What the Hell?!? Friday - Another Movie Review

COWBOYS AND ALIENS

If you think the title tells it all, you're pretty darn close.  Obviously, the intent is to blend the genres.  I'll give it an A for effort, cinematography and acting.   Story line?  Uhhhhhh  .  .  .

My view of this movie is undoubtedly informed [or perhaps deformed] by seeing it so close to HANNA, which I reviewed last week.  Indeed, there are some similarities: genre bending, wanton slaughter, a strong heroine, and cosmic-sized plot holes.

Director Jon Favreau crossed HIGH NOON with WAR OF THE WORLDS [you might identify better choices] and got a Chimera.  The tropes are there in multitudes: the strong, quite stranger [Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig)] as protagonist, meek townsfolk, the arrogant quasi rich guy [Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford)] who thinks he runs the town, and the kinda, sorta love interest [Ella Swenson (Olivia Wilde)] who turns out to be something quite different, and, of course, murderous invaders from outer space.

Mitt's Big Success

The Salt Lake City Olympics, of course.

The $1.3 Billion paid for by you and me is just a detail not worth mentioning.

But I guess I'll mention it anyway.  Maybe it makes a nice counterpoint to his acceptance speech.

The Impending Romney Disaster

If you've been reading here regularly, you know what a disaster a Rethug win in Nov. would be, and why.

It's also no secret that changing demographics disfavor the Rethugs - hence their strong attempts at voter suppression.

In an interesting twist, Johnathon Chait points out that the specific 2012 vintage strategy of divide and conquer along lines of age and race will never work again [in the sense of bringing a Rethug victory,] because those demographic changes will have shifted the balance by 2016.  Hence this year's desperate attempt to cede the wealth of our nation to that rapacious top 1%, and undermine the future of social welfare and safety net programs.  This amounts to a last ditch effort to completely destroy the last tattered shreds of the New Deal while they still can get it done.

There’s no moral or policy rationale for Romney’s proposal to increase social safety net spending on current retirees while cutting Pell Grants, Medicaid, children’s health insurance, and food stamps to shreds. The nonwhite share of the electorate is increasing fast enough that the political math of this sort of gambit will grow completely impossible — there will simply be, from the right-wing perspective, too many of them and not enough us. But there may be just enough us to pull out one more win, and thus the Republican determination to make such a win as consequential as possible.

H/T to Scott Lemieux

Yiddish Curses for Republicans

Find them here.

H/T to PK.

My fav:

May you have a rare disease and need an operation that only one surgeon in the world, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, is able to perform. And may he be unable to perform it because he doesn’t take your insurance. And may that Nobel Laureate be your son.

Now, that is nasty.

What the Hell?!? Friday - Movie Review Edition

What the hell - why not?

HANNA

This movie is apparently intended to be a genre-bender, with elements of sci-fi, action-adventure, quest, coming of age, revenge, and whatever the Bourne series (which I have never seen) represents.  It also includes some fairy tail tropes - the wicked witch/step mother, orphanhood, being lost in the wilderness - all twisted into a new, and perhaps refreshing shape.

HANNA is a deeply flawed experiment with a lot of good to go with the bad.  You can read about the movie's defects - which are legion - in the many reviews at IMDB.   It's deeply polarizing: people seem to either love or hate it.  I did neither, and find myself largely agreeing with critics in both camps. 

Akin For a Fight

There is little for me to add to the flap about what Missouri senate candidate Todd Akin said about rape and pregnancy.  Here's Eric Loomis.  

The deeper issue - and I've heard this mentioned by a few people - is the nature of Akin's mistake.   What he got wrong politically was not in what he said, but in where and when he said it.

The sad truth is that Akin's thinking - not just about rape, but about all of the medieval misogyny that lies at its core - is close to main-stream thinking in a large portion of the Rethug constituency.

It's not just the rich elite economic preferences of the Rethugs that are taking us back to the 12th century.  It's a whole complex of elitist politico-social concepts that go hand-in-hand with the religious dominance so fiercely desired by the American Taliban.

My fear is that Missouri will elect this dinosaur - knowing full well how he thinks and what he represents.   I may well live to see the concept of the Divine Right of Corporations become a social norm.

Debt, Recession, and That Ol' Devil Denominator

Krugman recently presented this graph, showing household debt as a percentage of GDP.

and made this comment.

Second, a dramatic rise in household debt, which many of us now believe lies at the heart of our continuing depression.

There are those who seem to believe that if Krugman says it, it must be wrong.   Here is Scott Sumner's reaction.

What do you see?  I suppose it’s in the eye of the beholder, but I see three big debt surges:  1952-64, 1984-91, and 2000-08.  The first debt surge was followed by a golden age in American history; the boom of 1965-73.  The second debt surge was followed by another golden age, the boom of 1991-2007.  And the third was followed by a severe recession.  What was different with the third case?  The Fed adopted a tight money policy that caused NGDP growth to crash, which in turn sharply raised the W/NGDP ratio.  Krugman has another recent post that shows further evidence of the importance of sticky wages.  Forget about debt and focus on NGDP.  It’s NGDP instability that creates problems, not debt surges.

Bold emphasis is provided by Marcus Nunes, who goes on to say:

Why does the share of debt rise? I believe it reflects peoples “optimism” about future prospects. In the chart below I break down Krugman´s chart and separate mortgage and non-mortgage household debt as a share of NGDP. I also add the behavior of the stock market (here represented by the Dow-Jones Index).

[See the linked Nunes post for his chart.]

What the Hell?!? Friday - "Romney Girl" Edition

Via the Ed Show on FB or ABC News.

H/T to the LW.

The White Swan of Black Lake

This majestic bird visited - or perhaps invaded - us a few times during our week at the lake.  

Always looking for a handout.  

Yeah - we fed him/her.

But wait - there's more.

Here, at no extra charge -- DUCK BUTTS!

What the Hell?!? Friday - Alfred Hitchcock Edition

After mowing the grass this afternoon, I was on the patio, with my shoes off, brushing the clippings from my socks, when this guy swooped down and landed about 4 feet in front of me.

I retreated, and he perched himself on one of my now-empty shoes.  Then he gave me a you-wanna-make-something-of-it look.  Since he was equipped with beak and talons and all I had was a whisk broom, I beat a hasty retreat into the house.

When I re-emerged, camera in hand, he took a strategically superior position on the roof.

At that point, we called a truce.

Can anybody identify him?

In Which I Get Chastised by Anon

Over at Orange Crate Art, I got into an off-topic debate in comments with an Anon, after he said:

I enjoyed the "lost revenue" phrase. When a government cannot collect all it needs, wants and desires, it is probably not the revenue which is lost, but the serfs. In the USSR this was that which brought them to collapse. The dark joke was that "I was working against my government by not working." As dear, delightful I. F. Stone wrote, "governments lie." So where was/is/will be all that lost revenue anyway? It's an interesting question.

I replied:

Here in the U.S. the lost revenue is due to the lowest tax rates in almost a century on people with huge incomes and enormous wealth.

At the same time, national wealth has been squandered on long-lasting pointless and unjustifiable wars.

The Republican agenda is to undo the New Deal, the Progressive movement, the Constitution, and even the enlightenment on which it is based.

Funny you should mention serfs, since where we are headed is the new feudalism, where our masters are trans-national mega-corporations with no loyalty to anyone nor any thing.

Which prompted this:

Thanks for half the story, Jazzbumpa. In the first two years of this administration, said "lost revenue" could have been collected from those you identify. After all there was that renown "super majority" in Congress in that time. It is lovely to create a partisan story line, but it seems both parties have their hands deep in the cash box, which makes me all the more certain of my choice of verbiage, "serf." A progressive agenda would actually have stopped the deficit spending, closed Gitmo, exited Afghanistan, not put 13,500 troops in Bahrain as just announced this last month, shot drones into Pakistan only in the last weeks, engaged in war acts in North Africa and so much more. The elements of storytelling are about word choices to convey the next twist in the plot. As to "enormous wealth," I am good to go in confiscating a large portion of billionaires' wealth as long as all partisan sides get gouged. It is a sad tale indeed in which some get a free pass for being somehow on one side of the storyteller's divide, but not for those on the other. Let's confiscate half of Adelsohn's and Soros' wealth for starters. I wager they will become part of the same political strategy in an instant. "Lost revenue" has a storytelling function, implying that someone "lost" the "revenue." Well, when that doesn't include both political parties, then it wasn't "lost" from 2008 to 2010, was it? And the wars continue, serfs are not being asked for their political opinion about it. After all, as Jazzbumpa's story continues, "our masters are trans-national mega-corporations with no loyalty to anyone or anything." And the current administration must therefore be part of these "masters." Or at least doing their bidding? Storytelling is about following the sense of the language. Serfs. Lost revenue. Masters. Gosh, why give this current crop of politicians a pass? It does not advance the story. Happily ever after. PS I love jazz!

Anon [despite his disdain for white space] makes some good points here, but this is not one of them:  "In the first two years of this administration, said 'lost revenue' could have been collected from those you identify. After all there was that renown "super majority" in Congress in that time."   There were several Blue Dog Dems in the senate before the Rethug take over of 2010, so the (presumably progressive) Dem majority was illusory, and the super-majority totally non-existent.  To say otherwise is simply repeating a regressive talking point.

Further, there is nothing in my narrative that generates a partisan story line.  It's clear to anyone who has both eyes open that the problems with dysfunctional government lie squarely at the feet of the Rethugs.  Pointing out that Rethugs have degenerated into a condition where they are [to a reasonable first approximation] all wrong, all the time does not in any way suggest that the Dems are right about anything, ever.

Concentrating my critical efforts on a target where I feel they are the most needed is not giving anybody a free pass.  I have limited time and energy, plus the freedom to chose the topics that most engage or enrage me.  Others can take on the Dems - I have other, more important, fish to fry.

If this constitutes a sin of omission, then so be it.  Now I'm out of time now - gotta run.

QE Timeline

When I want to find these dates, I always have a hard time nailing them down.

Here is the timeline for QE and Twist operations from Bill McBride at CR, along with a nice graph of the SP500 in context.