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Alyssa

Yes, It IS Complicated

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 11, 2010 at 4:42 pm

I went, last night, to belatedly see It’s Complicated, since I wasn’t home long enough over the holidays to talk my female relatives into attending with me.  And, I am sorry to say, despite the presence of Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin, and a manly effort by John Krasinski, Nancy Meyers’ movie is, in certain ways, the most relentlessly unpleasant movie I’ve attended in quite some time.  It’s not as dreadful as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, or G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (which I saw for work, I swear).  But there is an unrelenting sour note in between some quite effective bouts of manic humor and occasional tenderness.

Let me put it this way.  Even if I am supposed to empathize with Meryl Streep, because she is a goddess, and because some day I, too, will be in my fifties and may feel insecure around younger women, it is not remotely okay for Streep’s character to have an affair with her ex-husband, who is now remarried to one of said younger women.  And it’s not really okay for a movie that wants us to like Meryl Streep’s character to essentially refuse to reckon with the impact of that affair, which is summed up in a tear group hug with her children after which everything is supposed to be dandy, and one anguished look on Lake Bell’s face.  As the Younger Woman for whom Baldwin left Streep, Bell is horribly abused by the script, reduced to a sexy midriff, occasional nasty hectoring, and then delivers one of the better moments of acting in the film when it becomes clear to her that her husband has fallen back in love with his ex-wife.  It’s a moment, and it’s far more payback than Meyers deserved for giving her such a shrewish, one-note role.  Streep’s character, despite behaving recklessly and selfishly, gets everything she wants.

My real problem with It’s Complicated isn’t the home design porn, of which there is a whole lot.  I tend to believe that it’s basically the equivalent of movies where men have a lot of guns, or nail a lot of girls, or get to drive great cars.  I just can’t get perturbed about that.  No, what bothered me is the refusal to take Jane’s actions, or the loneliness that led to them, truly seriously.  Meyers has made a movie that’s supposed to be a treat for women, particularly older ones, that instead viciously condescends to them.

That said, there is a great, extended, bravura central sequence involving Streep and Baldwin trysting in a hotel, Baldwin fainting, Baldwin having to explain to his doctor that he’s been sneaking FloMax, Streep and Martin getting stoned, Kraskinski getting stoned, and the judicious use of the Fine Young Cannibals “Good Thing” in a dance sequence (although for that song, no movie will ever, ever be better than Tin Men).  The rest of the movie is sort of speechy and moral and nasty.  It’s unfortunate.  I haven’t disliked or been disappointed by a movie so much in ages.

Security

Flashback: Bush Also Threatened To Withhold Loan Guarantees From Israel

By Zaid Jilani on Jan 11, 2010 at 4:40 pm

wall1 This past Wednesday, U.S. Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell — who successfully brokered peace in Northern Ireland — suggested to a PBS host that the United States could “withhold support on loan guarantees to Israel” as one tool to pressure the Israelis to seriously engage in peace efforts.

Mitchell’s remarks have sparked an “uproar” among the Israeli right, which has been intransigent on the issues of settlement expansion and the economic blockade of Gaza. Israel’s Maariv newspaper called Mitchell’s suggestion a “bombshell,” and Israeli finance minister Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz snapped, “We don’t need to use these guarantees. We are doing just fine.” Additionally, “senior members of Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party…[said] in a statement that they would not be ‘threatened’ by the US.”

Meanwhile, a group of legislators — Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), John Barrasso (R-WY), and John Thune (R-SD) — appeared at a press conference in Jerusalem and slammed Mitchell’s openness to using all available tools to forge a Middle East peace:

Lieberman, after saying that an administration official had already disavowed Mitchell’s statement, said that in his opinion “any attempt to pressure Israel, to force Israel to the negotiating table by denying Israel support, will not pass the Congress of the United States. In fact, the Congress will stop any attempt to do that. I don’t think we will come to that point.”

McCain was equally unequivocal, saying that this type of pressure would not be helpful “and I don’t agree with it.” McCain added that he was sure that the administration would make it clear in the future that this was not its policy.

What right-wing critics of Mitchell’s suggestion do not acknowledge is that threatening to freeze loan guarantees is hardly unique to the Obama administration. In fact, the last time such a threat was made was under President George W. Bush. In 2003, Bush made the explicit threat to withhold loan guarantees from the Israelis due to the expansion of their “security fence” deep into Palestinian territory. Bush’s father went even further. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush briefly cut off loan guarantees to the Israeli government over their settlement policies, successfully forcing “Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir…to attend the Madrid Peace Conference.”

As Ori Nir of Americans for Peace Now writes, Mitchell’s “determination deserves support” in his effort to use every option in our diplomatic toolbox to successfully bring about peace in the Middle East. The former senator made peace “in Northern Ireland and he is determined to do it in Israel-Palestine as well.”

Economy

Obama Administration Planning Bank Fee To ‘Recoup’ Bailout Cost, Reduce Deficit

By Pat Garofalo on Jan 11, 2010 at 4:10 pm

AP090318013035Politico reported today that the Obama administration is planning to unveil a bank fee in its next budget “designed to recoup some of the cost taxpayers incurred in the bailout”:

This will stop short of a financial transactions tax, and the administration has decided that a tax on compensation packages would be too easily evaded. The officials said the final approach has not been locked down. The chief goal is a fee that is not easily passed along.

The Wall Street Journal added these details:

One option discussed involves placing a fee on a bank’s liabilities, a number that theoretically represents the amount of risk a bank takes on, according to officials familiar with the matter. Another would be putting the fee on bank’s profits, as an approximation of their success and ability to absorb such a fee, these people said.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs “declined to say whether the budget will include a new fee on banks,” but when asked “if there will be something specific in the budget that ensures the repayment of taxpayers” for the bank bailouts, Gibbs said, “that’s the president’s goal, yes.”

There is a lot of wisdom to crafting a bank fee along these lines, particularly one aimed at firms that, for all intents and purposes, are still “too-big-to fail.” My preferred approach is that which the House adopted in its regulatory reform debate: the fee goes toward building up a fund that would be used in the event that a failing financial firm needs to be dismantled. Once a sufficient fund is built up (the House set it at $150 billion), subsequent revenue could easily be put toward deficit reduction.

The economic upside of this is that Wall Street is just about the only place that it’s even mildly desirable to look for a revenue increase in the near future. As Michael Ettlinger wrote, financial services is “an industry that — with a huge amount of help from taxpayers — is now turning enormous profits…It’s also an industry that really does owe something to the rest of the country.”

Even former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, not exactly a paragon of banking virtue, said that banks can handle a “too-big-to-fail” fee. “You could actually charge them,” he said. “And the bigger they are, the more complicated they are, the more you charge them.”

All that said, the administration is continuing its maddening insistence on not considering a financial transactions tax. A minuscule tax on transactions would be a good way to raise revenue largely from Wall Street, and in a way that would not increase the cost of trading beyond what it was in the 70′s and 80′s (thanks to technological advances that have significantly decreased trading costs). Wall Street is going to great lengths to torpedo this idea, and I wish the administration would stop stepping all over what is a legitimate idea that could raise significant revenue.

Update

Felix Salmon has more.

Yglesias

Mark Schmitt on the Filibuster

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 11, 2010 at 3:58 pm

Mark Schmitt talks about how to fix the filibuster:

I think you should fix the filibuster by having the senate vote the same way that the State Senate of Vermont or the Parliament of the Netherlands or the Parliament of India or the Japanese Diet or the Supreme Court of the United States or the United States House of Representatives or the Virginia House of Delegates or the General Assembly of the United Nations and the vast majority of other groups of human beings vote—you count the people who say “yes” and you count the people who say “no” and the side with the more votes wins. It’s not a perfect system, but it works well enough and it has a pretty clear and compelling logic. 60 seems very arbitrary to me, driven in part by the coincidence that 100 Senators is a very round number. If there were only 94 Senators, would we prefer a 56 Senator supermajority (which approximates 60 percent) or would we prefer 55 which is a round number?

Schmitt’s main idea, however, has some merit as a compromise. What he wants is to change the rule from requiring an affirmative vote of 60 Senators to pass a bill to requiring an affirmative vote of 40 Senators to block a bill. On major issues, that probably wouldn’t change anything. But it would reduce the quantity of purely petty obstructionism. Jon Kyl would only be able to hold the entire Treasury Department hostage to a minor concern with the timing of the implementation of gambling regulations would require him to find colleagues who actually support this course of action.

For now, though, I feel like being uncompromising. Majority rules is the normal and obvious way of resolving bivalent “yes or no” questions.

Politics

Reid tells press he has ‘done more for diversity in the U.S. Senate than all the rest of people put together.’

By Amanda Terkel on Jan 11, 2010 at 3:41 pm

Today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) held a nationally televised press conference to address his 2008 remarks that Barack Obama was “light-skinned” and possessed “no Negro dialect.” During the briefing, Reid admitted that he “could have used a better choice of words.” He also discussed his civil rights record and noted all the support he has received from civil rights leaders and government officials, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who reportedly said that Reid has “done more for diversity in the U.S. Senate than all the rest of people put together”:

REID: As a very young man in the state of Nevada, I was one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Nevada. I had a lot of moving to do. Gov. O’Callaghan — he and I worked hard to work out the consent decree to allow integration of the gaming community in Nevada. Moving forward, I’m very aware of the fact that the first African-American to serve on the federal court in the state of Nevada was because of direct work I did, recommending Johnny Rawlins to President Clinton. The first diversity program in —

I got a call last night — it was late, I was surprised he was up this late — from Secretary Salazar, and he said, “Harry, you make sure you tell everybody that you have done more for diversity in the United States Senate than all the rest of people put together.”

Watch it:

In the 110th Congress (2007-2008), Reid scored a 90 percent on the NAACP’s federal civil rights legislative report card; thirty five senators scored higher than he did. In the 106th Congress Reid scored a 100 percent.

Transcript: Read more

Yglesias

Promises and Penalties

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 11, 2010 at 3:14 pm

I agree with Roger Lowenstein that families that think it serves their interests to default on mortgage payments shouldn’t feel morally obligated to avoid default. But people shouldn’t embrace overstated philosophical claims just to bolster this point. Lowenstein writes:

Mortgage holders do sign a promissory note, which is a promise to pay. But the contract explicitly details the penalty for nonpayment — surrender of the property. The borrower isn’t escaping the consequences; he is suffering them.

If my friend says he wants to meet for a drink at 8PM, and I say “are you going to show up 15 minutes late as usual?” Then he says “No way. If I’m late, drinks are on me.” Then he shows up 20 minutes late, but follows through on his promise to pay the tab I think it’s fair to say that he’s still open to moral criticism. Similarly, a person who drives all around town blocking fire hydrants is doing something wrong even if he willingly pays all applicable fines in a prompt manner.

The difference, I think, is that my mortgage is an agreement I’ve made with Bank of America which is a publicly traded for-profit corporation. Companies like that, unlike people or people agencies or other kinds of institutions, don’t recognize any kind of goals other than monetary ones. Under the circumstances, any relationship you might have with Bank of America is a purely transactional, purely commercial one and if you treat it as anything other than that you’re being a sucker. You don’t treat your friends or your church that way, because they’re not supposed to treat you that way and if they started you would get different friends and a different church.

Health

Is Removing The Insurer Anti-Trust Exemption A Good Substitute For The Public Option?

By Igor Volsky on Jan 11, 2010 at 2:49 pm

“In the absence of government-sponsored health coverage, liberals now want negotiators to waive the anti-trust exemptions for insurance companies –another sticking point for Nelson,” Politico reports. “Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio told his fellow Democrats on Thursday that it needs to be in the final package to keep insurance companies accountable.”

Progressives have argued that a public option would restore competition to concentrated markets, curtail abusive industry practices and lower health care costs — and they believe they can accomplish the same goals by removing the insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption. But anti-trust experts disagree. They argue that simply eliminating the exemption is not enough; lawmakers must strengthen enforcement mechanisms if they wish to hold insurers accountable.

“At some point in time, the anti-trust exemption probably served as some type of an obstacle and inhibited the federal anti trust agencies from going in and blocking some of the mergers that have led to such a concentrated market,” former anti-trust enforcer David Balto explained in an interview with the Wonk Room. “At this point, there is really no need from the industry’s perspective, for an anti trust exemption. This anti trust exemption permits them to coordinate activities which would be considered collusion in other industries. When you are a monopolist, there is no need to collude.” Today, one in six “metropolitan areas in a 2008 study of more than 300 U.S. markets is [are already] dominated by a single health insurer that controls at least 70% of consumers enrolled in health maintenance organizations or preferred provider organizations.”

Removing the exemption would allow anti-trust enforcers to begin preventing anti-competitive activities and enforcing the new regulations of reform, but lawmakers need to buttress the capabilities of the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission if they wish to prevent insurers from entering into collusive arrangements that would undermine any new competition, Balto argues. He proposes several ways to jump start enforcement:

1. Marshal competition and consumer protection enforcement resources to focus on insurers’ anticompetitive, egregious, and deceptive conduct.

2. Create a vigorous health insurance consumer protection enforcement program.

3. Reinvigorate enforcement against anticompetitive conduct.

In light of the compromises progressives have made to advance health care reform, simply removing the anti-trust exemption is too little too late. If progressives want to achieve some of the goals of the public plan — and hold insurers to account — they better give their exemption demands some teeth.

Politics

Sarah Palin signs on as Fox News contributor.

By Victor Zapanta on Jan 11, 2010 at 2:46 pm

palin-alertAccording to The New York Times, Sarah Palin has signed a multi-year deal as a contributor to the Fox News Channel. TVNewser reports Palin’s reaction:

“I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News. It’s wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news.“

Fox News has long maintained a cozy relationship with the GOP’s former vice presidential candidate. Before her so-called bus tour, Palin posted a list of interviews she expected to appear in, mostly with Fox News personalities. Weeks later, Fox News was forced to issue an apology after Think Progress called out the network for recycling old campaign footage as massive bus tour rallies.

Update

Fox Nation is already celebrating the get:

Screen shot 2010-01-11 at 2.04.01 PM

Alyssa

What We Watch

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 11, 2010 at 2:42 pm

I’ve gotten a number of requests to comment on the New York Times nifty Netflix-rental tracker app.  I played around with it a bit in Washington, DC, and I have to say, I’m not particularly stunned by any of the patterns.  It’s not incredibly surprising to me that, say, Slumdog Millionaire would be a higher rental priority for folks in whiter Northwest Washington than in blacker Southeast, or that the reverse would be true for Seven Pounds, a recent Will Smith weepie.  I suppose I’m surprised by Doubt‘s persistence across the region, since it’s neither a super-fun thing to watch on a weekend nor something that was so critically-acclaimed it seemed like a must-watch (I saw it in New York with Cherry Jones in the title role, and didn’t feel the need to see it on film, no matter how much I love Meryl).  I Love You, Man is popular near Andrews Air Force Base, as is Role Models (curiously, Transformers looks less popular than either of those two movies in that area).  Both Frost/Nixon and State of Play are frequently rented in Northwest and the ‘burbs where a lot of politically-oriented folks live.

Look, as all of you know, I’m a huge proponent of the idea that the popular culture we consume says a great deal about us.  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, but where we spend our money and our time is a significant indicator of our priorities, and damn do we spend a lot of money watching giant robots fight people and Channing Tatum flaunt his abs.  But as with a lot of societal indicators, sometimes things are just obvious: people with less money and without insurance probably aren’t going to be as healthy as people with access to both.  People are going to watch movies about people who look like them and professions that they’re involved with.  I’m most interested in the cultural phenomena that dredge up something from our collective subconscious, or seem to.  Does Twilight‘s popularity mean that a couple of generations of American women want submissive, obsessive relationships?  What does Transformers or G.I. Joe say about what we wished the American military looked like in terms of an ability to project forward basically without casualties, despite our queasy feelings as expressed in opinion polling about Iraq and Afghanistan?

In other words, I think this Netflix map is a nice aggregation of data.  But it’s really a couple of steps behind where I would like the conversation about what we like to be.

Climate Progress

Must-see video of coal industry witness: Go ahead and put some coal ash on your cereal!

By Joe Romm on Jan 11, 2010 at 2:40 pm

Why regulate arsenic? “We eat it every day in our foodstuffs, we drink it every day in our water.”

You won’t believe this until you see it with your own eyes — and maybe not even then.  From the GOP witness to the December 10 hearing on “Drinking Water and Public Health Impacts of Coal Combustion Waste Disposal” — a medical doctor (!):

Read more

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