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So... You Either Have Insurance Or Pay A Tax, But Congress Can't Make The States Offer Affordable Coverage To Poor People?

There will be lots of focus today on the 5-4 upholding of the indvidual mandate, and that's sort of fair: the requirement to have insurance or pay a relatively small fee was the linchpin of a much broader consitutional argument, and that argument, as I suggested earlier this week, remains a non-starter. While Congress may not have the right to "compel" commerce, it does have the power to tax you if you don't show proof of health insurance. It's worth pointing out that 4 Justices would have accepted the Commerce Clause argument, while 4 others would have rejected the tax claims as well. So... basically, only John Roberts thinks that Congress can tax you, but can't regulate commercial inactivity. Or something.

Lost in today's coverage - except, admirably, from Megyn Kelly on Fox - is the 7-2 decision that may yet prove the bigger problem: the Court sharply limited Congressional ability to force the states to expand Medicaid coverage or face the loss of all Medicaid funds. The practical implications of this are still being sorted, but from what I can tell, this could be not only a huge mess for Medcaid recipients, but also for the individual mandate.

Remember, the ACA does about 4 things to make sure that everyone has access to affordable health insurance: most people will get covered by their employers (including ending pre-existing condition limits, lifetime caps, and extended coverage for young people on parent plans to age 26), seniors remain covered by Medicare, people above 133% of poverty but unemployed (or self employed or such) can buy coverage on new "insurance exchanges"... and people at or below 133% of poverty figures were to be covered by Medicaid.

Unfortunately, Medicaid right now isn't budgeted to offer that kind of massive expansion of coverage. So Congress, trying to paper over the problems of adding a huge budget increase did what it usually does when poor people are involved: Congress played math games, pretending that a less than full increase of funding can somehow cover the first five years of the expansion, and then told the states that after the first five years, a large bulk of the expansion would become their budget problem instead. 

Let's be clear: Medicaid right now already fails to adequately cover the small number of people in dep poverty it needs to cover. Medicaid expansion doesn't just enormously increase the problems of insuring poor individuals (who, most likely, need healthcare they can't afford now, meaning costs for care will have a large initial spike... but Medicaid is also the insurer of last resort for poor elderly people in nursing homes. By widely exapnding the ability of people to qualify for Medicaid, it's likely that even more elderly people in extended care will need coverage. And for the sunbelt states - most of which were the main parties to this suit - that cost increase could be crippling.

What the Supreme Court said - apparently - is that these states could decide not to expand Medicaid and to refuse the funds tied to the expansion, but still receive their existing Federal Medicaid grants. And it may be, as some theorize, that even with that permission, a number of states will take the extra money and do some sort of expanded offering to their poor citizens. But it's also quite possible that Texas, say, will just refuse to do anything, not lose the limited Medicaid funds it already gets, and leave millions of poor people with no real way to get insurance coverage.

And guess what happens then... under the mandate's tax policy... they owe the tax.

In a sense, Roberts has shown himself to be a more traditional conservative, a more Reagan era appointee than many guessed at the time of his appointment. A product of the Reagan Justice Department, Roberts was part of the first wave of true believers, and his decision - and make no mistake, this ruling is all him; no other Justice or group of Justices agreed with the whole of his opinion - reflects those beliefs. While he makes more allowances for federal power than some far right types would like, he also shows the myopia to policies which make it hardest for people in poverty to change their circumstance, a classic Reagan-era conceit. This is "Welfare Queens" and Bootstrap Logic all over again, and in some ways worse. And the end result is some real mischief, which explains why my sympathies lie most with the angriest Justice: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who correctly pointed out that health care reform is meaningless if it doesn't help the most vulnerable and in need. Upholding a tax on lack of insurance was never the worst thing this Court could do - the worst thing would be making it harder to make sure poor people never faced that tax.

And that's exactly what seems to have happened.

The Awesome Award: Speaking Truth To Fast And Furious

For weeks, I've been debating saying something - though never exactly sure what - about the "Fast and Furious scandal", Darrel Issa and Eric Holder. Like Kevin Drum, I figured I had a rough idea what the story was. And like Kevin, I heard about this article in Fortune. Well, it does turn out that the article is brilliant, and up-ends virtually everything we think we know about the whole story of Fast and Furious, and the ATF's attempt to reduce illegal gun sales in the Phoenix area. 

Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

Katherine Eban is going on to suggest, apparently, that the Obama Aministration's real failure - shades of Shirley Sherrod - is that the White House is too skittish about giving conservatives ammunition for bad PR to actually figure out the underlying details of the manufactured "scandal." This, after all, rings far more accurately than suggestions of some massive "cover up" at the Justice Department, rather just the small, sad example, yet again, of an Administration to cautious to actually stand up for the actual people who are being wronged.

I haven't given an "awesome" award in awhile, but this article is genuinely awesome. It demands to be read and shared. Please try and do both.

Worst Song Ever: Let Go. No Seriously, Let Go.

And now, a round of "it's just too easy":

Justin Bieber, Boyfriend. There's a rhythm track these days that just plucks my last nerve: it's this kind of very spare, very slow beat box, often accompanied by a high pitched whistle, and it's really popular with rappers, and I think it came from Timbaland and the only person I've heard use it effectively without killing me is Missy Elliott. And that, my friends, is the signature hook to "Boyfriend," the lead single from Justin Biber's "Now I'm a Grown Up" second album. Bieber's got a serious case of Timberlake envy (all Justins are a problem: discuss), and just as Timberlake pursued an awkward melange of blue eyed soul, rap beats and techno edginess until a world cried out "enough already and take sexy back where you left it!", Bieber is similarly poised to wear out his welcome, and fast. Tween girls will, no doubt, lap this stuff up with a spoon (through radio has been curiously slow to dive into it), but with the usual amount of stalker lyrics and PG 13 sexiness, Bieber's both dull and dishonest, rather than sly and sexy, traits I'm pretty sure he enturely lacks. It's hard trick, drifiting from pre-teen bubblegum to young adult serious pop stardom (Leif Garrett, anyone?) and even Timberlake has fled to film acting (where, sadly, I think he's probably going to fulfill his promise). Here's hoping Bieber gets acting lessons. Or a fresh approach to songwriting.

Fun, We Are Young (featuring Janelle Monae). A song with a chorus so annoying, I've literally turned away every time; except one, when I decided I had to listen all the way through, just to be sure about my sense that it is indeed a Worst Song. Nope... I was right all along. My only question is who thought the reasonably interesting, if downbeat, verses of the song ought to marry up to that inane, loud, chant-like chorus (and sub question: can anyone find Janelle Monae in this)? Dopey, meaningless, yet somehow perceived as deep, We Are Young makes actually being young sound far worse than it is, or was. And this, from a group named Fun?

Train, Drive By. For me, Train exists on this knife edge of pop kitsch: in their bombastic, middling way when they shoot for the moon they often get further than they rightfully should, and it really is pop magic (Drops of Jupiter, Calling All Angels, Hey Soul Sister, Marry Me). Too clever by half, the lyrics are often just short of treacle and musically, the band is workmanlike without necessarily being revelatory (the Glee arrangement of Hey Soul Sister for The Warblers actually imroves the song's dynamics, just as a f'rinstance). Drive By is a good example of how that all looks when it goes wrong: the lyrics are a mush of cheap sentiment and couplets that try too hard, while musically there's no payoff (it doesn't help that Patrick Monahan has a voice nearly as high as Adam Levine's, and is scraping the ceiling, much like Payphone). There's even less payoff in comparing love to a "drive by" - which usually refers to shootings, IIRC. All of which is a creepy reminder that Train tends to look daring singing about reinfocing social norms and standard expectations (Gee, Drive By seems to say, I hope you don't think I only screwed you once and walked away, cause that would make you look really bad). Still, I'm in a forgiving mood, and I suspect this was just a random misstep. So don't go proving me wrong, tramp.

A Nation Of Laws. Occasionally, Also, Lousy Ones.

I've been on a break - and how - from writing, especially about politics, for a number of reasons. Much of it is related to my promotion at work, which has consumed a great deal of my time; other life interests are intervening as well. Still, I've also been so thoroughly disgusted with much of what passes for politics lately, that a general run of silence seemed the most practical response. 

Lately, I've been finding myself waiting - like others - for the Supreme Court's health care decision; since until they provide some clarity on something, it's hard to say where health care issues really are, politically. But yesterday brought a decision in the Arizona immigration case, and it reminded me of a couple of things that I think have been lost in a lot of recent political handwringing.

Let's start with the fact that striking down Arizona's immigration law was really the only sensible, plainly logical step to be taken. Giving state and local law enforcement broad powers to stop and check the immigration status of anyone was everything its opponents claimed: probably racist, an intrusion by the state into federal jurisdiction, and no solution to the ostensible problem it claimed to solve.

It shouldn't, really, be remarkable that the Supreme Court invalidated large chunks of the law. Yet the decision, clearly, surprised both overconfident conservatives who expected to celebrate the power of a newfound majority, and a shock to liberals sure that conservative politics would trump common sense and basic decency.

That's why I think the decision was a good reminder of a couple of less discussed points: that being a nation of laws actually matters, and that conservatives cannot win a battle based on a failed idea like "states rights."

The concept of States Rights - that the federal government has amassed too much power and control and some of that should return, naturally, to the various 50 states, has its roots in the Civil Rights era, though the concept is older, and reflects the basic tension of founding a country of states bound together by a Constitution and a central government (and a lesson in how not to do this, lately, is the European Union). Fundamentally, States Rights is an argument that variations in governing and laws between the states are okay, so long as certain "basic" functions of government are handled nationally. States Rights was a partciularly attractive argument to white southerners looking for a way to carve out protections first for slavery, then for Jim Crow and voting rights limitations (not to mention disparities in education between the races, and so on). 

The idea of states prevailing over the federal government is a dream of the right which has never really won out - in most cases, especially the high profile ones, the Supreme Court has pretty firmly restated the primacy of federal law and national government every time. Even the occasional nibbling at the edges - such as the surprise ruling in the "Guns 500 feet from schools" ruling that placed some limitations on the Commerce Clause (that is, that Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce will generally overcome objections to most laws) - have never really embraced the idea that the States can supersede federal power in siginificant ways.

In this sense, the decision in the Arizona case wasn;'t even close: it was a 5-3 decision, with Elena Kagan recused (remember when liberals fretted that Kagan's appointment would be a disaster for cases where she would recuse, like the Arizona immigration case?), and Kagan clearly would have sided with the majority, making it 6-3 (or 7-2 where Justice Alito agreed with the majority as well). Even with a spate of "conservative" appointments, some of the biggest conservative goals - like significantly lmiting the ability of federal law to trump states - remain almost entirely out of reach. And despite continued liberal handwringing, that still isn't likely to change.

This isn't to say that we're living in a moment where conservatism poses no threat, or to deny that some decisions by the Court clearly set up problems (though I'm not one to see Citizens United as the disaster many want to see it as).  But time and again, with each successive conservative appointment, we're told that this one means legal armageddon on the Court. While the reality is that in many ways - this week, most obviously on immigration and children facing life without parole - we conitnue to see that liberal ideas tend to continue to win out.

More pointedly, what we've seen this week is that fears about the Court being solely about the easy political divides of left and right miss the reality that the Justices are still deeply concerned most with the law and interpreting it properly. Our long history as a nation of laws has given us a Supreme Court that tends to favor established precedent, that tends to err on the side of our freedoms, and manages, surprisingly often, to adapt our legal system to the changing realities of the world (as they did this year, when a surprising majority ruled electronic surveillance of a car by GPS an illegal search because placing the GPS device requires a warrant). We would have better politics, and a healthier debate, I'm convinced, if we could stop casting the Supreme Court into a role it doesn't play in our political life. Rather than fear the worst, we could wait, calmly, for the Court to do its best. And realize that extreme, untenable views of the law will be marginalized in the Court even when they can't be entirely marginalized in leglislatures and even society.

A corollary to that thought is that liberals really ought to stop approaching these halthy debates of issues from an endless defensive crouch; we've always been right about rejecting States Rights arguments, and we continue to be right. As long as Republicans chase a dwindling, extreme minority of angry, mostly, white, mostly older, conservatives, they will continue to marginalize themselves into irrelevance. Immigration is a difficult, complicated issue that won't be easy to solve (and the reforms we need, I suspect, are ones that involve controls and restrictions some liberals will not like)... but conservatives will continue to lose, and lose big, favoring a closed nation with fences and guard dogs and random stops and arrests. That's not who we are. And as liberals, we should be confident to say that, and hold to it.

I don't know what the coming days hold in terms of the health insurance mandate and the Court's decisions; I have suspicions, ones that the Arizona case only reinforced, but I admit the possibility that liberals could lose, and lose big. And maybe there is a newfound, newly powerful conservative majority. But if there were, as with Arizona, I'd think we'd see more evidence of it than we've seen thus far. If this Court is serious about our nation of laws, as they seem to be, then the law will guide them to a sensible result. And bad laws can be fixed, too.

...And All The Other Boys

Okay, maybe this I gat:

 

Rock Of Ages: Sticky Sweet

Rock and Roll has a long, checkered history on film; in part, I suspect, it's because the anarchic rebel heart of rock can't really be subsumed or captured by Hollywood's embrace of the most "conventional" conventions. So much of what defines pop culture - the very structures of our popular entertainments - are the hoariest notions of storytelling enshrined onscreen. From HIgh School Confidential to The Girl Can't Help It, through Help! and the counterculture apex of Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, into the seventies era morass of Streisand's A Star Is Born and Midler's Rose.... Hollywood's history is littered with attempts to use "rock" as a way to give voice to a "youth culture" as a way to challenge a "status quo" that fails on all counts. 

If Rock of Ages is a dreadful dud - and it's surely one of the most dreadful, duddiest attempts out there - it would be a mistake
to isolate it as a lone example of the "rock musical" gone bad. "Rock musicals" are, in fact, generally problematic, the good ones (I'd say, well, Hair... and then what? Grease?) not so far from the bad, and all struggling with, as I said, trying to square a circle of presenting youthful rebellion in a clean, neat Hollywood package.

Sloppy and lazy, Rock of Ages pulls together a fairly random set of eighties "rock" songs, packages them up with a fairly limp familiar plotline of "I wanna be a star!" and flails around in search of a conclusion. Originally created for the theater, Rock of Ages - still running - is mostly a tired excuse to pull in kids my age with a vaguely familiar soundtrack of songs from our youth, packing them in even if, under even mild examination, the show is illiterate and incoherent. One of the most obvious problems is the show's soundtrack, which  vaguely assembles  eighties "hair metal" songs, a genre which, I'd argue, isn't really a genre at all: the real story of the eighties is how the notion of "rock" splintered apart after a seventies era apex of Album-oriented rock (AOR, in radio parlance) and hard rock ubiquitousness. By the mid-eighties, "rock" was, in many ways, nearly dead, with hair metal and other sub-genres simply serving as the dead end for diehards - who, it could be noted, amount to a white working class of mostly men holding out against the resurgence of dance and urban music that was really changing the face of pop.

That whitneness is a large chunk of Rock of Ages' dilemma onscreen, only partially solved by the late appearance of Mary J. Blige, in what appears to be the show's second act. By then we've been introduced to Sherri, a young aspiring singer who leaves Oklahoma to come to LA and pursue her dream. She quickly gets mugged (this happens in more Broadway shows than you might think), and meets her male counterpart, also an aspiring singer who works in The Bourbon Room, a larger scale club space that has a long history of launching and promoting up and coming rock acts. Drew, the young man, brings Sherri to the cliub, gets her a job, and the two begin a fairly conventional romance.  The club, meanwhile, under pressure from Moral Majority types, is struggling to stay in the black, and the owner pins his hopes on a desperate plan to revive the club's fortunes with a concert by popular band Arsenal, fronted by the charismatic, yet odd, Stacee Jaxx.

Tom Cruise, as you may have heard, plays Stacee Jaxx, and the performance is, by now, classic Cruise: a true movie star, Cruise may not be the strongest actor, but he plays Tom Cruise really, really well, and to the extent that Stacee Jaxx works, it's because Cruise exudes the star quality needed to pull it off. Say what you will, but Cruise has never been one to just phone it in, and he's not starting now. There's an intensity and determination to his performance that goes a long way to lifting this material above where it might be otherwise, and Cruise deserves credit, as he did in Magnolia, with proving that he's at his best, often, in these supporting roles where he can dare to be less than entirely likable.

But Cruise is no singer, and it shows. As much as he swaggers and stomps through his backstage drama, once he's onstage as Jaxx, Cruise's studied approach to "Rock God" reveals his limitations. Compare Cruise, for instance, to Blige, and the contrast is obvious: Blige, as usual, inhabits her singing with a passion that's almost impossible to bottle. Cruise, by contrast, gives the impression of moving across the stage, striking pose after pose, vaguely reminding us of other stars (Jagger, Tyler... you know the drill), without a real feel for how these stars found their stage presences in the songs they sang. It doesn't make him a failure in the part, but it's a reminder, however subtle, that Cruise is, in some ways, enitirely miscast in this role, struggling to make it work.

Much of the casting is similarly head scratching: actors with no real musical background, like Cruise, Alec Baldwin and Paul Giamati (who makes the film's irredeemable villain so irredeemable as to be a cartoon), against more traditional musical theater types like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Diego Boneta and Julianne Hough, and more rock and radio based types like Blige and Russell Brand.  That the musical theater types fare best (CZJ, however thankless her role is as the uptight antirocker, can't hide her ways with a good number) gives away the game that for all its claims to a rock and roll heart, Rock of Ages is grounded, really, in terribly conventional musical theater cliches: this is a showbiz, backstage musical with "rock songs" where 42nd Street should be, which goes a long way towards explaining why it doesn't really work.

As the young leads, Hough and Boneta are pretty enough - too pretty, really, on both counts - but they're both saddled with some of the worst of this film's material, particularly Boneta, mouthing words to Foreigner and Journey songs that seem, in context, like gibberish. Hough, as she demonstrated in the Footloose remake, is tougher and smarter than the limited, good girl in trouble business she has to put over here. Her character's hardest choice is going from waitress to stripper, and Hough radiates the kind of unreality that she's too sweet to get too jaded from it all, but even she's too smart to buy it.

The film struggles, really with the challenge of being "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll" while being the more PG-13 "Smooches, Occasional Drinking and Pop Rock" family friendly alternative. No one in the movie gets stoned, never mind the odd absence of coke or heroin, even in an ostensible mess like Stacee Jaxx (Cruise is no one's idea of a hardcore alcoholic, no matter how he strolls around, scotch bottles in hand). And while the film pants with a kind of soft porn leeriness, the sexual situations are mostly tame, even in an obvious over the top number like the version of "I Want to Know What Love Is" that Jaxx sings while laying Malin Akermann's patently unbelievable Rolling Stone reporter on the back room pool table. Raunchy sex never had it so sad.

Most everything is this film is a pale carbon of other, not necessarily better, but still more committed rock films. Mark Wahberg, I think, can rest easy knowing that his own turn in Rock Star - along with Jennifer Aniston's - has more heft than anything Hough or Boneta can produce. Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous is way more true to the seventies era ethos of groupie/rock god, Rolling Stone excess than anything here. Blige's turn as a strip club owner with a heart of gold is essentially Cher's role in Burlesque, and both women have the star power to exceed weak material, but even Burlesque feels more ultimately authentic than anything Rock of Ages can conjure. 

Perhaps most weirdly, the flm can't shake the odd homoerotic undertone of its material; there's a whole lot of creepy male bonding on display here, too much crotch level interest in the men's leather pants to be ignored (Cruise, ever the tease, can't resist parading around in codpiece, jockstrap and assless chaps, and even his twin gun tats aimed at crotch level are really gay porn iconography). The film's cringiest, yet oddly sublime scene has Baldwin's club owner finally admitting his dirty desires for Brand, as the club's manager, to the tune of "Can't Fight This Feeling" the REO Speedwagon tune rock fans are most likely to call "That's so gay." That Brand has the verve to do the number in his best Freddie Mercury impression only adds to the subtlety, and to his credit, Baldwin is actor enough to sbubsume his "straight stud" history and commit to the moment at hand.

Fundamentally, though, that psychotic number is, in a nutshell, all the Vegas-y, trashy incoherence that sums up everything wrong with Rock of Ages: the wrong material, the wrong performers, the wrong (and false) emotional notes (as a runner up, among a "hard to choose just one" field, let's nominate Blige's strip club ode to "Any Way You Want It"). Director Adam Shankman can't begin to find a sustaining tone for this material, veering between satire, leaden humor, and melodrama without ever touching passion, intensity or ecstasy in any real way. Shankman managed to make sense of all of this with Hairspray (and try not to imagine how Blige could have steamrolled the Queen Latifah role there, either), but that just underlines where pop rock conventions and Hollywood work best in familar frames. Rock of Ages can either fit in the box and be denuded of its real danger and pathos... or it can soar. This film decidedly doesn't, with it's feet firmly on the floor, however strewn with used beer cans.

Finally, this film deserves two final slaps: one for the shoddy score, which is too lazy to include either Def Leppard's title track or Steve Perry's "Oh Sherrie", despite the obvious references to the lead character. Too many of the numbers smash together incongruous pairings (Harden My Heart and Shadows of the Night? We're Not Gonna Take It and We Built This City?), and find little musical payoff. Too many of the songs, especially the Foreigner material, turn out to be full of weak lyrics (making Mick Jones his generation's Jerry Herman, I think). Even the moments that work - especially Cruise's actorly reading of "Pour Some Sugar on Me," which was already all about sex, but becomes all about sex and Tom Cruise - have a sleazy obviousness that's trite. And yet more insulting, if that's possible, is the sleazy costuming which make the eighties look even worse than we all might remember them - from Zeta Jones' ill fitting suits to Hough's hooker streetwear, to Boneta and Cruise in tight jeans and nothing to the imagination tops, this film makes a whole era into a sleazy looking cartoon. And that, I suspect, is its real point. Hot and sticky sweet... those used to be good things. I swear.

Learning to Madison

I haven't written a lot about politics in a while. Hell, I haven't written much of anything in a while. Oh well.

Last night, I got mildly caught up in the angst of Wisconsin's recall election. But not too much... which probably goes some ways to explaining why a seemingly controversial, not exactly popular Governor managed to survive one of the few recall elections ever held (though apparently he's the only one who ever survived.

There's lots of talk about the "money in politics" part of this story, and no doubt, throwing millions and millions of dollars at a desired result has to help, but I just wanted to take note of a few of the less popular, less liberal friendly lessons this election might be giving us. Not to annoy anyone - even my closest friends have given up on me ever being a proper liberal - just to lay out some of the political issues that the left struggles with. So here, as they kind of occurred to me:

• Elections are local, and specific choices between actual people. There was lots of blather, last night, from people who don't live in Wisconsin, about the Governor's race, but I was struck by the fact that this election was basically a replay of the last one... and Tom Barrettt lost that one, too. I don't live there, I have no idea what Barrett's been like as Mayor of Madison. But apparently, Wisconsin does. There's a part of this story, I think, that both hasn't been told, and relates to the local scene. And I'm not sure many people not in Wisconsin really care what the details are. But they probably matter to how this election shook out. A corollary from this is that it's hard to extrapolate a "national message" here, though conservatives would like this to prove that Mitt Romney can/will beat President Obama. I don't buy that, not yet anyway. 
• Unions represent a small fraction of the entire populace. This is a reality that frustrates many lefties and makes it hard to come up with a new kind of liberal politics, because Union paricipation in the Democratic Party - financially, through volunteerism, and with expectations for return on investment - is out of proportion to that reality. We are well past the old romantic days of a manufacturing based working class well spoken for by union bosses, and liberal and Democratic Party politics have to move past those old mindsets. That's not an "antiunion" sentiment... but to the extent that this election was a referendum on public sector unions, the votes reflected a couple of unhappy corollaries: non-union households are not especially sympathetic to the remaining union gripes, and lots of people think it's reasonable to rein in government spending by cracking down on union benefits, which are perceived as plush.  Democrats can't stop Walker and Walker-like conservatives while clinging to outdated notions of "pro-union" boilerplate.
• Don't pretend there isn't a fiscal crisis. Walker's anti-union push was built on the noiton of making "hard choices" for how to deal with reducing government spending. I get that many liberlas don't like this, but Walker won by making these "hard choices" sound reasonable, and part of his success was that opposition to it sounded myopic and unrealistic. And while I don't think Wisconsin has huge national implications, there is a point to be made here about the coming budget, debt celing and tax fights in Washington: "raise taxes on millionaires" is hardly a serious approach to reining in spending or addressing revenue issues. 
• You can't fight money with nothing. Nobody wants to feel bought, and few want to think of themselves as mindless sheep, easily driven by propaganda to a desired result. All of the "this was about money" griping can't evade the fact that removing Walker was not unachievable, even with millionaires sinking lots of money into a desired result. Which is why I keep saying liberals need more of a call to action than anger and resentment towards a small number of rich people. People vote FOR things; and liberals who care should figure out why so many people - especially people who could have been persuaded otherwise - voted for Scott Walker. Again. Ideas matter, laying out a choice matters, and anger alone isn't a strategy. 

It's Hard To Look Right, At You Baby...

 

 

I have to admit... I don't entirely get this; the phenomenon of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" as a YouTube/lip-synch/cover item just mystifies me. The song is tuneful enough (which, among several reasons, is why I wouldn't call it a Worst Song Ever), but pulling out the video camera and shooting a lip synch video with my frat/cheerleading squad/co-workers... not really, no. I suspect that this YouTube phenom is actually the culmination of several trends in pop music that have been bubbling under the radar for a while (the lip synchs, the cover versions, the flash mobs, your nephew, her grandmother...), and ultimately, this may be the New Milennium equivalent of the Mix Tape - remember when you thought you were the only one making mix tapes? And then it turned out everyone did it?

Yeah, kind of like that. 

Now, who can take this to the next level?