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Alyssa

Breaking The Mold On TV Criticism

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 9, 2011 at 5:23 pm

My friend Ryan has a great post up challenging the accepted wisdom that individual episode recaps ought to be the dominant form of television criticism, and calling for other changes in the way critics conceive of themselves and their obligations to readers. I’m particularly sympathetic to this part of the essay:

Fuck objectivity when it comes to criticism. Seriously. There’s a difference in being able to look at a piece of television objectively and writing about it as such. Instead of hiding personal biases, opinions, and history, these should be part of the critical process. In order to differentiate yourself from other critics, readers should be able to feel that whatever they read from you comes from a place of truth. Whether or not they agree with your assessment is largely irrelevant, and out of your control. But the authenticity of the piece is something you can absolutely control. Owning up to one’s shortcomings is just another way of providing context to the review. Above all, people should be able to identify a piece by you with the byline removed. By letting yourself into the piece, you’re giving yourself a voice online. Trying to be “objective” will only make you sound like everyone else. And who wants that?

Obviously I’m totally biased here, as someone who spends a lot of her time arguing that the politics of culture deserve pride of place alongside aesthetics. But I also think critics have an obligation not simply to disclose what their preferences are, but to engage in a vigorous debate about what constitutes quality. When The Sopranos debuted, an experiment in making viewers relate to and invest in a repulsive criminal who was also a family man was an intriguing experiment. Now, anti-heroes are a dime a dozen and the simple act of going dark doesn’t get you originality points. Similarly, something like Breaking Bad may be part of the anti-hero canon, but it feels like it’s raised the bar for cinematography on television: the way it uses light and color make me look at everything else differently. These norms shift over time. Getting a gay hairdresser in a movie might have been revolutionary in 1985. But it doesn’t cut the mustard now if you want credit for inclusion. We should be laying down a lot of markers, all the time.

NEWS FLASH

Huckabee Endorses Anti-Gay Extremist For Senate | Today, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee endorsed the rabidly anti-gay Gary Glenn for U.S. Senate. Glenn is head of the Michigan chapter of the American Family Association, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as an anti-gay hate group. As Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch documents, Glenn has an extensive record of homophobia, including leading the campaign to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan, fighting the passage of the federal hate crimes bill, and calling for the criminalization of homosexuality. Huckabee has previously called Glenn a “very special friend,” adding, “if we had leaders like Gary Glenn across America, our work wouldn’t be so hard.”

Yglesias

This Time It’s Smugger

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 9, 2011 at 5:11 pm

Atrios writes that “the powers that be patted themselves on the back two years ago thinking they’d solved the problem.”

They certainly did. But that the powers that be were overly optimistic about their initial response to the crisis is unsurprising and in its way unforgivable. If you read This Time It’s Different, you’ll see that’s basically what always happens. What’s strange to me is what happened next. Instead of recognizing that they’d repeated the time-honored errors of the past, the powers that be started specifically reading This Time It’s Different as not an indictment of policy errors but an apologia for them. Instead of saying “we thought we’d learned the lessons of the past, but instead we’re repeating them” the powers that be started saying, “the lesson of the past is that these problems are inevitable, so don’t blame us for everything being terrible.” That’s a perverse attitude to take. It’s true that it’s not unusual to screw up in the wake of a financial crisis, but that doesn’t make it okay.

Special Topic

GOP Rep. Tom Price Refuses To Disparage Occupy Wall Street, Says He Understands Its Frustrations

By Zaid Jilani on Nov 9, 2011 at 5:10 pm

Even a staunch right-winger like Price won't insult Occupy Wall Street.

On Monday, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) visited Kennesaw State University and fielded questions from students. In a video captured on YouTube, a student asked Price about what he thought about the 99 Percent Movement and the occupations taking place across the country.

Price, despite being one of the most right-wing members of the House of Representatives, said he did not want to disparage the movement like many of his colleagues. While he thinks some of the anger of the movement is misdirected, he understands its “frustrations”:

STUDENT: What do you think about the occupation of Wall Street movement.

PRICE: What do I think about the occupation of Wall Street movement. From the first time that this began, a lot of my colleagues, there were some who were disparaging of this movement. What I said, I believed it then and I believe it now. The Occupy Wall Street movement and all the other discontent that’s out there in society says that people have the same kind of impression that I’ve tried to convey to you about the disfunction of our policymakers in addressing the major issues of the day. And that frustration and anger extends all the way from the far right to the far left. It’s a peculiar response because I think it’s misdirected. I think a lot of the anger ought to be directed towards the administration. That’s my political sense. I understand completely the frustration people are feeling.

Watch it:

If even a very right-wing member of Congress like Price is expressing empathy towards Occupy Wall Street, it means that the protesters in New York City and the wider movement have gained a hefty amount of political clout. (HT: JswiftMedia YouTube account)

Justice

Study: GOP’s Balanced Budget Amendment Would Double Unemployment Rate, Put 15 Million Out Of Work

By Travis Waldron on Nov 9, 2011 at 5:10 pm

In a week, the GOP will again vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment, the cockamamie economic proposal they have toyed with several times over the last several months, including during the debate over raising the debt ceiling. The vote is part of the final compromise to raise the debt limit, in which President Obama and Senate Democrats promised to hold a vote on such an amendment, despite the fact that such votes have failed numerous times in the past.

Republicans have taken to ignoring the obvious perilous consequences of the amendment even as voices on both sides of the aisle denounce it as the “worst idea in Washington.” The current amendment, former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett said, “looks like it was drafted by a couple of interns on the back of a napkin.” Today, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) added to that criticism, releasing a study highlighting a piece from Macroeconomic Advisers that notes that such an amendment would make future recessions “deeper and longer” and saying that if a BBA had been enacted prior to the 2008 recession, the “effect on the economy” would have been “catastrophic.”

And according to CBPP, passing a Balanced Budget Amendment now, with the country trying to climb out of the hole of joblessness caused by the recession, would have the exact opposite affect one would expect policy makers to try and achieve. In fact, the budget cuts required by such an amendment now would double the unemployment rate and slide the country back into the throes of recession:

If the 2012 budget were balanced through spending cuts, those cuts would total about $1.5 trillion in 2012 alone, the analysis estimates. Those cuts would throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.

That should be a reality check for Republicans who claim to be focused on job creation. Yet, despite evidence that the amendment would have disastrous consequences for our economy, Republicans — even those who pitch themselves as credible on the economy, like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — continue to support it. Some even distort the past positions of Democrats to make it look like the proposal has bipartisan support.

In reality, such an amendment would only serve to exacerbate the very problems the GOP says it is trying to fix. And, as CBPP notes, the idea is utterly impractical: “[T]he only way to implement a BBA without some fiscal drag is to ratify it when the budget is in balance or surplus. Of course, then we wouldn’t have needed the BBA to achieve balance in the first place.”

Climate Progress

New Ad Targets Scott Brown’s Oily Votes

By Brad Johnson on Nov 9, 2011 at 5:00 pm

The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) has launched a new ad asking Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) to end subsidies for big oil. Brown has received $152,100 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, including $8,500 from Chevron, Conoco Phillips, and Exxon in the two weeks before his May 17 vote against S. 940, which would have killed some oil industry subsidies. The advertisement portrays a Brown-lookalike in his campaign gear of a Carhardt jacket, leaving oily marks as he wanders through Boston:

Scott Brown said he’s one of us. But there’s a growing stain on his record. Senator Brown’s taken over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars from big oil. And while Americans have been struggling at the pump, Senator Brown voted to keep giving oil companies billions in special government handouts. Sticking us with the bill, and a really big mess. Tell Senator Brown to vote to end tax breaks for Big Oil.

Watch it:

A new Public Policy Polling survey, conducted on behalf of LCV, finds that that 71 percent of those polled in Massachusetts think that tax breaks for oil companies should be eliminated, with only 18 percent in support of maintaining them.

NEWS FLASH

275,000 People Want MSNBC To Fire Pat Buchanan | MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan has made a career out of bigotry. His thoughtful contributions include calling gays satanists, praising the Nazis and the KKK, decrying Dr. Martin Luther King as a fraud, and telling African Americans that they should be grateful for slavery. While touring the networks to promote his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, he stopped by a white nationalist radio program The Political Cesspool which was only too happy to advertise his theories. In response, African-American civil rights organization ColorOfChange.org and CREDO Action gathered 275,000 people who are demanding that MSNBC President Phil Griffin fire Buchanan immediately. The ColorOfChange.org petition reads, “Buchanan has a long and consistent history of peddling white supremacist ideology as legitimate political commentary, on your network and elsewhere.” Noting that Buchanan has the right to express his views, the petition says “he’s not entitled to a platform that lets him broadcast bigotry and hate to millions. If MSNBC and NBC want to be seen as trusted, mainstream sources of news and commentary, you need to fire Buchanan now.” Buchanan has not appeared on MSNBC since he began promoting his book on Oct. 22.

By Tanya Somanader on Nov 9, 2011 at 5:00 pm

NEWS FLASH

Hospitals Urge Super Committee To Expand Comparative Effectiveness Research | “The American Hospital Association is urging the debt law’s super committee to embrace ‘real’ comparative effectiveness research that includes cost analysis as it searches for health care deficit cutters,” Inside Health Policy’s Sahil Kapur reports. “When we talk about ‘real’ comparative effectiveness research, we really support including cost-effectiveness of different treatment options,” the AHA official said. “We know that others don’t. But we think that information is one other component to determine what might be best for the needs of patients.” Doctors, device makers, and Republicans had repeatedly warned that considering “cost” in coverage recommendations would lead to European-style health care rationing and lawmakers omitted the measure from the health care law. Other groups believe that including cost could encourage innovation and lower health care spending.

Economy

Paul Ryan: ‘I Agree’ We Need To Reinstate Glass-Steagall

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Nov 9, 2011 at 4:45 pm

Republicans have vociferously fought new banking regulations in the name of job creation, with many lawmakers and presidential candidates even calling for undoing existing ones, such as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, which was passed in order to guard the financial system against a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.

So it was surprising to hear Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the powerful chairman of the House Budget Committee, say he’d be interested in reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that curbed speculation by separating deposit and investment banks. The law was repealed in 1999, but on conservative host Bill Bennett’s radio show last week, Ryan said he “agree[d]” with a caller who wanted to reinstate the law:

CALLER: Hasn’t there been a separation with the removal of Glass-Steagall and the uptick rule to let Wall Street go wild? When is someone going to put that back in place? We need to put that back in place to help stabilize things.

RYAN: Yeah, I agree with that. [...] Mixing banking and commerce, meaning allowing banks to go do non-banking activities, by leveraging their deposits. [...] The way I look at this, there’s a lot of merit to what you just said. [...] If banks want to make hedge fund-like returns, then they should go be a hedge fund. But if you want to be a bank, then be a bank. Don’t try to be a hedge fund and take undue risks with your depositors money. So the way I see it, we need to have more conservative leverage limits, so you can’t leverage too much, and keep these firms within the silos where they are supposed to operate based on the degree of risk that they’re supposed to take. And if you’re just taking deposits, then I think we need to reestablish those kind of limits.

Listen here:

The repeal of Glass-Steagall led to the creation of mega-banks like Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase that combine traditional lending with risky investment banking. Many economists believe the repeal played a key role in the financial crisis of 2008. “As a result [of the repeal], the culture of investment banks was conveyed to commercial banks and everyone got involved in the high-risk gambling mentality. That mentality was core to the problem that we’re facing now,” said Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Indeed, two of the repeal’s chief proponents, former President Clinton and former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R), have recanted. “In retrospect, repealing the Glass-Steagall Act was probably a mistake,” Gingrich said yesterday. “I made some mistakes, too,” Clinton wrote in his new book, including, “signing the bill repealing the Glass-Steagall Act.”

The reinstatement of Glass-Steagall would go much farther than Dodd-Frank does in breaking up the big banks, yet Ryan has been a vocal opponent of the milder law, and the GOP budget he authored would have repealed some of its provisions. Still, it’s welcome to see Paul embrace support for Glass-Steagall. Perhaps he could use his considerable influence in the GOP caucus to advance a bill reinstating it.

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