NRO's Kevin D. WIlliamson: Wisconsin union-busting about defenestrating Democrats, not deficits

I think it's interesting that National Review's top online column at the moment is about how the real reason public-sector unions need to be busted is not because of the effect they have on states' bottom lines, but because they're quite effective at political organizing—whether or not they have collective bargaining rights. And this is bad for the public because ... well, mostly because those unions oppose GOP policy prescriptions.

I think it's worth noting that conservatives tried to temper criticism of of the Citizens United ruling by pointing out that unions would also be able to pour lots of money into campaign races—that it wouldn't just be the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and wealthy plutocrats. But there's a number of legislative efforts underway (and not just in Wisconsin) to dilute the power of unions to organize workers, pool their money, and actually offer substantive opposition to the plutocrats. If the GOP wins its union-busting fights, that will only compound the ability of the Kochs and Americans for Prosperity to flood races with money. Williamson argues that the amount of money and organization unions can muster somehow distort democracy—but he doesn't bother considering how that's also true when the money supports conservative causes.

(Not The) Netflix Queue: Mike Leigh's "Another Year"

Three quick thoughts about Mike Leigh's "Another Year," viewed this afternoon at an actual movie theater!

• The first thing you need to know is that this trailer is a goddamn lie:

What kind of movie does this look like? Maybe a James L. Brooksian dramedy with some sad moments, but ultimately a bit of uplift? Wrong! It's a Mike Leigh movie, and Mike Leigh movies are almost unremittingly, irredeemably grim. I knew this. It's why I don't generally go watch Mike Leigh movies, no matter how well-crafted they are. I don't need my movies to be all sunshine and light, to have a happy ending every time. But there's a limit the amount of nihilism that I want to experience at the cinema, and a single Mike Leigh movie generally fills my quota for five years or so. 

• This is a movie, really, about aging. Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen are the happily married couple at the center of the movie, and they are the ones who have aged well. They have good jobs, a community garden plot they tend together getting their fingers dirty in the wet soil, and a modest but well-appointed slightly-upper-middle-class rowhome where they make great meals, drink moderate amounts of wine, and read smart books. We follow them through "another year" of their life together, but the movie isn't really about them—it's about their friends, the people they host, people who have not aged well. 

• Chief among them is Mary, played by Leslie Manville, a boozy fading beauty who has always relied on the kindness of strangers. As "Another Year" progresses, we see the sad realization dawn on her that it's too late to achieve the kind of intimacy and good feeling that Broadbent and Sheen have in their marriage. Almost every one of Manville's scenes are excruciating, a well-drawn portrait of a self-deluded woman starting to lose those illusions. But Manville's performance illustrates my chief complaint about the movie: She is a three-dimensional character, but Broadbent and Sheen are not—they are archetypes, the mythical end-states of lives well-lived. They have to be, in order to make Manville's journey as pathetic as possible. (Otherwise, they would have realized what is plain to the audience: That Manville wants to screw their grown son.) Roger Ebert writes that "Every single character in 'Another Year' is human," but he's wrong. Only one, Manville, approaches full flesh. But it's a Mike Leigh movie: It makes sense that the most fully human character is also the most depressing. 

 

Buzz Bissinger's ugly lynch-mob advocacy column for the Daily News

Last week's Buzz Bissinger column—made up entirely of his Tweets—was hysterically banal, if such thing is possible. His first real column in today's Daily News is horrifying, and raises the question of whether he deserves the space Larry Platt is giving him.

Bissinger, like most of us, is horrified by the allegations against West Philly abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, who stands accused of killing patients and live-born babies. Bissinger's solution? Let's kill Gosnell right now.

I believe that Gosnell deserves to be executed right now.

There is no need for months of delay. Nor is there any more need for why-did-this-happen stories. The culprits are always the same and always will be—state incompetence, local incompetence, the abortion politics of Harrisburg, regulations that are written up only to convince the public that the bureaucracy is actually doing something besides sending threatening letters that your tax payment is off by a dollar. It has happened before. It will happen again. Pure evil always overcomes its obstacles anyway.

I am against the death penalty. I think it is barbaric, an American stain. But I would pay to watch.

Bissinger gives a head-nod to the idea that Gosnell deserves a day in court, the but his overall approach here is something closer to a lynch mob. And it gets worse when he fantasizes about how, precisely, Gosnell should die.

I hope they hold him down on a bloody blanket and stuff his mouth with a cloth soaked with act piss. I hope they ask him if he wants painkillers and when he pleads that he does but has no money, they say he is out of luck because he has to pay for them. I hope they produce a weapon honed into a makeshift pair of scissors. I hope they plunge it into his neck and sever his spinal cord.

Granted, these are the same acts Gosnell is accused of perpetrating. They really are unspeakably horrifiying. But Bissinger's masturbatory fetishism here is nearly as disturbing.

I think newspaper columns should enlighten, entertain, and even provoke. I guess Bissinger's column does the latter, but to me it crosses a line into ugly and lurid Charles Bronson machismo that does little but inflame readers—and to what end? New editor Larry Platt wants people to buzz about the Daily News (and, here I am, writing about it) and I realize that tabloid standards are different from my own. But today's Buzz Bissinger column is starting to make me wonder if any standards of judgement, taste, and community-mindedness remain at the Daily News.

 

Wisconsin and public unions

That's this week's Scripps Howard column this Ben Boychuk. My take:

Public unions aren't organized against the public. They're organized for their members, workers who can be exploited like other workers.

But public unions face a challenge that private-sector unions don't: The employer, apparently, can unilaterally revoke their bargaining rights.

Why is Gov. Scott Walker trying to take away those rights? Because (the story goes) Wisconsin faces a budget deficit that can't be properly tackled: Overpaid teachers and clerks won't make concessions needed to bring the state's finances under control.

One problem: Almost none of that is true.

Wisconsin government workers aren't overpaid. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute shows the state's public workers are paid about 4.8 percent less than private-sector peers with similar education and experience.

And the unions have said they will make concessions -- accepting cuts in benefits and the adoption of a merit-pay system for teachers. Why won't Scott Walker take accept that for an answer? Look at the details of Walker's proposal. All the public unions will have their bargaining rights taken away -- except for the police and firefighters unions whose members tend to support Republicans. The governor is plainly using his office to break the backs of a constituency that usually supports the Democratic Party. This is ugly stuff.

Private-sector workers shouldn't think these efforts are limited to public employees. GOP union-busting knows no bounds -- the Republican-controlled House in Washington D.C. last week tried and failed to eliminate funding for the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces laws that let workers unionize.

Unions helped create a vibrant middle class in America. The middle class is faltering these days, and Republicans want Americans to believe it's the fault of lowly DMV file clerks and overworked teachers. It's not. If Republicans get their union-busting way, the pain will only get worse for all of us.

Obama won't defend DOMA, but he will enforce it

Before my gay-rights-loving friends get too excited, here's a very important part of Eric Holder's letter to Congress:

The President has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the President has instructed the Department not to defend the statute in Windsor and Pedersen, now pending in the Southern District of New York and the District of Connecticut. I concur in this determination.

Notwithstanding this determination, the President has informed me that Section 3 will continue to be enforced by the Executive Branch. To that end, the President has instructed Executive agencies to continue to comply with Section 3 of DOMA, consistent with the Executive’s obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, unless and until Congress repeals Section 3 or the judicial branch renders a definitive verdict against the law’s constitutionality. This course of action respects the actions of the prior Congress that enacted DOMA, and it recognizes the judiciary as the final arbiter of the constitutional claims raised.

I'm ... not so impressed by this. "It's unconstitutional, but we'll enforce it" is ... lousy. Possibly even indefensible. I'm not certain what the federal government actually does to enforce the law, so it might be a moot point, but it's possible the president is making a very loud noise over very little substance here. 

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO!!!!!

From the blog logs:

Lexington, Kentucky arrived from google.com on "Cup O' Joel" by searching for joel mathis shirtless.

Kevin Drum on why we need unions

Of course unions have pathologies. Every big human institution does. And anyone who thinks they're on the wrong side of an issue should fight it out with them. But unions are also the only large-scale movement left in America that persistently acts as a countervailing power against corporate power. They're the only large-scale movement left that persistently acts in the economic interests of the middle class.

So sure: go ahead and fight the teachers unions on charter schools. Go ahead and insist that public sector unions in Wisconsin need to take pay and benefit cuts if that's what you believe. Go ahead and rail against Davis-Bacon. It's a free country.

But the decline of unions over the past few decades has left corporations and the rich with essentially no powerful opposition. No matter what doubts you might have about unions and their role in the economy, never forget that destroying them destroys the only real organized check on the power of the business community in America. If the last 30 years haven't made that clear, I don't know what will.

via motherjones.com

Violence in Libya, and why Egypt was probably the last peaceful transition we'll see anytime soon

A friend Tweets:

My response: "Yes. That's the whole point. I deplore it though."

It's worth mentioning, though, that after Tunisia and Egypt, we're probably done seeing peaceful transitions away from authoritarian rule in the Middle East—at least for a little while. Those countries' rulers passed from the scene with relatively little violence, and it's easy to see that other rulers in the region decided that the lesson was they'd either A) have to commit bloodshed to hold onto power or B) give up power. There's little chance, at this point, that they'll try to peacefully outwait the protesters: That route doesn't seem to work. For authoritarians, the incentives now belong on the violent side of things.

I'm not suggesting the protests are futile. The use of violence, as in the case of Libya, probably further de-legitimizes governments that are already illegitimate. But if this series of revolutions is to continue, the easy parts are probably already over.

Why is there income inequality?

Apologies for the lateness of this post compared to the first two. There's lots of other work to be done, and this series has required me to do some hard work in the form of thinking through things. It's more time-consuming than the usual point-and-shoot of blogging. 

So we've established that there is, in fact, growing income inequality in the United States. And the evidence of history suggests that such inequality can be a societal problem over time. So the next question is this: Why is inequality growing here? And what can be done about it?

Paul Krugman—whose 2007 book, "The Conscience of a Liberal" forms the basis of this series of posts—seems to offer a simple, even seductive answer: It's the Republicans' fault. They're the ones who radically cut marginal taxes on top earners after 1980, and they've done all they can to weaken the power of unions, who were a major factor in lifting the tide for working-class Americans in the post-Depression era.

Here's the crux of it, he says:

Over the course of the 1970s, radicals of the right determined to roll back the achievements of the New Deal took over the Republican Party, opening a partisan gap with the Democrats, who became the true conservatives, defenders of the long-standing institutions of equality. The empowerment of the hard right emboldened business to launch an all-out attack on the union movement, drastically reducing workers' bargaining power; freed business executives from the political and social constraints that had previously placed limits on runaway executive paychecks; sharply reduced tax rates on high incomes; and in a variety of other ways promoted rising inequality.

Krugman, of course, is as interested in reining in the elites as he is helping the working and middle classes get ahead.  I'm more concerned with the latter part of the equation, and it seems to me he doesn't do a good enough job addressing why that second part failed to happen. There's no reason that rising executive pay should necessarily require stagnating worker pay in a growing economy, it seems to me. And despite the efforts of some more committed conservatives, there's not really been much reining in of the welfare state in the last 30 years—Republicans have even expanded it without bothering to pay for it.*

*If they somehow manage to slash and burn Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, however, this statement is null and void.

This is leading me to a conclusion about the cause of the inequality problem, but I want to prod at Krugman a little more first. He spends much of his time exalting the 1950s—when inequality was low, marginal tax rates were high, and everybody lived better than the generation before them. And that's true. But Krugman doesn't really address something I've got to believe has to be a major factor in all of this: the 1950s also happened to be a time when the United States was, more or less, the only industrialized power left standing. All the other ones had been destroyed by World War II, and it took the Marshall Plan to get a lot of those economies starting to roll in the right direction. The United States had a big head start on the rest of the world, which means its workers had a head start on the rest of the world, right?

Fan mail: Billy Eger sets me straight

My most-persistent correspondent doesn't like my views on NPR. I wrote: "And the money spent on public broadcasting creates a public good far more valuable than those dollars would indicate: It creates a better-informed citizenry, the kind needed for a well-functioning democracy."

Billy's response:

For a well functioning democracy? That's your problem Dumbshit ,WE ARE A REPUBLIC NOT A DEMOCRACY.SO UNTIL YOU ACTUALLY LEARN YOUR HISTORY AN NOT WHAT YOU WANT IT TO BE ,YOU SHOULD SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE ,IF YOU HAD BRAINS YOU'D BE DANGEROUS,HAVE A NICE DAY STUPID.CAN'T FIX STUPID

billy from wickliffe

I enjoy Billy's pedantry. But for the sake of argument, here's James Madison's definition of a "republic," writing in Federalist 39: 

If we resort for a criterion to the different principles on which different forms of government are established, we may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior.

The government derives its powers "from the great body of people." Now. Billy's right that we're not strictly speaking a democracy. (Strict democracy is ... kind of socialistic.) But the term hasn't generally been used strictly, really. Lots of people—most people, I'd say, and certainly some notable conservatives—use and have used the term "democracy" to describe our republican form of government, so I don't think I was doing anything particularly ill-informed. Since our republican form of government derives its powers from the people, my point still stands. 

 

The Daily News' new ombudsman lives in ... North Dakota?

At the end of the first column from the Daily News' new "public editor" comes this startling bit of information:

Richard Aregood is the Charles R. Johnson Professor of Journalism at the University of North Dakota.

North Dakota?

Now, granted, Aregood isn't a stranger to the Philadelphia scene. As his UND bio notes, he "worked as a reporter, rewriteman, rock critic, city editor, deputy sports editor, and assistant managing editor before moving to the editorial page." He won a Pulitzer. And granted, he seems (appropriately) skeptical about the journalistic acumen of new Daily News editor Larry Platt.

But still. North Dakota.

The upside to this is that Aregood will have a lot of distance from the newsroom and editors he is supposed to critique on behalf of the public. The downside is that he's also going to have a lot of distance from the readers he's supposed to represent. 

Sure, you can email Aregood with your complaints and compliments about the Daily News. But it appears that Aregood won't be around Philadelphia to get a deeper sense of what people are saying to each other—say, at a food cart on Broad Street near City Hall—when they pick up a copy of the paper. Despite his deep roots at the Daily News, I suspect Aregood will be plenty willing to let the paper have it with both barrels when needed. But given that there's 1,500 miles of distance between Aregood and the community he's serving, I'm not sure he'll always know when it's needed.

Fan mail: No funding for lefty NPR

W.R. Engel writes me from Muncie, Indiana:

Joel, PBS, NPR should be defunded not to kill off Big Bird and friends (although I feel the world could do without Barney the big purple) but because taxpayer money should not be used to fund politically biased organizations. If you don't think there is a left-leaning bias at PBS and NPR I've a few bridges to sell you, or ask Juan Williams. Not to worry, Elmo, Bert and Ernie and all will find new homes and become millionaires.

This same issue was raised in the comments of an earlier blog post I wrote on the topic. My response, admittedly quite glib, was that NPR is "liberal" only in the sense that "informative" is somehow construed as being liberal. Less glibly, it's always tough for me to weigh these kinds of accusations: The kind of people who make these accusations seem to believe that every news organization that isn't explicitly conservative in its outlook is somehow liberal. I don't buy that.

But this kind of thing is in the eye of the beholder. To the extent we can quantify this, it's worth noting that NPR's listenership comes from all over the politicial spectrum—tilted, perhaps, ever-so-slightly to the left, but not by much. And that audience mostly believes NPR is very fair.

NPR is going to get into ideological dustups from time-to-time—like the Juan Williams imbroglio—because major news organizations can't really avoid them. I remain convinced that NPR (and, to a lesser extent, PBS) provides a profoundly good public service that the private market has shown little inclincation to provide. It is worthy of continued taxpayer funding.

In Wisconsin, Republicans discover democracy

Love this from Sen. Lindsay Graham:

Graham: “In a democracy, when you run on something, you do have an obligation to fulfill your promise. [Gov. Walker] didn’t take anybody by surprise, he’s doing exactly what he said. There was a referendum on this issue and the unions lost, and the Democrats in Wisconsin should come back to Wisconsin to have votes.”  

Graham, of course, a starring member of the the Republican minority during the 111th Congress elected with President Obama. Somehow, Republicans--despite massive defeats at the polls--found it right to ignore the message voters sent then in order to mount a record 112 filibusters in one year. Lectures from Graham on the nature of democracy are frankly laughable.

Netflix Queue: 'The Twilight Samurai'

Three quick thoughts about 'The Twilight Samurai':

* This sweet, slow, and elegaic film focuses on Seibei Iguchi, a low-ranking samurai at the end of the samurai era. He is poor and dirty, loves his daughters and even encourages them to study books(!!), but serves out ancient obligations to his sponsoring clan. Because his clan is mostly at peace--until the end of the film--he and his fellow samurai have little to do; they serve as clerks and accountants instead, rarely drawing their swords in anger. Given this film was made in 2002, a few years into Japan's real-life "lost decade" of recession, it's not difficult to read his situation as an allegory of Iguchi's modern-day countrymen living lives as semi-neutered "salarymen" torn between past glories and current duties.

* The presence of women in this film is what makes it unusual, at least from my experience of samurai movie watching. In both Japanese and American action movies, we tend to like our sword- and gun-slingers somewhat ascetic, stoic, and bordering on chaste. Their deepest emotional attachments tend to be with other men--or, if with women, doomed. (Make of that what you will.) But Iguchi's love for his daughters shapes his other actions in this movie--and not in the usual "I've got to get vengeance for them or protect them from a threat" kind of way. That makes him a different kind of hero, actually vulnerable instead of movie vulnerable. And that's what draws us in, even if the pacing seems to drag a bit at times.

* In the end, Iguchi must strap on his swords and have a climactic battle. Though 'The Last Samurai' has an elegaic feel to it, it seems that here is where we're given permission not to mourn what has passed. Iguchi and his opponent do not fight for their own honor, or freedom, or anything noble. They're each performing the assignments they've been given--"You're an errand boy. I've been an errand boy too," his opponent says--in order to keep the pillars of Japanese feudal society in place. The fighting is messy, inelegant, fought by two complicated humans instead of Good Guy and Bad Guy. The fight and the film end on a bittersweet note, then: We are the warrior-protagonists in our own lives, and if the battles we're sent to fight are sometimes less-than-noble, or even outright incomprehensible, there's still an honor to be found in fighting the best we can, and in finding comfort in the ones we love.

Netflix Queue: 'Mean Streets'

Three thoughts about Martin Scorcese's 1973 debut, 'Mean Streets'...

• This is where Martin Scorcese started to become Martin Scorcese, after a few years of laboring under shlock king Roger Corman. It's got all the Scorcese touches, in an early and kind of raw form: The Rolling Stones on the soundtrack, New York, tracking shots and, of course, DeNiro. It's got a kind of punk rawness to it that's still kind of thrilling 40 years later.

• An immense part of the punk rawness comes from DeNiro. He's always been an intimidating, middle-aged presence in my mind--even when playing young Vito Corleone in 1974's "The Godfather Part II." So it's kind of amazing to see him playing, essentially, a kid—a cocky young man, wet behind the ears, barely into the world but already at war with it. He's beautiful and fierce, but (like Scorcese) he's not ROBERT DENIRO yet, and seeing the performance anew—after decades of DeNiro watching—is a kind of revelation.

• A friend on Twitter says this movie doesn't really hold up very well, and it's not aged well. It's got a slack Cassavettian talkiness that meanders nowhere in particular at times. There are scenes that appear to have been improvised by the actors without much in the way of direction except: "Argue! Now!" It's just not quite as entertaining as, say, "Taxi Driver" or "Raging Bull" or "Goodfellas" or even "Casino." But it's still worthy of viewing, a movie that ties itself firmly to its time and place (New York in the early 1970s, when the city was falling apart) and, as a document of that time and the young vision of a great director, a fascinating piece of filmmaking. "Mean Streets" isn't a masterpiece, but it shows you the preparation for a career full of them.

Eugene Robinson on Haley Barbour's failure to denounce the KKK

For those who do not see the Civil War through a revisionist gauze of gallantry and Spanish moss, Forrest is an abomination. In 1864, his troops mowed down scores of black Union soldiers who were trying to surrender, in what became known as the Fort Pillow Massacre. After the war, Forrest became one of the founding fathers of the terrorist Ku Klux Klan - and was the group's first national leader, or "grand wizard."

Barbour was asked whether he would denounce the idea of honoring such a figure. "I don't go around denouncing people," he told reporters. "That's not going to happen."

via washingtonpost.com

I know many of my conservative and Republican friends really, really hate being tarred with the brush of racism—and I don't blame them. But if you want your movement disassociated from that sin, a good place to start would be by making sure your governors and former RNC chairmen unequivocally denounce the Klan. It's not a high bar.

Missing the Internet in Rural America, and why NPR should be funded by the feds

In my Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk this week, I argued for continued funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting largely on the basis that it's rural parts of the country that would suffer if services like NPR—with its in-depth news and coverage—disappear.

A story in today's New York Times kind of reinforces my point:

COFFEEVILLE, Ala. — After a couple of days in this part of rural Alabama, it is hard to complain about a dropped iPhone call or a Cee Lo video that takes a few seconds too long to load.

The county administrator cannot get broadband at her house. Neither can the sportswriter at The Thomasville Times.

Here in Coffeeville, the only computer many students ever touch is at the high school.

“I’m missing a whole lot,” said Justin Bell, 17. “I know that.”

As the world embraces its digital age — two billion people now use the Internet regularly — the line delineating two Americas has become more broadly drawn. There are those who have reliable, fast access to the Internet, and those, like about half of the 27,867 people here in Clarke County, who do not.

In rural America, only 60 percent of households use broadband Internet service, according to a report released Thursday by the Department of Commerce. That is 10 percent less than urban households. Over all, 28 percent of Americans do not use the Internet at all.

There are a variety of problems with this. As the Times notes, there are economic, medical, and education consequences to the lack of access to the modern world. But one of the problems is informational:  “This is about whether rural communities are going to participate in our democratic society," one of the Times' experts says, and he's right. Which is why cutting funding for the CPB really is a bad idea! The residents of Coffeeville, Alabama can't so easily call up the New York Times or the Washington Post or BBC News on their computers. NPR probably offers a nice and vital window to the broader world that isn't easily found otherwise. 

Remember Larry King's old USA Today column? That's Buzz Bissinger's Tweets in the Daily News.

I'm not so sure this worked:

Buzz Bissinger, author of "Friday Night Lights" and "A Prayer for the City," has joined the Daily News as editorial adviser and occasional columnist.

He also has 19,607 followers on Twitter. Here's what @buzzbissinger was tweeting yesterday. Which may explain why we still don't have a column from him. And why he has so many followers:

The Philadelphia Daily News is so desperate they want to reprint my tweets. Think it's a completely f---ed up idea.

Nothing to rant on. Gaga. Repubs. Dems. Big f---ing deal. Been there done that.

Phillies starters best on paper. Let's see what happens. One of them will get hurt. Trust me. Burden of expectations. Only disappoint.

I haven't taken my meds today. I should soon. Between the anti-depressants, Coumadin, Lipitor, baby aspirin. F---ing pharmacy.

And so on. "Burden of expectations. Only disappoint." Indeed.

A great, kid-friendly repurposing of a skateboard

Seen at Almaz Cafe in Center City. The girl's father gave me permission to shoot, FYI.

The coffee maker is dead. Long live the coffee maker.

Delivery from UPS!