The Case against Elizabeth Warren

Let me start by pointing out that I think Elizabeth Warren is great. I agree with virtually everything I have heard her say. I also appreciate her forthrightness and clarity, features that elected politicians often don't have. In this way, she is more like Bill Clinton than Hillary Clinton.

Late last week Warren made an epic speech on the Senate floor pleading with her colleagues to vote against the budget bill that was needed to keep the government operating. Her opposition was based on the fact that it contained a provision slipped in at the last moment that would partially repeal one aspect of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that passed in response to the financial meltdown of 2008. If you missed the speech, you should take a moment to watch it. It is awe-inspiring.

 

To be sure, the provision in question is a noxious piece of legislation. It was literally written by Citibank lobbyists and would have repealed the part of Dodd-Franks that forbade financial institutions from investing in risky derivatives using depositor's FDIC-insured money. The intent of the provision was to make it less likely that financial institutions could ask the government (and taxpayers) to bail them out if their own high-risk investment strategies went sour. They could make these investments if they wanted to, but just not with FDIC-insured money. It seems like a sound principle and a commonsensical one as well.

Although I agree with her assessment of the provision in question, I nonetheless disagree with her plea to reject budget deal. Why? There are several reasons.

1. Not everyone who is on what I think of as our side of the argument agrees with Warren. For example, no less than Paul Volcker has said that the provision's main problem is symbolic. It will have little real effect on the banks. His reasoning is that he believes that another part of Dodd-Frank, the part that is commonly referred to as the "Volcker rule" would prevent the kind of systematic risk that Warren warns of. Also, Paul Krugman reminds us that the most damaging behavior that led up to the 2008 crisis did not come from FDIC insured banks, but from bank-like entities, such as Countrywide, AIG, and Lehman Brothers.
2. If the provision, obnoxious as it is, does not in fact pose the threat to the economy that Warren seems to believe it does, then simply on a cost/benefit analysis shutting down the government to fix this is simply not worth it. 
3. If the budget deal is not agreed-to now, it will be brought up again in the next Congress when the GOP will have even more votes. What comes from that is likely to be much worse from a Democratic point of view. 

Thus, my beef with Warren is not really on policy grounds so much as it is on the politics. It is just possible that, having won control of the Senate, the GOP now feels some incentive to actually start caring about governing the country rather than simply trying to blow it up through obstruction as a political maneuver to gain power. In this new frame of mind, perhaps we can get back to normal political deal-making in which each party gets part of what they want, rather than on insisting upon everything or nothing, which is one of the most damaging characteristics of the Tea-Party Republicans.

Gone Girl: I Don't Get It

Spoiler Alert: Don't read this unless you have already read the book Gone Girl or seen the movie adaptation, or plan never to expose yourself to either.

I have been hearing about this book for a couple of years. Friends and members of my family read it and mostly loved it. The advance reviews of the David Fincher film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike were almost universally positive. The only thing I knew about the story was that it concerned a man suspected of killing his wife and that the story contained a great plot twist.

Now having seen the film, I have to say that I just don't get it. Let's start with the big twist. I am not particularly good at seeing elaborately disguised plot twists in advance. I don't know, maybe I am just gullible. The big reveals in Sleuth, The Crying Game, and The Sixth Sense, to name but three examples, left hairs standing up on the back of my neck I was so surprised and exhilarated.

By way of comparison I saw the plot twist in Gone Girl coming a mile away. I wasn't the least bit surprised when the big reveal occurred. Why? I can think of several reasons. First, Amy was portrayed as friendless, loathed by Nick's down-to-earth sister Margo, and as very intelligent, but somewhat manipulative and who loved to play elaborate games.

Second, Ben Affleck's Nick just didn't seem particularly menacing. I had no trouble believing that he would screw an undergrad. The fact that the undergrad was the gorgeously sexy Emily Ratajkowski--the topless, prancing star of last summer's Blurred Lines video--made it even more believable. Affleck was easy to see as a cad, but not as a murderer.

Finally, and most importantly, the big plot twist was, frankly, not very clever. The person who fakes their own death to serve some ulterior purpose is a shopworn literary device almost to the point of cliché. It has been used over and over going back at least as far as Agatha Christie's 1939 novel And Then There Were None. More recent uses of this trope in film can be found in You Only Live Twice (1967), The Sting (1974), Body Heat (1981), The Usual Suspects (1995), and Double Jeopardy (1999). There is even an original Star Trek episode (Court Martial, 1967) in which Captain Kirk is framed for a murder by man who fakes his own death as a way of getting revenge, much like in Gone Girl.

My point is that--unlike The Crying Game and The Sixth Sense, who's surprises were both shocking and shockingly original--Gone Girl relies on a plot twist that is almost absurdly familiar.

OK, once you get past the plot twist, what's left? The best part of Gone Girl is the winking satire on the modern media's exploitation and sensationalistic approach to crime stories. One of the characters is a very thinly disguised version of Nancy Grace who bloviates on national television about case she knows very little about. This is good stuff, but it occupies only a relatively small space within the larger story. The bulk of the narrative stays with the consequences of the act of a manipulative, psychopathic femme fatale.

Been there, done that.

The History of Southern California Rock--The Byrds to the the Eagles

I ran across a quite excellent 2007 BBC documentary on YouTube entitled Hotel California: LA from The Byrds to The Eagles.

Its basic premise is that the popular music scene in LA that began with The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield and culminated with the Eagles is a story of idealism corrupted by corporate commercialism. It is also a story--though less emphasized in this piece than it should be--about how the early promise of great groups such as CSNY was squandered when cocaine and speed replaced marijuana as the drug of choice.

The 90-minute documentary is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the emergence of CSNY out of the ashes of The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and The Hollies as the first S. California super group. The second part--and the most interesting to me--is about the rise of the singer/song writer and merging of country, rock, and folk music with acts such as Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, Carol King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and Linda Ronstadt. Ronstadt, a personal favorite of mine, is an exception in this group as she was never a song writer. Her talent, as the documentary points out, was surrounding herself with great song writers and performing the best version of other people's songs.

The third part focuses on the Eagles as the most commercially successful group to arise from the crucible of the Troubador and the Laurel Canyon enclave of pop music talent.

If you are interested in the subject matter I strongly recommend this documentary.

An Update on the 858,000 Conservative Viral Infection

The RAND study discussed in the previous post has now been made public.

It reports, contrary to the countless conservative web sites that claimed only 858,000 out of 7.1 million of ObamaCare exchange enrollees were previously uninsured, the actual figure is, (predictably) much, much higher. RAND estimates that as of mid-March, when there were 3.9 million exchange enrollees, 1.4 million of them were previously uninsured. When you extrapolate these numbers through of the end of March--a period in which the number of exchange enrollees exploded to 7.1 million--you get 2.5 million exchange enrollees who were previously uninsured. The represents a 36% slice of the exchange pool who are newly insured, which is 3 times the rate claimed by bogus conservative reporting of the RAND study prior to publication.

Furthermore, when you include the other areas of ObamaCare, primarily the expansion of Medicaid, the total number of newly insured from Sept. 2013-mid-March, 2014 is 9.3 million, a drop in the percent of uninsured in the country from 20.5% to 15.8%.

This is one of the clearest examples of how the conservative media can disseminate false information through a viral connection of media outlets.

Viral Information and ObamaCare

Do me a favor. Do a Google search on "RAND Corporation 858000".

You will get countless hits from conservative web sites all claiming that an "under wraps" or "hush-hush" RAND Corporation study has concluded that only 858,000 enrollees in ObamaCare were previously uninsured. These articles all use almost exactly the same language, because they are just viral repetitions of the same source.The thing is, though, none of these sites link to an actual RAND study. Presumably because it is, well, still "under wraps."

If this is true, then only about 12% of those getting insurance through the state and federal exchanges were previously uninsured.

I have a prediction to make.
1) The RAND Study will never see the light of day, either because it never existed or because it was never an official RAND study deemed worthy of public release.
or,
2) The RAND study will appear, but it will not show what this conservative viral phenomenon claims that it shows.

The claims about the mysterious RAND study seem to originate from a Daily Mail Online article that also does not provide a link to or provide any sourcing for this claim. As of now the mainstream media has ignored this story because, until an actual study is published, it is little more than rumor.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

EDIT: It appears that (2) is more likely. Apparently the study is real enough. This LA Times article claims to have seen the unpublished data and even names the study's author as Katherine Carman. The money quote from the article is this:

A February survey by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found 27% of new enrollees were previously uninsured, but newer survey data from the nonprofit Rand Corp. and reports from marketplace officials in several states suggest that share increased in March.

If the RAND study suggests that the number of previously uninsured was greater than 27% of new enrollees, then it certainly cannot claim that the number is 12% or 858,000. It is possible that the 858,000 number ignores the increase in the Medicaid participants, which was always envisioned as perhaps the most significant method for lowering the number of those left without health insurance. Until the study is finally published it is impossible to know.

EDIT 4-2-2014: The Washington Post also spoke directly to the RAND Study's author, Ms. Carmen, and they report "What percentage of the 7 million are “newly insured?” No one really knows at this point, though a reasonable, conservative estimate would be about one-third. That’s a little over 2 million people."

It is becoming increasingly evident that, as I suspected, the 858,000 (or 12% of 7.1 million) figure was bogus. Both the LA Times and the Washington Post have spoken directly with the study's author and both report that the number is higher 27% of new enrollees. The Post pegs it at about 33%, or 2.3 million.

The Passing of a Comedy Legend that many People Didn't Know

When Saturday Night Live premiered in the Fall of 1975 I immediately knew that it was something special. Having grown up enjoying the comedy of Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, and others it was clear that SNL was something entirely different, a comedy from and about my generation. It was a seminal cultural event. I would routinely stay in on Saturday nights just to watch SNL with my friends. Nearly 40 years later, SNL is now an institution, but at the time it was part of a revolution.

This article is about someone who was never on SNL and never wrote for the show, but was as much a part of the entertainment revolution that SNL represented as Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, or John Belushi. He arguably had a bigger influence on this new wave of comedy than any of these famous performers and yet most people wouldn't recognize his name.

A Chicago native, Harold Ramis began his career as an feature entertainment writer for the Chicago Daily News. Later, he worked briefly a joke writer for Playboy magazine. His first real job in comedy was as a performer and eventually head writer for SCTV, the Chicago-based sketch show that both inspired SNL and provided many of its original cast members, including John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Bill Murray.

Ramis's introduction to Hollywood came in 1978 as a screenwriter for Animal House, which starred SCTV cast mate and SNL member John Belushi. It was a huge hit and Ramis became a bankable figure for behind-the-scenes work in contemporary comedy. Ramis's connection to SNL continued with his next four films in which he served as either writer or director: Meatballs (Bill Murray), Caddyshack (Chevy Chase and Bill Murray), Stripes (Bill Murray), and National Lampoon's Vacation (Chevy Chase). The John Hughes-penned Vacation was a huge success and inspired many sequels starring Chase, though Ramis was only involved with the original.

His biggest hits came in the mid 1980s and early nineties with Ghostbusters I and II and Groundhog Day, which among his many films is the most likely to be remembered as a classic.. All of these efforts involved collaborations with either Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, or Dan Aykroyd. Other than a few small roles, he appeared in front of the camera only with Murray in Stripes and with Murray and Aykroyd in the Ghostbusters films. His primary contribution was behind the camera as a creative force.

Ramis's singular major success without SNL ties was in 1999 with Analyze This, which he directed. Analyze This and a less successful sequel starred Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. Ironically, Analyze This, a story about a mob figure (De Niro) who seeks treatment from a psychiatrist (Crystal) came out the same year as The Sopranos, which had essentially the same theme.

If I had to pick one Harold Ramis film that is not well-remembered, but offers consistent laughs it would be Multiplicity, a film he directed in 1996 starring Michael Keaton and Andie McDowell (Murray's love interest in Groundhog Day). Keaton plays multiple roles as a character who clones himself as a way of giving himself--the original--more time to pursue personal interests. It is a lot of fun and Keaton and McDowell both give great performances.

Harold Ramis died yesterday at the too-young age of 69 after a four-year battle with autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, an autoimmune disease related to lupus in which the body attacks the blood vessels, which can result in multiple organ failure.

Recently, there was some talk of a Ghostbusters III film, which Bill Murray tended to dismiss in public interviews. It certainly won't happen now.

Harold Ramis Selected Fimography

Screenwriter
SCTV (1976-1979)
Animal House (1978)
Meatballs (1979)
Stripes (1981)
Ghostbusters (1984)
Ghostbusters II (1989)

Director
National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)
Multiplicity (1996)

Writer/Director
Caddyshack (1980)
Groundhog Day (1993)
Analyze This (1999)

Single Payer. . .Nah.

Ezra Klein has an exceptionally smart column today about the mistaken belief by many liberals that the problem with the U.S. health care system in general and ObamaCare in particular is that it relies on private insurance companies.

The gist is that the huge inefficiencies in our health care delivery system are caused by the providers themselves, not insurance companies. Pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and, yes, physician salaries are where all our health care money is being squandered.

This is mandatory reading.