meditations

What Went Wrong With Two and a Half Men?

In two words: Charlie Sheen.

Say what you want about Charlie, and Lord knows there's a lot to say, but he's a significantly above average actor, especially as a comedian.

Lou Costello, praising Bud Abbott, famously said, "Comics are a dime a dozen, but good straight man is hard to find." Sheen was/is a decent comedian, but he's an amazing straight man. Go back to the first few seasons of 2.5 Men — I have almost no knowledge of the timeline on Charlie's personal demons, but, like Matthew Perry, his later work suffered — but in the early years he could accomplish more with a deadpan or confused silent stare than most major comics can do in a thirty minute monologue.

Once Sheen left the scene — again, no idea how bad his personal issues were — the show lost its moorings. Ashton Kutcher, his supposed replacement, is a below par actor. Call him an 8 handicap, and played an unsympathetic character. Who is going to identify with an emotionally immature billionaire with a private jet? Courtney Thorne-Smith played an increasing role, but is similarly a below replacement level actress whose character was an indifferent, screeching, alcoholic mother.

Moreover, good actors like Holland Taylor and Melanie Lynskey (a Kiwi!) essentially disappeared from the show. They played flawed characters, to be sure, but were spot-on at it. Instead the show kept introducing half-baked characters who never broke through. Amber Tamblyn was okay for a while, but never really took, and the guy who played Barry was a joke, and not in the good way. The child actor who played Louis was nothing more than a throwaway. I hope he's overcome the experience.

Instead we were left with hours of  Jon Cryer cringe comedy. Seriously, do any of us need another scene of Alan Harper in a neck brace? The absolute low point of the series was in Episode 6 of the penultimate season when Lynda Carter guested as herself and Alan made a complete fool of himself as a rabid Wonderwoman groupie. You can admire Cryer's commitment to do anything for a laugh, but eventually cringe comedy is just cringe.

So fare thee well Charlie Sheen. You are missed.

Same old plot, same old cast of characters

Once again, prompted by an op-ed by Warren Buffett, Kevin Drum wades into the septic swamp of increasing taxes on the rich. He includes a plot comparing the capital gains tax rate to real (private sector) investment in the economy, and to my eye they look completely uncorrelated, with post-WWII investment growing in almost linear fashion (he plots the Log) while the CapGains rate has jumped all over the place.  However, Kevin doesn't give sourcing on the chart, so it's hard to know what the assumptions behind it are. Does it adjust for inflation? What about population growth? Etc.

In any event, within minutes the Republican trolls were out in full force in his comments section, performing the written equivalent of drowning Kevin out by singing LA LA LA with their fingers in their ears. Proof once again that the GOP has devolved into  a religious cult trapped in cognitive dissonance. It's a mental house of cards so unstable that anytime the core falsehoods are challenged the "When in doubt, SHOUT" reaction is sure to follow.

As I never tire of telling people, over the past 35 years the GOP has been taken over by crackpot "supply side" economics — crackpot in the sense that there is no empirical evidence to support their theory, and a great deal to disprove it — a process nicely chronicled by John Chait in his book The Big Con. The infamous Laffer Curve, which (falsely) suggests that lowering tax rates causes government revenues to rise, is the best known aspect of supply side economics. So well known, in fact, that the average person might think "supply side" and "Laffer Curve" are equivalent terms. They're not, and in fact if it was that simple the GOP would likely have escaped its deluded cargo-cult state. Cognitive Dissonance almost always rests on having a complex interlocking series of arguments that allow the cult to rationalize their way around confronting their false beliefs. In the case of the supply siders, that means a multigenerational argument — largely led by the Editorial staff a the Wall Street Journal — that marginal tax rates, particularly low marginal rates on upper incomes, are a key variable in economic growth. (Indeed, in recent years some supply siders have become so extreme they border on positing marginal tax rates as the only variable in growth rates.)

That seems like an easily tested hypothesis, and sure enough, Jacques Distler has the goods, and I've taken the liberty of copying the chart below. As with Kevin's chart of investment vs. the capital gains rate, there's no there there. If anything, there's a slight correlation with increased rates on upper incomes promoting growth — Gee, you think maybe people work harder in order to bring home the same net income? — a correlation which is only going to increase when the figures from 2010 and 2011 are added.

It would be nice to think straightforward analyses like this could start an intelligent dialog and perhaps lead the GOP back to reality. But as the response to Kevin's post shows, the rabid-right is so far the anti-tax rabbit hole that it will take a generation for them to come to their senses, if then.

Update: Corrected the sentence about the Laffer Curve to reflect that it's government revenues that are supposed to rise, not government spending. Thanks for the catch Periodista.

WORST.PRESIDENT.EVER

Up to now I’ve been willing to defend Bush against the “worst president ever” argument on the grounds that Pierce, Buchanan and Harding at least deserve consideration. But as far as I’m concerned this puts him over the top

Bush war on cheese raises a stink in France

Banning Roquefort? High tariffs on truffles and foi gras and Pellegrino? I may starve!

UPDATE: While talking this over with Jodi she asked me for a one line summary of the history of this conflict. I came up with “We stuck it to the French with McDonald’s, and now are sticking it to ourselves by doing without good food.” Truly no one wins in a trade war.

Another Light in My Life

Jodi’s youngest son Joe — her father is also named Joe, her mother Laura Jo, and her sister is Jinny Jo, detect a pattern? — is quite a character. He’s amazingly charismatic for someone who just turned eight. Here he is sleeping with his beloved stuffed guinea pig. We recently got him a live version, that he christened George. It took him less than two days to suggest he really needed two guinea pigs so “George won’t get lonely.”

A Particularly Special Day

January 21, 2009: Rest in Peace EO 13233.

The Dynamics of a Presidential Legacy: Jimmy Carter

As I noted earlier, apologists for the Bush administration have been actively trying to burnish his legacy as the reign of error comes to an end. One talking point consistently stressed is that “only history can judge” the merits of a presidency and, like Harry Truman, over time Bush will move from the ranks of the lowly regarded to one of the greats.

Methinks not.

In the last 100 years there are three parallels for potential redemption Bush can draw from, Carter, Truman, and Wilson — Nixon was unredeemable and Harding, having died in office, had no opportunity for redemption — and I’ll go through them in reverse chronologic order, starting with Carter, whose redemption at this point remains outstanding.

Like all presidents Carter had personal traits, and presidential results, both good and bad. One thing that surprises me when discussions of his legacy arise is that people seldom cite the single most positive act of his presidency, pardoning the Vietnam draft resisters. If you think the culture wars have been bad these last thirty years, imagine them with that festering sore. Unfortunately, Carter took that action his very first day in office and it was downhill from there. Once you get past the pardons, along with the Panama Canal treaties and some decent moves on the environment — he more than doubled the size of the national park system — you're pretty much done with the asset side of Carter's ledger. Arguably some fraction of the Camp David accords should go to him, but it was Sadat who made the bold move that set the stage. Similarly, Carter made an early and forceful stab at making the US energy independent, but once he left office the effort evaporated.

As for the negatives, sigh... For those not old enough to remember it's almost impossible to describe how bleak the late 70s were. There were three separate recessions in the decade, two major oil crises, and economic productivity barely budged. Starting in the late 60s inflation began to undermine the overall economy and grew steadily despite the highly distinct approaches of three different administrations, hitting close to 20% in the first two quarters of 1980. (I had a part-time job in the local college package store and remember Tuesday as "price day" when it might take my entire shift to go through the shelves putting new price tags on all the bottles.

The Summer of Sam, the hostage crisis (and bungled hostage rescue), the air traffic controllers strike, the Olympic boycott, Three Mile Island... it goes on. And let’s not even talk about the hangover of Vietnam. In almost every way it seemed the age of American ascendancy was over. To be sure, Carter wasn't personally responsible for most of these events, just a victim of circumstances and bad luck. But his histrionic and melodramatic approach to the presidency — in my lifetime he's the only president to complain (repeatedly) "the job is too big for one man." Can anyone imagine Reagan or Clinton or Margaret Thatcher saying that? — meant he was going to take a lot of the blame.

And in foreign policy he was utterly feckless, piously lecturing countries about "human rights" while cozying up to the Shah and other autocrats, failing to get the SALT II treaty through the senate, saying "the scales have fallen from my eyes" after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, having his secretary of state resign in protest after the failed hostage rescue, saying he wouldn't leave the white house until the hostages were freed, and then changing his mind when he fell behind Kennedy in the polls.

History has been kind to a couple of 20th century Democratic presidents (Truman and, amazingly, Wilson) but I doubt it will extend the same benefit to Carter.

He has (like John Quincy Adams) been a remarkably positive “ex-President” through his books, charitable efforts, and on the ground work monitoring elections in emerging democracies. But (a) that doesn’t change the borderline failed essence of his presidency and (b) doesn’t provide George W. with a realistic template for rehabilitating his image. Can anyone really picture W with a hammer in his hand building a house for a poor family? Or traveling to some third world country to help monitor elections?

Favorite Recipes #4: Indian Spiced Potatoes

My late mother gave me this, not sure of the original source.

Indian Spiced Potatoes

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon Butter (+ small amount to grease pan)
2 large onions
1 Tablespoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground tumeric
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon salt
2-6 cloves of garlic
Fresh ground pepper
3 large baking potatoes
1 cup heavy cream or half-et-half

Directions:
Peel onions, halve, then slice thinly crosswise.
Melt butter, add onions. Cook on medium, stirring regularly, for 30 minutes.
Peel and cut potatoes into thin slices.

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

In a bowl put cumin, tumeric, cayenne, salt and pepper.
Mince garlic, add to bowl. Stir.

Butter a 13" X 9" X " baking dish.

Place in half of potatoes in overlapping fashion into the pan and sprinkle with half of the spices.
Add onions and then add rest of potatoes, again in overlapping fashion.
Then add rest of spice mixture.
Pour cream over top.

Cover with aluminum foil and bake for one hour.
Remove foil and cook for ten minutes to brown top.

Serves 4-6 easily.

Presidential Legacies

There has been a lot of talk in the last couple months about “The Bush Legacy.” This is in no small part because Karen Hughes, Karl Rove, et al. actually organized a “Bush Legacy Project” to convince us (poor, mindless cretins that we be) “he really wasn’t as bad as you think.” I expect this effort will only escalate as we head into “the final days” and the fact that I use that phrase, so fraught with meaning from the Nixon years, says a lot about the fruit this effort will bear. But there’s a much clearer way to put it, “only a president with a truly lousy legacy would need a concerted effort to improve how his legacy is viewed.”

Is W the worst president ever? While plenty of people happily hang that title on him, the scientist in me thinks “worst” is a superlative, and thus sets a pretty high standard, and the historian in me says “Worse than Pierce? Worse than Buchanan? Worse than Harding?” Seems like we could have a healthy debate on the subject. But worst president to be re-elected? To wreak havoc for more than four years? Bush takes the prize and it’s not even close. Nixon (who got only six years) was a disaster in almost every way — to this day I’m stunned his wage & price controls aren’t taught as a textbook case of how not to manage the economy — but he had real and long-lasting accomplishments as well, including opening up China and the SALT I treaty. So the “man who is buried in Grant’s tomb” can rest easy, he’s about to move up a notch.

Cheney, Rove, Rice and other proxies, as well as Bush himself, repeatedly state “history will be the final judge” and they frequently invoke Harry Truman as an example of how perceptions can change over time. Fair enough regarding Truman, who left office the most unpopular president (save Nixon, depending on how you measure the polls) in the 20th century. But, speaking as someone who reads lots of presidential history, Truman was a “special case” in ways that don’t remotely map to Bush. The Bush apologistas would be better served invoking the legacy of Woodrow Wilson, another short-sighted moralistic idealist who left a world-wide mess in his wake.

Bottom Line: George W. Bush is, and will almost certainly remain, one of the worst presidents in the nation’s history. He has in only eight years taken us from a nation of peace and prosperity to endless conflict and quasi-bankruptcy. His successes are few and far between — I’ll give him PEPFAR and the Surge — while his failures are almost innumerable (and likely to grow once the new administration starts turning over the rocks on torture, Cheney’s energy task force, etc).

Offhand I can think of four presidents in the last hundred or so years whose reputations needed and were open to major rehabilitation: Wilson, Truman, Carter and GWB (Nixon needed it but was beyond salvation). I’ll try to write a short summary of the first three over the next couple of weeks. George W will be an ongoing dialogue.

Favorite Recipes #3: John Hinterberger's Clam Spaghetti

Speaking of having friends over for dinner the other night, here is the main course. It’s adapted from John Hinterberger’s (legendary) Clam Spaghetti recipe. Hinterberger was a long time writer for the Seattle Times and, as I remember, he would publish this on occasion with no two versions being quite the same. He would tweak the recipe over and over, sometimes there was wine, sometimes there were olives and/or pimento, etc. In his spirit I played with the recipe a bit and have settled on the following, although it’s definitely not something I follow to the letter, more of a Jazz fugue.

John Hinterberger's Clam Spaghetti

6 servings

½ cup plus 1 tablespoon olive oil, divided
1 dried red chili pepper, finely chopped or 1 tsp red pepper flakes crushed
1 large onion, chopped
3-6 (to taste) large garlic cloves, minced or mashed
½ cup fresh basil leaves, chopped, or 2 tablespoons dried
2 tablespoon oregano
Salt and pepper
½ cup dry white wine
2 cans (4½ ounces) chopped clams, drained with liquid reserved
1/3 pound mushrooms, sliced
1 tablespoon butter
1 pound dried spaghetti or linguine (for this dinner I used Bucati)
Grated Romano or Parmesan cheese

1. Put ½ cup olive oil in a large saute pan and heat, adding the dried chili pepper, chopped onion and garlic cloves. Cook slowly for about 30 minutes or until the onions are very soft.

2. Add to pan the basil, oregano, salt and pepper, wine and liquid from the clams. Continue to simmer until the liquid is reduced by 1/4 to 1/3. Keep warm. In the meantime, in a separate pan sauté the mushrooms in a tablespoon of butter or olive oil and add to the mixture.

3. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Cook spaghetti until barely al dente.

4. As pasta is cooking, add the clams and cheese to the sauce and simmer at low heat for about 5 minutes. The cheese serves as a thickener and the amount you add depends on how much you reduced the liquid. I like to reduce it by about 25% and to add about 1/4 cup of cheese.

5. After draining the pasta, stir into the sauce and toss. Sprinkle generously with grated cheese and additional pepper.

Stability in the Midst of Chaos

One of the more amusing gifts that Jodi (errrr.... I mean Santa!) got for her younger son Joe was a drinking bird science toy. Of course, the amusement proved more long-lasting for Jodi and me (particularly me) as Joe, after a few minutes of enchantment, moved on to his Kung Fu Panda video game.

While I’d seen a drinking bird before, I’d never really pondered the device much. I knew it was a thermodynamic engine of some sort, but figured it was just powered by the difference between the ambient temperature in the room and the liquid and that after a period of time it would stop. That turns out not to be true. The bird is powered by the by the temperature difference between the evaporating water on the beak (evaporative cooling) and the temperature in the abdomen, using a difference in vapor pressure to move the internal fluid. Really quite sophisticated in its own way and has even been the subject of an article in the American Journal of Physics.

Eventually even I would have lost interest and moved on to my equivalent of a video game (meaning a crossword puzzle or two) but the other morning the bird got my attention again. I came down the stairs to find it on the dining room table where Jodi had left it the night before, but instead of bobbing up and down it was almost perfectly stationary with its beak submerged in the water. My first guess was that it had hung on the hinges, or the equilibrium had been broken and it was resting against the glass, but on closer inspection it was bobbing up and down ever so slightly and the fluid inside was moving slightly back and forth in a slow cycle. I realized that by chance we must have hit a near stable point, where the evaporation from the head — all of which was now saturated with liquid — was at just the right rate to create an equilibrium. Who says Christmas presents can’t be educational?

Left to my own choices, I would have waited a few days until the water level dropped enough that the equilibrium was broken, but we had guests coming over for dinner last night so, without asking and thinking only of our guests, Jodi moved everything out of the way — personally, as a major science nerd, I think it would have made a great conversation piece for our friends. Fortunately, I did think to take a picture first. So here you have it, the “stable” bobbing bird. If you look closely you can see the slight gap between the body and the glass.