Monk

Are you aware that "Atlas Shrugged" the movie, part two, has come out? Maybe, like me, you found it drowned out by all the double-oh-seven buzz. David Futrelle gives us a nice discussion of the "Atlas Shrugged" phenomenon in "Time" magazine. Speaking of the lack of success of the first movie:

The first installment, out last year, didn’t exactly set the world on fire; it was panned by critics (and even some Ayn Rand fans) as tedious and talky and just plain awful all around. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote that the “low-budget, no-talent treatment” of Rand’s novel “sits there flapping on screen like a bludgeoned seal.” Having seen the film myself, I can only say that this description makes it sound a lot more lively than it really is. The film fared no better in the marketplace than it did with critics, earning back only a fraction of its less-than-extravagant budget.

However, Mr. Futrelle goes on to talk about how the Ayn Rand love only grows stronger off the screen, as some of our rich folks are seriously seeking to create their own Galt's Gulch, their libertarian heaven on earth:

These days, as Quartz reports, libertarian utopians are setting their sights on Honduras. Inspired by the ideas of American economist Paul Romer, who for years has urged developing countries to give small chunks of their territories over to autonomous “charter cities,” the Honduran government last year agreed to set up Romer-esque Special Development Regions. In September, the government signed an agreement with a consortium headed by an American libertarian named Michael Strong, who hopes to carve out a space in an undeveloped area of the country to build what he hopes will be an “anarcho-capitalist paradise.”

Such is our world today.

(Source: David Futrelle, "Atlas Shrugonomics" in "Time" Magazine)

These Christian-fundamentalist yahoo statements be Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia have been buzzing around the Internet:

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior ... What I’ve come to learn is that [the Bible is] the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason as your congressman I hold the holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I will continue to do that.

Andrew Sullivan makes an interesting point:

Of course, Broun is not stupid. He has an M.D. from the Medical College of Georgia and a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Georgia at Athens. He's on the House Committee on Science and Technology and chairs of one of its subcommittees on investigations. Fundamentalism is not about being dumb; it is an act of will to over-ride reality with totalist faith, so that nothing is left unresolved and everything can be explained by a single text, or a single religious leader. It is, in some ways, a neurotic response by many educated, intelligent people to live their lives according to something that cannot admit uncertainty or doubt.

It's religion fused with the the totalist claims of modern political ideology.

I marvel that I had not heard of this Broun character before, but we have more than our share of this type. You would have to go to a country such as Afghanistan to find as much religious radicalism as you can find in America. No wonder we are behind the rest of the developed world.

(Source: Sully's Dish)

If you thought the Republicans might feel some pressure to get nasty in the closing weeks of the campaign, well, you were only thinking the obvious, and the Grand Old Party has not failed to live down to our expectations.


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For a while now, pictures purporting to show Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, modeling in 1950s bondage and fetish porn have been floating around the darker corners of the Internet. Now, though, they’ve made their way into a pseudo-documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams from my Real Father, which is being mailed to voters in swing states, promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican. At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Obama’s America—the first of all his works to hit the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list—has a chapter essentially calling Dunham a fat slut. If Obama is reelected, it’s hard to imagine where the right goes from here.

It’s tempting to ignore Dreams from my Real Father because it’s so preposterous. The movie claims that Obama’s actual father was the poet and left-wing activist Frank Marshall Davis, who Dunham met through her father, who was a CIA agent merely posing as a furniture salesman. “My election was not a sudden political phenomenon,” says the narrator, speaking as if he were Obama reading his autobiography. “It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that my real father, Frank Marshall Davis, nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades.”

Davis enjoyed taking nude photos of women, and the images said to be of Dunham, to which the director pays lascivious attention, are presented as evidence of their intimate relationship. “These photos were taken a few weeks before 1960, when Mom was about five weeks pregnant with me,” the narrator says. “Frank then sold the photos to men’s mail-order catalogs.”

What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right. Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams from my Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another 2 [million] or 3 million, just state by state,” he told me.

Gilbert won’t say who is funding this distribution, and there’s no way to verify his numbers. Had he not made other right-wing documentaries in the past, I might suspect that the whole thing is a brilliant conceptual art project about the limits of anti-Obama credulity. But the fact is, people are reporting receiving the disc in the mail. Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it. It was shown at a right-wing film festival in Tampa during the Republican National Convention, and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council in Missouri. Alabama GOP Chairman Bill Armistead recently recommended it during a speech, saying, “I’ve seen it. I verified that it is factual, all of it. People can determine.”

-- Michelle Goldberg at The Daily Beast

The big, if-not-quite-articulated, message in Tampa was that in a free economy, everybody will get what they deserve. There is no need to worry about the vast, growing gap between the richest and the rest, or the shrinking middle class, or the fact that America currently has one of the worst rates of social mobility in the developed world.

Untrammeled, the business sector will create plenty of jobs, and the hard-working big-dreamers will jump in, amass wealth and achieve success. You cut taxes, reduce regulation and let the magic happen. It’s that or what Paul Ryan called “a dull adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.”

-- Gail Collins at The New York Times

The Repubicans have wrapped up their convention and Romney has given his big speech, but I'm going to let Paul Krugman take his swing at Paul Ryan and his speech.

We really are seeing an historic move: the Republicans have fully taken politics into the post-truth, post-modern realm - a real Alice in Wonderland, Newspeak kind of world. I kind of wish that I was in my seventies lying in my death bed, because I have this heavy feeling that life in this country is going to get really ugly in the years ahead.


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Paul Ryan’s speech Wednesday night may have accomplished one good thing: It finally may have dispelled the myth that he is a Serious, Honest Conservative. Indeed, Mr. Ryan’s brazen dishonesty left even his critics breathless.

Some of his fibs were trivial but telling, like his suggestion that President Obama is responsible for a closed auto plant in his hometown, even though the plant closed before Mr. Obama took office. Others were infuriating, like his sanctimonious declaration that “the truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.” This from a man proposing savage cuts in Medicaid, which would cause tens of millions of vulnerable Americans to lose health coverage.

And Mr. Ryan — who has proposed $4.3 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, versus only about $1.7 trillion in specific spending cuts — is still posing as a deficit hawk.

But Mr. Ryan’s big lie — and, yes, it deserves that designation — was his claim that “a Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare.” Actually, it would kill the program.

[...]

The question now is whether voters will understand what’s really going on (which depends to a large extent on whether the news media do their jobs). Mr. Ryan and his party are betting that they can bluster their way through this, pretending that they are the real defenders of Medicare even as they work to kill it. Will they get away with it?

-- Paul Krugman at The New York Times

Here is an intense little piece on the consolidation of plutocratic power. And it seems to be from a Republican for a conservative publication.

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Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained.

[...]

The objective of the predatory super-rich and their political handmaidens is to discredit and destroy the traditional nation state and auction its resources to themselves. Those super-rich, in turn, aim to create a “tollbooth” economy, whereby more and more of our highways, bridges, libraries, parks, and beaches are possessed by private oligarchs who will extract a toll from the rest of us. Was this the vision of the Founders? Was this why they believed governments were instituted among men—that the very sinews of the state should be possessed by the wealthy in the same manner that kingdoms of the Old World were the personal property of the monarch?

-- Mike Lofgren at The American Conservative

The Republicans are having their big convention in Florida this week, if the hurricane does not throw things too wildly out of whack for them. Apparently there is a stripper in Tampa who is doing a Sarah Palin act. I think I'd like to see that and get a good feel. Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd continues to lament the seduction of Mitt Romney, "Even though he once seemed to have sensible, moderate managerial instincts, he won’t stop ingratiating himself with the neo-Neanderthals."

This is a familiar line in discussions about Romney. He has a remarkably moderate record, even somewhat liberal, especially when he was the governor of Massachusetts. However, considering the larger arc of his Bain vulture-capitalist type of life, I am afraid that it is his moderate side that was the politically expedient act, even when it comes to the religious social issues. I mean, the man is a devout Moromon, which is rather cultish, like Scientology but with fewer celebrities. No, I don't think he is ingratiating himself with neo-Neanderthals. I think he is a Neanderthal.

(Source: Maureen Down at The New York Times)

Paul Ryan, who teamed up with Akin in the House to sponsor harsh anti-abortion bills, may look young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids. But he’s just a fresh face on a Taliban creed — the evermore antediluvian, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-gay conservative core. Amiable in khakis and polo shirts, Ryan is the perfect modern leader to rally medieval Republicans who believe that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs.

-- Maureen Dowd at The New York Times

Ms. Dowd is responding to the Todd Akin controversy, bringing out the argument that it is not the substance of the man that troubles Republicans, including presidential contender Mitt Romeny, but the man's presentation, which was crass enough to offend even semi-educated, anti-poor, racist independents. Americans are not quite that dumb, at least not yet, despite the best efforts of Fox News - maybe the next generation at the rate we are going.

“If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”

-- Paul Ryan

Mr. Cohen gives us a sharp overall view of the role of foreign policy in this year's presidential election, and he agrees with Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan's quote above, but then goes on to argue for the great divergence between the Republican view and, what we may call, the sane view. Romney and Ryan are only more aggressive in their war footing, despite their focus on fiscal stability, which may account for how hard they want to go after programs and benefits for the poor and the middle class, in an attempt to do both wage all the war they want and maintain a strict fiscal discipline. The part of the Republican prescription that is difficult to square with rationality is that they still want to maintain the key Republican signature of cutting taxes for the wealthy. Wars and tax cuts have never gone well together. President Dubya tried it, and, well, we saw how well that worked out, but the rich and the Republicans cannot let go of the dream of both having a great nation and not having to pay anything for it, and are thus the real threat to the integrity and vitality of America.


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NEW YORK — I may have missed it but I’ve not seen a war that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan don’t want to fight. Romney vows never to negotiate with the Taliban and declares, “We go anywhere they are and we kill them.” He beats the war drums on Iran. He has a bizarre itch to open a new era of confrontation with Russia.

When he sniffs the possibility of war Romney drops his frequent imitation of the Beatles’ Nowhere Man (“Doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to”). He becomes a Real Man fired up.

After more than a decade of inconclusive U.S. wars, this is not reassuring.

In a similar vein, Ryan, whose experience outside Washington is limited, believes that in Afghanistan, “Now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach.” Said “success” is as hard to identify as the tax loopholes Ryan insists he wants to close.

The big question, of course, is how all this squares with the concerns over the U.S. debt that Romney has placed at the center of the campaign by picking Ryan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost over $1.3 trillion. Several estimates, including one last year from Brown University, suggest the final bill will be $3.7 trillion or higher.

New or rebooted wars are scarcely the fiscal medicine the United States needs.

Ryan seemed to grasp this last year when he declared in a speech in Washington: “If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”

The Wisconsin congressman was right about that.

He continued: “In the coming years, our debt is projected to grow to more than three times the size of our entire economy. This trajectory is catastrophic. By the end of the decade, we will be spending 20 percent of our tax revenue simply paying interest on the debt.”

Yet Romney and Ryan are up for any costly fight. One reason, of course, is that they face a president who, with a bold decision, eliminated America’s mortal enemy, Osama bin Laden, and whose cool review of “kill lists” selecting the next targets of drone attacks hardly suggests a lack of decider’s testosterone. Upping the military ante against this incumbent is not easy. But, as Ryan’s introduction before the U.S.S. Wisconsin suggests, it is something Romney feels he must do in pursuit of his new American Century.

Here we come to the heart of the matter: the desperate Republican quest to portray Obama as a quasi-European intent on the very European business of managed decline rather than renewed American glory.

No fiscal detail — a trillion here, a trillion there — can stand in the way of what Romney has called his “one overwhelming conviction and passion” — that the 21st century be as American as the 20th. Battlefield triumph seems to be part of the Romney-Ryan recipe for this.

Romney has zeroed in on a phrase in a campaign white paper written last fall by the historian Eliot Cohen, who argued that the Obama administration views U.S. decline as a “condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.”

Aha! Romney declares: “I do not view America as just one more point on the strategic map, one more power to be balanced. I believe our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known.”

Ryan, likewise, has said that some — read the Obama administration — have decided “that the choice we face is over how, not whether, to manage our nation’s decline.” But these “calls to surrender” must be rejected; the United States is “a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today.”

I believe in the enduring centrality of American power; I don’t believe the nation’s immense capacity for renewal is exhausted. But more war is not the “necessary” choice for the United States today if fiscal and foreign policy are to be taken off their “collision course.” The 2014 timetable for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan is right; war with Iran is avoidable; the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan, wars without victories, must be learned. And even all the right choices for the United States will not alter the rise of India and China or make the 21st century America’s as the 20th was.

Obama, as Joseph Lelyveld wrote in a recent New York Review of Books essay, has two major foreign policy achievements: “Getting American forces out of Iraq and compressing his predecessor’s expansive, grandiose-sounding ‘Global War on Terror’ into a narrowly focused, unremitting campaign against the remnants of the Qaeda network, relying largely on high-tech intelligence gathering and pilotless drones.”

These are sober achievements for sobering times. Economic turnaround is Job 1 for the next president. It will not be fostered by delusion, nostalgia or military overreach.

-- Roger Cohen at The New York Times

Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who is running against Sen. Claire McCaskill, justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses that prevent pregnancy.

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

-- News-LJ

See what happens when you start turning away pieces of knowledge like evolution and you believe ideas like early-earth creationism, and you start thinking that knowledge is not something that you have to learn and work on but something you can just pull out of your ass at a moment's need: the dumbness grows and grows. It's running at epidemic rates in Republican circles. The Center for Disease Control should step in. Knowledge and reality are not faith-based.