The Death of the Rock Star

Jon Fine and Robert Wright raised an interesting point was raised in this Blogging Heads: Rock stars don't exist anymore. But besides being intriguing, it seems completely accurate. The big, sex-oozing rock gods of the 1970s have gone by the wayside, and those who gradually replaced them during the eighties and nineties (Green Day, U2, RHCP) are on their last legs. Radiohead is likely the most critically-acclaimed artist of the past 15 years and a band whose every chord and utterance is treated as unquestionable gospel by millions of people, yet they are not "rock stars"--both because they don't make arena rock but also because they are not a singles-friendly (nor, therefore, an MTV-friendly or radio-friendly) type of band. Their magnum opus, OK Computer, is rife with classic tracks. But there's no "Where The Streets Have No Name," no "Black Dog," no "Money," no "All Apologies," no "Evenflow"--fuck, not even a "New Pollution." Radiohead just isn't that type of band.

Which is fine, because Radiohead is still excellent. But it's a very fascinating phenomenon. My favorite band is The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones are behind them. And Pink Floyd, The Clash, Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers, Steely Dan, AC/DC, Creedence, Bowie, Springsteen, Bob Dylan, et. al. were all, at one point or another, in constant rotation on my CD player (and then iPod). All of them were big hits in their respective eras, selling out venues left and right and attracting obsessively devoted fanbases. But more to the point, these guys--John Lennon, Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Bon Scott, Roger Waters--were fucking stars. The subject of public adoration beyond belief, the fantasy of every teenage boy and (for different reasons) teenage girl; the only way to describe their fame is to invoke Dave Chappelle--"It's hard to imagine what it's like to be that famous... Imagine, someone can suck your dick, and then they're famous."

But who do I listen to these days? Okkervil River, TV on the Radio, Wolf Parade, MGMT, The Decemberists, The Arcade Fire, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Iron & Wine, Grizzly Bear, Wilco, The White Stripes, and so on and so forth. The White Stripes is a glaring exception, commanding both tremendous credibility among people who know what they're talking about, but also remaining famous within the mainstream, showing up on Grammy and MTV Video Music Award lists constantly. But Jack White's standing is only equivalent to Robert Plant's if you think Reservoir Dogs is equivalent to Pulp Fiction. It's just not a serious contest. Good rock music these days, for the most part, requires effort to unearth; it isn't going to be slamming through every radio station or pumping out of your TV 24/7. The bands that have replaced Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, Nirvana, and Oasis as top-dog rock and roll sensations have been nearly uniform in their production of utterly terrible music.

The Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album in the past decade have gone to Foo Fighters twice, Santana, Coldplay, U2 twice, Springsteen, Green Day, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Santana and Springsteen have been around for 40 years. U2, 30. Green Day, over 20. Red Hot Chili Peppers, nearing 30. I would say that calling Coldplay "rock" is a perfect example of how things have changed; Coldplay are certainly stars, and they are about as ubiquitous as a band can be these days, and I thought Viva la Vida... was actually a pretty good album, but nobody looks at Chris Martin like people did Mick Jagger. Chris Martin isn't cool. Mick Jagger personified cool. Foo Fighters are a reasonable exception to my thinking, and they may very well be an A-level rock band with widespread appeal and decent star power. But if Foo Fighters is the best our generation can come up with, that says a lot.

Here's a good chart of MTV Awards for Best Rock Video that perfectly serves the general point here:

In almost linear fashion, the "Rock Star" factor has gone down as time has worn on. Aerosmith and Guns 'n' Roses are on one plane. Metallica, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, all very popular in their own niches, but representative of growing trends in the disaggregation of rock music. Korn, Linkin Park, and Limp Bizkit obviously represent the beginnings of a rap-rock era that held court over much of popular rock in the past decade and continues to be influential. But is anyone going to compare Fred Durst to Axl Rose?

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. In fact, the result of this trend has been more bands that I can get my arms around, and new, great albums are being pumped out at a weekly rate. As the corporatization of pop music has taken full root and the barriers to entry for budding artists have been significantly lessened because of technology, two musical worlds have been created: Billboard and Pitchfork. Nearly all the music I listened to in middle school was available on MTV; indeed, the way I found out about these bands was courtesy of MTV. Now, virtually none of the bands I like are "mainstream"; you won't see them headlining Madison Square Garden, your forty-year-old uncle will have never heard of them, and they'll never be on the cover of Rolling Stone.

And yet today is probably the best time in history to be a fan of rock music. So maybe this is all for the better.

Why Does Peter Baker Even Attend White House Briefings?

It's clear he's clairvoyant:

But if liberals see Obama as the bold Clinton, some moderates and conservatives worry that Obama is reversing his predecessor’s direction. Clinton sought to remake a broken party in a more centrist mold.

Of course, this is The New York Times, so Baker absolutely neglects to, you know, mention a single one of these alleged worrywarts. But it certainly is eyebrow-raising; if Peter Baker knows what everyone thinks, why does he not just phone in his daily gig and print an unedited transcript of Robert Gibbs' thoughtstream instead?

5/29, Town Hall: Grizzly Bear, Here We Go Magic

Managed to score some last-minute terrific seats off StubHub, somehow for a price below box office. If I said I was a die hard Grizzly Bear fan, I'd be lying, so I won't say that. I tried out Yellow House a few years back and wasn't super-impressed. But I acknowledge that they are Exhibit A of bands whose albums require no fewer than five thousand listens to come around to them. (I didn't dig TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain for the first two years I owned it, and then... whabam! It hit me really hard.) So when GB's new record, Veckatimest, became the recipient of more music-circle praise than In Rainbows, I naturally had to try it out. And I think it's phenomenal. But more on that later.

Here We Go Magic was the lone opener. They were decent, and they had some nice, frenetic piano-bouncin' riffs. Their vocalist didn't add much, and the songs mostly just meandered around without ever doing much, but I found them moderately enjoyable. I did manage to amass a massive crush on their keyboardist/backup singer in the 33 minutes they were on stage, and I was and remain a big fan of "Fangela," which I suppose could accurately be dubbed their hit.

The Brooklyn foursome Grizzly Bear swarmed the stage next, to much applause. (Brooklyn Vegan has the pictures, albeit from the previous night's show.) They've amassed quite a following, although I'm sure a Pitchfork 9.0 and a Metacritic 88 don't exactly make it difficult for them to do so. Trying to describe Grizzly Bear, as The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones attempted to do earlier this month, is mostly an act in futility; Fleet Foxes, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and Nick Drake all come to mind, but only to a small extent. Grizzly Bear is some weird amalgam of jazzy percussion, Mamas and the Papas-style vocal harmonizing, funereal church music, and catchy, singalongable pop sequences. Nothing about them evokes specific Beatles songs per se, but it does sound as though Ed Droste listened to Abbey Road a ton.

The bottom line, however, is this: These dudes are great musicians. They rarely, if ever, descend into the overaggressive antimelodic drivel that dominates much of music these days and is in fact the M.O. for many modern bands; when the song they're playing runs it course, fuck it--it's time to just go balls to the wall! Instead, Grizzly Bear is defined by their restraint. Which is why they are among the very few bands who could pull off the encore they performed. They did one song--acoustically, since Town Hall "is good for this sort of thing," as they intimated. Drummer with a single snare and a tamborine, Droste with an acoustic guitar, and the remaining members without their instruments, simply going a cappella. It was perfect, and it displayed very well what is so great about Grizzly Bear. It was a light onslaught of lush harmony, with vocals weaving in and out of guitar chords and a light percussion pitter-patter providing some time in the background.

The crowd seemed to love it (the whole show). There weren't any clunkers, and few if any meh tracks--it should be noted that Grizzly Bear is not a "songs" band as much as they're an "albums" band; "While You Wait For The Others" is simply awesome, but it's simply awesome x 100 if you happen across it in the course of listening to Veckatimest rather than just double-clicking it for a quick fix of excellence. GB is chock full of variety, variety in the way of OK Computer and Illinois. Granted, it's not everyone's bag, which is fine, because it's that type of thing. I love Kill Bill, but I can understand if someone doesn't. I really can't say the same for Pulp Fiction. Nor can I for With The Beatles. But Grizzly Bear isn't Billboard pop and it isn't for everyone. It is, however, a great band, eminently listenable, and the creator of one of 2009's best albums.

Der Untergang

Pretty good. The thing is, there are tons of World War II films and tons of Holocaust films, but rare is the film that focuses primarily on Hitler himself. He is not an easy man to portray, so avoidance is the rule of thumb. Well, Der Untergang (or Downfall) is specifically about Hitler's last days in the bunker and his interactions with his top men and closest "family," so you couldn't exactly go Jon Voight-in-Pearl Harbor and expect to come away with a winning flick.

Bruno Ganz stars as Der Fuhrer and, insofar as I can judge this sort of thing, he gave a damn good performance. Considering Downfall occurs when Hitler's entire life is falling down around him--his Thousand Year Reich has become merely a fantasy, his top staff is betraying him for their own self-interest, and his delusional paranoia leads him to conclude that it is the Jews who are opening round-the-clock artillery fire on his lair--Ganz's task couldn't have been easy. He obviously had to get down "angry Hitler," because there was certainly a motherload to be angry about, but he couldn't fully barrel into a crazed buffoon or a caricature without risking making the film look like a modern Thomas Nast creation. A deft balance was required; when all is said and done (and based on my personal experience spending ample one-on-one time with Adolf Hitler), I really enjoyed the results.

It certainly seemed to be a very strange film. It is principally about Hitler's last bunker days of course, but it also offers substantial screentime to a few select characters (Hitler's secretary being essentially the film's protagonist, but, in addition, a young boy, a skeptical Nazi doctor, Speer, Goebbels, Eva Braun, and a slew of top Nazi military men) and features short bursts of heavy military battling (read: Nazis getting the living fuck mortared out of them). Downfall basically rotates between these many subplots, always preserving a permeating degree of apocalyptic pessimism, but providing a nice variety of lenses through which to view the time leading up to V-E Day. Of course, it's Nazis, so there are no scenes like the train-to-Auschwitz sequence in Schindler's List, and overall, empathy and relatability is on the low side for a WWII flick. (There are virtually identical scenes in this and Saving Private Ryan, where the unwitting soldier takes a bullet through his helmet, but somehow, for some inexplicable reason, it's hard to care much when that soldier is fighting for Germany...)

But overall--yes, well done. Hitler had good taste in hot secretaries. Although, seriously--no wall decoration of any kind in the bunker? No paintings? No posters? Come on, Adolf...

Into The Wild

There is a scene during the first half of Into the Wild where Chris McCandless, played by Emile Hirsch, visibly breaks down the fourth wall, a la Zack Morris or Ferris Bueller. He is talking to and eating an apple when he leans into the camera, essentially winking and acknowledging its presence. As a directorial decision, it is a fascinating one. It conveys that McCandless almost knew the book Into the Wild, and later, the movie, were going to come to be as a result of his journies. It's a "Look how much fun I'm having" stylistic choice, and, aside from utterly endearing the viewer to McCandless/Hirsch, it essentially invalidates McCandless's entire ostensible rationale for, well, "going wild." McCandless struck out into the forests and deserts with the goal of disassociating himself from society and ending his dependence on others and vice versa. And yet, in a single wink, director Sean Penn reveals that this is but a disillusioned experiment, and that throughout, McCandless is still in need of the company of others. And if that wasn't enough, McCandless's final journal entry--"Happiness only real when shared"--rips off the facade. Before he dies, he reclaims his memories and his birth name for himself, rendering final verdict on his neo-Luddite, anti-society quest.

This film was brilliant. I actually wasn't the hugest fan of Krakauer's book, but that could have been because I read it for a class and under a deadline--an environment in which most books suck enormously. Here, however, everything is on point: Emile Hirsch is simply awesome, not just in this role but in general; Eddie Vedder's soundtrack is absolutely essential--without it, the film would be lacking something vital; Sean Penn's cinematography and wildlife shots are amazing; and a variety of bitparts by Kristen Stewart, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Hal Holbrook, et. al. are striking in their diversity but equally welcome in their warmth and, to borrow a phrase, their organicness. The whole thing, all one hundred and forty-five minutes of it, is very chill. Aside from some physical and emotional skirmishes between McCandless's parents and a rough beating that he takes from a semi-cop, the film is thoroughly peaceful, and a delight to watch. I'm surprised Hirsch did not pick up an Oscar nod for this; he was certainly no Daniel Plainview, but nonetheless this was a most deserving performance.

My only "qualm," perhaps, is that Penn portrays McCandless's journey in too favorable and benign a light. I finished watching Into the Wild and started immediately looking for my sleeping bag and canteen (both of which I discovered do not exist currently, if they ever existed at all). But strutting out into the, um, wild, and going au natural and anti-establishment isn't exactly a walk in the park. Life must have fucking sucked for him for many of those nights. But in the film, his life looks like an endless camping trip turned up to eleven. Which I presume is necessary to maintain the McCandlessian aura, but perhaps rather deceptive when you get down to brass tacks.

Feist & Ben Gibbard, "Train Song"

Totally awesome track. Feist rocks.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Eh... I wasn't a fan. Somehow I had never seen it throughout all these years. It's certainly not an accessible movie, but neither is Apocalypse Now or The Big Lebowski, both of which Fear and Loathing sported copious shades of. And yet it didn't really work, at least for me. It's a textbook case where the sum of the parts is much greater than the whole; I found Johnny Depp totally engrossing and uproarious, the script (mostly) devilishly funny, and the set pieces and soundtrack to be very good. But in the end, it's really a stoner's movie. With Dazed and Confused and Pineapple Express you don't need to be on mescaline to enjoy it. With Fear and Loathing, I sorta think that's a prereq. Certainly, many of the brilliant lines can be appreciated in a sober state--"I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo"; "The dope fiend refers to the reefer butt as a 'roach' because it resembles a cockroach"; and "She's doing her master's thesis on well, um, Barbra Streisand" were my favorites--but the entirety of the film doesn't truly pull together and form something cohesive. And obviously it's Hunter S. Fucking Thompson, so perhaps "cohesive" is the antithesis of things in this case. But still, it's a two-hour flick, not a Grateful Dead jam session, and I don't think it worked wonders.

Maggie Gallagher Was Never Taught How To Read

NRO's Maggie Gallagher, frothing anti-gay-marriage advocate, tries her hand at poll parsing today:

Independents and Republicans oppose gay marriage. Which may explain why Rudy Guiliani decided to voice opposition to SSM in New York [...]

This would be really hilarious if it were true, since Gallagher supports gay marriage being banned in every county in every state, regardless of what on-the-ground voters think. But, of course, it's not true. And Maggie Gallagher's mind is where facts go to die.

From the Siena poll:


But of course Independents are turned off by gay marriage. Everyone knows that.

Being the mongoloid firebreathing lovechild of Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly is one thing. Feeling free to completely lie to your readers is another.

Politico: Obama's President and Dems Control Congress, So Let's Hear From Republicans

Gossip rag Politico reveals what an unbelievable piece of shit it is today, transforming its front page into a veritable smorgasboard of GOP boilerplate on Sonia Sotomayor:


Nobody. Cares.

CNN's Pundits And Why I Hate Them

CNN is the most unbelievably vapid news source there is. It, for all its "No Bias, No Bull" and "Just The Facts" middle-of-the-road hype, time and again proves to be mentally regressive. You will never be entertained by a show on CNN and you will never learn anything from a show on CNN. Both are impossible. And this is in no small part because of the pervasive Establishment idiocy that is endemic in nearly everyone that works at and regularly appears on CNN.

1. Larry King

Larry King, aside from looking like a caricature of a Halloween mask that was left out in the sun for four years, is just a blathering idiot. His show features the most retarded panel line-ups--Meghan McCain, Joy Behar, Ronald Reagan Jr., and Kiki McLean... My God, what a treasure trove of insightful opinion!--and infinitely worse guests. No, that's not quite right. Actually, Larry King scores the best guests. He just asks the worst fucking questions I've ever heard. He could have Ahmadinejad on and the first question would be "So Mahmoud, I'm going to play a clip of Katy Perry's new music video and then we're going to talk about it. Okay?"

2. Wolf Blitzer

Wolf Blitzer makes Jewish nursing home residents throw remotes at the television. His voice, which can be characterized as "stumbling monotony," in tandem with his eyes, which can be characterized as "really fucking annoying," combine to form, when spread out over the three fucking hours CNN gives him everyday, perhaps the most annoying pundit and the most bland show on TV today. The worst part of his show, aside from him, his voice, and his questions, is undoubtedly the degree to which he makes the viewer needlessly wait. At the opening of his show, "The Situation Room" (4:00 P.M.) , he will say in his best overly-dramatic voice, "New news about Froot Loops--Is General Mills killing your children?" And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, until finally, at 6:48, he throws the story over to some braindead reporter, and it turns out there was a cereal recall in a small town in Seattle because of possible lead poisoning. Which of course means that Wolf Blitzer created news that did not exist. Which is nothing new for him, because he's an idiot devoid of meaningful insight or opinion on anything that actually matters.

3. Ali Velshi

Ali Velshi, CNN's go-to business and Wall Street dude, is a douchebag. He reminds me of the uppity Asian business school kids in college who aced all of their problem sets and midterms without ever actually internalizing the real-world usefulness (or lack thereof) of what they were learning. Like any other business pundit, he specializes in unfettered retardation. If the DJIA soars, he will be called in to opine on why. Because there is always a reason why. And because he knows it, obviously. "Wall Street had a great day today because The New York Times published this cool photo of Tim Geithner." Velshi's pipeline into the inner workings of The Street is both incomparable and invaluable. Clearly this much is true.

4. Erica Hill

Okay, I don't hate her. She's ridiculously hot and a bright beacon of charm amidst a sea of virtually unending dullness.







5. Jack Cafferty

Jack Cafferty is probably my least favorite TV personality. He does not contribute nothing. He makes everyone who views his blatherings a significantly dumber human being as a result. "The Cafferty File," his daily segment on Wolf Blitzer's show, is where he gives a topic du jour to his audience (I don't want to even imagine who these mouthbreathers are) and asks them to send in their thoughts. To his credit, he has stood up to right-wing idiocy constantly over the years. But not to his credit, he has made the act of standing up to right-wing idiocy look like a fool's game. (If you're in favor of gay marriage, you certainly don't want Steve-O leading the cause.) He's worse than Alan Colmes; he's a one-man sacrificial lamb. There's no Sean Hannity required. Think about how it looks: You have 50 CNN pundits all spouting the same Beltway tripe, day in and day out, and then you have Jack Cafferty, the senile grandpa, leading the way in favor of torture prosecutions.

Plus, he has the most annoying voice of anyone on CNN. And beating out Wolf isn't easy.

6. Ed Henry

Ed Henry is the guy everyone knew in college, fitting the archetype of the douche-frat-hand-cum-successful-CEO quite well. Except he's not a CEO, he's a Senior White House Correspondent. And so instead of having to backslap with him at regular ten-year intervals, you get to see him, in all his self-aggrandizing glory, every afternoon on C-SPAN during the White House briefing. He's not blatantly partisan--people who appear regularly on CNN rarely are. He's just a total shill for contrarianism, whether it even resembles intelligent debate or not. (It often looks as if he's just shilling for Republicans, and that may be true, but I think it's more that he has nothing intelligent to say, ever, and so he resorts to being John Boehner's personal stenographer because that task is insanely easy, and quite fun.) His questions are invariably mindnumbingly stupid, and any occasion on which he "gets it right" can simply be chalked up to to the Broken Clock Theorem. Moreover, he's one smug fuck. He loves getting aggressive in spots where logic would dictate that there is no issue. CNN revolves around the short clip, so his dream is to catch Robert Gibbs in a slip-up, forcing a walk-back or creating a minor hysteria. He fantasizes himself as Woodward reincarnate, only instead of uncovering major presidential corruption, he'll settle for getting a scoop on whether Nancy Pelosi is going to be eating pizza at the White House on Friday. Fuck him and all ten horses he rode in on.

7. Sanjay Gupta

CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent and failed Surgeon General nominee, Sanjay Gupta, isn't that bad. I'm just not sure what he's ever contributed to society. Obviously he demands a high price from CNN for his myriad "services" (which include live-blogging a reenactment of Natasha Richardon's accident and death). And as I recall he did some miracle-working with emergency patients in Iraq some years back. But that doesn't really have much to do him being a pundit. America as a whole seems to have gotten, um, much unhealthier since he's had his job. I won't lay blame on him, but I can't see where credit is due here. He seems to specialize in fear-mongering the common cold, which is hilarious, but not particularly useful.

8. Roland Martin

Roland Martin, CNN's "black pundit" and temporary host for Campbell Brown's "No Bias No Bull," is also alright in my book. He's not particularly intelligent or suave or entertaining, but I developed a modicum of affection for him ever since he was crying on TV when Obama won. It is funny how pigeonholded he is on CNN, though; Anderson Cooper will go around the table, asking about how such-and-such policy will affect Capitol Hill to one person, Wall Street to another, oil companies to a third, internal White House politics to a fourth, and then he'll finally get to Martin: "What are they saying about this in Harlem, Roland?"

9. John King

John King should be sitting in the backroom at Madame Tussauds, leafing through transcripts of his old interviews. His only source of value came in the form of election handicapping, but NBC's Chuck Todd destroyed him in 2008. So now he's just a regular Washington journalist, laying out the facts as... they appear in Human Events headlines.



10. Candy Crowley

The only more apt name would be Big Mac McShouty. Candy Crowley is the embodiment of evil. Her analyses are as well-developed as her abdominal muscles. She stands (er, hulks) on television, every night, spewing GOP talking points and utterly refusing to find out whether any of them are actually true. She delights in political kabuki theater more than she takes pleasure in Twinkies. Her face looks eerily similar to the "after" pictures of that facial transplant pioneer, and from the neck down it just gets worse. She has never seen a scoop she didn't immediately want to sink her teeth into--be it Jeremiah Wright videos or Chunky Monkey. Candy Crowley is simply the personification of everything wrong in society. That she still holds a job is a testament to something which I really, really don't want to imagine.

Breaking: Opera Music Not That Popular

I don't really understand what some people thought Susan Boyle was going to become. Essentially nobody actually liked what she was singing. They liked what she was singing in the setting in which she was singing it. The whole hubbub over Boyle is based off one YouTube clip from "Britain's Got Talent." So it was like "Wow, sick--old, ugly lady sticks a dagger in Simon Cowell's throat." Yes, the video was awesome. But no, she isn't a star. Did people really think that that Pavarottiesque opera crap was going to be storming the charts? Everyone can appreciate the idea of Susan Boyle. Nobody* actually likes Susan Boyle.

*I'm treating operagoers as something other than human beings for the purpose of this post.

Michael Clayton

Yeah yeah, I'm a year late, buzz off.

There were two things I found really great about Michael Clayton. Well, not exactly; there were like nine, but the others have all been rehashed to death in the postmortems of others.

Lots of films get to the point immediately. In No Country For Old Men, you get that some nasty Frenchie is chasing around a cowboy pretty quickly. In The Day After Tomorrow, there's snowball-sized hail and glacial earthquakes within the first ten minutes. Batman and Robin--isn't the first scene Chris O'Donnell and George Clooney doing triple salchows around a decidedly un-gubernatorial Mr. Freeze? My point is: This movie makes you wait. I was like "wait... what?" at regular eight-minute intervals until the film was halfway over. Tony Gilroy handled Michael Clayton like a Mexican dude unraveling a freshly-cleaned rug. There's Clooney gambling--okay, money issues, psychological issues. Tom Wilkinson going all bipolar--mysterious... what's going on here? Clooney getting Wilkinson out of jail--alright, they work for the same firm, Clooney's a go-to "fixer" guy, and this is a situation that, um, needs a fuckload of fixing. Clooney has marital issues; Tilda Swinton is a conniving bitch (a.k.a., a lawyer); Wilkinson holds in his possession very damning evidence that seals the plaintiff's case; Swinton hires thugs to kill Wilkinson and Clooney; Clooney escapes--due to a horse fetish?--and performs something that can only be classified as being a notch under a deus ex machina... It all just slowly reveals itself to you. Most films tell you what is going to happen upfront; a running marquee saying "CLASS ACTION SUIT GOES WRONG, DEFENDANT'S COUNSEL TRIES TO KILL OPPOSITION, CLOONEY SAVES THE DAY" would be pretty much standard operating procedure in 98% of Hollywood films. Luckily, Gilroy escaped the conventions. And man, it works.

My second "highlight" was the degree to which this was truly an insider's film (or at least the degree to which I think this was truly an insider's film). "The West Wing," for mainstream television, is wonky as all hell--which is no surprise, considering former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers and former Senate Finance Committe chief of staff Lawrence O'Donnell pretty much pulled the strings behind the scenes. No layman has any fucking idea what is going on in the West Wing. The show, therefore, is incredibly revelatory, purely by its very nature. Whereas "The Office" isn't: Everyone has worked in an office. Michael Clayton features an incredibly high-end New York law firm where Harvard Law on one's resume is required and high-end, multi-million dollar apartments are simply the employee standard. Its top guys are all masters of the profession, and it even employs a "fixer" (Michael Clayton), who, like, is on call 24/7 to handle really fucked-up shit. He's a legal version of Pulp Fiction's Wolf. Anyway, the bottom line is: I don't have a clue about the internal politics and policies of top NYC law firms. So Michael Clayton is really neat insofar as it gives me a very long glimpse--however embellished it may be--into the world of the five-thousand-dollar-suit attorneys. It wasn't particularly stylized or Boiler Room-y, but it kept me rapt nevertheless.

Highly recommend, this one was really good.

5/21, Bowery Ballroom: White Rabbits, Cymbals Eat Guitars, The Antlers

Aside from being pissed as hell that I had to bail before the encore because I had to catch a bus, I was very pleased with the show. Certainly, none of these bands is really in my upper echelon of personal favorites, but when I saw it was a three-for-one deal, I sprung immediately. I really enjoy seeing shows when I'm at the level of band-familiarity that I was, and still am, with all three of these acts. If you don't know anything about a band, a live show can be fairly meh, because small clubs aren't the greatest venues to initiate yourself to a new act. But if you're too familiar with a band's studio work, you can have a certain ingrained mindset, vis-a-vis how the songs "should sound," that totally puts a damper on the experience. (Bear in mind, the latter isn't really common. I'm just making up a straw man to suit my initial point, which is something that I think more people should regularly employ.)

The Antlers were first up. Trio band--drummer, guitarist/vocalist, and a keyboarder. I thought they were pretty damn tight. I'm a big fan of "Kettering" off their album Hospice, but the rest is just okay in my mind. But live, they were really rockin'. Lots of shoegazey stuff transitioning into explosive finales. I was a big fan. "Two" was one of my favorites.

Next came Cymbals Eat Guitars, who were the act I was truly most looking forward to. They were a bit clumsy, and they didn't really differ from the album much--or "put on a show," if you will--but that's fine, because Why There Are Mountains is just a really great record as it is. Terrific versions of "Indiana" and "Wind Phoenix," both of which sport orgasmic trumpet numbers. Overall, they were enjoyable--but I perhaps liked them even more than I otherwise might because I usually don't really like the scream-y indie rock groups. So I'm always surprised that I keep coming back to listen for more.

Headlining, of course, were White Rabbits. I think It's Frightening, their just-released album, is pretty much whatever. It's not bad, but aside from "They Done Wrong/We Done Wrong" and "Percussion Gun," nothing stops my heart. But I'm a big fan of Fort Nightly! And they of course rocked the place out with "The Plot," "Kid on My Shoulders," and "While We Go Dancing," the latter of which is just insane when performed in a club setting. Their entire sound was great (the clarity of each piano key means a sigh of relief for me) and their energy even better (it really makes all the difference; even the so-so songs are head-boppers). I love big ensemble acts and I love drum-centric bands even more, so, even though I might not be choosing to listen to White Rabbits ad nauseam, as I often do post-show, I had a lot of fun.

But seriously--"While We Go Dancing" is just fantastic. Like The Clash fused with '64-era Beatles.

I Hate Meteorologists

NRO's Kirsanow: Favorability Polls Should Take Into Account Chance of Asteroid Hitting Earth

In a remarkable post at The Corner, NRO's Pete Kirsanow nods in agreement with a friend on Cheney:

Since Cheney has relatively high unfavorables, it's assumed that the public dismisses his statements.

It would be interesting to see the results of a more finely calibrated poll, one that compares how well-respected, competent, and effective the subject is perceived to be relative to similarly situated individuals. As a friend succinctly puts it, "When that big asteroid finally heads toward Earth, who's the person you'd most want to be in charge?" I suspect Cheney would score at or near the top.

So there you have the current position of the Republican Party. Polls and favorability -- meaningless liberal propaganda. Unless the question is "Would you approve of Dick Cheney flying into space and crushing an earth-bound asteroid with his ass cheeks?"

Perfectly sensible. The party of Michael Bay.

Paper of Record

Couldn't tell you what it meant if I tried...

Jesus Christ, Primary Harry Reid

The political calculus is easy to understand.

Harry Reid is mega-unpopular, with half of Nevadans saying they've had enough of him and only about a third saying they'd vote to reelect him in 2010. Nevada, despite Obama's easy win there, is still a right-leaning state. The issue of releasing Guantanamo prisoners into, you know, real prisons, is likely not very popular. And the anti- stance is one that Congressional Republicans--ostensibly the same Republicans who are of the rah-rah-tough-white-men and serious-on-terrorism cloths--have pounced on. They don't want dem Ayrabs comin' to our Amurika.

But here's the thing: Nobody gives a fuck what Republicans think. Harry Reid presides over a filibuster-proof Senate majority, and he also has a sitting President and a large House majority who could be shown the correct path on this one if there was only some actual spine shown.

But no. Harry Reid--a horrible person and an even worse senator, a babbling idiot devoid of any leadership skills, a frothing prolife Mormon who should be running a mission in Taiwan rather than the U.S. Senate--says woah, woah, wait a minute.

"QUESTION: If the United States -- if the United States thinks that these people should be held, why shouldn't they be held in the United States? Why shouldn't the U.S. take those risks, the attendant risk of holding them, since it's the one that says they should be held?

REID: I think there's a general feeling, as I've already said, that the American people, and certainly the Senate, overwhelmingly doesn't want terrorists to be released in the United States. And I think we're going to stick with that.

QUESTION: What about in imprisoned in the United States?

REID: If you're...

(CROSSTALK)

REID: If people are -- if terrorists are released in the United States, part of what we don't want is them be put in prisons in the United States. We don't want them around the United States."

Thanks for jumping through hoops there, Har!

This argument has never made and will never make any sense. They are not going to be "around the United States." They are going to be behind bars. Well, some of them. Hopefully, the ones that aren't guilty of jack will be released back to their countries.

Obviously, Jerry Bruckheimer isn't a staple in the adolescence of a budding Mormon. Or else Reid would know of the Bruckheimerian Rules of Prisons:

1. It's actually really hard for people to break out of prison! Like, really hard!


2. For this reason, it's very rare that people ever break out of prison.


3. And we already house some pretty bad mo-fos in the U.S. Prison System!


3. And actually, some of our prisoners--and presumably, many of Guantanamo's prisoners--aren't so bad!


So stop acting like a blathering retard, Harry. Or at least plop your ass on a couch and watch Con Air.

Idol, 5/19 -- FINALE

Let's. Do. This.

Pre-show, you've gotta be betting on Adam. Kris just isn't good enough, and this night should expose his flaws handily.

Adam: "Mad World"... Very good, great even. Like how he changed stuff up from his version a few months ago. Randy: "This is it!... An A for Adam!" Kara: "Incredible artist... changed the game up." Paula: "Unbelievably proud." Simon: "A little bit over-theatrical." Simon Cowell insinuating that Adam Lambert is gay. Shocking development.

Kris: Fuck this talentless hack. Get him out of here. If he wins it'll be like Watts '65. Only not really. "Ain't No Sunshine"... WTF. You lose. GTFO. Hated this originally. I mean, it's not bad or anything, he just has the vocal strength of a four-week-old squirrel. Webster's definition of bland. Randy: "I can tell exactly what kind of artist you are." Kara: "If you can't feel a Kris Allen performance... there's something wrong with you." Oh my God. Paula: "You awaken the spirit in all of us." Lol. Simon: "When your name was announced last week, I wasn't sure America made the right choice. I absolutely take all that back after that performance." WTF...

Adam: "Change Is Gonna Come"... This version rocks. How can Kris possibly win this justifiably? Okay, the screeching was self-indulgent. But come on. Randy: "What you did just there... you can sing your face off!" Kara: "That may have been your best performance." Paula: "[Unintelligible.]" Simon: "You are 100% back in the game."

Kris: "What's Goin' On"... This is such lame Jason Castro, acoustic-style cop out. If you can't sing with electric guitars, just sit down with a fucking mandolin and pretend to be a Mexican street entertainer. So lame. Randy: "We got ourselves a real, live duel competition... A little bit light for this big ol' room." Owned. Kara: "True to yourself." Paula: "Made Marvin Gaye proud." Simon: "It was like three friends in their bedroom, strumming along to Marvin Gaye... Sorry." Awesome.

Adam: "No Boundaries"... Oh man, this song fucking blows. Kara should throw herself off something. It's like an elementary school band covering Dream Theater. What the hell can you even say about that. Randy: "Dude, you can sing the phonebook. It was just aight." Uh, lol. Kara: "It is amazing." Paula: "Adjectives can't express what you've brought to this season." Only verbs, obviously. Simon: "Over the entire season, you've been one of the best, most original contestants we're ever had on this show." Sick praise.

Kris: "No Boundaries"... This arrangement is superior to Adam's, but again, his actually vocal range is fucking awful. So mundane. Randy: "You should be very proud of what you've done in this competition." Kara: "You've come into your own." Paula: "You should take it in." Simon: "Your mum and dad's face tells me everything."

Jay Nordlinger: Opposing the President Is Fine Unless It's Bush

NRO's ever-retarded contributor Jay Nordlinger today talks about Obama's invitation to Notre Dame, commenting on the fact that many have said "He's the President! That alone warrants invitation." He invokes a fairly amusing Tiger Woods anecdote from the 1990s:

I had a thought on the Notre Dame thing I wanted to share — sort of an offbeat one. A lot of people say, or imply, that other people have a lot of nerve, opposing an invitation to the President of the United States. Why, he’s the President of the United States. What more is there to say?

Well, a fair amount more. I had a memory — had not thought of this episode for a long time. Occurred twelve years ago, in April 1997. Tiger Woods won the Masters, for the first time. And President Clinton immediately invited him to Shea Stadium, to participate in a Jackie Robinson ceremony. Tiger said no-thanks — he had plans to go to Mexico, with friends.

A couple of things went into this, I think. First, Tiger is a pretty conservative guy, and he is very pro-military. His dad served in Vietnam. Tiger was named after a war buddy of his dad’s. I have a feeling Tiger doesn’t have much use for President Clinton. Also, as a rule, he abhors anything racial — anything race-related. (I devoted a piece to this, here.) Then, Tiger is simply an independent cuss.

He continues:

I commented at the time that it was sort of neat that Tiger turned down that invitation. And a colleague of mine disagreed, strongly. “This is the President of the United States,” he said. He calls, you come. To refuse to do so was something like an act of unpatriotism. And Tiger was showing bad manners, acting like a petulant brat.

My view was much different. Tiger is a citizen of a free republic, not a serf in a kingdom. You don’t have to answer the summons of the ruler. You may choose to do so — you may be flattered and giddy — but you aren’t compelled to do so. As I saw it, Tiger showed a fine republican spirit. The president is a mortal, who happened to be elected to an important office. He may be a saint; he may be a horse’s butt. Free people can respond to him, or not, as they like.

Hmm, very interesting! Because--surprise!!!--Nordlinger took, um, different views when the White House resident was George W. Bush.

Here he advises John McCain on how to respond to campaign-season attempts by Obama to tie him to Bush:

“Say what you will about President Bush, senator, but he is the twice-elected president of the United States and a good and honorable man. I would rather be associated with him than with Billy Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and Tony Rezko, to begin with.”

He may be a saint, he may be horse's butt... except W., who's a saint. Obviously. You don't demean him.

Here's Nordlinger on a San Francisco recycling issues:

Was interested in this story on trash in San Francisco. “Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents’ trash to make sure pizza crusts aren’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom. And if residents or businesses don’t separate the coffee grounds from the newspapers, they would face fines of up to $1,000 and eventually could have their garbage service stopped.”

This is the same city, of course, in which people are proposing to name a sewage-treatment plant after President Bush. It’s on the November ballot.

Whoops! They demeaned the President--their views and policies have thus been invalidated. You may express your views in whatever manner you wish. Just not, you know, if you're anti-Bush. He's a good and fucking honorable man. Clinton wasn't, and obviously that Malcolm X-reincarnate Obama clearly isn't.

Oh! Oh! And here's Nordlinger on the inauguration crowd, after being forced to bear the fallout of eight years of royal fuck-ups, booing the man who caused them:

When I read that the crowd today booed President Bush — and then saw a video of it — I thought of a quip my friend Eddie made, not long ago: “When the Left asks for a classless society, now I know what they mean.”

Damn, those guys should have been more respectful.

So let's get this straight Jay. Tiger Woods not accepting an invitation from a popular president who didn't serve in Vietnam and therefore is anti-military or something--fine. Citizens booing the outgoing leader who fabricated a casus belli, tortured people, ballooned the debt, oversaw one of the worst economic collapses ever, and presided over the worst terrorist attack in American history--totally fucking uncool.

Gotcha.

Dark City

I can definitely appreciate it, but I did not really like it. Hey, sci-fi just isn't my thing. And man, oh man, that protagonist is just a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad actor.

Why Do They Even Pretend?

First, new ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Jeff Sessions said he would be open to a gay nominee for the Supreme Court. And that same day, Sessions asserted that he'd be open to a pro-choice nominee as well:

In an appearance on Fox News, the Alabama Republican said he did not "believe in a litmus test," and was comfortable with a judge who had "a different view on abortion than I have." Such a judge, he added, could "still receive my vote."

Asked, specifically, if a pro-choice nominee would could potentially get his backing once he or she was brought to the committee, Sessions replied: "yes"

Unfortunately for the reality-based community, when he said these things, it seems that it coincidentally happened to be Opposite Day in the Senate Republican Caucus.

Because two days later, he said that a possible SCOTUS candidate's gayness would be a really big concern, and that some people (i.e., Jeff Sessions) would not be okay with it. And today, the New York Times' Charlie Savage reports that:

WASHINGTON — If President Obama nominates Judge Diane P. Wood to the Supreme Court, conservatives plan to attack her as an “outspoken” supporter of “abortion, including partial-birth abortion.”

If he nominates Judge Sonia Sotomayor, they plan to accuse her of trying to “expand constitutional rights beyond the text of the Constitution.”

And if he nominates Kathleen M. Sullivan, a law professor at Stanford [and a lesbian], they plan to decry her as a "prominent supporter of homosexual marriage."

So Jeff Sessions is perfectly fine with a pro-choice gay SCOTUS justice. Except not one that rules in favor of gay rights or a woman's right to choose.

Why don't Republicans on the Judiciary Committee just write an Op-Ed in the Washington Post titled "GTFO Baby Killin' Faggots!" and be done with it?

The Day the Earth Stood Still

This movie made me mad. Mad at myself for viewing it. Mad at Americans for flocking to it. Mad at Jennifer Connelly for aging like a withered prune. Mad at Keanu Reeves for continuing to seek employment in Hollywood. Mad at Jon Hamm for tarnishing his sheen from Mad Men with random shitty bit-parts like this one. Mad at Black America's Hollywood delegate for continuing to push for horrible token black kid roles in disaster flicks. Mad at the soldiers for thinking that shooting a gun at a blob of sand will have a positive expectation. Mad at John Cleese for... John, what the FUCK were you doing in this movie?

Jesus Christ Almighty, this was godawful. Just a total trainwreck with no redeeming qualities. I'll sum it up as such: No good film has ever come from a casting brainstorming session where someone uttered "Okay, we need a Secretary of Defense. Is Kathy Bates available?"

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The many morals to the even manier stories of Benjamin Button: Pedophilia is perfectly acceptable if the pedophile in question is Brad Pitt; black-white relations in the 1920s were fine and dandy; a baby left on a doorstep can turn out to be really good-looking and successful; the absolute best time to tell your daughter who her father is is right before you are about to die; and dancing in traffic... maybe not such a good idea.

What to say about this film that hasn't been said already? It's over-the-top, utterly fairy-tale in nature, too long, and nothing really happens. I really wanted to hate it. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it. About 80 minutes in I started to get antsy. But the back half was truly terrific.

The real winner here is Brad Pitt. His performance is very understated, yet totally memorable. Brad Pitt has certainly never (or rarely) been a bad actor ("Whhaatt's in the boxxxxx?" might count as one glaring exception) but he's usually not at his best when he's all amped up (e.g., in Babel). But here he is just the lovable idiot, a simple man with simple plans, who doesn't really know what to do or how to act in life because he's never been taught. For me, it really worked, not because he was relatable--it's hard to empathize with a mutant octogenarian baby who's part Peter Pan and part Simon Birch--but because of how good a person he was. And most of this was reflected through his relationship with Daisy, played by Cate Blanchett.

Benjamin and Daisy are not exactly two peas in a pod. They meet as "youngsters," but then he moves away and they don't see each other for 20 years until she returns to their stomping grounds in New Orleans (a scene which prompts this great look of shock made famous from the trailer). But then Benjamin blows his chance to bone her, and she moves to Paris to pursue her ballet career, where she finds another man. All this time, she still fantasizes about him, and then she gets run over by a taxi. He returns to help, she spits in his face. Then, years later, she comes back to New Orleans and they have a kid and live happily ever after. Well, not really. See, he's still reverse-growing, so he leaves because he can't be a real father to their child. And so the end of the movie is filled with scenes of the 70-year-old Daisy playing games with the 2-year-old Benjamin--the same Benjamin whom she was fucking regularly just years before. To be sure, it's kinda weird.

But that doesn't make it bad. Benjamin and Daisy's relationship is problematic from the start, but the problems are so endemic to their situation that they don't even need to discuss them. Instead, they just have fun while they can. There's a great montage where they move into a duplex after Benjamin's mom dies, and "Twist and Shout" is blaring in the background while they live like kings and queens, without (seemingly) a care in the world. Very simple, but good in a heart-on-a-sleeve fashion.

So yes, I suppose that--overall--I did enjoy The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It certainly has shades of Forrest Gump (if you define "has shades of" as "is cloned from") but hey, Gump was one sympathetic fuck. The cinematography is absolutely incredible, and obviously the make-up is "WTF how did they do that?"-level stuff. But most of that is secondary. The core of the film is about the trials and tribulations of Benjamin forming and maintaining relationships with people whom he is aging in the opposite direction from. The point is: If you're a baby, you can't have sex with a grandmother. Maybe that should've been the tagline.

Valkyrie

There are a zillion ways to quibble with Valkyrie--Nazis didn't, um, speak English; Tom Cruise is still a terrible actor; there's absolutely zero subtlety; and the climax is pretty damn anticlimactic--but these are mere speedbumps. This, for all my originally-high-and-then-later-on-very-very-very-low expectations, was a very enjoyable flick.

The brilliance of Singer's work in Valkyrie lies in the film's ability to convince the audience that Cruise and co. can actually pull it off. (They are trying to overthrow Hitler.) But obviously everyone knows that this didn't work; Hitler committed suicide later, in the face of foreign invasion--he wasn't killed by his own men. And yet there's a stretch of about forty minutes in Valkyrie where you're utterly enthralled, rooting the plot along. It really takes awhile before reality sets back in and you have an "Oh, fuck me" moment. But by then, the damn thing is nearly over.

This is a Tom Cruise movie as much as it's a Hitler movie. And Tom Cruise has some serious fucking screen presence. I mean, he is a really, really poor actor. But he holds together the entire thing, and I have no idea how he does it. Maybe this means I'm secretly in love with Tom Cruise, but I doubt it. All I know is that I could never look away when he was onscreen. In Valkryie, he's honestly not that different from his M:I-series character Ethan Hunt. It's a very Crusian performance--Tom is not Daniel Day-Lewis. But just as Tom Cruise is rarely very good in his roles, he's always very watchable. I've sat through Vanilla Sky and The Last Samurai and 103 viewings of Jerry Maguire--trust me, it wasn't the writing.

There are quite a few things I liked about this film. One was the very slick decision with how to portray Hitler. It's a "Hitler film," but it's not about Hitler. So they kept him mostly offscreen, fed him only murmurings for lines, and treated him like the omnipresent and omnipotent fascist he really was. It was a very nice depiction. Another great quality was the score: it's masterful. Pumping blood in every freaking scene, it just doesn't let up. Tons of bombast, but it's fucking World War II, so it's totally acceptable. But of course the score would be irrelevant without the fantastic pacing of Valkyrie. They just leap right into the thick of things. Tom Cruise gets horribly injured in Africa, he recovers, and boom, it's time to knock off Der Fuhrer. Nearly every scene thereafter is filled with tension. It's great fun.

---

There were also myriad references to the, um, 400,000 other films that have been done on World War II and the Nazis. But this one--a tracking shot made from the back of a moving car--was one of my favorites. It immediately called to mind Leni Riefenstahl's work in the intro to Triumph of the Will and Spielberg's copying of it in Schindler's List (second and third pictures, respectively).

Sean Hannity: Go Fuck Yourself

It is without irony that Hannity proclaimed tonight on his show that he was in favor of an investigation to get to the bottom of what Pelosi knew and when she knew it.



In a reality-based world, this would seem... strange, because Hannity is and always has been a torture advocate. He stated that looking into the past would be "politicizing our national security"; he's said that torture "saved... Los Angeles"; he's said "good for you" to a guest that said she believed in the "interrogation methods of Jack Bauer"; he's play-tortured a football, pretending it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's head, while declaring that we should "dunk [his head] in water so we can save American lives"; and he's coaxed Karl Rove along as Rove whined that prosecuting torture memo authors would turn America into the "moral equivalent of a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses."

Sean, you are in favor of torture. What do you care about what Pelosi knew about if this was all well and good? What you're doing is kinda like exonerating Michael Corleone for the murder of Fredo and indicting Connie.

Marley and Me

Key takeaways from Marley and Me:

• It is exceedingly realistic that a woman who looks like Jennifer Aniston would get hitched with a guy who looks like Owen Wilson. I know this is a tired complaint, but come on.
  
• I tear up insanely easily during dog-centric films. Lassie, White Fang, My Dog Skip, now this. Okay, maybe not Beethoven's 2nd.
  
• You can not only retain your job, you can receive lavish praise in the process, if you are an Op-Ed columnist in Miami and write 75% of your columns about your dog.
• There are two blond-haired 10-year-old boys in Hollywood. Just two.
• Apparently, you can live like a millionaire if you have three kids, a dog, a wife that doesn't work, and you are employed as a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. It truly is a dream job.
• There are two film cliches more annoying than "husband talks up how much he doesn't want a baby right before his wife breaks the news that she's pregnant." They are: 1) "Wife gets pregnant, everyone's happy... Oops, miscarriage." and 2) "Alan Arkin as the old Jewish curmudgeon who means well but is rough around the edges." All three of them are featured in Marley and Me.
  
• Jennifer Aniston does her thing where she technically gets naked, but they don't show any of it. You can find similar in The Break-Up and Wanted (with Angelina Jolie, in the case of the latter). This is an endlessly annoying tactic. Either full-on or not at all.
  
• In the end, it is hard to hate this film. It is all very predictable, but it's a dog movie--that's how they roll. It's a tearjerker at parts and amusing at others. I'd summarize it at "pet film boilerplate," but that's not a pejorative in this case. Not really, at least.
  

Let Nancy Hang Out to Dry

Ever since the news broke that Nancy Pelosi knew more about the torture proceedings than she initially let on, both the right and the left have exploded into utter insanity. While the right has used this to show how torture is all the Democrats' problem (torture is good when Republicans do it and bad when Democrats do it), that is fairly predictable. They're babies and we expect that.

Democrats often aren't much better, but they're usually a little better. Not in this case. They're totally leapt to Pelosi's defense, seeking to vindicate her before all the facts are even on the table. I saw David Shuster on MSNBC yesterday categorically waving aside the idea that Pelosi bore any responsibility. And Media Matters implicitly comes to Pelosi's defense in this otherwise-well-deserved slam of Politifact's analysis. "Democratic strategists" are flooding the airwaves with DNC talking points that are composed of denial after denial of any Democratic responsibility. This isn't how they should be responding.

Let the chips fall as they may. Many have already fallen. Greenwald documented the fact that Pelosi and other leading Democrats not only clearly knew about the torture policies, but supported them. It would be a stretch to go full-National Review on things and call the entire torture framework a "bipartisan issue"--it's about as bipartisan as the stimulus vote--but there doesn't appear to be any denying that Democrats screwed the pooch here. The fact that Pelosi knew about this doesn't in any way transfer blame away from Bush and Cheney. There's no need for liberals to inanely and instinctively leap to defend someone whom they perceive as "one of their own." If Pelosi knew, then she deserves whatever type of punishment you get for knowing about shit like this. That's how it works.

And I can't say I understand defending Nancy Pelosi, of all people. She has proven herself to be ineffective and wrong on many key issues. Just because O'Reilly can paint her as a "radically leftist San Franciscan" doesn't mean it's really so. Watching her give speeches or do interviews is a form of torture unto itself. She's a babbling buffoon. If she's the best the Democrats have to offer in the way of candidates for Speaker of the House, well that's a shame. I'd be very glad to see her go.

Megan McArdle Embraces Idiocy

It's well-known to anyone who has ever ran farther than 100 yards, lifted more than 25 pounds, or done a single pull-up that mainstream medical science, as it pertains to exercise and diet, is often not much more than a pseudoscience. Body responses often vary, and what works for some people won't work for others. But beyond that, the advice is still often flawed. You have a guy eating Rice Krispies for breakfast and a steak for dinner, and the doctor tells him to cut the steak. Crap like that.

The bottom line is that you start with a general idea, and then change it up as it you see fit. Like, blueberries are good, donuts are bad. Chicken is good, iced tea is bad. Lifting weights is good, running on a treadmill is dumb. Then you use your experiences to alter your routine. It isn't rocket science.

It especially isn't rocket science if you decide to go full retard like Megan McArdle does today:

But take heart: exercise may not be nearly as great as we've been told. It definitely helps ward off diabetes, but most of that benefit comes at very modest levels. It might have modest effects on depression, heart disease, and cancer, but it's hard to tell because of selection effects: if you stay depressed, you probably stop exercising. And it's hard to tease out the confounding factors in the other two: the exercisers are also thinner, more educated, and less likely smoke than the others. I was shocked to find out how much of the difference between women's and men's life expectancy was accounted for by their different rates of smoking, and it seems the same sort of thing may be operating here.

Yes, Megan, the sole benefit of working out is reducing your risk of diabetes. How about not looking like the rest of America? Or feeling better? Or being stronger? Or more able to walk up a motherfucking flight of 12 stairs without gasping for air? To Megan, these are simply not benefits. They're just illusions. She continues spewing:

Oh, and exercise probably won't make you thin, either, particularly if you're the sort of person who finds it hard to lose weight. Your appetite eventually seems to increase enough to compensate.

Laugh. Out. Loud. This is essentially false without qualification. If you "find it hard to lose weight" you need to stop eating fucking donuts. Thyroid problems and the like are bullshit excuses for America's giants and giantesses, on par with ADD diagnoses for children whose parents royally fucked the cat at their jobs. People "have trouble losing weight" in the same way they "have trouble keeping their car from being drawn to the drive-thru window." If you lift weights, you will develop more muscle, and therefore acquire a faster metabolism, which will allow you to eat more. Going for a run doesn't give you carte blanche to become Entenmann's spokesperson. Only an... Atlantic blogger would think that.

Basically, unless you're at risk for diabetes, Kolata says there's no solid evidence that exercise will do much besides make you sweat.

Of course, my idea of exercise is biking to work, so you'd expect me to say that.

This must go down as one of the worst posts in e-history. Calling it a "cop-out" is a cop-out. It's full blown Downie retardation at the highest level imaginable. It really makes you wonder if these people have ever, ever, exercised--shot hoops, done a single bench press, completed a sit-up, jumped rope... It's not something you analyze on paper. You try shit out and the results will come.

Unsure...

Atrios makes this post about affirmative action:

As Adam says, if any of those enrgaged by affirmative action would spill half as much ink on legacy admissions, a practice which, whatever its intended purpose, has the clear effect of privileging the progeny of wealthy white people, I'd be more sympathetic.

And Adam Serwer's original point:

It makes me wonder if the vitriol directed at AA isn't just a matter of competition for resources. People instinctively let legacies fly because the people benefiting from them are white, while affirmative action is seen primarily as a method of rewarding undeserving outsiders...

Despite the focus on race-based AA, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action remain white women.This points to AA's real purpose: not "punishing whites" for historical injustice, but acting as a corrective against intentional or unconscious discrimination. Once you acknowledge that, it's hard to describe AA as discrimination against whites, which eliminates the line of argument most often used by its opponents. At the same time, the people most likely hurt by legacy admissions are white people of a certain social class.

All of this makes sense. But a few points do need to be made (not necessarily all of which will be coherent or grounded in logic):

1. Affirmative action, as it stands today, will always lead to at least some, if not many, prospective students being passed over for less qualified students. That's just the way it works in an environment with finite resources. So yes, to that point--Serwer's "competition" argument is very strong. If one white kid is displaced for one Hispanic kid, for no reason besides ethnicity, I think that a lot of people would have, and do have, strong aversion to that idea.

2. With that said, affirmative action's goal is to combat institutional benefits, aside from legacy admissions, that are afforded whites. So when someone complains that he didn't get into Notre Dame because a black kid "took his spot," he should realize that he himself was likely the recipient of a) a better secondary school education, b) better prep for the SAT, c) a more diverse set of clubs and activities to pad his resume with, and so on. Affirmative action, in theory, helps to put on a black kid from D.C. on a sorta-but-not-really equal plane with a white kid from suburban New Jersey.

3. However, if that is true, then there's a huge fail going on in affirmative action. Socioeconomics, as many others far smarter than I have touched on, is the real issue. Race isn't. Race is correlated with socioeconomics, for sure. But the idea that wealthy African-Americans are displacing less fortunate and more qualified white Americans, purely on quota reasoning, is fairly absurd. And yet it's assuredly happening. And it's not as though whites have a monopoly on the legacy game; you don't think that a Barack Obama who was still working as a law professor in Chicago would make a few calls to get one or both of his daughters into Harvard when the time came?

4. Legacy admissions, or their equivalent, of course will never end. To a huge extent, they are unfair. You'd be more likely to hit the Powerball than get into an Ivy these days without some external "help." Yet a few things need to be said about legacies:

1. The absurd craziness that surrounds college admissions bears the bulk of the responsibility. Of course, in the old days, it was simple. You lived in Westchester, you went to Exeter, and you--and 50 of your male classmates--got plucked for Yale. Easy peasy. Not so easy today. And you really only get one shot. So for people that have their heart set on going to Yale, if their parents' friend of a friend's cousin is a trustee, you can be sure they're going to be making a phone call. To do otherwise is to throw away expectation and put yourself at a disadvantage.
2. Legacies don't work in the same fashion as affirmative action. A white legacy candidate isn't going to replace a less qualified black candidate who was accepted for quota reasons. Universities want a certain percentage of students to be black. They don't want a certain percentage to be legacies. The latter result is simply because of how the institution works.
   
3. How much do legacies really change the outcome of admissions? Being a "Harvard legacy" usually means your parent or grandparent went to Harvard (and continued to give money after he graduated). This quality in and of itself usually means that you will be smarter than many or most of your peers (or, if not smarter, than privileged with access to things--good schools, tutors, and a nondisruptive household--that can make all the difference in a college admissions setting). So if you throw away legacies, something which will never happen, then how different, from a 30,000 foot view, will admissions results be? White underprivileged kids will certainly, it appears, receive a not-insignificant benefit from the undoing of legacy admissions. But will university student bodies really be much different? Whereas, if you undid affirmative action, things certainly would be different.
   
4. Serwer's initial point--"People instinctively let legacies fly because the people benefiting from them are white, while affirmative action is seen primarily as a method of rewarding undeserving outsiders"--still does hold serious water with me. But I'd have a quibble: the reason people let legacies fly is not simply, or not really, that the people benefiting from them are white--it's that they are the people benefitting from legacies. Look, poor white people in Kansas don't have the ability to call someone up at Columbia and ask for special favors. Yet poor people aren't those who you hear complaining about affirmative action (poor people do not have voices in American politics). Middle class white are both the main beneficiaries of legacy admissions and the loudest drumbeaters against affirmative action. Certainly, you'll hear grumbling about how "you need to play an instrument" or "you need to be a legacy" in order to get into Harvard these days. And that grumbling is fair. But it's only grumbling, and not Congressperson-writing, because these people know full well that while an Ivy League school for their daughter might be a bridge too far, they sure as fuck are calling their brother-in-law on the board of University of Michigan. And so the cycle continues.
   

I'm still against affirmative action. But certainly Atrios and Serwer's points are both extremely valid.

Why I'm Glad I Didn't Apply to Notre Dame

They're a bunch of fucking wackos:



...Or are they?

Here's the thing about this "Notre Dame controversy." A very strident and wackjob-run minority of leaders, students, and alumni have successfully painted the situation as "the entirety of Notre Dame in revolt over Obama's invitation to speak at commencement." When that's clearly not at all the case.

The majority of Notre Dame students voted for Obama over McCain. Obama won 54% of the Catholic vote. Catholics think, by a margin of 50-28, that it was right for Obama to be invited to Notre Dame. Even Catholics that attend weekly services--i.e., the most batshit crazy of them--are not overwhelmingly against the invitation; they split 37-45 against. And 73% -- 73% -- of Notre Dame students believe that inviting Obama was correct.

This is a nonstory. It's a wedge issue from past years that old alumni, Fox News, National Review writers, and worthless pundit-theocrat hybrids have drummed up, rather successfully, into a war of the worlds. Only the true Jesus-worshipping goons give a hoot about this; it doesn't take a tea-leaf expert to see that, when students at Notre fucking Dame aren't with you, you're probably on the fast track to irrelevancy.

Never Let Anyone Tell You Americans Are Intelligent

There's an ongoing category of posts in the liberal blogosphere that hypes up the underestimated intelligence of Americans. When Obama was elected, it was hailed as a sign that Americans weren't dumb enough to play into the same old Rovian games. When the Big Three were "raked over the coals" on Capitol Hill while Wall Street got to "run the show," bloggers proclaimed it "obvious that Americans see what's going on now... they're attuned to the game." Whenever a gay marriage poll reflects more people voting to support it, this is trumped up as a sign that modern Americans are totally plugged in to the goings-on of their local governments and care deeply about the issues.

Even if any of that were true, this chart alone should be evidence enough that the majority of this country is dumb as a fucking post. (Via Yglesias.)



To be fair, this is not a unilateral fail. The marketing geniuses behind the "cap and trade" slogan are... not marketing geniuses. The term is totally amorphous and only further confuses people on a topic they know fuckall about to begin with. How about "carbon emissions policy"? Wasn't that hard.

But that shouldn't absolve American citizens. This chart would be horribly depressing if I were the type to place any faith in the people that live in this country. I don't, so it wasn't. But man--cap and trade has been a hot-button issue for years, and it was talked about quite a lot during the campaign. And the question isn't "What's the limit the government should impose on carbon emissions, and why?" It's "WHAT DOES THE FUCKING TERM MEAN?" And nobody has nary a goddamn clue.

Glenn Loury's Interesting Flip...

I like Glenn Loury's contrarian approach to things quite a bit; I think he's a refreshing voice. But I just caught this from a November 2008 Bloggingheads:

LOURY: Maybe there's a possibility for a real War on Poverty. Okay. How about taking on the idea that hedge fund managers, and Wall Street bankers, make a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times what the ordinary person on the street is making, and really bringing that into the center of our politics. Now I don't much expect that to happen, but that's the kind of thing that I would get excited about.

And here's Loury in a more recent Bloggingheads, discussing executive compensation and the $500,000 "limit" for firms taking bailout money:

LOURY: But this $500,000 thing... I'm thinking, suppose I lived in Manhattan. Suppose I needed to send my kids to the equivalent of Sidwell Friends in Manhattan, if I could get them in there. Suppose I had a loft over in Battery Park, or over in Brooklyn somewhere, or whatever, I don't know what the real estate market is like... They're telling me it's like $1500 a square foot for anywhere decent in Manhattan, so if you got 2000 square feet, that's $3 million dollars... And I'm pretty good at what I do. Okay. Derek Jeter is pretty good at playing shortstop and hitting a baseball. Some people are pretty good at assessing business deals or deciding whether or not to invest money... Five hundred thousand dollars ain't diddly. This is the statement that I want to make. I'm sorry, I'm not running for office, I can actually tell you the truth--it's not a lot of money. For such a person. It is a lot of money for Joe Sixpack, proverbial... But for millions of Americans--a surgeon, anywhere in this country, who's halfway decent at what they do, a heart surgeon, neurosurgeon, orthopedic surgeon--they're gonna make way more than five hundred thousand dollars.

Loury seems to relish in employing a bit of demagoguery in the first quote--the same demagoguery, ironically, that he decries in the second quote. So what's the deal? Shorter early Loury is: Wow, some people make a lot more money than others, we need to address this. Shorter later Loury (which I happen to think is the logical take) is: WTF, $500K ain't squat for someone living a good life in New York City.

Loury seems to acknowledge that some jobs are going to fetch more on the market than others. Ergo, some people are always going to be a lot richer than others. That's just the way it works in a semi-capitalist system like ours. There's nothing wrong with this--in fact, there's everything right with this. And Loury seems to agree. So why does he feel the need to employ pointless populism in seeking to address the War on Poverty? Of course "poverty" is always relative--but the frame of reference should not be Wall Street bankers. That just doesn't make any sense and only serves to cloud the issue.