Pun Salad

URLs du Jour — 2008-07-23

• You really oughta read Paul Gigot's article about his long history of skeptically investigating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the editorial pages of Wall Street Journal. As a reward, he was reviled by company executives and their politically powerful friends.

  At the time, Wall Street's Fannie apologists outdid themselves with their counterattack. One of the most slavish was Jonathan Gray, of Sanford C. Bernstein, who wrote to clients that the editorial was "unfounded and unsubstantiated" and "discredits the paper." My favorite point in his Feb. 20, 2002, Bernstein Research Call was this rebuttal to our point that "Taxpayers Are on The Hook: This is incorrect. The agencies' debt is not guaranteed by the U.S. Treasury or any agency of the Federal Government." Oops.

  Oops indeed. As USA Today put it yesterday:

  Congress' top budget analyst says a federal rescue of troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could cost taxpayers as much as $25 billion.

  That should give you all the motivation you need to pay attention to Gigot's conclusion:

  The abiding lesson here is what happens when you combine private profit with government power. You create political monsters that are protected both by journalists on the left and pseudo-capitalists on Wall Street, by liberal Democrats and country-club Republicans. Even now, after all of their dishonesty and failure, Fannie and Freddie could emerge from this taxpayer rescue more powerful than ever. Campaigning to spare taxpayers from that result would represent genuine "change," not that either presidential candidate seems interested.

  "Indeed."

• And, in further imitation of Mr. Insta: they told me if George W. Bush were re-elected, newspapers would be forced to withdraw stories that angered the politically powerful, and they were right!

• Star Wars geeks can feast their eyes on fine art that's been photoshopped to include familiar characters. For some reason David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps was a popular victim. (Via BBSpot.)

New Hampshire Republicans Can Come In Off the Ledge

If you are a NH GOPer, you might cheer yourself up a bit by checking out UNH's Granite State Poll released today. High points:

• Jeanne Shaheen's lead over John Sununu has shrunk from 12 points in April to 4 points now. Sununu's favorable/unfavorable ratings have improved, Shaheen's have worsened.

• Carole Shea-Porter's favorable/unfavorable ratings also continue to worsen. Jeb Bradley outpolls Congresswoman Shea-Porter by 46%-40%. The other GOP candidate, John Stephen, doesn't poll as well against Shea-Porter, losing 42%-36%.

• But it ain't looking good for any Republican running against Congressman Paul Hodes in NH's other district. Hodes continues to outpoll Bob Clegg (44%-25%, although that's slightly better than April's 51%-24% result). Similar results obtain in a Hodes-vs-Jennifer Horn race. Hodes' favorability ratings are decent and improving.

The Granite State Poll's Monday release showed Obama with a nanotube-thin lead over McCain, 46%-43% in New Hampshire. (Unfortunately for McCain, that's a comedown from his 6-point lead in April. But we'll try to stay optimistic.)

You can check the links for margins-of-errors, etc. New Hampshire's leftward movement doesn't look to be that inexorable.

[Note: the UNH Survey Center's final poll picked Obama over Clinton in the NH Primary, 39%-30%. Clinton wound up winning 39%-36%. So: Don't take polls seriously. Don't take this article seriously. Sorry for wasting your time.]

URLs du Jour — 2008-07-22

• There was a New York Times story a couple days ago in its "Debt Trap" series. Although they could have also entitled it "Desperately Seeking Scapegoats." After detailing the financial woes of Ms Diane McLeod of Philadelphia PA, and intimating that her sad story is shared by bazillions of Americans "standing at the financial precipice":

  While the circumstances surrounding these downfalls [yes, Americans are at a "precipice", but at the same time have experienced a "downfall"] vary, one element is identical: the lucrative lending practices of America’s merchants of debt have led millions of Americans — young and old, native and immigrant, affluent and poor — to the brink. More and more, Americans can identify with miners of old: in debt to the company store with little chance of paying up.

  For Thomas Sowell, the phrase "lucrative lending practices" is a fat slow pitch in the middle of the strike zone:

  It must take either a willful determination to believe whatever they want to believe or a cynical desire to propagandize their readers for the New York Times to call "lucrative" the lending practices that have caused many lenders to lose millions of dollars, some to lose billions and some to go bankrupt themselves.

  Kip Esquire is unsympathetic to Ms. McLeod: his article on the NYT piece is titled "New York Times Devotes 3,233 Words to Defending an Idiot". Ouch.

• I saw a pointer in the new Wired to GraphJam, billed as "Pop Culture for People in Cubicles". I resemble that! Sample:

  

  And from that very same movie:

  

  Those are just examples, there are plenty of others. You have to have a certain mentality to find this amusing, but … you know who you are.

• Speaking of Wired, I was also much impressed by this brief interview with NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson describing her harrowing Soyuz re-entry last April.

  Wired: Any landing you can crawl away from is a good one, I guess.

  Whitson: Obviously it wasn't totally nominal.

  NASA astronauts: still got the Right Stuff. Dr. Whitson has logged 377 days in space during her two International Space Station Missions, more than any other American. She's from Iowa, like all decent folk.

The Bank Job

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'Tis a heist movie, it is. Like Ocean's 11, except that these guys are about ten times less glamorous and fifty times less competent than Danny Ocean and his pals.

It's set in 1971. Jason Statham plays the lead crook; he's roped into a scheme to knock over the safety deposit vault in the Baker Street branch of Lloyd's by an ex-girlfriend. (That's always a sign of upcoming trouble.) He recruits a bunch of his pals to help out. Unbeknownst to him, the real target is not the cash or jewels in the boxes, but a bunch of dirty pictures of Princess Margaret.

Part of the robbers' charm is that they are small-timers way over their heads. They station a lookout on a roof, with whom they communicate via walkie-talkie; it never occurs to them that anyone can listen in on their chatter. Pretty soon, not only the police are after them, but a number of shady characters who had important items in the vault; some of their pursuers have no compunctions about using violence in their retrieval efforts.

The movie based on an actual robbery back in 1971, which is still shrouded in mystery, due to the British government's efforts to hush things up. The filmmakers built a pretty good yarn on top of the sketchy facts available.

According to this story, the Baker Street robbers spraypainted "Let Sherlock Holmes try to solve this." before they exited the vault. It's nice to know that literate criminals of the era remembered that Sherlock lived just a few blocks down. Alas, this amusing detail didn't make it into the movie.

The Dark Knight

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As I type, The Dark Knight is the number 1 movie on IMDB's top 250 movies of all time. That will probably come down a bit. Um, maybe.

You've almost certainly heard about the plot, so I won't bother to summarize it.

All the actors here give outstanding performances. Heath Ledger has gotten the most attention for his interpretation of the Joker, but Aaron Eckhart also deserves some major respect for his Harvey Dent; without spoiling things too much, his character undergoes the biggest transformation in the movie. And Maggie Gyllenhaal brings an intelligence to the role of Rachel Dawes that was pretty much absent with Katie Holmes in the previous movie.

And Christian Bale really is the best Batman ever.

It's all very intense and bleak and (sorry, I know this is the word everyone uses) dark. (It's PG-13, but I wouldn't take a 13-year-old.) But it's not unremittingly dark; again without spoiling things, one major plot point near the end is resolved with optimistic inspiration. But the rest of the movie's gloomy enough so that's kind of a shock in itself.

It's also 152 minutes in length, with what seems like 20 minutes of previews on the front end, so the small-bladdered should plan accordingly.

The Phony Campaign — 2008-07-20 Update

After a reality-sundering week at the number two position, Obama's back on top:

We're pretty much laying off Obama today, though. Those who can't get along without a summary of Barackrobatics can check out James Lewis at the American Thinker for your weekly dose: Barack's Disgraceful Global Phony-Ops.

In other phony news:

• Bob Barr doesn't get a lot of phony love on the web, but a gentleman named "Thirsty McWormwood" tries to correct that at the American Spectator.

  No politician in recent history has flip-flopped as spectacularly as Barr has done while at the same time managing to avoid the charges of hypocrisy, rank cynicism, or spinelessness that such transformations inevitably bring with them.

  Mr. McWormwood runs down five guidelines for other politicians who want to flip-flop with as little attention for it as Barr has received. He missed number six though: run as a Libertarian Party candidate; you'll find nobody really cares about your consistency, or anything else, really, other than your ability to be a spoiler for one of the major party's candidates.

• Jonathan Chait rose to a sort of prominence back in 2003 when he opened a New Republic column with "I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it."

  Amazingly, he's apparently paid to, at least occasionally, lay bare his quirky gut-reactions to politicians. Pretty good gig, when thousands of bloggers do that nearly every day, for free.

  In any case, his latest article is the latest example:

  Yes, people put far too much stock in the candidates' personalities. (I'd vote for an obnoxious, pampered phony who shared my beliefs over a charming war hero who didn't.) But personality isn't completely meaningless, either. A president sets the tone for our public discourse, and McCain is pretty easy to take. His demagoguery comes with an awkward forced smile, which doesn't make it more forgivable but does make it less irritating.

  So McCain has hit Chait's sweet spot of "unforgivable, but less irritating." McCain's sloganeers should take notes. What of his substantive views?

  As for his substantive views, they do (now) closely resemble Bush's. Yet the upside to a candidate who changes his philosophical orientation as often as McCain is that he could always switch back. While I certainly wouldn't recommend that anybody go so far as to vote for him on that basis, it still offers some grounds for hope. The Bush presidency is like being married to a sociopath. A McCain presidency would be more like being married to a drug addict--however badly he behaves, he could always sober up.

  I've never been married to a sociopath or a drug addict, so I'll defer to Chait's expertise there. But what does it say about modern liberalism when one of the closest metaphors they can think of for a presidency is that of marriage?

  Chait's bottom line: McCain's a phony, but not an obnoxious and pampered one, and the phoniness means he could totally betray the people who voted for him. So, hey, not bad!

• Over at Time, James Poniewozik writes loosely on the infamous recent New Yorker cover and the difficulty in coming up with good political jokes. Hey, he asks, what about folks like John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and (!) Keith Olbermann?

  These commentators are so effective (and more popular, among some audiences, than the straight media they've supplanted) precisely because they spray seltzer in the face of the official, inoffensive, phony public discourse. Unlike many politicians, they say what they think; unlike much of the media, they trust their audience's intelligence. That we should rely so heavily on them to do so is the biggest joke in American public life. I wish I could laugh.

  Poor glum Jamie P! Pun Salad translates his "they trust their audience's intelligence" as "they know their audience's political viewpoints, and carefully tailor their presentations so as to not seriously challenge them." You know, kind of like Time magazine.

• For a real chuckle, the Google will also take you to a pamphlet issued by the "Internationalist Group". (Which I suspect may be more accurately called either "Three Guys Who Meet in Steve's Mom's Basement" or "Some Frat Boys Who Know Enough Left Wing Jargon to be Freelance Agents Provocateurs")

  Imperialist war can only be defeated with class war. Talk of “majorities” peacefully persuading the (ruling-class) “minority” to withdraw from Iraq by “demonstrating” that the majority is a majority, is a deception that serves the ruling class by promoting illusions in bourgeois “democracy.” So what if the capitalists and war supporters are a minority? It hasn’t stopped them before. This minority rules through the capitalist state apparatus: it has the police, the prisons, the courts and the armed forces at its disposal, as well as the capitalist media as a platform for “opinion makers.” This minority makes war to keep its heel on the necks of oppressed and exploited millions. Nothing but smashing the capitalist system will put an end to imperialist war. The “Progressive Democrats,” Greens and the phony socialists are opponents of workers revolution. Unity with them means endless war.

  The real fun is reading the Internationalists inveighing against a host of "opportunist Leftist groups", including the "League for the Revolutionary Party", the "Northeast Federation of Anarcho-Communists", the "AL (Animal Liberation) collective", and the "ex-Trotskyist Spartacist League". These guys hate themselves much more than they hate capitalism. Which is, I suppose, kind of a good thing.

• Our regular readers will want to know that our word "Barackrobatics" is still being beaten like a Gotham City thug in Google Hits by "Obamafuscation", 947 to 3.

Mamma Mia!

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I've been waiting impatiently for The Dark Knight ever since the closing credits of Batman Begins. I desperately want to see The Dark Knight before inadvertant web surfing reveals plot spoilers. So, naturally, at my first opportunity on this premiere weekend, Mrs. Salad and I went to see … Mamma Mia!

Long story.

Plot: Sophie's getting married, and she wants to invite her dad to her wedding. Complication: she doesn't know who that is. So she steals her Mom's diary covering the period of her conception, and narrows the field down to three candidates, and, unbeknownst to Mom, invites all three.

That sounds like a recipe for laff-filled wacky mayhem, and it is, but wait! There's more: (a) it all happens on a romantic Greek isle; (b) Mom is played by Meryl Streep; (c) the potential dads are played by Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård; (d) Mom's buddies show up, and they are played by Julie Walters and Christine Baranski; (e) everyone and anyone can break into a big-production ABBA song at any time.

ABBA, for you youngsters, was a pop group with music so fluffy and bland and bouncy, it made the Carpenters look like the Sex Pistols.

Now, most of these people have no musical or dancing talent any greater than you might catch at the Hackmatack Playhouse in Berwick, Maine, on any summer weekend. But that's not bad, because (like the Hackmatack), everyone's very enthusiastic and clearly having a blast. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to get roped into the fun.

I checked out the audience in our crowded theatre. I think women outnumbered men about 4-to-1. And, for the first time in perhaps decades, I may have been younger than the average attendee. It's probably a pretty good date movie, but it's an even safer bet if you take your Mom.

Experimental Results — 2008-07-20

This week's test of the Sunday Basic Cable Movie Actor Theory:

• 12:30AM on TNT: Space Cowboys (Clint Eastwood)
• 3:00PM on USA: Bad Boys II (Will Smith)
• 8:00PM on FX: Batman Begins (Morgan Freeman)

And yea verily the theory stands unrefuted for the past 22 weeks.

August Rush

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A welcome respite from my recent streak of unfunny comedies, this movie is (instead) a very sentimental story about love and music. During the movie, I thought to myself: if Dickens were alive, and a screenwriter, this is the kind of movie he'd write. Now I've looked at some of the reviews, and it appears that a lot of critics mentioned this too.

It's the story of a young lad who has grown up in an orphanage. Via flashbacks we learn that he's the offspring of two musical talents who had an impossibly romantic hookup one evening. By a series of plot contrivances, father, mother, and child are all separated from each other for years. Will they be reunited? Son, is water wet?

This got mediocre reviews (36% on the Tomatometer), but if you're not a critic, and you're not allergic to supergooey sentiment, you might like it. There are (I thought) some pretty clever things done with the sound editing. The principal characters, played by Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Freddie Highmore are all pretty good. Robin Williams has a supporting role as Fagin, I mean "Wizard", a collector/curator/exploiter of homeless street kids.

Go Away, Little Girl

Our local newspaper reports on yesterday's visit of Carole King to our area, where she campaigned for Barack Obama and Jeanne Shaheen (who's running against our state's incumbent Senator, John E. Sununu).

She's certainly enthusiastic. Apparently riffing off an allegedly inspirational comment from Hillary Clinton in her concession speech:

"I love what she said about there are now 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling," King said. "There are now 18 million cracks in another kind of ceiling. And when you put them together, and if we have all this cracked ceiling, maybe the ceiling will go away, and then there won't be any ceiling any more for anybody ever again."

Be careful, you might get what you wish for:

Soon after that, King led the group in a sing-along, tweaking her music in hopes of sending Obama, a senator from Illinois, to the White House.

I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down, tumbling down
I feel my heart start to trembling
Whenever you're around

Why yes it can. Because Carole has lots of pre-feminist odes to slavish devotion, and she's not shy about recycling them:

And then to Barack," King said softly, "we'd say, 'Where you lead, I will follow, anywhere that you tell me to ... .'"

But wouldn't even a Democrat find this unabashed sycophancy more than a little creepy?