Brief thoughts on last night’s Homeland

Film/TV, , , , ,
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZjPzWPdoqw]

Warning: Homeland spoilers below.

I seem to be in some weird alternate universe in which I disagree progressively more strongly with the critical consensus on Homeland episodes. Yesterday’s episode, “The Clearing,” is a case in point: many reviews I read took a decidedly “meh” tone about the story, while I thought it may have been Homeland‘s strongest week of the entire series (or at the very least, in the top three or so).

The one thing almost everyone agreed upon was the pool scene, in which a solitary Nick Brody was momentarily able to escape his increasingly complicated life by taking a brief swim in the dark. The combination of the music, the deliberately slow pacing (which contrasts heavily with the general feel of Homeland), and the solitude rendered this one of the single best moments in the entirety of the show. Just a beautifully executed scene.

In all other aspects of the episode, reviews were mixed. But I thought all the storylines were actually well-constructed and helped to contribute to a pervasive sense of betrayal and abandonment. Jess feels betrayed by Brody (for not telling her about killing Tom Walker), by Dana (for running someone over and not confessing earlier), and — to a lesser extent — by Cynthia Walden (for immediately seeking the coverup instead of acting ethically). Brody, in turn, feels betrayed by Carrie for using him in the eponymous clearing of the title, and then for her humiliation of him in front of Dana at the end of the episode. Saul feels betrayed by Aileen, with whom he’d believed to have established a rapport. And Dana feels betrayed by a compromised father whom she once idolized, and by Finn for his coldness after she forced their confession.

Also, can we please see more of Mandy Patinkin? That guy’s the best actor on the entire show. As Alan Sepinwall alluded to in his review, Patinkin’s scene with Aileen — especially after he realized what she had done — should single-handedly win the man an Emmy. What a performance.

Irrational exuberance?

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[hulu http://www.hulu.com/watch/423753]

Frank Rich thinks so. Echoing his comments from mid-October (which I covered here), Rich insists that the post-election Democratic triumphalism is misguided, and that nothing has substantially altered the long-term prospects for Tea Party-style conservatism:

More seriously, if you look at the GOP’s suicidal talk right now, and the Democratic and liberal triumphalism, it’s very much a replay of what I wrote about in last month’s piece. After LBJ beat Goldwater in a far bigger victory, an out-and-out landslide, in 1964, Republicans moaned about being consigned to minority party status and possibly oblivion; Democrats talked about having won the war of ideas and demographics as well as the politics. (Goldwater only carried his home state of Arizona and a swath of the Confederate South.) Two years later, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, and four years later Richard Nixon became president. The core small-government credo of conservatives has been remarkably consistent and resilient ever since and still commands a majority following according to last week’s exit polling. What’s more, the GOP bench — Rubio (who’s very slick by the way), Ryan, Christie, Jindal, etc — is far younger than that of the Hillary-Biden post-Obama Democrats. This new Republican generation will find a way to put a kinder, gentler, Hispanic, female face on the GOP soon enough.

This is a depressing forecast. But it’s a useful counterpoint to jubilant predictions of Republican moderation (which I’ve expressed as recently as yesterday). Jonathan Cohn is on roughly the same page regarding the mindset of the American right:

It’s basically another version of the 47 percent argument—i.e., that 47 percent of the country is dependent on the rest of the taxpaying public. It was kicking around in conservative circles even before Mitt Romney invoked it at that now-infamous Florida fundraiser. And judging by recent commentary, it’s going to keep kicking around for a while longer. Last week, National Review’s Kevin Williamson concluded that “offering Americans a check is a more fruitful political strategy than offering them the opportunity to take control of and responsibility for their own lives.” Just today, Washington Post conservative writer Jennifer Rubin wrote that the Democratic Party won by “feeding its base cotton candy.”

It’s true that Americans, on the whole, are more enthusiastic about receiving public services than they are about paying for them. They always have been. And it creates real policy dilemmas, particularly as an aging population makes services more expensive. Do we scale back these programs or raise taxes to pay for them? Do we trust the marketplace to find efficiencies, or turn to the government? Conservatives need to be more forthright than they have been about their proposed answers to these questions: We can’t cut Medicaid by a third, as Paul Ryanproposed to do, without seriously harming low-income people. But liberals also need to confront some unpleasant realities. Over the long run, we can’t sustain the current level of benefits without asking the middle class to pay at least a little more in taxes.

But sometimes the argument about free stuff has a more insidious meaning—and you don’t have to strain to hear it. During the Fox News broadcast on Election Night, Bill O’Reilly declared, “It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.” In case the reference to “traditional America” was too subtle, O’Reilly went on to talk about Obama’s strong support among blacks, Latinos, and women.

Tangentially, this “maker vs. taker” paradigm is no longer restricted to the United States: it’s taken on a global appeal. Fellow blogger Max Marder notes a very 47%-esque comment coming from a member of Israel’s new Yisrael Beiteinu-Likud party:

An article from Haaretz this afternoon quoted Likud-Beiteinu Knesset member Faina Kirshenbaum  Romneyesque’s diatribe against Israeli-Arab citizens:

“The Arabs are an economic burden on the state. They barely pay taxes and receive enormous budgets from the state,” Kirshenbaum told a German-Israeli sister cities conference held in Jerusalem by the Union of Local Authorities in Israel.

“The Arabs in the State of Israel pay NIS 400 million in taxes, but receive benefits worth at least NIS 11 billion,” she said.

“The Arabs in the State of Israel want equal rights, but they don’t contribute to the state. In order to receive equal rights, they must contribute to the state like every other citizen and serve three years, either in national service or in their communities.”

“Only 38 percent of Israeli citizens pay taxes, and a small portion of them are minorities. Tax-paying citizens of the state are carrying the rest of the population on their backs,” she added.

Kirshenbaum’s comments doubly mirror defeated presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who said both that a lack of Palestinian economic success vis-a-vis Israel was the result of cultural inferiority and that 47% of Americans were essentially moochers off of the state. What both Romney and Kirshenbaum miss, obviously, is that Israeli-Arabs are at best second-class citizens in the Jewish State. Israeli-Arabs, like African-Americans, are worse off than the majority because of historic discrimination, not laziness.

It’s a bitter irony that, following on the heels of one of the worst global recessions in modern history, the emerging narrative is that class warfare is being waged by the poor against the successful and wealthy. This seems odd, given the enormous bailouts staged in the United States and elsewhere simply to save this very same Team Successful from irreparable financial ruin. Clearly, no good deed goes unpunished.

I am becoming gradually convinced that one of the chief problems preventing genuine financial and tax reform in the U.S. is the massive blindspot that lower- and middle-class Americans have about…themselves. No one thinks of himself as a taker, but millions think that half the rest of the country is. How convenient, then, that all these nameless, faceless takers all turned out to have voted for Barack Obama. Maybe Frank Rich has a point.

(Video at the top is only marginally related to anything in this post, but I couldn’t let the opportunity to sneak it in slip away.)

Hurricane Syria continues to expand

Politics, , , , , , ,

And is threatening not just Lebanon, but Turkey and now Israel as well:

Syria pulled both Turkey and Israel closer to military entanglements in its civil war on Monday, bombing a rebel-held Syrian village a few yards from the Turkish border in a deadly aerial assault and provoking Israeli tank commanders in the disputed Golan Heights into blasting mobile Syrian artillery units across their own armistice line.

he escalations, which threatened once again to draw in two of Syria’s most powerful neighbors, came hours after the fractious Syrian opposition announced a broad new unity pact that elicited praise from the big foreign powers backing their effort to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

“It is a big day for the Syrian opposition,” wrote Joshua Landis, an expert on Syrian political history and the author of the widely followed Syria Comment blog. Mr. Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, wrote that the “Assad regime must be worried, as it has survived for 42 years thanks to Syria’s fragmentation.”

There has been speculation that Mr. Assad, feeling increasingly threatened, may deliberately seek to widen the conflict that has consumed much of his own country for the past 20 months and left roughly 40,000 people dead. Although there is no indication that Mr. Assad has decided to try to lure Israel into the fight, any Israeli involvement could rally his failing support and frustrate the efforts of his Arab adversaries.

The attack on the Turkish border, by what Syrian witnesses identified as a Syrian MIG-25 warplane, demolished at least 15 buildings and killed at least 20 people in the town of Ras al-Ain, the scene of heavy fighting for days and an impromptu crossing point for thousands of Syrian refugees clambering for safety into Turkey.

At this point, I’d be most worried about Israel and Lebanon. Turkey may be upset but is unlikely to do something disproportionately aggressive without some semblance of international acquiescence (or, at least, ambivalence). Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel, on the other hand, is in a hostile and unpredictable mood (as it has been since he took office in 2009), especially now that the extremely hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu-Likud connection has been solidified into an actual coalition. And Lebanon continues to fulfill its role as a propane gas tank just waiting to burst into flames.

The ingredients for massive chaos to boil over are all there. Now all it might take is a little something extra to turn up the heat.

Replacing Hillary

Humor, Politics, , , , , ,

Regarding possible successors to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel can’t resist a little snark:

Among the maybe-candidates are Massachusetts Senator ex-Presidential nominee John Kerry and former Utah Governor, ambassador to China, and too-reasonable-to-survive-the-primary Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman. While Huntsman and Kerry have both demonstrated that they have foreign policy chops, the US hasn’t had a white male Secretary of State since 1997. Is America ready?

The Secretary of State job requires both tenacity and restraint, both of which may be difficult for a man’s unique chemical constitution. The male hormone testosterone, while responsible for such wondrous miracles as back hair and upper body strength, is also responsible for an increase in male aggression, anger, and even violence. Diplomacy is a difficult enough task without having to temper a man’s natural tendency to throw chairs through windows when angered by gridlock.

Further, it’s a well-known fact that men’s lack of intuition and emotional intelligence has translated into a troubling inability to cry under appropriate circumstances. War, death, and destruction are horrifying realities that Secretaries of State from Madeleine Albright to Condoleezza Rice have had to face, and an insufficient emotional response to tragedy will reflect poorly on our country. Do we want our allies to think we’re a bunch of callous jerks who are totally unmoved by the death of innocents?

Yes, Huntsman has been a career diplomat who has managed to avoid punching foreign leaders in the face out of anger during his work for four different Presidential administrations or inappropriately smiling during serious discussions because he’s excited that the Utah Utes football team won. And sure, John Kerry’s tenure as the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been remarkably free of in-chamber shootings, but any testosterone-producing, low emotion man is a ticking time bomb. If either Jo(h)n ends up accepting an appointment as Secretar of State, let’s hope the Obama administration is smart enough to recommend he always travel with a trusted female chaperone who can help him navigate the volatile male hormonal landscape.

The beginnings of a thaw

Media, Politics, , , , , ,
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0Oa4gB28Co]

The Huffington Post reports on an unlikely ally for Obama’s attempt to allow the Bush tax cuts on the rich to expire:

Conservative commentator and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said Sunday the Republican Party should accept new ideas, including the much-criticized suggestion by Democrats that taxes be allowed to go up on the wealthy.

“It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It really won’t, I don’t think. I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer.”

“Really? The Republican Party is going to fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires, half of whom voted Democratic and half of whom live in Hollywood and are hostile?” he asked.

One of the biggest fights as Congress returns will be over taxes, as cuts put in place by former President George W. Bush are set to expire at the end of the year. Republicans want to extend those tax cuts for all income brackets, while Democrats want to raise revenue by allowing them to expire for wealthy Americans.

Earlier, FOX News talk show star Sean Hannity underwent a sudden conversion:

We’ve gotta get rid of the immigration issue altogether. It’s simple for me to fix it. I think you control the border first, you create a pathway for those people that are here, you don’t say you gotta go home. And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because you know what–it just–it’s gotta be resolved. The majority of people here–if some people have criminal records you can send ’em home–but if people are here, law-abiding, participating, four years, their kids are born here… first secure the border, pathway to citizenship…then it’s done. But you can’t let the problem continue. It’s gotta stop.

A presidential mandate?

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The Economist digs into the question of whether Barack Obama now has a mandate and concludes that there’s really no way to know:

Wittgenstein is helpful here. Consider proposition no. 114 in his “Philosophical Investigations”: “One thinks that one is tracing the outline of a thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” So in claiming that President Obama “has” a mandate or “lacks” one, we are just giving voice to our conception of what a mandate is and whether we’d like to confer one on a given president. The mandate is in the eye of the beholder.

Presidents have mandates, then, if we perceive them as having mandates, and don’t if we don’t. Which means that President Obama has one and doesn’t have one. And nailing down the matter is even more problematic than that. When we perceive a president as having a mandate, we are making a claim about what the American people meant when they cast their votes. To be a little too obvious: there is no “mandate” box to check on electoral ballots. You just vote for a candidate. There is no formal or informal way for the people to “give” a president a mandate. So when journalists and politicians weigh in on the subject they are really psychoanalysing the electorate writ large. That’s no mean task.

The magazine goes on to note that even exit polls may not be sufficient to imply the contours of a possible mandate for specific policies:

Polls can tell us something about voters’ policy preferences, but they cannot affirm or disprove the existence of a mandate. Let’s take tax policy in this fall’s election as an example. A Washington Post exit poll showed that 59% of voters nationwide “said the economy was the biggest issue facing the country.” A similar proportion seemed to share Mr Obama’s stance on taxation:

Six in 10 voters said that taxes should be increased, including nearly half of voters saying that taxes should be increased on income over $250,000, as Obama has called for. Just over one-third said taxes should not be increased for anyone. But more than 6 in 10 voters said taxes should not be raised to cut the budget deficit.

This may be the best evidence available for the existence of sufficient popular support to raise tax rates for the upper brackets, but its strength withers when the numbers are analysed. First, if 60% of voters want higher taxes, and only a fraction over 50% voted for Mr Obama, that means at least one-sixth or so of voters seeking tax hikes did not, for one reason or another, vote for the president. And if “nearly half” of voters sign on to the Obama plan to increase taxes on those who earn over $250,000, this means that more than half of voters prefer a different proposal. Where does that leave Mr Obama’s purported mandate?

Meanwhile, the same magazine analyzes the new prospects for tax reform.

Who do you think will win the election?

Politics, , , , , ,

Justin Wolfers and David Rothschild are coming out with a paper called “Forecasting Elections: Voter Intentions versus Expectations.” In it, they explain that voters predict election outcomes more accurately when they are asked who they think will win, as opposed to who they intend to vote for. The authors’ takeaway?

The answers we receive from the expectation question are about as informative as if they were themselves based on a personal poll of approximately twenty friends, family, and coworkers. This “turbocharging” of the effective sample size makes the expectation question remarkably valuable with small sample sizes. Moreover, because our model gives insight into the correlation between voting expectations and intentions, even samples with a strong partisan bias can be used to generate useful forecasts.

The key insight from our study—that analysts pay greater attention to polls of voter forecasts—in fact represents a return to historical practice. In the decades prior to the advent of scientific polling, the standard approach to election forecasting involved both newspapers and business associations writing to correspondents around the country, asking who they thought would win. We are in many respects, recommending a similar practice. Having shown the usefulness of this approach for forecasting elections, we hope that future work will explore how similar questions can be used to provide better forecasts in a variety of market research contexts from forecasting product demand to predicting electoral outcomes, to better measuring consumer confidence.

I’ve noticed before that polling analysis usually fails to take into account the wording used in the question. Assuming Wolfers’ and Rothschild’s reasoning bears out, this will be a very useful start to rethinking exactly how pollsters should frame their questions if they want to achieve the most accurate results (which, quite frankly, is not the objective of many organizations that conduct polls).

Related articles

FOMO

Miscellaneous, , ,

Or the “Fear of Missing Out.” For today’s children of the mid- to late-’80s, it’s a mounting dilemma:

The acronym has previously been defined as a syndrome born from the constant pressure of social media, and it is in that context that Twentysomething addresses FOMO. But FOMO should really be understood much more broadly than that; by limiting itself to the strictly social elements of the syndrome, the book only scratches the surface of the term’s emerging ubiquity amongst Millennials and the extent to which it shapes our lives.

“I moved to New York City after college purely because of FOMO,” said Sarah Muir, 25, who grew up in Portland, Maine. She explained that the move was a lifestyle choice rather than a career one. Muir, who double-majored in International Studies and Spanish and always saw herself doing something “meaningful”, took an entry level job in Search Engine Marketing because it paid the bills. “I hated the work, but it allowed me to live this glamorous urban lifestyle that I’d always dreamed about,” said Muir.

Even living the life, Muir’s FOMO persisted, only now she found herself wondering if she was missing something else, somewhere else. She found herself scouring travel blogs at work, dreaming of backpacking through Asia or moving to Argentina, where she studied abroad in college.

As a card-carrying member of the late-’80s crowd, this is definitely a problem to which I can attest.