Lily Salter's Blog, page 980
October 16, 2015
We are still plagued by “Heart of Darkness”: Conrad’s ambiguous masterpiece haunts the new “Beasts of No Nation,” and almost every other Western work about Africa’s troubles
Why is Africa the way it is? As Joseph Conrad observed at the turn of the previous century, it’s a question that tormented “civilized” Europe, which gazed into a continent it considered primitive and unknown only to find a dark mirror of its own brutality. It is also a loaded or overloaded question that begins by assuming too much. How much do we really understand about Africa, in the global north and the industrialized West, about its past or present or possible future? Beyond clichéd images of starving children, shantytowns and incomprehensible tribal warfare – clichés that are not entirely inaccurate, but cannot encompass an enormous and diverse continent of 54 (or possibly 56) sovereign nations, more than 1 billion people and perhaps 3,000 languages – the answer is that we understand almost nothing. Conrad’s 1899 “Heart of Darkness,” with its memorable portrayal of Kurtz, a white colonial officer in the Belgian Congo driven to madness and murder, is increasingly viewed by Western academics as a problematic work and has been sharply criticized by African writers and intellectuals. Chinua Achebe, probably the continent’s most prominent novelist, attacked Conrad’s novella in a famous 1975 lecture as “an offensive and deplorable book” whose critique of colonialism is so corrupted by racism and xenophobia as to undermine any claims to literary greatness. Some Africans or people of African ancestry, including the British novelist Caryl Phillips, have taken a more nuanced view, perhaps because they perceive that “Heart of Darkness” is not so much about Africa as about European civilization’s confrontation with itself, and that the darkness Conrad perceives is within the human soul, and has little to do with geography or skin color. To this day “Heart of Darkness” retains a powerful grip on the Western imagination when it comes to our engagement with the colonial and imperial past and the global capitalist present, around the world but especially in Africa. All the problems and limitations Achebe identified in Conrad’s work are still with us too, in subtly altered form, making it difficult for us to perceive Africa on its own terms through the scrim of Western arrogance and guilt and self-delusion and self-regard. By any reasonable standard, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s much-anticipated film “Beasts of No Nation” (which is released simultaneously in theaters and on Netflix this week) is also a Western work set amid the baffling and possibly metaphorical carnage of Africa, and one with a distinct debt to Conrad’s classic. “Beasts” is an alternately gruesome and heartbreaking tale of innocence destroyed, built around the remarkable performance of child actor Abraham Attah as an orphaned boy in an unnamed West African country who becomes a child soldier in a civil war he doesn’t remotely understand. The film was shot in Ghana, but financed in America. Its writer and director, best known for his stylish and moody work on the first season of “True Detective,” is from California. Its only name actor, Idris Elba – who plays a charismatic, ruthless and possibly psychotic warlord with distinctly Kurtz-like qualities -- is from the London suburbs. Yes, Fukunaga’s screenplay is based on the acclaimed novel by writer, scholar and physician Uzodinma Iweala, who was born in Nigeria – but who largely grew up in Washington, D.C., where he attended St. Albans School before going to Harvard. I’m not disputing Iweala’s credentials or his African identity. I’m observing that the world of the 21st century has become complicated in ways Joseph Conrad could not have imagined, but that the dynamic cultural relationship between Africa and the West that he saw in the 1890s has continued to evolve. Iweala is as much a product of Conrad’s tradition as of any indigenous African tradition, and even Chinua Achebe surely understood that it’s much too late to disentangle the two. My problem with “Beasts of No Nation” is not with Attah and its other young actors, not with Fukunaga’s ambitious ground-level cinematography (he shot the film himself) and certainly not with Elba’s terrifying but magnetic antihero, known only as the Commandant, who dominates his child warriors through a combination of brutality, drugs, sexual abuse, superstition and psychological manipulation. Nor is it Fukunaga’s canny inversion of Conrad’s archetypes and the suggestion – which is by no means a new idea – that colonial psychopaths like Kurtz served as teachers and models for generations of African Kurtzes who emerged from the chaos of the post-colonial era. But at least in Fukunaga’s screen adaptation, “Beasts” is a faintly patronizing and emotionally manipulative work that explains far too much about its central character’s inner life (as if we couldn’t tell that he is profoundly traumatized after he is forced to kill a man with a machete) but almost nothing about his social context. Even in its better moments, as when we see Elba’s ghoulish Commandant as a weak and power-hungry man at the mercy of greater forces who has learned one lesson – the logic of superior force and ruthless violence – I wanted to go back to other movies that tackle the contradictions of contemporary Africa and its relationship to the West more honestly and directly. If the accessibility and wide availability of “Beasts of No Nation,” along with Elba’s star appeal, opens a door for audiences, then the film will have done its job. On the other side of that door are many dazzling discoveries that don’t have one-tenth of this movie’s profile but help illuminate my naïve opening question: What happened to Africa, and who is to blame? There are “Timbuktu” and “Bamako,” the masterpieces of Abderrahmane Sissako, Africa’s greatest living filmmaker. (Who lives and works in France, because there is no escaping the global system or the historic crimes depicted in his films.) There are the acerbic, witty and brilliant documentaries of Austrian director Hubert Sauper, who has repeatedly risked his life flying around Africa in a homemade airplane, “Darwin’s Nightmare” and “We Come as Friends.” There is “War Witch” by the Canadian director Kim Nguyen, and “Munyurangabo,” by the American director Lee Isaac Chung, two zero-budget indies about African war orphans that are better than “Beasts of No Nation.” (The fact that three such films have been made by North American directors of Asian ancestry is a coincidence I will not try to explain.) Standing as the theoretical underpinning or advanced course behind all those, there is also Göran Hugo Olsson’s haunting and mesmerizing collage documentary “Concerning Violence,” a work I return to almost compulsively. Composed entirely of vintage film or video footage drawn from the half-forgotten era of African revolutionary nationalism and anti-colonial warfare, it features Lauryn Hill reading excerpts from “The Wretched of the Earth,” the classic work of revolutionary philosophy by Caribbean-born, French-educated black radical Frantz Fanon. It was Fanon who observed that colonialism teaches the native people that violence is the only effective political strategy, and the only language the colonizing power will ever understand. That was the lesson Joseph Conrad saw in Africa in the 1890s, however imperfectly, and that “Beasts of No Nation” echoes today.Why is Africa the way it is? As Joseph Conrad observed at the turn of the previous century, it’s a question that tormented “civilized” Europe, which gazed into a continent it considered primitive and unknown only to find a dark mirror of its own brutality. It is also a loaded or overloaded question that begins by assuming too much. How much do we really understand about Africa, in the global north and the industrialized West, about its past or present or possible future? Beyond clichéd images of starving children, shantytowns and incomprehensible tribal warfare – clichés that are not entirely inaccurate, but cannot encompass an enormous and diverse continent of 54 (or possibly 56) sovereign nations, more than 1 billion people and perhaps 3,000 languages – the answer is that we understand almost nothing. Conrad’s 1899 “Heart of Darkness,” with its memorable portrayal of Kurtz, a white colonial officer in the Belgian Congo driven to madness and murder, is increasingly viewed by Western academics as a problematic work and has been sharply criticized by African writers and intellectuals. Chinua Achebe, probably the continent’s most prominent novelist, attacked Conrad’s novella in a famous 1975 lecture as “an offensive and deplorable book” whose critique of colonialism is so corrupted by racism and xenophobia as to undermine any claims to literary greatness. Some Africans or people of African ancestry, including the British novelist Caryl Phillips, have taken a more nuanced view, perhaps because they perceive that “Heart of Darkness” is not so much about Africa as about European civilization’s confrontation with itself, and that the darkness Conrad perceives is within the human soul, and has little to do with geography or skin color. To this day “Heart of Darkness” retains a powerful grip on the Western imagination when it comes to our engagement with the colonial and imperial past and the global capitalist present, around the world but especially in Africa. All the problems and limitations Achebe identified in Conrad’s work are still with us too, in subtly altered form, making it difficult for us to perceive Africa on its own terms through the scrim of Western arrogance and guilt and self-delusion and self-regard. By any reasonable standard, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s much-anticipated film “Beasts of No Nation” (which is released simultaneously in theaters and on Netflix this week) is also a Western work set amid the baffling and possibly metaphorical carnage of Africa, and one with a distinct debt to Conrad’s classic. “Beasts” is an alternately gruesome and heartbreaking tale of innocence destroyed, built around the remarkable performance of child actor Abraham Attah as an orphaned boy in an unnamed West African country who becomes a child soldier in a civil war he doesn’t remotely understand. The film was shot in Ghana, but financed in America. Its writer and director, best known for his stylish and moody work on the first season of “True Detective,” is from California. Its only name actor, Idris Elba – who plays a charismatic, ruthless and possibly psychotic warlord with distinctly Kurtz-like qualities -- is from the London suburbs. Yes, Fukunaga’s screenplay is based on the acclaimed novel by writer, scholar and physician Uzodinma Iweala, who was born in Nigeria – but who largely grew up in Washington, D.C., where he attended St. Albans School before going to Harvard. I’m not disputing Iweala’s credentials or his African identity. I’m observing that the world of the 21st century has become complicated in ways Joseph Conrad could not have imagined, but that the dynamic cultural relationship between Africa and the West that he saw in the 1890s has continued to evolve. Iweala is as much a product of Conrad’s tradition as of any indigenous African tradition, and even Chinua Achebe surely understood that it’s much too late to disentangle the two. My problem with “Beasts of No Nation” is not with Attah and its other young actors, not with Fukunaga’s ambitious ground-level cinematography (he shot the film himself) and certainly not with Elba’s terrifying but magnetic antihero, known only as the Commandant, who dominates his child warriors through a combination of brutality, drugs, sexual abuse, superstition and psychological manipulation. Nor is it Fukunaga’s canny inversion of Conrad’s archetypes and the suggestion – which is by no means a new idea – that colonial psychopaths like Kurtz served as teachers and models for generations of African Kurtzes who emerged from the chaos of the post-colonial era. But at least in Fukunaga’s screen adaptation, “Beasts” is a faintly patronizing and emotionally manipulative work that explains far too much about its central character’s inner life (as if we couldn’t tell that he is profoundly traumatized after he is forced to kill a man with a machete) but almost nothing about his social context. Even in its better moments, as when we see Elba’s ghoulish Commandant as a weak and power-hungry man at the mercy of greater forces who has learned one lesson – the logic of superior force and ruthless violence – I wanted to go back to other movies that tackle the contradictions of contemporary Africa and its relationship to the West more honestly and directly. If the accessibility and wide availability of “Beasts of No Nation,” along with Elba’s star appeal, opens a door for audiences, then the film will have done its job. On the other side of that door are many dazzling discoveries that don’t have one-tenth of this movie’s profile but help illuminate my naïve opening question: What happened to Africa, and who is to blame? There are “Timbuktu” and “Bamako,” the masterpieces of Abderrahmane Sissako, Africa’s greatest living filmmaker. (Who lives and works in France, because there is no escaping the global system or the historic crimes depicted in his films.) There are the acerbic, witty and brilliant documentaries of Austrian director Hubert Sauper, who has repeatedly risked his life flying around Africa in a homemade airplane, “Darwin’s Nightmare” and “We Come as Friends.” There is “War Witch” by the Canadian director Kim Nguyen, and “Munyurangabo,” by the American director Lee Isaac Chung, two zero-budget indies about African war orphans that are better than “Beasts of No Nation.” (The fact that three such films have been made by North American directors of Asian ancestry is a coincidence I will not try to explain.) Standing as the theoretical underpinning or advanced course behind all those, there is also Göran Hugo Olsson’s haunting and mesmerizing collage documentary “Concerning Violence,” a work I return to almost compulsively. Composed entirely of vintage film or video footage drawn from the half-forgotten era of African revolutionary nationalism and anti-colonial warfare, it features Lauryn Hill reading excerpts from “The Wretched of the Earth,” the classic work of revolutionary philosophy by Caribbean-born, French-educated black radical Frantz Fanon. It was Fanon who observed that colonialism teaches the native people that violence is the only effective political strategy, and the only language the colonizing power will ever understand. That was the lesson Joseph Conrad saw in Africa in the 1890s, however imperfectly, and that “Beasts of No Nation” echoes today.
Chris Hayes upends the latest Jeb Bush/Donald Trump 9/11 feud with one tweet
First Donald Trump reminded everyone today that the president on September 11 was one George W. Bush. "When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time," Trump told Bloomberg TV. "He was president, OK? ... Blame him, or don't blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign." Then Jeb! took to Twitter, to call Trump's remarks "pathetic." "We were attacked & my brother kept us safe," he said. Leave it to Chris Hayes to put that into perspective: [embedtweet id="655109334725210113"]First Donald Trump reminded everyone today that the president on September 11 was one George W. Bush. "When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time," Trump told Bloomberg TV. "He was president, OK? ... Blame him, or don't blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign." Then Jeb! took to Twitter, to call Trump's remarks "pathetic." "We were attacked & my brother kept us safe," he said. Leave it to Chris Hayes to put that into perspective: [embedtweet id="655109334725210113"]First Donald Trump reminded everyone today that the president on September 11 was one George W. Bush. "When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time," Trump told Bloomberg TV. "He was president, OK? ... Blame him, or don't blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign." Then Jeb! took to Twitter, to call Trump's remarks "pathetic." "We were attacked & my brother kept us safe," he said. Leave it to Chris Hayes to put that into perspective: [embedtweet id="655109334725210113"]First Donald Trump reminded everyone today that the president on September 11 was one George W. Bush. "When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time," Trump told Bloomberg TV. "He was president, OK? ... Blame him, or don't blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign." Then Jeb! took to Twitter, to call Trump's remarks "pathetic." "We were attacked & my brother kept us safe," he said. Leave it to Chris Hayes to put that into perspective: [embedtweet id="655109334725210113"]First Donald Trump reminded everyone today that the president on September 11 was one George W. Bush. "When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time," Trump told Bloomberg TV. "He was president, OK? ... Blame him, or don't blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign." Then Jeb! took to Twitter, to call Trump's remarks "pathetic." "We were attacked & my brother kept us safe," he said. Leave it to Chris Hayes to put that into perspective: [embedtweet id="655109334725210113"]First Donald Trump reminded everyone today that the president on September 11 was one George W. Bush. "When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time," Trump told Bloomberg TV. "He was president, OK? ... Blame him, or don't blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign." Then Jeb! took to Twitter, to call Trump's remarks "pathetic." "We were attacked & my brother kept us safe," he said. Leave it to Chris Hayes to put that into perspective: [embedtweet id="655109334725210113"]
Want a gun? Take a bullet: Take this, gutless NRA cowards — you can have a gun, once you understand the pain of being shot
As a teen I watched Chris Rock brilliantly address America's gun problem during his Bigger and Blacker stand up. “We don’t need gun control,” Rock pleaded to a packed house, “We need bullet control––if bullets were $5000, people would think before they shot some one! You gotta really piss someone off for them to dump $50,000 worth of bullets in to you!” And just like the crowd, my brother, some friends and I erupted in laughter. Rock was definitely on point, $5000 bullets would be great but I’d take it a step further––I believe that being shot should be requirement for gun ownership in America. It’s very simple. You need to have gun, like taking selfies with pistols, can’t live with out it? Then take a bullet and you will be granted the right to purchase the firearm of your choice. If we could successfully implement this rule, I guarantee the mass shootings will stop. Watching cable news now in days makes me physically ill. Week in and week out we are forced to learn about another coward, who can’t stand to deal with the same rejection that most of us face–– so they strap themselves with guns and then cock and spray at innocent people. Heartbroken survivors and family member images go viral, as our elected officials remain clueless. The Democrats faced off for the first time this week. Clinton lead with a stat that was just as staggering as it was sad, “90 people a day die due to gun violence!” followed by the rhetoric that has been tossed around for years––more rigorous gun laws coupled with a stricter screening process and plans that are never clear or properly fleshed out. She and Bernie traded blows on who’s tougher but still––no solutions on aggressively addressing this matter. People like Dr. Ben Carson make matters worse with the same tired sayings that offer guns as a solution to everything––even historic tragedies like the Holocaust and recommending that fire arms be present in elementary classrooms. I know that if you want to win a Republican nomination, you must be a rifle-hugging Christian. However, Carson’s responses to our nation's gun problem, along with statements from the rest of the gang that make up the Republican candidates on the these mass shootings have been some of the most disrespectful, insensitive things I ever heard in my life and represent why many in our nation are disenchanted with party politics. I expect the disconnect from a guy like Trump who has probably never met a poor person in his life, but Carson spent years in my hometown of Baltimore. The nation knows that people in Baltimore are quick to reach for their guns, as our per capita murder ranks among the highest in the country every year. Carson worked at Johns Hopkins, a place that treated many victims of senseless gun violence and even tells the story of the time a dude in Popeye’s whipped out on him. If that dude would have shot him, his view on gun control would be completely different. Bullets are extremely hot and they hurt. I saw them paralyze, cut through faces, pierce children and take life. I have friends, relatives and loved ones be gunned down. Guns break apart families and ruin lives. Other than giving a coward the heart to stand tall, what’s the positive part of gun ownership? Other than the people in rural areas who use them to hunt for food, I have only seen them destroy, both in the suburbs and in our inner cities. Gun culture is American culture––it’s historic, stitched into the fabric of our country and can’t be assigned to regions or ideologies. Thomas Jefferson’s vice president Aaron Burr murdered Alexander Hamilton, the guy on your $10 bill, over political disagreements. President Andrew Jackson loved guns and was itchy to use them as a tool to settle disputes. And then there is the untimely deaths of our revolutionaries and icons. Huey Newton was shot to death. Fred Hampton, a guy with enough power to end gang violence in Chicago was shot. Guns killed Lennon, Kennedy–– Medgar and Martin and Malcolm. 2Pac and Biggie, national treasures and pioneers of an original art form created in America both gunned down before their time with Columbine, that movie theater in Colorado, the elementary school in Connecticut, VA Teach, the military center in Chattanooga, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Umpqua in Oregon and a laundry list of other places as the back drop. The fact is that our country isn’t responsible enough for firearms. They always end up in the wrong hands. Gun praisers are just like the people who were in favor of slavery back in the day–– the elite, lazy and ignorant who weren’t being beaten, raped or in the field doing the work, so they were perfectly okay with involuntary servitude, which is a problem and why I think gun owners need to feel more––they need a taste of the other side. So if you love guns, if they make you feel safe, if you hold and cuddle with them at night, then you need to be shot. You need to feel a bullet rip through your flesh, and if you survive and enjoy the feeling––then the right to bear arms will be all yours.As a teen I watched Chris Rock brilliantly address America's gun problem during his Bigger and Blacker stand up. “We don’t need gun control,” Rock pleaded to a packed house, “We need bullet control––if bullets were $5000, people would think before they shot some one! You gotta really piss someone off for them to dump $50,000 worth of bullets in to you!” And just like the crowd, my brother, some friends and I erupted in laughter. Rock was definitely on point, $5000 bullets would be great but I’d take it a step further––I believe that being shot should be requirement for gun ownership in America. It’s very simple. You need to have gun, like taking selfies with pistols, can’t live with out it? Then take a bullet and you will be granted the right to purchase the firearm of your choice. If we could successfully implement this rule, I guarantee the mass shootings will stop. Watching cable news now in days makes me physically ill. Week in and week out we are forced to learn about another coward, who can’t stand to deal with the same rejection that most of us face–– so they strap themselves with guns and then cock and spray at innocent people. Heartbroken survivors and family member images go viral, as our elected officials remain clueless. The Democrats faced off for the first time this week. Clinton lead with a stat that was just as staggering as it was sad, “90 people a day die due to gun violence!” followed by the rhetoric that has been tossed around for years––more rigorous gun laws coupled with a stricter screening process and plans that are never clear or properly fleshed out. She and Bernie traded blows on who’s tougher but still––no solutions on aggressively addressing this matter. People like Dr. Ben Carson make matters worse with the same tired sayings that offer guns as a solution to everything––even historic tragedies like the Holocaust and recommending that fire arms be present in elementary classrooms. I know that if you want to win a Republican nomination, you must be a rifle-hugging Christian. However, Carson’s responses to our nation's gun problem, along with statements from the rest of the gang that make up the Republican candidates on the these mass shootings have been some of the most disrespectful, insensitive things I ever heard in my life and represent why many in our nation are disenchanted with party politics. I expect the disconnect from a guy like Trump who has probably never met a poor person in his life, but Carson spent years in my hometown of Baltimore. The nation knows that people in Baltimore are quick to reach for their guns, as our per capita murder ranks among the highest in the country every year. Carson worked at Johns Hopkins, a place that treated many victims of senseless gun violence and even tells the story of the time a dude in Popeye’s whipped out on him. If that dude would have shot him, his view on gun control would be completely different. Bullets are extremely hot and they hurt. I saw them paralyze, cut through faces, pierce children and take life. I have friends, relatives and loved ones be gunned down. Guns break apart families and ruin lives. Other than giving a coward the heart to stand tall, what’s the positive part of gun ownership? Other than the people in rural areas who use them to hunt for food, I have only seen them destroy, both in the suburbs and in our inner cities. Gun culture is American culture––it’s historic, stitched into the fabric of our country and can’t be assigned to regions or ideologies. Thomas Jefferson’s vice president Aaron Burr murdered Alexander Hamilton, the guy on your $10 bill, over political disagreements. President Andrew Jackson loved guns and was itchy to use them as a tool to settle disputes. And then there is the untimely deaths of our revolutionaries and icons. Huey Newton was shot to death. Fred Hampton, a guy with enough power to end gang violence in Chicago was shot. Guns killed Lennon, Kennedy–– Medgar and Martin and Malcolm. 2Pac and Biggie, national treasures and pioneers of an original art form created in America both gunned down before their time with Columbine, that movie theater in Colorado, the elementary school in Connecticut, VA Teach, the military center in Chattanooga, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Umpqua in Oregon and a laundry list of other places as the back drop. The fact is that our country isn’t responsible enough for firearms. They always end up in the wrong hands. Gun praisers are just like the people who were in favor of slavery back in the day–– the elite, lazy and ignorant who weren’t being beaten, raped or in the field doing the work, so they were perfectly okay with involuntary servitude, which is a problem and why I think gun owners need to feel more––they need a taste of the other side. So if you love guns, if they make you feel safe, if you hold and cuddle with them at night, then you need to be shot. You need to feel a bullet rip through your flesh, and if you survive and enjoy the feeling––then the right to bear arms will be all yours.As a teen I watched Chris Rock brilliantly address America's gun problem during his Bigger and Blacker stand up. “We don’t need gun control,” Rock pleaded to a packed house, “We need bullet control––if bullets were $5000, people would think before they shot some one! You gotta really piss someone off for them to dump $50,000 worth of bullets in to you!” And just like the crowd, my brother, some friends and I erupted in laughter. Rock was definitely on point, $5000 bullets would be great but I’d take it a step further––I believe that being shot should be requirement for gun ownership in America. It’s very simple. You need to have gun, like taking selfies with pistols, can’t live with out it? Then take a bullet and you will be granted the right to purchase the firearm of your choice. If we could successfully implement this rule, I guarantee the mass shootings will stop. Watching cable news now in days makes me physically ill. Week in and week out we are forced to learn about another coward, who can’t stand to deal with the same rejection that most of us face–– so they strap themselves with guns and then cock and spray at innocent people. Heartbroken survivors and family member images go viral, as our elected officials remain clueless. The Democrats faced off for the first time this week. Clinton lead with a stat that was just as staggering as it was sad, “90 people a day die due to gun violence!” followed by the rhetoric that has been tossed around for years––more rigorous gun laws coupled with a stricter screening process and plans that are never clear or properly fleshed out. She and Bernie traded blows on who’s tougher but still––no solutions on aggressively addressing this matter. People like Dr. Ben Carson make matters worse with the same tired sayings that offer guns as a solution to everything––even historic tragedies like the Holocaust and recommending that fire arms be present in elementary classrooms. I know that if you want to win a Republican nomination, you must be a rifle-hugging Christian. However, Carson’s responses to our nation's gun problem, along with statements from the rest of the gang that make up the Republican candidates on the these mass shootings have been some of the most disrespectful, insensitive things I ever heard in my life and represent why many in our nation are disenchanted with party politics. I expect the disconnect from a guy like Trump who has probably never met a poor person in his life, but Carson spent years in my hometown of Baltimore. The nation knows that people in Baltimore are quick to reach for their guns, as our per capita murder ranks among the highest in the country every year. Carson worked at Johns Hopkins, a place that treated many victims of senseless gun violence and even tells the story of the time a dude in Popeye’s whipped out on him. If that dude would have shot him, his view on gun control would be completely different. Bullets are extremely hot and they hurt. I saw them paralyze, cut through faces, pierce children and take life. I have friends, relatives and loved ones be gunned down. Guns break apart families and ruin lives. Other than giving a coward the heart to stand tall, what’s the positive part of gun ownership? Other than the people in rural areas who use them to hunt for food, I have only seen them destroy, both in the suburbs and in our inner cities. Gun culture is American culture––it’s historic, stitched into the fabric of our country and can’t be assigned to regions or ideologies. Thomas Jefferson’s vice president Aaron Burr murdered Alexander Hamilton, the guy on your $10 bill, over political disagreements. President Andrew Jackson loved guns and was itchy to use them as a tool to settle disputes. And then there is the untimely deaths of our revolutionaries and icons. Huey Newton was shot to death. Fred Hampton, a guy with enough power to end gang violence in Chicago was shot. Guns killed Lennon, Kennedy–– Medgar and Martin and Malcolm. 2Pac and Biggie, national treasures and pioneers of an original art form created in America both gunned down before their time with Columbine, that movie theater in Colorado, the elementary school in Connecticut, VA Teach, the military center in Chattanooga, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Umpqua in Oregon and a laundry list of other places as the back drop. The fact is that our country isn’t responsible enough for firearms. They always end up in the wrong hands. Gun praisers are just like the people who were in favor of slavery back in the day–– the elite, lazy and ignorant who weren’t being beaten, raped or in the field doing the work, so they were perfectly okay with involuntary servitude, which is a problem and why I think gun owners need to feel more––they need a taste of the other side. So if you love guns, if they make you feel safe, if you hold and cuddle with them at night, then you need to be shot. You need to feel a bullet rip through your flesh, and if you survive and enjoy the feeling––then the right to bear arms will be all yours.
Jenny McCarthy’s absurd Playboy hypocrisy: “They weren’t the girls that had just got off Monday nights on the poles”
Taking a break from spreading bad science about vaccines and autism, former model and "The View" host-turned-reality show star Jenny McCarthy waxed nostalgic about her time as a Playboy Playmate after the magazine announced this week that it would cease running nude photographs in its printed magazine. On her SiriusXM show "Dirty Sexy Funny" this week, a heartbroken McCarthy declared, "in solidarity, I will be wearing my panties at half-mast." Why the wistfulness over the end naked women in Playboy? McCarthy lamented the end of the era of "classy" nudes that the magazine was known for, heaping praise on their method of showcasing "girls next door" ... like her: “They weren’t the girls that had just got off Monday nights on the poles." In McCarthy's vision, women who want to pose nude for men's magazines are acceptable only when they "capture the innocence in the women," as in her own 1993 test shoot, when "I had one uni-brow and a giant bush to my knees, and they were like, ‘You’re in! You’re a girl next door!’" "There was nothing ever skanky, I thought, about the photos," she continued. "There was nothing I felt was too embarrassing or too gross." McCarthy has every right to be proud of her 1993 appearance in Playboy, which turned into a Playmate of the Year designation and launched the totally not-embarrassing career she has today starring in A&E's "Donnie Loves Jenny," the sort of reality TV "Joanie Loves Chachi" to "Wahlburgers"' "Happy Days." What she doesn't get to cling to is a completely "embarrassing" and "too gross" moral high ground of slut-shaming dancers or other women and men who have performed sex work that isn't up to her own hypocritical standards. Then again, many logical people have been flying their own panties at half-mast for years over McCarthy's departure from reality on everything from medical science and immunity to working for "The View." Call me skanky, but being the symbolic face of the crackpot "why not bring polio back?" movement would be a great deal more shameful to me than someone thinking I look like a stripper, "classy" or otherwise. McCarthy has generously volunteered to be in Playboy's last nude issue — hopefully not alongside anyone embarrassing and gross, of course. Listen to the whole segment: Taking a break from spreading bad science about vaccines and autism, former model and "The View" host-turned-reality show star Jenny McCarthy waxed nostalgic about her time as a Playboy Playmate after the magazine announced this week that it would cease running nude photographs in its printed magazine. On her SiriusXM show "Dirty Sexy Funny" this week, a heartbroken McCarthy declared, "in solidarity, I will be wearing my panties at half-mast." Why the wistfulness over the end naked women in Playboy? McCarthy lamented the end of the era of "classy" nudes that the magazine was known for, heaping praise on their method of showcasing "girls next door" ... like her: “They weren’t the girls that had just got off Monday nights on the poles." In McCarthy's vision, women who want to pose nude for men's magazines are acceptable only when they "capture the innocence in the women," as in her own 1993 test shoot, when "I had one uni-brow and a giant bush to my knees, and they were like, ‘You’re in! You’re a girl next door!’" "There was nothing ever skanky, I thought, about the photos," she continued. "There was nothing I felt was too embarrassing or too gross." McCarthy has every right to be proud of her 1993 appearance in Playboy, which turned into a Playmate of the Year designation and launched the totally not-embarrassing career she has today starring in A&E's "Donnie Loves Jenny," the sort of reality TV "Joanie Loves Chachi" to "Wahlburgers"' "Happy Days." What she doesn't get to cling to is a completely "embarrassing" and "too gross" moral high ground of slut-shaming dancers or other women and men who have performed sex work that isn't up to her own hypocritical standards. Then again, many logical people have been flying their own panties at half-mast for years over McCarthy's departure from reality on everything from medical science and immunity to working for "The View." Call me skanky, but being the symbolic face of the crackpot "why not bring polio back?" movement would be a great deal more shameful to me than someone thinking I look like a stripper, "classy" or otherwise. McCarthy has generously volunteered to be in Playboy's last nude issue — hopefully not alongside anyone embarrassing and gross, of course. Listen to the whole segment:
Men need rape crisis care, too: We know men are sexually assaulted — why is it so hard for them to get help?
Rape is a crime that thrives on the shame and silence of the victim. And if you're a male survivor of sexual assault, the challenges of being heard — and of being taken seriously — are unique. Too often, the idea that men can be raped is treated as a joke, or a commentary on their sexuality, or a fitting punishment for their own misdeeds. But now, what's being dubbed as the first facility of its kind has opened in Sweden — a rape center for men. The center, which Metro UK says opened in Stockholm's Södersjukhuset hospital on Thursday, was first announced back in the summer, with the promise of offering "gender equal" services for men and boys. The hospital already has a round the clock walk-in clinic that serves between 600 and 700 patients annually. Speaking to Sweden's Sveriges Radio in July, Lotti Helström, a senior physician at the hospital, said that the new facility aims to dispel myths and stigma. "The general perception is that men cannot be raped," Helström explained, adding, "In studies, the health effects are shown to be greater for men, both in terms of physical health and mental health. There is a greater risk of a raped man getting post-traumatic stress disorder," in part because the topic is considered "extremely taboo." The timing and location are especially apt, in a country that claims the dubious distinction of the highest rate of sexual assault in Europe. (A report in Sweden's The Local does note, however, that part of that high number may come from the fact that "the country records allegations in a different way to most other countries, tracking each case of sexual violence separately.") But throughout the world, sexual violence against men — in acts committed both by men and by women — is both astonishingly prevalent and disturbingly underreported. Here in the U.S., the FBI only recognized that men can be rape victims in 2012. Last year, a report on "The Sexual Victimization of Men in America" concluded that "federal surveys detect a high prevalence of sexual victimization among men — in many circumstances similar to the prevalence found among women." Male sexual assault occurs across a spectrum, from intimate relationships to locker rooms to prison cells. In 2013, the father of a 13 year-old Colorado boy who claimed he'd been sexually abused by three members of his wrestling team was told blithely by the parent of one of the suspects, "This happens 1,000 times a day around the U.S." The statistics on male prison rape, meanwhile, are varying and conflicting, but a 2012 report estimated that "More than one-third of gay and bisexual male inmates said that they were victimized by another inmate. By comparison, only 3.5% of straight male inmates reported being sexually assaulted by other inmates." Oh, only. There are nearly 1.5 million men in America's penal system. The incidence of prison sexual assault is, as Jill Filipovic wrote in the Guardian in 2013, "horrifying." Meanwhile, in the UK earlier this year, Survivors UK, a support organization for men who've experienced sexual assault, found its funding from the Ministry of Justice victims’ fund withdrawn. The Guardian reported in August that it is now in danger of closing — "despite a 120% increase in male victims of sexual violence in the capital last year." And just earlier this month, a judge ordered that the female babysitter who sexually abused a male child in her charge was given a suspended sentence after declaring, "It was quite clear he was a mature 11-year-old." It's pretty hard to stop a problem that isn't recognized as a problem. To end sexual violence against men — just like ending it against women — it has to first be acknowledged. And in one corner of Scandinavia, now it is. It's a start.Rape is a crime that thrives on the shame and silence of the victim. And if you're a male survivor of sexual assault, the challenges of being heard — and of being taken seriously — are unique. Too often, the idea that men can be raped is treated as a joke, or a commentary on their sexuality, or a fitting punishment for their own misdeeds. But now, what's being dubbed as the first facility of its kind has opened in Sweden — a rape center for men. The center, which Metro UK says opened in Stockholm's Södersjukhuset hospital on Thursday, was first announced back in the summer, with the promise of offering "gender equal" services for men and boys. The hospital already has a round the clock walk-in clinic that serves between 600 and 700 patients annually. Speaking to Sweden's Sveriges Radio in July, Lotti Helström, a senior physician at the hospital, said that the new facility aims to dispel myths and stigma. "The general perception is that men cannot be raped," Helström explained, adding, "In studies, the health effects are shown to be greater for men, both in terms of physical health and mental health. There is a greater risk of a raped man getting post-traumatic stress disorder," in part because the topic is considered "extremely taboo." The timing and location are especially apt, in a country that claims the dubious distinction of the highest rate of sexual assault in Europe. (A report in Sweden's The Local does note, however, that part of that high number may come from the fact that "the country records allegations in a different way to most other countries, tracking each case of sexual violence separately.") But throughout the world, sexual violence against men — in acts committed both by men and by women — is both astonishingly prevalent and disturbingly underreported. Here in the U.S., the FBI only recognized that men can be rape victims in 2012. Last year, a report on "The Sexual Victimization of Men in America" concluded that "federal surveys detect a high prevalence of sexual victimization among men — in many circumstances similar to the prevalence found among women." Male sexual assault occurs across a spectrum, from intimate relationships to locker rooms to prison cells. In 2013, the father of a 13 year-old Colorado boy who claimed he'd been sexually abused by three members of his wrestling team was told blithely by the parent of one of the suspects, "This happens 1,000 times a day around the U.S." The statistics on male prison rape, meanwhile, are varying and conflicting, but a 2012 report estimated that "More than one-third of gay and bisexual male inmates said that they were victimized by another inmate. By comparison, only 3.5% of straight male inmates reported being sexually assaulted by other inmates." Oh, only. There are nearly 1.5 million men in America's penal system. The incidence of prison sexual assault is, as Jill Filipovic wrote in the Guardian in 2013, "horrifying." Meanwhile, in the UK earlier this year, Survivors UK, a support organization for men who've experienced sexual assault, found its funding from the Ministry of Justice victims’ fund withdrawn. The Guardian reported in August that it is now in danger of closing — "despite a 120% increase in male victims of sexual violence in the capital last year." And just earlier this month, a judge ordered that the female babysitter who sexually abused a male child in her charge was given a suspended sentence after declaring, "It was quite clear he was a mature 11-year-old." It's pretty hard to stop a problem that isn't recognized as a problem. To end sexual violence against men — just like ending it against women — it has to first be acknowledged. And in one corner of Scandinavia, now it is. It's a start.
The GOP’s entire identity is based on a lie: How the Obama presidency exposed Republican deficit delusions
Following the first Democratic debate, Fox News and the broader conservative ecosystem erupted in a coordinated effort to paint the Democrats as frivolous spenders, handing out free stuff to everyone without bothering to discuss how they'd pay for it. However, the irony of this attack is thick, given how the Democrats have taken up the burden of fiscal responsibility in the modern era. The Republican Party has no choice but to dig deeply into the history books to find the last GOP president who actually bothered to leave the deficit in better shape than when he was inaugurated. Meanwhile, President Obama, like President Clinton before him, has seen the federal budget deficit fall by record numbers. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch site, the federal government ran up a deficit of $439 billion for the 2015 fiscal year. That's 2.5 percent of GDP, which is the lowest level since 2007. Why is this significant? The Obama administration inherited a $1.4 trillion (with a "t") budget deficit -- driven in large part by stimulus spending meant to combat the financial crisis -- which authorized George W. Bush in October 2008. Since then, Obama has presided over a gradual $1 trillion-dollar reduction in the deficit. Insofar as deficit reduction is important -- and remember, according to the rhetoric of the GOP over the past several years, it is very important -- this is a massive achievement for the Obama administration. Massive. And neither he nor the Democrats will get any credit for it.
Chart via Steve Benen
If Mitt Romney's lies about the deficit in 2012 were a predictor of the GOP's attack plan for 2016, we can expect to hear the Republican ticket attack both Obama and the Democratic nominee on this very issue. But they won't cite deficit numbers because, well, they're not nearly as dumb as they look. Instead, they'll recycle the Romney tactic of conflating the deficit and the national debt -- two entirely separate numbers. For example, Romney said during his first debate against Obama in 2012: "The president said he’d cut the deficit in half. Unfortunately, he doubled it." Well, no. The deficit wasn't "doubled" at all. It was the debt that rose, but analysts have repeatedly shown that the chief drivers of national debt were George W. Bush's wars, Medicare Part-D (a Bush-era policy) and the impact of the Great Recession -- none of which was offset with higher taxes or spending cuts. Obama can hardly be blamed for all that. Not insignificantly, though, the Obama administration's deficit reduction has slowed the growth of the debt. In fact, the year-over-year increase in the debt has slowed to 10 percent. Compare that with the highest growth rate for the debt ever -- 13.4 percent per year under, yes, Ronald Reagan. We'll circle back to comparing the records of recent presidents in a second. Meanwhile, contra Romney, Obama promised to cut the deficit in half, and he did. It took him five years instead of four, but he did it. Suffice to say, when you hear the GOP talk about government spending, listen for their deliberate swapping of the terms "deficit" and "debt." They do it a lot. How exactly did Obama manage to slash the deficit so drastically? It's true that Republicans have controlled the House of Representatives since January 2011 (along with the Senate this term) and those years have been marked by aggressive GOP attempts to roll back the welfare state, punctuated by episodes of legislative brinksmanship that ultimately resulted in the dreaded sequester. But that only tells a part of the story. Nearly every bill signed by the president has included offsets to make the spending deficit neutral. Why? Because it's been the law of the land ever since President Obama signed the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act in February 2010, which mandates that new spending be offset with spending cuts or new revenue. Yes, a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress passed this legislation. Guess how many congressional Republicans voted for the law. Zero. Not one. Consequently, the president is responsible for the lowest government spending growth in 60 years. Once again, let's reference Market Watch:
I can name two Democratic presidents who've cut the deficit through the duration of their presidencies: Clinton and Obama. And what about Republican presidents? Bush 43? He turned a $200 billion surplus into a $400 billion deficit by the end of his first term, and a $1.2 trillion deficit by the end of his second term. Bush 41? Nope. Reagan? No. Ford? No. Nixon? No. The last Republican president who cut the deficit was Eisenhower. Along those lines, the recently introduced tax plan of the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, would explode the deficit by as much as $10 trillion over a decade. Tell me again: Which is the party of fiscal responsibility? A caveat: It's true that Congress, not the president, passes the federal budget, and that the recent Republican-dominated Congresses have been particularly vicious where non-military expenditures are concerned. But if the president is to be blamed for the size of the deficit -- and reminder: Obama is being blamed, at every opportunity -- then it's only fair and intellectually consistent that he should get credit when the deficit is reduced. Furthermore, and not to bury the lede, but there's no reason the deficit needed to shrink this rapidly. Given the depth of the Great Recession, government spending could've done more to stimulate the economy. That said, there's this GOP-based obsession with deficit reduction as an indicator of political success even though governments can operate quite well with short-term deficits. Accepting, though, that deficit reduction is a political reality, the Democratic record is galactically better than the GOP on this front. Numbers don't lie.Following the first Democratic debate, Fox News and the broader conservative ecosystem erupted in a coordinated effort to paint the Democrats as frivolous spenders, handing out free stuff to everyone without bothering to discuss how they'd pay for it. However, the irony of this attack is thick, given how the Democrats have taken up the burden of fiscal responsibility in the modern era. The Republican Party has no choice but to dig deeply into the history books to find the last GOP president who actually bothered to leave the deficit in better shape than when he was inaugurated. Meanwhile, President Obama, like President Clinton before him, has seen the federal budget deficit fall by record numbers. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch site, the federal government ran up a deficit of $439 billion for the 2015 fiscal year. That's 2.5 percent of GDP, which is the lowest level since 2007. Why is this significant? The Obama administration inherited a $1.4 trillion (with a "t") budget deficit -- driven in large part by stimulus spending meant to combat the financial crisis -- which authorized George W. Bush in October 2008. Since then, Obama has presided over a gradual $1 trillion-dollar reduction in the deficit. Insofar as deficit reduction is important -- and remember, according to the rhetoric of the GOP over the past several years, it is very important -- this is a massive achievement for the Obama administration. Massive. And neither he nor the Democrats will get any credit for it.
Chart via Steve Benen
If Mitt Romney's lies about the deficit in 2012 were a predictor of the GOP's attack plan for 2016, we can expect to hear the Republican ticket attack both Obama and the Democratic nominee on this very issue. But they won't cite deficit numbers because, well, they're not nearly as dumb as they look. Instead, they'll recycle the Romney tactic of conflating the deficit and the national debt -- two entirely separate numbers. For example, Romney said during his first debate against Obama in 2012: "The president said he’d cut the deficit in half. Unfortunately, he doubled it." Well, no. The deficit wasn't "doubled" at all. It was the debt that rose, but analysts have repeatedly shown that the chief drivers of national debt were George W. Bush's wars, Medicare Part-D (a Bush-era policy) and the impact of the Great Recession -- none of which was offset with higher taxes or spending cuts. Obama can hardly be blamed for all that. Not insignificantly, though, the Obama administration's deficit reduction has slowed the growth of the debt. In fact, the year-over-year increase in the debt has slowed to 10 percent. Compare that with the highest growth rate for the debt ever -- 13.4 percent per year under, yes, Ronald Reagan. We'll circle back to comparing the records of recent presidents in a second. Meanwhile, contra Romney, Obama promised to cut the deficit in half, and he did. It took him five years instead of four, but he did it. Suffice to say, when you hear the GOP talk about government spending, listen for their deliberate swapping of the terms "deficit" and "debt." They do it a lot. How exactly did Obama manage to slash the deficit so drastically? It's true that Republicans have controlled the House of Representatives since January 2011 (along with the Senate this term) and those years have been marked by aggressive GOP attempts to roll back the welfare state, punctuated by episodes of legislative brinksmanship that ultimately resulted in the dreaded sequester. But that only tells a part of the story. Nearly every bill signed by the president has included offsets to make the spending deficit neutral. Why? Because it's been the law of the land ever since President Obama signed the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act in February 2010, which mandates that new spending be offset with spending cuts or new revenue. Yes, a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress passed this legislation. Guess how many congressional Republicans voted for the law. Zero. Not one. Consequently, the president is responsible for the lowest government spending growth in 60 years. Once again, let's reference Market Watch:
I can name two Democratic presidents who've cut the deficit through the duration of their presidencies: Clinton and Obama. And what about Republican presidents? Bush 43? He turned a $200 billion surplus into a $400 billion deficit by the end of his first term, and a $1.2 trillion deficit by the end of his second term. Bush 41? Nope. Reagan? No. Ford? No. Nixon? No. The last Republican president who cut the deficit was Eisenhower. Along those lines, the recently introduced tax plan of the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, would explode the deficit by as much as $10 trillion over a decade. Tell me again: Which is the party of fiscal responsibility? A caveat: It's true that Congress, not the president, passes the federal budget, and that the recent Republican-dominated Congresses have been particularly vicious where non-military expenditures are concerned. But if the president is to be blamed for the size of the deficit -- and reminder: Obama is being blamed, at every opportunity -- then it's only fair and intellectually consistent that he should get credit when the deficit is reduced. Furthermore, and not to bury the lede, but there's no reason the deficit needed to shrink this rapidly. Given the depth of the Great Recession, government spending could've done more to stimulate the economy. That said, there's this GOP-based obsession with deficit reduction as an indicator of political success even though governments can operate quite well with short-term deficits. Accepting, though, that deficit reduction is a political reality, the Democratic record is galactically better than the GOP on this front. Numbers don't lie.
Chart via Steve Benen
If Mitt Romney's lies about the deficit in 2012 were a predictor of the GOP's attack plan for 2016, we can expect to hear the Republican ticket attack both Obama and the Democratic nominee on this very issue. But they won't cite deficit numbers because, well, they're not nearly as dumb as they look. Instead, they'll recycle the Romney tactic of conflating the deficit and the national debt -- two entirely separate numbers. For example, Romney said during his first debate against Obama in 2012: "The president said he’d cut the deficit in half. Unfortunately, he doubled it." Well, no. The deficit wasn't "doubled" at all. It was the debt that rose, but analysts have repeatedly shown that the chief drivers of national debt were George W. Bush's wars, Medicare Part-D (a Bush-era policy) and the impact of the Great Recession -- none of which was offset with higher taxes or spending cuts. Obama can hardly be blamed for all that. Not insignificantly, though, the Obama administration's deficit reduction has slowed the growth of the debt. In fact, the year-over-year increase in the debt has slowed to 10 percent. Compare that with the highest growth rate for the debt ever -- 13.4 percent per year under, yes, Ronald Reagan. We'll circle back to comparing the records of recent presidents in a second. Meanwhile, contra Romney, Obama promised to cut the deficit in half, and he did. It took him five years instead of four, but he did it. Suffice to say, when you hear the GOP talk about government spending, listen for their deliberate swapping of the terms "deficit" and "debt." They do it a lot. How exactly did Obama manage to slash the deficit so drastically? It's true that Republicans have controlled the House of Representatives since January 2011 (along with the Senate this term) and those years have been marked by aggressive GOP attempts to roll back the welfare state, punctuated by episodes of legislative brinksmanship that ultimately resulted in the dreaded sequester. But that only tells a part of the story. Nearly every bill signed by the president has included offsets to make the spending deficit neutral. Why? Because it's been the law of the land ever since President Obama signed the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act in February 2010, which mandates that new spending be offset with spending cuts or new revenue. Yes, a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress passed this legislation. Guess how many congressional Republicans voted for the law. Zero. Not one. Consequently, the president is responsible for the lowest government spending growth in 60 years. Once again, let's reference Market Watch:
I can name two Democratic presidents who've cut the deficit through the duration of their presidencies: Clinton and Obama. And what about Republican presidents? Bush 43? He turned a $200 billion surplus into a $400 billion deficit by the end of his first term, and a $1.2 trillion deficit by the end of his second term. Bush 41? Nope. Reagan? No. Ford? No. Nixon? No. The last Republican president who cut the deficit was Eisenhower. Along those lines, the recently introduced tax plan of the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, would explode the deficit by as much as $10 trillion over a decade. Tell me again: Which is the party of fiscal responsibility? A caveat: It's true that Congress, not the president, passes the federal budget, and that the recent Republican-dominated Congresses have been particularly vicious where non-military expenditures are concerned. But if the president is to be blamed for the size of the deficit -- and reminder: Obama is being blamed, at every opportunity -- then it's only fair and intellectually consistent that he should get credit when the deficit is reduced. Furthermore, and not to bury the lede, but there's no reason the deficit needed to shrink this rapidly. Given the depth of the Great Recession, government spending could've done more to stimulate the economy. That said, there's this GOP-based obsession with deficit reduction as an indicator of political success even though governments can operate quite well with short-term deficits. Accepting, though, that deficit reduction is a political reality, the Democratic record is galactically better than the GOP on this front. Numbers don't lie.Following the first Democratic debate, Fox News and the broader conservative ecosystem erupted in a coordinated effort to paint the Democrats as frivolous spenders, handing out free stuff to everyone without bothering to discuss how they'd pay for it. However, the irony of this attack is thick, given how the Democrats have taken up the burden of fiscal responsibility in the modern era. The Republican Party has no choice but to dig deeply into the history books to find the last GOP president who actually bothered to leave the deficit in better shape than when he was inaugurated. Meanwhile, President Obama, like President Clinton before him, has seen the federal budget deficit fall by record numbers. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch site, the federal government ran up a deficit of $439 billion for the 2015 fiscal year. That's 2.5 percent of GDP, which is the lowest level since 2007. Why is this significant? The Obama administration inherited a $1.4 trillion (with a "t") budget deficit -- driven in large part by stimulus spending meant to combat the financial crisis -- which authorized George W. Bush in October 2008. Since then, Obama has presided over a gradual $1 trillion-dollar reduction in the deficit. Insofar as deficit reduction is important -- and remember, according to the rhetoric of the GOP over the past several years, it is very important -- this is a massive achievement for the Obama administration. Massive. And neither he nor the Democrats will get any credit for it.
Chart via Steve Benen
If Mitt Romney's lies about the deficit in 2012 were a predictor of the GOP's attack plan for 2016, we can expect to hear the Republican ticket attack both Obama and the Democratic nominee on this very issue. But they won't cite deficit numbers because, well, they're not nearly as dumb as they look. Instead, they'll recycle the Romney tactic of conflating the deficit and the national debt -- two entirely separate numbers. For example, Romney said during his first debate against Obama in 2012: "The president said he’d cut the deficit in half. Unfortunately, he doubled it." Well, no. The deficit wasn't "doubled" at all. It was the debt that rose, but analysts have repeatedly shown that the chief drivers of national debt were George W. Bush's wars, Medicare Part-D (a Bush-era policy) and the impact of the Great Recession -- none of which was offset with higher taxes or spending cuts. Obama can hardly be blamed for all that. Not insignificantly, though, the Obama administration's deficit reduction has slowed the growth of the debt. In fact, the year-over-year increase in the debt has slowed to 10 percent. Compare that with the highest growth rate for the debt ever -- 13.4 percent per year under, yes, Ronald Reagan. We'll circle back to comparing the records of recent presidents in a second. Meanwhile, contra Romney, Obama promised to cut the deficit in half, and he did. It took him five years instead of four, but he did it. Suffice to say, when you hear the GOP talk about government spending, listen for their deliberate swapping of the terms "deficit" and "debt." They do it a lot. How exactly did Obama manage to slash the deficit so drastically? It's true that Republicans have controlled the House of Representatives since January 2011 (along with the Senate this term) and those years have been marked by aggressive GOP attempts to roll back the welfare state, punctuated by episodes of legislative brinksmanship that ultimately resulted in the dreaded sequester. But that only tells a part of the story. Nearly every bill signed by the president has included offsets to make the spending deficit neutral. Why? Because it's been the law of the land ever since President Obama signed the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act in February 2010, which mandates that new spending be offset with spending cuts or new revenue. Yes, a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress passed this legislation. Guess how many congressional Republicans voted for the law. Zero. Not one. Consequently, the president is responsible for the lowest government spending growth in 60 years. Once again, let's reference Market Watch:
I can name two Democratic presidents who've cut the deficit through the duration of their presidencies: Clinton and Obama. And what about Republican presidents? Bush 43? He turned a $200 billion surplus into a $400 billion deficit by the end of his first term, and a $1.2 trillion deficit by the end of his second term. Bush 41? Nope. Reagan? No. Ford? No. Nixon? No. The last Republican president who cut the deficit was Eisenhower. Along those lines, the recently introduced tax plan of the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, would explode the deficit by as much as $10 trillion over a decade. Tell me again: Which is the party of fiscal responsibility? A caveat: It's true that Congress, not the president, passes the federal budget, and that the recent Republican-dominated Congresses have been particularly vicious where non-military expenditures are concerned. But if the president is to be blamed for the size of the deficit -- and reminder: Obama is being blamed, at every opportunity -- then it's only fair and intellectually consistent that he should get credit when the deficit is reduced. Furthermore, and not to bury the lede, but there's no reason the deficit needed to shrink this rapidly. Given the depth of the Great Recession, government spending could've done more to stimulate the economy. That said, there's this GOP-based obsession with deficit reduction as an indicator of political success even though governments can operate quite well with short-term deficits. Accepting, though, that deficit reduction is a political reality, the Democratic record is galactically better than the GOP on this front. Numbers don't lie.
October 15, 2015
Hillary vs. Hillary: In the “Alien vs. Predator” cage match between the humane and reasonable debate winner and the cynical neoliberal hawk, do any of us actually win?
Hillary Clinton’s strong performance in Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas clearly came as an immense relief to her backers and supporters, who have alternately felt offended, perplexed and terrified by the improbable rise of Bernie Sanders. For many people on the Democratic left, not to mention those radicals or progressives with a more agonized or conflicted relationship to the party (or who simply hate its guts), Hillary’s resurgence after many weeks of left-wing rhetorical pummeling also marks the re-emergence of an insoluble paradox. Which Hillary Clinton will we get, as the presumptive Democratic nominee and as the 45th president of the United States? The humane, reasonable and pragmatic leader who showed up on TV the other night, or the opinion-poll weathervane, foreign policy hawk and shameless Wall Street tool? One Clinton seems to promise a return to effective White House leadership and legislative compromise, with less high-flown rhetoric than the Obama years but greater transparency and more tangible accomplishments. The other suggests a hardened imperial presidency with a friendly female face, where the realm of political reality is defined by neoliberal economics, the Sauron-like reach of the national security state and the global tides of investment capital backed by American military power. Hillary Clinton’s most formidable opponent on the path to becoming the first female American head of state – a development that will occur embarrassingly late in history, I have to say, after Britain and Germany and Israel and India and Pakistan and Moldova and Senegal, for the love of Christ – is Hillary Clinton. I don’t mean that metaphorically. The monstrous caricature of Hillary Clinton created by her enemies on the right, and to a lesser extent the one created by her enemies on the left, both stand in her way, their bloody fangs bared. So too, and far more significantly, does the reality that has fueled the enduring stereotype that Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted: Her actual record as an endlessly calculating policymaker and political operative whose core ideology has never been clear. Robert Reich, the staunch liberal economist and former secretary of labor who has known both Hillary and Bill Clinton since all three were classmates at Yale, assured Salon’s readers last spring that he felt no doubt about the strengths of Hillary’s “values and ideals.” Even in that piece of relative puffery, Reich was notably unable or unwilling to explain what they were. A few months later, Reich showed up on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show to assign letter grades to Clinton’s economic platform, along with those of Sanders and Jeb Bush. He gave Clinton an A for explaining the central importance of widening economic inequality, but a “C or D or maybe even a failing grade” when it came to explaining what the hell she would actually do about it. For those of us who will soon face the existential dilemma of supporting Hillary Clinton as the unquestioned lesser of two evils -- however tepidly and against our better judgment -- or turning our backs on the whole damn thing and deciding that “Game of Thrones” is more important, those letter grades delivered by one of her oldest friends sum up the problem. How do we understand the relationship between those two Hillarys, between the A-student analyst and the one who flunks out on actual policy changes that might begin to alter the dark dynamics of money and power in American society? Can we reconcile their areas of overlap and apparent contradiction? Is the first persona a cynical ruse, meant to dupe the gullible Democratic electorate one more time, like Lucy Van Pelt with that football? Does the second persona reflect an understanding that in our disordered nation realpolitik and Machiavellian maneuvering are the only possible ways to get anything done, and the fact that Clinton is too shrewd to make promises she can’t keep? Those questions will preoccupy Democratic voters, and then the entire nation, for months to come. I don’t propose to answer them here in any definitive way. It’s nearly useless to say this amid the hilariously overheated discourse of the left, but I am neither trying to prop Hillary Clinton up nor chop her down, and I am not so deluded as to believe that I can achieve either objective. (If the great male chauvinist campaign to demolish Hillary, or for that matter the great Establishment crusade to stop Bernie Sanders, would like to ensure my loyalty, they know where to send the check.) A veteran political journalist and insider told me years ago that the only way to say anything interesting about politics was to back away from questions about who will win, or who should win, both because they are self-limiting – a reader either agrees with you or doesn’t – and because they are never as important or useful as the more open-ended questions about why events are unfolding as they are, and what stories we tell ourselves about them. With all that said, of course the election’s not over just because Hillary Clinton had a good debate, and because lots of well-dressed people in Beverly Hills or on the Upper West Side indulged in a celebratory single-malt on Tuesday night. In fact, the social-media response, along with all those Google searches for alarmingly inadequate dictionary definitions of “socialism,” suggests that Bernie Sanders’ prime-time rollout went pretty doggone well. But the reappearance of Hillary Clinton as a calm, confident, witty and (at least by her standards) personable candidate struck many in the insider class as reassuring evidence that the previously delirious 2016 campaign is coming down from its nitrous oxide high, and that we will soon see political reality reassert its natural laws. I have a number of responses to that, but here’s what they all boil down to: Be careful what you wish for, O punditocracy! On the Republican side, it is indisputably true that the great sky-obscuring blimp of Donald Trump’s candidacy is beginning to sag and list hither and yon with the shifting winds. Whether the huge crowds who eat up Trump's outrageous pronouncements and outsize persona were ever likely to translate themselves into real-world votes was always open to doubt. I mean, come on: Who votes anymore? The Trump demographic largely consists of people who have concluded that politicians are corrupt and elections are pointless, and it’s difficult to fault their logic. Those who claim to understand things like probability and plausibility and polling data and campaign spending in ways that I would never pretend to are confidently pronouncing that Trump and Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson are daylilies doomed to fade, and that Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio will be beaming down at us from the sun’s face before we know it. It is equally true that even Bernie Sanders’ true believers are beginning to cast a cold eye on the political calendar, which informs them that after Iowa and New Hampshire in early February come primaries and caucuses in 23 states over the ensuing five weeks, and that Sanders will be extremely fortunate to win four or five of those. He will quite likely be competitive with Clinton in Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Maine and his home state of Vermont, and might be able to keep it close in Virginia, North Carolina and Michigan. Anything beyond that is wish-casting, pure and simple. Give Bernie any six states of your choosing, just for the hell of it, and the race will still be over after the Florida, Illinois, Missouri and Ohio primaries on March 15, at the very latest. Again, that isn’t meant as an endorsement, and it isn’t the important part. If the whole thing were up to me – well, let’s just be glad it isn’t. That long, cold drink of political probability is good news for Nate Silver and Karl Rove and the Koch brothers and other people who have a vested interest in not being wrong, and in restoring the universe of American electoral politics to its normal (and profoundly depressing) parameters. But it isn’t good news for the rest of us, and it might not even be good news for Hillary Clinton or for whichever supposedly mainstream Republican – stretching that concept to a ludicrous extreme – emerges from the GOP’s tragicomic primary scrum. If Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have accomplished anything, they have made this election seem like fun. On some level it’s no more complicated than that. They have injected the somnolent political process with unpredictable electricity, and no one knows what will happen when all that energy is discharged into the ether and we are faced with the disheartening prospect of a nine-month campaign between two candidates who cannot afford to say what they mean or mean what they say, and who almost no one actually likes. A showdown between Clinton and Marco Rubio next November (let’s just say) might be historically important -- and also might be close enough to make us all sweat. But the "Alien vs. Predator" cage match between Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton is the main event, the one whose outcome will shape history and is shrouded in doubt. Does any of that sound like fun? I fear the fun is just about over.
Amy Schumer cleans up her act: After a summer of backlash, her new HBO special mostly avoids jokes about race
The Apollo Theater in Harlem is not just a historic venue for African-American music, it is a symbol; the brick-and-mortar incarnation of a cultural movement that endured despite centuries of oppression. To paraphrase the New York Times, it’s a legacy that can be expressed just in list form: Winners of the Apollo’s amateur night include Ella Fitzgerald, the Jackson 5, Patti LaBelle, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, and the Isley Brothers. Performers on the stage include Ray Charles, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Dizzy Gillespie, and the Supremes. And comedians who have brought the house down on that stage include black comedians Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Wanda Sykes, and Katt Williams, as well as non-black comedians with marquee standing, such as Robin Williams, Louis C.K., Ellen Degeneres, and George Lopez. And now, Amy Schumer. On Saturday HBO will premiere the comedian’s hourlong special at the Apollo, which serves as a capper, of sorts, to the Summer of Schumer. Apparently it took until season three for her show, “Inside Amy Schumer,” to get both really brilliant and really popular. After debuting in April to rave reviews (including my own), the show went on to snag seven Emmy nominations and eventually two statues. Schumer followed that up with the surprise hit “Trainwreck,” a summer R-rated comedy that swept the field to eventually rake in $110 million, over three times its $35 million budget. Now Schumer is on tour, returning to her stand-up roots after six months that have changed her life. With extraordinary success has come extraordinary scrutiny. Schumer is smart, funny, and successful; she is also unabashedly political, centering feminism, equality, reproductive rights, and discrimination in her work. The result is that her media profile somewhat hovers in between successful comedian and outspoken activist. When one of America’s many mass murderers walked a screening of “Trainwreck” in Lafayette, Louisiana and killed two audience members because he “hated feminists,” it cast Schumer into even more of an activist-crusader role. Which is difficult, because although Schumer’s comedy about gender is incisive and hilarious, her comedy on race is much less so. In June, shortly before “Trainwreck”’s debut, Schumer and her Twitter account were at the center of a seemingly never-ending cycle of discussion about whether or not Schumer is a racist. (She’s probably no more racist than any other white woman, for whatever that’s worth. Say what you will about the crack on Latino men, for example, but it wasn’t not racist.) It led to some important commentary on what comedy can and should get away with—my personal favorite example came from Silpa Kovvali in the New Republic—as well as a lot of less fulfilling handwringing about “political correctness” and “punching down.” (The Daily Beast went so far as to headline a piece “The Persecution Of Amy Schumer,” with the kicker “BACKLASH.”) Schumer, like Lena Dunham before her, has shifted from making jokes about hot-button issues to becoming a hot-button issue herself. Every time she opens her mouth, the thinkpieces seem to write themselves; this one you’re reading right now is no exception. Given all of that, New York Times Magazine editor Jazmine Hughes’ joke on Twitter that “Amy Schumer: Live At The Apollo” “sounds like an Onion headline” makes a lot more sense (and is painfully accurate). Schumer’s struggled to be as nuanced on race as she is on gender, and now she’s going to walk the almost-sacred stage of the Apollo? What gives? It seems to me that Schumer is in the middle of a rebranding project. Whether or not she really is racist, great pains are being taken to ensure that she no longer looks quite so clueless about racial issues. The HBO special is not just at the Apollo; it’s directed by Chris Rock. Before her stint guest-hosting “Saturday Night Live,” Schumer tweeted a long, joking text from friend and fellow comedian Kevin Hart. Look, the subtext reads; some of her best friends are black! The stand-up material is very good, and notably steers very clear of race-inflected humor, except when she ribs the mostly white audience for braving Harlem just for her show. And she emphasizes self-deprecation, assessing correctly that the more she mocks herself, the more she can push the envelope when her stand-up persona says selfish, racist or otherwise horrible things. (For example, the “Inside Amy Schumer” sketch about being unable to tell several black retail employees apart reflects entirely on her; likewise in “Trainwreck,” when her character tries and fails to produce a photo as evidence of allegedly having black friends.) Indeed: A lot of “Amy Schumer: Live At The Apollo” pushes back against the notion that Schumer is a “good feminist”; like any comedian, she bristles at any label that prevents her from making a good joke. Schumer plays up her anxieties about her weight and her envy of beautiful women; she also describes the residue left in her underwear at the end of a day with lovely, filthy detail. “Warts And All” might as well be the motto of this special. It is notable, then, that HBO—or Rock, or Schumer herself—decided to edit out one rather telling wart, in this otherwise race-free hour. The special filmed on May 29; on May 31 Melissa Castellanos at Latin Post wrote a very positive review of the event, that ends with “Keep bringing the hotness, Amy!” Included in her recap is a joke that does not make it to the HBO special: After “getting into her zone,” Schumer “scolded an Asian girl on the balcony, (who she referred to as Woody Allen's step-daughter-turned-wife, Soon-Yi ) who was munching too loudly on chips…” I wasn’t there. I don’t know how this joke played. Considering we did not see a deluge of thinkpieces following the event, I’m assuming no one in that audience took it out of turn. Still, it’s kind of a stunner, in black-and-white. This was a good month before this summer’s discussion about Schumer’s race-inflected jokes; and even more time before “Trainwreck,” where Schumer’s character makes a different Soon-Yi joke. But I’m not surprised that it was edited out of the HBO special, to give the audience an hour of race-free Amy Schumer. Say what you will about the joke, but it wasn’t not racist.
