Heartache With Hard Work

Bruno’s Torso – Death Vessel (from Nothing is Precious Enough For Us)

Two things about the cost-of-living bonuses and social security.

Background: Social Security has an automatic cost-of-living increase that has taken effect every since since the adjustments were instituted in 1975. This year, however, since there was no inflation (and in fact there was deflation) no increase will happen. This creates a problem because people assume those increases will happen and if they don’t, they get angry. So, in lieu of the cost of living increase, the administration is proposing simply cutting them all a $250 check.

The first point to make about this is well stated by Kevin Drum:

this does go to show the power that sustained inflation holds on our imaginations. Technical arguments about CPI calculations aside, the fact is that seniors haven’t gotten a benefit increase for decades. It’s just not the way the program works. But the fact that their checks keep going up makes it seem like they have. So now, despite the fact that the huge benefit increase of last January combined with the deflation of the past 12 months means seniors really are getting higher benefits for the first time in recent memory, it doesn’t seem like it.

This is a larger problem of how we talk about money in our society. We all understand in a general sense that inflation means things are always going to cost more over time. And yet when it comes to specific instances it’s hard to keep track of that. And that’s nowhere more apparent than something like this.

Given this, there is a general sense of outrage about this. And at first glance it makes sense. ‘Look how ridiculous our system is!’

But in reality this is an excellent problem to have at this particular moment. We should be spending a lot MORE in stimulus than we are, but the political winds made it impossible to get the extra several hundred billion dollars. Situations like this, where an immensely powerful sub-group expresses a sense of entitlement to extra cash, are perfect in this context.

Even though it’s a stupid reason for the policy, the underlying dynamic is perfectly rational. Build in a cost of living increase and any time when that doesn’t kick in is, by definition, going to be a time when it’s a good idea to get extra money into the hands of folks who will be somewhat inclined to spend it.

It’s a much smaller microcosm of some pretty serious public engineering issues. Medicaid, for example, is a policy that could potentially serve this same effect. It’s a counter-cyclical program. When the economy falls, more people need it, but that’s precisely when state budgets are smaller and less capable of covering the cost. The result: cuts in spending when they are most needed. Which may be a good argument for putting it under exclusive federal control. As a federal entitlement, it would enable more money to go to those who needed thanks to the federal government’s ability to deficit spend.

Of course, it’s easy to take this kind of thing too far. As much as I’d love a well-constructed liberal-socialist state that took on WAY MORE entitlements, we do not have such a state. And as such, trying to graft in too many of these sort of entitlement-fixes into the structurally unbalanced system we’ve got risks political backlash that could eviscerate some major elements of the social safety net.

So you’ve got to calibrate this stuff. But a few billion of extra stimulus in the disguise of a check to compensate the lack of a cost of living increase…that’s easy business that helps everyone.

Optimist Vs. The Silent Alarm (When The Saints Go Marching In) – Casiotone for the Painfully Alone

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone has been around for years and years, occasionally putting out a track that I enjoyed but mostly losing me in the meanders of the uber-lo-fi tones. In 2009, though, Owen Ashworth finally emerges in the cool light of day, with real instruments and everything on Vs. Children – without a doubt his most accomplished effort. The most notable change is the powerful presence of organs, pianos, keyboards and the like. The old Casiotone has been swapped on many of these tracks for big old fashioned gospel romps.

The highlight of these is “Optimist Vs. The Silent Alarm (When The Saints Go Marching In)” – which carries all the urgency and presence of a great escape, combined with the the wild sentiment and urgent dreams of somone on the run. And nothing could feel more appropirate than the final 20 seconds, when the theme of “When the Saints Go Marching In” takes over. It’s the most insistent song he’s produced to date – you can almost feel the stolen bills fluttering out the back of the car as it tears down the road.

Shortly after comes “Traveling Salesman’s Young Wife Home Alone On Christmas in Montpelier, VT” which offers another dose of acute longing. Here the delicate balance of intricacy and simplicity is carefully negotiated.

There are too many tracks that never quite launch for this to work perfectly for me as an album. But the highs are superb.

Kevin Drum talks about the currently growing brand of right-wing lunacy, talking in particular about John Shadegg (R-Arizona), who described the current bills on health care reform as “Soviet-style gulag health care”:

it’s a good example of what I mean when I suggest that today’s right-wing lunacy is different from left-wing lunacy of the Bush years. Sure, there were lefty bloggers who went over the top about Amerika and how the NSA was bringing 1984 to life and so forth, but for the most part you didn’t have members of Congress taking to the House floor and joining in. They largely managed to keep a slightly more even keel. But on the Republican side, after a mere few months of Obama, this kind of stuff has become routine. They’ve joined the Caps Lock crowd feet first.

I would posit that any significantly large set of people contains an extreme wing – not just extreme in the content of their beliefs but also in the form that they use to express those ideas. As Drum calls it: the CAPS-lock wing of the group.

I tend to be skeptical of all the lefty hand-wringing about the ‘tone’ of things these days, and consider the youtubization of politics that enables all the crazies who have been around forever to suddenly have an easy route for public consumption. That said, I do think there’s something going with the “CAPS-lock theory of right wing politics.”

Which is not to accuse every – or even a significant percentage – of Republicans of going ALLCAPS on us. There are always going to be nuts in any crowd. It’s just to say that it’s striking how easy and comfortable the respectable parts of the right-wing seem to be jostling elbows with the nuts.

Ballad Of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll) – Yim Yames

Given my absolute soul-clenching hatred for the last My Morning Jacket, it’s such a breath of fresh air to hear Jim James (pseudononymously going by Yim Yames) getting back to his roots on Tribute To, a short EP of songs covering some of the more obscure George Harrison cuts.

Okay, maybe ‘fresh’ isn’t really the right word – since there is definitely nothing surprising or new here. In this case, the Pitchfork review from Paul Thompson is quite apt: “Not only does he sing these Harrison songs just like Jim James, but if you’ve spent any amount of time around either, what you’re currently hearing in your head couldn’t be closer to the truth.”

That’s just about right. He doesn’t add anything tremendously unique to any of these tracks – or rather, he adds one unique thing, his voice, to each of the tracks in pretty much the same way.
The thing is, I don’t seem to mind. Most of the songs are from Harrison’s debut solo record (All Things Must Pass) – which is probably the second best solo record any of the four ever made, and it’s well suited for James’ brand of reverb-drenched vocals and faded sonic pictographs.

I appreciate this record mostly for its sense of genuine appreciation. Almost across the board, the originals are preferable – but I don’t necessarily see that as a problem. The care with which one artist treats the work of another. The feeling and passion that it reveals can be worth it for its own sake.

And there is one track that I think is improved: “Ballad Of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll).” It was always one of my favorite Harrison tracks, but I still felt like there was something that didn’t quite gel. James nails it, slowing things down and letting the darkness rise all around.

Will It Float – The Triangles

Two optimistic takes on health care. First, Jonathan Chait points out that despite all the public fights and sensationalist coverage, the real matter here is whether 60 Democrats will be willing to simply not filibuster whatever bill actually ends up on the floor of the Senate. And it appears that this is the case. There’s a lot of time left for things to go wrong, but ultimately if all sixty of those Democrats come to the conclusion that it will be a disaster for them personally and the party overall to actually FILIBUSTER health care reform to death…then it’s going to pass.

And that’s pretty significant. They don’t have to vote for the thing – maybe there’s currency in voting against it while still not filibustering it. They don’t have to LIKE everything that’s in the bill – they almost certainly won’t. They just have to realize how much of a disaster it will be for them if they end up singly responsible for killing the single most important progressive bill in 40 years.

Ezra Klein, meanwhile, points out that all the fretting and backlash has failed to actually turn any votes. Not a single Democrat seems willing to filibuster now, after all the August screaming. Which means there’s not a whole lot of reason to think they’ll balk down the line. The media loves a good story to cover, but Klein sums it up nicely: “They had the votes in the beginning. The question is whether they can keep them together at the end. That is all that has ever mattered, or really been possible. Everything else is just noise, and the players who matter appear to have ignored it entirely.”

I’m not saying it’s a sure thing. But I do think that at this point something pretty fundamental is going to have to change to kill health care reform. The real issue was whether ephemeral polling was going to scare the moderate Dems off the ship. That doesn’t seem to have happened. Which means that if things continue along their current path, the incentives to filibuster aren’t going to get any stronger.

There’s still a lot to worry about, but it’s important to remember that we’re already further into the process than the Clintons ever got. The Finance Committee is going to pass their bill soon (particularly given the pretty strong CBO scoring it got). The other four versions have already passed. It’ll go through the two main chambers, they’ll put together a bill in conference, and then we’ll see if anyone is so angry about the modest pains it’ll impose on insurance companies that they’re willing to annihilate their own party.

Of course, there’s still all kinds of chances for perfectly reasonable parts of the process (the public option, the Kerry amendment to help choose options, etc.) to get cut out. And when some of them don’t end up passing, it will be incredibly frustrating.

But if we get the majority of the bill, I’ll be happy to make those things supplemental efoorts for the coming decade.

Kent Brockman: Senator Dole, why should people vote for you?
Kang: It does not matter which way you vote! Either way your planet is doomed! Doomed! Doomed!
Kent Brockman: Well, a refreshing bit of candor from Senator Bob Dole!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of public reason in this great republic of ours. In part because it plays pretty significantly into what I’m trying to do academically. The more cynical I get about the capacity for our public politics to incorporate reasoned debate and argument on things like health care, the more pessimistic I get about my broader goals of trying to recuperate the core of some type of political liberalism.

Yeah, yeah, theories of justice are great in principle, but what do you do about a political landscape that appears to be wholly uninterested in the faculties of reason? Is that proof that we just need to do better, or is it proof of a fundamental paradox built into this type of system?

No Reason – Against All Authority

I don’t have any firm answers. But it’s hard to avoid thinking about it. A couple recent posts in particular got me wondering about where we stand as a nation right now on this sort of thing.

First, there’s Ezra Klein a few weeks back, pointing out something deeply troubling:

There is a famous poll from 1994 that shows the American people had a clearer idea of Clinton’s health-care reform bill at the beginning of the process than at the end. This is a serious problem: Polls are a good barometer of the mood of the public, but if the public is systematically misled, it’s hard to say what the poll is measuring. A few months ago, health-care reform was quite popular. Today, it’s unpopular. Is that because the public knows more about the bill? Or less?

He talks about this in the context of polling, suggesting that Democratic legislators ought not rely too much on them to guide their actions. And I think that’s an excellent point. There are just structural elements of this process (a deeply ingrained status quo bias being the most powerful) which mean that the side proposing change is going to do worse and worse in the polls the closer it comes to actually passing something.

People love ‘change’ when it’s abstract, but the more particular it gets, the scarier it becomes. This is to be expected. The job of legislators is not to freak out too much about public opinion in the short-term. If you drill down to just a single moment, you’ll get a far less useful understanding of the situation than if you recognize the rolling and fundamentally temporal nature of social attitudes.

There’s every chance that ‘health care reform’ will be polling under 50% when this thing finally comes to the floor. What Democratic legislators need to understand is that a few years down the road people will have become accustomed to their new levels of health coverage and things will be well on their way to turning the 2009 health care bill into another third rail.

In short, it’s not a coincidence that the Republicans are demonizing the current health care bill by trying to claim it’ll hurt Medicare (the last significant expansion of public health care). Whether it makes sense matters a lot less than whether it appeals to a sense of unease about change.

So there’s all that to draw from the breakdown in public opinion. And you can spin it optimistically as I’ve tried to do.

But still: there’s something deeply and profoundly disconcerting about living in a world where years of public debate about something produces an electorate that is less well-informed about the issue. I mean, yikes.

Which leads to another thing: Ed Kilgore pondering the issue of Joe Wilson and other right wing extremists, particularly whether or not their mere presence tends to shift the public debate rightward. He is skeptical, and is even more concerned about the idea that the appropriate progressive response is to lionize our own brand of ‘extremists’ whose job it will be to re-balance things:

The solution, this sort of analysis invariably suggests, is to counter right-wing “framing” of arguments with left-wing framing, pulling the debate back to something resembling the actual “center.” If this approach sounds a bit too cute and cynical, that’s because it assigns roles to various players in politics based on their tactical positioning rather than the validity of what they actually believe.
[…]
But perhaps there’s something to be said after all for truth-telling and reasonableness, not in the pursuit of compromises with the crazy people of the Right, but because a majority of people in this country will ultimately recognize and reject craziness, just as they’ve generally done in the past. Progressives shouldn’t have to cultivate their own cadre of “extremists,” or feign extremism in their own “positioning,” in order to show they are actually trying to solve the country’s many problems. Sometimes it’s best to say what you actually think, with emotional empathy and passion to be sure, but with a little more faith in democracy.

Obviously, I find this idea very appealing. A big part of what I liked about the Obama campaign was its promise of post-partisanship as a codeword for precisely this kind of attitude: the belief that the public is capable of sorting out the lunacy and the nutjobs and recognizing the value of real solutions to actual problems.

You don’t have to be a purist follower of J.S. Mill to find something of value in this approach. It’s very easy in this day and age to become overly concerned about the Ann Coulters and Glenn Becks and so forth. And it’s EXTREMELY easy to buy into the sensationalized take on things like the town halls of August that got broadcast over and over.

But the reality is that these people are on the far extremes.

Which is emphatically not to deny that they matter at all. Or to pretend that things like framing, the issue of what becomes acceptable forms of criticism and what gets relegated to unfair or ‘personal’ attacks, and all those sort of things are irrelevant.

But, perhaps, it’s possible to worry about those sorts of things as merely elements of constructing a more robust and viable stage of public consideration. Maybe we can see the willful efforts to evade debate as obstructions rather than fatal flaws in the struture of democratic reason.

The real issue in my mind is not about shutting down Glenn Beck; it’s about making it clear to those with their hands on the levers of power that this kind of thing should not serve as a fundamental barrier to the enactment of reasonable solutions.

The tea-baggers are a constituency. And we shouldn’t deny them entirely. But they are only one constituency, and not a tremendously large one. That they can shout loudly and bring in a bunch of headlines has very little to do with what makes for electorally sound policymaking for the long term.

I don’t want to go all Field of Dreams on you, but…if you build a good health care bill, the votes will come. People may not claim to care all that much about the super-wonky stuff, but they DO care about results. The wacko-fringes aren’t persuadable, but the folks in the middle care a lot more about good old fashioned policy than you’d expect given the way political coverage works these days.

At least, I still hold out hope for that.

How this health care stuff plays out over the next few months (and then over the next few years as it starts to get implemented) may tell us a lot about the empirical question of whether public reason can really take us anywhere.

I know it’s become pretty routine for me to pop up every couple months and apologize for the sporadic posting. But, here we go again.

It’s back into the school year – and I’m busier than ever now that I’m teaching as well as taking my own classes – so the pace probably won’t pick up all that much. But I’m going to make an effort to do a lot more short posts. There are albums I’ve been sitting on for a good six or seven months now because I wanted to devote the time to putting together a complete review.

But completeness is so 2008. Instead, you’re going to get summaries, dalliances, and just enough effort to let you know I’m still around. Still, I figure that’s better than failing to post on an artist before they’re old and gray.

So, one example: the bizarre and occasionally brilliant project Dark Night of the Soul – a joint project between Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse, with a revolving cast of collaborators including Wayne Coyne, Julian Casablancas, James Mercer, Nina Persson, and Frank Black to name a few. Oh, and David Lynch.

And yes, the whole thing ends up sounding pretty much like you’d expect given the component parts. For my money, the James Mercer and Nina Persson tracks are fairly strong, and I kind of dig the Strokes vibe that Julian Casablancas brings along for “Little Girl.” But the real highlight is the Wayne Coyne track that opens the record.

Revenge (feat. Wayne Coyne) – Sparklehorse

“Revenge” is everything that The Flaming Lips have failed to be recently. It exercises a modicum of restraint, marries a beautiful melody to a mournful, almost Phil Collins beat. It exudes a deep sense of pain and loss, with just the tiniest hint of escape. You don’t get a lot of Danger Mouse until the final minute, but he lends the breakdown a bit of oomph that might otherwise have been missing.

Of course, no project like this could possibly work out simply. The final twist is that – due to contract disputes with EMI – it hasn’t been officially released. The artists have decided to ‘sell’ blank CD-Rs and suggest that enlightened consumers figure out a way to download the thing themselves.

History Sticks to Your Feet – Modest Mouse

I wasn’t tremendously enthusiastic about the latest Modest Mouse record (or, really, the one before that). And I’ve posted here a number of times before about my growing acceptance of the fact that while they might have had two or three of my favorite albums ever back in the late 90s/early aughts, they’ve gone a different direction these days. Tastes change, and so on.

They can still put out a song that absolutely burns though. “Spitting Venom” from the last record has grown on virtually every listen and I now think it ranks among their best. So I’ll take the great songs as they come and be satisfied with that, and not expect another Lonesome Crowded West.

And with the release of a new EP this year No One’s First and You’re Next, there’s more evidence for this. It’s composed of b-sides and extras from the last two records and demonstrates a lot of the unevenness, as well as some of the shades of brilliance.

I’d heard a few of these songs already. I’ve been listening to “I’ve Got it All (Most)” since 2004, and “King Rat” for a couple years now. I thought the former deserved a place on Good News… over plenty of tracks that did make the cut so it’s nice to see it pop up again here. “King Rat” however felt preposterous and overwrought the first time I heard it – and doesn’t gain anything from the new digs.

Of the other six tracks, there are some other lows. But the whole package would be worth it if only for the explosive “History Sticks To Your Feet.” Isaac’s got his bark going on to great effect, and the guitar tear everything apart – just like the staccato blade they used to wield back in the day. It’s the sort of track that reminds me of how brilliant these guys really are.

Elsewhere, “Satellite Skin” is a relatively serviceable variation on the sort of songs that populated We Were Dead… It’s a little bit less polished, which is only a good thing in my mind. It doesn’t blow you away, but it’s been growing on me the more I listen to it.

Less successful are “Autumn Beds” which has a nice enough acoustic guitar line but just can’t overcome the cracks in Isaac’s voice and “Perpetual Motion Machine” which has the same horns that I didn’t like back on Good News For People Who Love Bad News. Both of these songs suffer from their Tom Waits obsession, which has just never done anything for me.

And then there’s the rambling mess of “The Whale Song” which wanders around in a drunken stupor for about four minutes before everything blows up (in a good way). Without that payoff the long introduction could have felt like a monumental waste of time…but instead they only help build to the payoff.

Cheat to Win – Slapstick (from Slapstick)

I always disliked John Edwards. I never felt good about it, because I couldn’t ever quite explain what it was about the guy that put me so on edge. All other things equal, I tended to agree with his policy positions more than the other ‘major’ candidates in 2008. And I wasn’t excited about suddenly finding myself being one of those people that voted on amorphous things like ‘character’ and ‘gut feeling.’

It didn’t help that he decided that the form of populism he was going to push was so anti-trade. I love that he made poverty a priority and pushed health care reform and all that. But I don’t see those things as synonymous with the sorts of tariffs and trade restrictions that he was yelling about.

But if I was honest with myself I had to admit that that issue was more a post-facto justification for having already rejected him. Because the thing that really got me was that he just felt so smarmy. I never really believed in him, and felt there was something I just fundamentally couldn’t trust. Even as someone who cares a LOT about the minutia of policy wonkery and who feels a lot of distaste at the “I just trust that person” method of choosing political leaders…I couldn’t get past it. I agreed with a lot of Edwards platform but simply couldn’t imagine wanting him to be in charge.

Of course, with several years of perspective, it turns out that my gut feeling was totally right. His affair and subsequent dealings paint the picture of someone I would not want leading the country.

Which is not to say that I think private sexual issues themselves constitute a reason for rejecting a person. I thought the whole impeachment charade with Clinton was a blight on our politics. And I frankly can’t work up much outrage about David Vitter or Eliot Spitzer or Mark Sanford or whatever. And to the extent that I do get up in arms about that stuff it’s when the public and private selves reveal a massive hypocrisy. When the Republican Party wants to regulate private sexual behavior it’s a bigger deal if the tub-thumpers for that cause reveal themselves to be just as dirty as the next folks. And closeted politicians who push an anti-gay agenda probably deserve a bit of scorn. And if you’re breaking the law in significant ways to fulfill your sexual interests that obviously matters. But really, I’m not ever going to push for someone to get kicked out of office simply because of who they sleep with.

And, generally speaking, I think that’s where a lot of the public is. David Vitter is still in the Senate. Newt Gingrich never got a lot of flak about his affairs. Giuliani managed to get by without a lot of questions. McCain’s stuff with his first wife was off-bounds. And so on.

So I’m curious about why the Edwards thing became so immediately toxic. I remember the day the rumors were confirmed. The general consensus was that ‘this guy is 100% done in politics.’ There was no speculation that he could even TRY to recover. To some extent, that’s because there was no constituency that stuck by his side. His Democratic allies felt no compunctions about kicking him to the curb. In the other direction, if the Republicans in the Senate aren’t going to shun David Vitter, why should we expect the media to?

But I think it has a lot more to do with the underlying dynamic that had already driven him out of the primary. People just kind of felt, deep-down, that this guy was not to be trusted with our politics, our country. And when it turned out that he made such an epic disaster of his own personal life, it just seemed like confirmation of what we already knew.

Result: I was not remotely surprised when all this came out. And I think a lot of other people felt the same way. It just seemed like the sort of thing I already expected out of him. In part because he’s a politician (and sex scandals for politicans shouldn’t be any more suprising than steroids scandals with professional atheletes), but in part because of what I could glean about him in particular.

Looking back, I think I seriously *underestimated* the irresponsibility of this guy. It’s profoundly disturbing that someone could seek the Democratic nomination while KNOWING that this was all out there. It’s one thing to cheat on your spouse. But then there’s cheating on your spouse who has cancer, failing to use protection, having a child with the other woman, trying to get a friend to pretend to be the father, getting your supporters to try and buy off the other woman. And then, in the immediate aftermath you launch a presidental campaign rested in no small part on the strong relationship between you and your awesome wife. And to top it all off, you risk the absolute worst case scenario of this stuff all getting revealed in the weeks or even DAYS leading up to the election.

Imagine, just imagine, that Edwards had won the nomination. And then in September or October all of this stuff came out. How many states do you think he’d have won? Single digits? People might eventually come to forgive a politician, but that stuff takes time, at an absolute minimum.

So Edwards launched his campaign KNOWING what kind of danger he was putting the Party (and the country) in. What kind of an ego does that take? What kind of judgment does it imply? What lack of concern for all the policies, principles, and ideas you supposedly stood for. To sublimate all of that underneath your own ambition…

That’s not something people are likely to forgive. It’s more than a little bit scary to imagine someone that reckless running the country.

So it appears that Massachusetts has (re)changed its rules about Senate appointments to allow the seating of an interim replacement for Ted Kennedy. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this is a crassly political move steeped in hypocrisy. After all, they only changed the rules in 2004 to prevent the governor at the time (Romney) from being able to appoint a Republican during the interim period.

So I can sympathize with this sort of attitude:

I’m not sure why they didn’t avoid this problem for the future by drafting it as “Democratic Party governors shall have the power to appoint replacements to the Senate, Republican governors shall not.” Surely that represents the will of the people better…

Still, it’s not really the same is it? The consistent theme in both of these cases is that the Massachusetts legislature wanted to ensure that the public would continue to receive the kind of representation that they had voted for. Romney appointing a temporary Republican sure doesn’t FEEL very democratic (small d) does it? And similarly, it would be macabre and depressing were health care reform to either fail to pass or be extremely watered down solely because Ted Kennedy died at an inopportune moment.

The people of Massachusetts voted for someone who made fixing our health care disaster one of his primary goals for his life. To deny them the chance to help make that a reality would be tragic and unfair.

So yeah, I’m okay with the appointment, even while recognizing that it’s an unfortunate process that surrounds it. All of which merely suggests that we really ought to do something to formalize this process so it can be taken out of the hands of political operatives all around. Perhaps a law that the person tapped may not run in the next election and must be selected from within the same party as the one who died.