. (And stings, too!) I'd kill to be able to write as effectively and idiosyncratically as Geoghegan does.

• He's a labor lawyer who's completely dedicated to the cause, but I've always gotten the sense that his eyes are wide open. He know which side he's on, and he knows why, and he can explain it in very plain English, but he never makes the mistake of thinking that unions are beyond reproach. They're human institutions, sometimes they suck, sometimes they're shortsighted, but they're still necessary and they're still the best bet we have to counterbalance the massive influence of corporations and the rich on the political and economic process.
  

The basic Geoghegan bio is on his Facebook page here. Kathy G. has a more personal account here. Fallows has this to say:

The remarkable thing is that in Geoghegan's case writing has been a sideline. Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and other employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like "the polarization of America" and "the disappearing middle class." Geoghegan's skills as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point.

Geoghegan is running against a gaggle of competitors, including Cook County commissioner Mike Quigley, State Representative Sara Feigenholtz, Alderman Pat O'Connor, State Representative John Fritchey, and several others. I have no idea how to handicap the race, but it should be an interesting one to watch.

UPDATE: TNR has just posted a collection of Geoghegan's writings for them here. They're all more than ten years old and I haven't read any of them, but they might be worth checking out.

Dennis Blair

DENNIS BLAIR....Last month Gary Farber noted that Adm. Dennis Blair, who is Barack Obama's choice to become our new Director of National Intelligence, has a gray spot on his record: in 1999, when he was Commander in Chief of the Pacific, he apparently cozied up with the Indonesian military at a time when they were supporting terrorist militias in East Timor — and he did it in spite of instructions to tell them it was time to shut down the militias. Here's a contemporaneous report from The Nation:

Officials say that this past April, as militia terror escalated, a top US officer was dispatched to give a message to Jakarta. Adm. Dennis Blair, the US Commander in Chief of the Pacific, leader of all US military forces in the Pacific region, was sent to meet with General Wiranto, the Indonesian armed forces commander, on April 8. Blair's mission, as one senior US official told me, was to tell Wiranto that the time had come to shut the militia operation down....But Admiral Blair, fully briefed on [a recent massacre at] Liquiça, quickly made clear at the meeting with Wiranto that he was there to reassure the TNI chief. According to a classified cable on the meeting, circulating at Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii, Blair, rather than telling Wiranto to shut the militias down, instead offered him a series of promises of new US assistance.

Last night Gary emailed to ask why nobody seemed to care about this. My response, essentially, was "I dunno."

And I really don't. In fairness, Blair doesn't seem to have disobeyed a direct order from the president or anything. The Nation piece uses the passive voice ("was dispatched to") in its description and a later admonition to Blair came from the State Department via the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. Blair, however, apparently felt that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and chose to engage with General Wiranto in hopes of gaining his trust, rather than delivering a sharp rebuke that might have broken U.S.-Indonesian relations completely. In an update, for example, Gary quotes a line from a Dana Priest article in the Washington Post:

Robert Gelbard, a former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, opposed Blair's push to work with that country's military in 2000, but he endorses Blair as director of national intelligence. "We had a legitimate policy disagreement. But he has a tremendous analytic mind and commands a lot of respect in Washington. His appointment comes at a time when there needs to be a critical reassessment of what the ODNI does," Gelbard said.

These kinds of intra-government disagreements happen all the time, so it's hard to say how big a deal this really was. And Gelbard certainly doesn't seem to hold it against Blair. Still, it seems worth making sure Blair's actions in Indonesia are at least on the table. So: is this a red herring or a legitimate beef? Anyone who happens to know more about what really happened here is invited to chime in in comments.

You Are the Best Readers Ever

A couple of weeks ago we posted about the tough financial times we’ve encountered as a result of some funders pulling back on previously made commitments (plus of course the general economic meltdown). We asked you to help fill the hole they left--and because you are awesome, you did. We’re going into the new year leaner, meaner, but close enough to our fighting weight to take on whatever stories our crack investigative reporters encounter. (Job One: Keep tabs on the new administration, not to mention that line of bailout applicants stretching around the block.) We’ll spend your money carefully and we hope you like (and are outraged by) the results.

While we’re on house news, next week (we think) we’re launching our brand new website—same content, but much better presented and with a spiffy new commenting system that builds on what we’ve learned from you over the years. Thanks again for being part of the MoJo community. And P.S. The subscriptions department kind of told us not to mention this, but we're going to anyway: There's a super secret special offer going on now whereby you get a MoJo subscription for a year PLUS a pound of Peace Coffee for $10. That's less than a pound of Starbucks! And then you can be just like this guy.

Top Ten Bills

TOP TEN BILLS....Over at Tapped, Tim Fernholz passes along summaries of the top ten bills the Senate Democratic leadership plans to introduce this month. It starts with S.1, the stimulus bill, and runs down through troubled mortgages, healthcare, climate change, education, immigration, and a few other things. The descriptions are mostly just placeholders and don't really say much, but it's still an interesting look at Harry Reid's priorities.

Perhaps what's most interesting, though, is what's not on the list: card check, forcing hedge fund billionaires to pay ordinary taxes on their income (possibly the biggest no-brainer legislation in recent history), military procurement reform of any kind, and serious financial regulation. That's not to say this stuff won't come later. But apparently it's not part of the Top Ten.

UPDATE: A couple of commenters think card check is implied as part of S.2. Maybe so. The wording seems awfully vague if that's really their intent, but we'll see.

Sanjay Gupta: Don't Laugh, It's a Good Pick!

The CNN personality is Obama's pick for Surgeon General. I like it.

If you believe, as I do, that the Surgeon General's top job in the Obama Administration will be convincing Americans that the obesity epidemic is a real crisis, Sanjay Gupta is your man. I know, it's easy to lump him in with Dr. Phil and all those other lightweight TV "doctors." But the man has tackled obesity before, is a university professor, advised Hillary Clinton on health policy when she was First Lady, and most importantly, has the pitchman skills to get Americans moving. You could even argue that having TV talent is the top requirement for the Surgeon General at this time. And dare I say it, you would be correct.

New Congress Begins With Progress on Earmarks

Now we're talking:

The chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations committees on Tuesday jointly vowed to slice the level of earmarks while providing unprecedented disclosure of Member requests.

House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) and Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) said that starting with the fiscal 2010 appropriations bills, when Members make their earmark requests, they will be required to post the requests on their Web sites explaining the purpose of the earmark and why it is a valuable use of taxpayer funds....

Gaza War Bush's Parting Gift to Middle East

At one point or another, most American presidents concern themselves with bringing peace to the Middle East. Ultimately, all other foreign policy achievements pale in comparison. It's the brass ring of presidential greatness, the elusive key to ensuring kind treatment in the eyes of history. Such thinking must become particularly acute as presidents reach the twilight of their terms and begin in earnest the inevitable consideration of how they will be remembered. Bill Clinton made a last-ditch effort late in his second term to become the great peacemaker. He failed, as had all others before him. But at least he tried. For his part, our current outgoing commander in chief, just weeks away from relinquishing his office, has steadfastly refused to get involved even as Gaza disintegrates into violence.

Not that this should come as a surprise. Bush's lack of engagement this late in the game, says the National Security Network, is nothing if not consistent with the rest of his term. As the group describes in press release issued today:

[Bush's] episodic involvement has been muddled and without coherent vision: supporting Palestinian elections in 2006, despite the very clear possibility that Hamas would win, then refusing to honor the results; asserting that the 'road to Jerusalem ran through Baghdad;' belatedly engaging through the Annapolis peace conference, which has proved to be too little too late. Experts and regional actors with differing views on the road ahead share the belief that the US absence from the scene is counterproductive and harmful to the interests of all concerned. The outbreak of war in Gaza confirms that after eight years in office the Bush administration will leave behind a region that is further from achieving a lasting peace than when it came to office.

Bringing Us Together

BRINGING US TOGETHER....The LA Times reports on Barack Obama's attempt to get wide bipartisan support for his fiscal stimulus package:

Despite Barack Obama's decision to include as much as $100 billion in business tax breaks to his economic stimulus package to woo reluctant Republicans, obstacles to speedy, bipartisan passage remain.

...."I think he would like to have a large bipartisan vote in favor of this package. And he knows, even before we mentioned it, that the way to do that is obviously for it to have elements that are appealing to Republicans," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said after a 90-minute meeting that Obama held with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders Monday.

....At the same time, McConnell and House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said they were not ready to endorse the overall stimulus proposal....House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), speaking after the closed-door meeting with Obama, said, "I think there would be a lot of support" for tax cuts among the GOP rank and file. But, he added, "we cannot afford to be burdening our children and our grandchildren with an extra trillion dollars in debt."

The more I read about this, the more perplexed I get. What is Obama's goal here? He's already tossed in something like $300 billion in tax cuts to curry Republican favor, and his spending plans amount to about $200 billion per year for two years. That's a big number, but it's also only about 1-2% of GDP. It's not that big a deal, and as a response to a massive recession it ought to be a no-brainer, even for Republicans.

But they're playing the game anyway. By pretending to be skeptical, they're hoping to wring yet more concessions out of Obama. Which is exactly what you'd expect them to do. It's politics.

But what does Obama get out of this? He's got the votes to pass his package already, and it's hard to see what a bigger vote total buys him. In fact, considering what a crowd pleaser this bill is likely to be (jobs + tax cuts + aid to states = wild popularity), it's not entirely clear why Obama is working so hard to get Republican votes. Wouldn't it be better if the public saw this bill as a Democratic victory enacted over the meanspirited, neo-Hooverite obstructionism of a dying and bitter Republican Party? Besides, when push comes to shove, my guess is that plenty of Republicans will be clamoring to vote for this bill no matter what Obama does. Who wants to be left off the gravy train with elections coming up in a mere 22 months?

(And if, against all odds, the bill ends up being unpopular, or viewed as ineffective? Or the economy continues to suck no matter what? Well, all the Republican votes in the world still won't help Obama. They'll attack him viciously whether they voted for the bill or not, and he'll own the economy, for good or ill, regardless.)

I guess this all comes down to whether you really believe Obama can change the tone in Washington. He seems to genuinely believe he can, and his actions on the stimulus bill make sense if you see them as the opening move in a long-term project to dial down the bitter partisanship of the past couple of decades. The press might eat this up (or might not, since they generally dismiss this kind of talk from Democrats), but I continue to wonder what makes Obama believe he can pull this off? There's just no evidence from history to suggest that this can work, and no evidence from the recent history of the conservative movement to suggest that they're planning to adopt a more conciliatory tone over the next few years.

So I continue to wonder: What does Obama see that I don't? What does he know that I don't? I'm flummoxed.

Bush Designates Massive New Marine Monuments

Coral reefs worldwide are in peril. Marine species, protected by ineffective regulations, are being fished to extinction. Ocean pollution has our seas nearing cataclysm. Fortunately, there's one group that's doing something about it.

The Bush Administration.

It's true. On Tuesday, President Bush, whose environmental policies have not exactly been the hallmark of his administration, designated three new marine monuments in the Pacific Ocean, an act that will protect some of the world's most pristine places and give ocean ecosystems a chance at recovery. Together, the Mariana Trench monument, the Central Pacific Islands monument, and the Rose Atoll monument in America Samoa (PDF map and images here), will encompass over 190,000 square miles, roughly the size of the states of Oregon and Washington combined. The protected areas include the habitats for several threatened species, rare underwater geological formations, and some of the oldest known life forms on the DNA tree.

Stooges Guitarist Found Dead

Original member of seminal rock band the Stooges Ron Asheton was reportedly found dead in his Ann Arbor, Michigan home this morning. He was 60 years old. While cause of death has not been determined, Rolling Stone reports that officials do not suspect foul play, and that "initial indications suggest Asheton had a heart attack." Asheton's personal assistant had not been able to reach him for days and contacted police, who found his body.

Asheton formed the Stooges in Ann Arbor in 1967 along with brother Scott, bassist Dave Alexander and legendary frontman Iggy Pop. The Stooges released only three albums between 1969 and 1973— The Stooges, Fun House and Raw Power— but despite their limited output, the band had an incalculable influence on modern music. Their edgy live shows set the bar for future performance artists and rock spectacles, while their raw, fuzzy sound can be heard in everything from punk to French techno. The Detroit Free Press put it this way:

The Stooges’ raw guttural sound helped create the template for punk rock, and later became hugely influential in the alternative-rock revolution of the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Asheton was not an incredibly gifted player technically, but the dirgy, guttural sounds he created on early Stooges classics like “I Wanna Be Your Dog” were cited by guitarists as varied as Kurt Cobain, Thurston Moore and Jack White — who once called the Stooges’ 1969 effort “Fun House” the greatest rock album of all time.

In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked Asheton at #29 on its "Greatest Guitarists of All Time" list, and in September of this year, the Stooges were nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user RealLowVibe.

Even Heather Mac Donald Is Right Twice a Year

I have to give this one to my girl Heather Mac Donald over at City Journal. Well, partly give it to her. She's right on the problem, but wrong-ish on the solution.

There's been lots of talk lately, however muted since black dysfunction is the issue, of rising intrablack homicide and violence rates. Overall, crime is down, except for blacks. What gives?

Political Persuasion

POLITICAL PERSUASION....Matt Yglesias mocks RNC Chairman Mike Duncan's recent burbling about how Republicans need to start using Twitter and Facebook and "the different technology that young people are using today":

I love Twitter. I have two Twitter feeds. I manage one with Twitterific and another with Twitterfox. And of course there’s my iPhone interfaces, too. Twitter’s neat, it’s fun, I enjoy it. But you can’t do political persuasion on Twitter and anyone who’s at all familiar with either Twitter or political persuasion could tell you that. It’s important for political movements to embrace new technologies, but part of embracing new technologies is understanding them and actually respecting what they’re for and Twitter is never going to be anything other than an incidental sideshow to political activism.

I'm not so sure about that. It sort of depends on what you mean by "political persuasion," I think. A steady stream of tweets containing ever more apocalyptic messages about (for example) the imminent demise of American civilization due to immigration legislation wending its way through Congress could be effective at helping to rouse the masses to protest. Couldn't it? Matt is probably right that Twitter by itself is something of a sideshow, but all of these technologies put together (Twitter, texting, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) could end up being as effective in mobilizing the 20something generation as talk radio was mobilizing the Newt generation. And mobilization is persuasion, no?

Actually, Duncan's real problem is probably not so much that he's wrong about Twitter, but that he doesn't have any real clue about what Twitter is. He seems to treat it more like a buzzword than a genuine concept. But at least it's a start.

Happy New Year, Obama Baby! MoJo's Creative Director on our Jan/Feb Cover Art (A Saturday Evening Post Homage)

When we started developing Mother Jones' January/February 2009 cover, we were looking for a way to depict President-elect Barack Obama in a lighthearted way, while acknowledging the mammoth task he has ahead of him the minute he assumes office. After rejecting numerous ideas, including one of Hercules shoveling dung out of the Augean stables (you're welcome!), we were intrigued by the image of Obama as an innocent New Year's baby (the thinking being that "innocence" can mean "not guilty" of said mess, but can also imply "inexperienced.")

I arrived at Norman Rockwell's predecessor at the Saturday Evening Post, illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, who blogger Charley Parker claims to be the source of the New Year's baby metaphor. Aside from having developed the "Arrow shirt man" (reportedly a likeness of Leyendecker's partner of 48 years, Charles Beach), and Saturday Evening Post covers throughout the first half of the 20th century, it seems that Leyendecker created the New Year's baby image for a 1908 Post cover and continued to explore variations on that theme until his very last cover, on their January 2, 1943, issue.

The Federal Gov't Decides to Let Old Folks Keep Their Own Money—What's Left of It

As one of its final acts in the worst economic year since the Great Depression, the federal government passed legislation suspending for 2009 the rule requiring old people to withdraw a minimum amount of money from their 401Ks, IRAs, or other individual retirement accounts. The current rule imposes a 50 percent tax penalty on anyone over age 70 1/2 who fails to take their so-called mandatory distributions by the end of the year.

That’s right, fellow oldsters--as a parting gift to all of us, the 110th Congress and George W. Bush, who failed to prevent or contain the financial meltdown that has cost some of us a third or more of our life savings, is now giving us permission not to spend some of what’s left.

The idea behind the legislation is that seniors shouldn’t be forced to sell off their investments at a loss. Unfortunately, however, it applies to 2009, not 2008--which is, of course, when our retirement accounts got gutted. According to the New York Times, some members of Congress urged Henry Paulson’s Treasury Department to apply the same change to 2008, but it declined to do so.

In a letter to members of Congress, the Treasury Department said any steps it could take to address the issue would be “substantially more limited than the relief enacted by Congress and could not be made uniformly to all individuals subject to required minimum distributions.” It also said carrying out the changes would be “complicated and confusing for individuals and plan sponsors.”

Well, by all means, let’s not confuse the old farts; we’re having a tough enough time figuring out how how it is that we did everything we were supposed to do--worked, planned, saved, invested--and still got so royally screwed. And let’s not complicate things for the financial institutions, who are already overburdened figuring out how to spend their $700 billion handout.