Never trust a man over 30

The New Neo Posted on by

The saying became a cliche (see above), but the idea that you shouldn’t trust anyone over 30 was coined during the Berkeley Free Speech movement of the mid-1960s. Those who said it, and believed it, have now been untrustworthy (over 30, that is) for many a long year.

I was reminded of the saying when I saw the headline to this article about Jodie Foster’s recent comments on the sexual harassment accusations in Hollywood and elsewhere:

“It’s every industry,” the actress said Wednesday. “It’s not just one socioeconomic bracket or one complexion. Pretty much every man over 30 has to really look and start thinking about their part. And I guarantee, lots of it is unconscious. When you’ve been in a privileged position where you haven’t had to look at your part, you didn’t 100 percent understand you were in a bubble. It’s an interesting time for men.

Oh, it’s an “interesting” time, all right.

And why the exception for those under 30? Foster added:

“I have two sons (ages 16 and 19), and I know their perspective,” the 55-year-old told the newspaper. “They go to a great school that has put them through the wringer about what consent is, what is humanism, what’s integrity. I just wish my generation had the benefit of that, and that everybody had the benefit of that.”

Perhaps some day we all will have the “benefit” of being “put through the wringer” of PC education or re-education. Till then, though, we’ll have to rely on our moral betters such as Foster.

And yes, yes, Foster is a lesbian. But I don’t think that’s so strong a factor here. What Foster said is non-controversial—maybe even mild—compared to the more strongly anti-male statements of some women who are quite heterosexual.

And then there other factors unique to Foster that may have been more relevant. I happen to basically like Foster as an actress, and remember her as an exceptionally talented (and precocious) kid actress. And because I remember her as a kid actress, I wonder what things she was subject to back then.

For example, you may remember (I certainly do) that Foster played a child prostitute in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver.” The prostitute was supposed to be twelve years old, and (unlike with many such situations, where the child is played by a somewhat older actor or actress) Foster herself was only twelve years old at the time.

That seemed like a bad idea then and it still seems like a bad idea now. Foster appeared to be a tough and mature kid, but twelve is twelve. It may have made for a better film, but (according to something I found by Googling it just now), Foster says it was very uncomfortable during the making of that film:

“They were very uncomfortable about my character. Nobody knew how to direct me.

“Scorsese would say something like ‘unzip his fly’ and just start laughing and not know what to do so he would hand it over to Robert De Niro and then Robert would tell me what to do.

“And he was even more ‘Robert De Niro’ then, even quieter and more strange.”

Just to be clear—this was all done in service of the script, not as some private exchange. The men seem to have been uncomfortable with it, too, and yet in the atmosphere in the 70s (this was roughly the same era as the Polanski rape, for example), it probably seemed tame and harmless enough. But I think the role itself was a form of institutional child abuse of a mild sort.

Child actors have been exploited in Hollywood for a long time—just look at the life of Judy Garland if you aren’t aware of it. But the roles they used to play back in the 30s and 40s and 50s were squeaky-clean. That certainly wasn’t true by the time Foster was acting.

Foster also was the target of another incident that must have been confusing and terrifying, at a still-young age. You may recall that Hinckley, Reagans’ would-be assassin, became obsessed with Foster in that movie:

Hinckley was suffering from erotomania and his motivation for the attack was born of his obsession with actress Jodie Foster. While living in Hollywood in the late 1970s, he saw the film Taxi Driver at least 15 times, apparently identifying strongly with Travis Bickle, the lead character portrayed by Robert De Niro. The arc of the story involves Bickle’s attempts to protect a 12-year-old child prostitute, played by Foster. Toward the end of the film, Bickle attempts to assassinate a United States Senator who is running for president. Over the following years, Hinckley trailed Foster around the country, going so far as to enroll in a writing course at Yale University in 1980 after reading in People magazine that she was a student there. He wrote numerous letters and notes to her in late 1980. He called her twice and refused to give up when she indicated that she was not interested in him.

Hinckley was convinced that he would be Foster’s equal if he became a national figure. He decided to emulate Bickle and began stalking President Jimmy Carter. He was surprised at how easy it was to get close to the president””he was only a foot away at one event””but was arrested in October 1980 at Nashville International Airport for illegal possession of firearms.

There’s much more—but the gist of it is that Hinckley turned his attention to Reagan and was nearly successful in killing him. What effect this all had on Foster can only be imagined; at the time, because Reagan and others were so gravely injured, it was not the focus of the story. In addition, Foster hasn’t spoken much about it publicly, and here she suggests that she has had to employ some survival techniques to stay grounded.

I would imagine that’s very true; she’s been through a lot. But blanket statements about whole swaths of men probably shouldn’t be one of those coping mechanisms, and it’s always a bad idea to think you know all that much about what’s going on inside a teenager’s mind, boy or girl.

The tax bill propaganda

The New Neo Posted on by

If you read Democratic reactions to the tax bill just passed by Congress, you’d think it orders that poor people and the middle class be shot at dawn. If you read Republican reactions, you get a spectrum of reactions from “pretty good although somewhat flawed” to “good.”

In other words, they’re analyzing the provisions of the bill and the effects of those provisions on the economy and segments of the population very very differently.

What are we, the American people supposed to think? How are we to evaluate the actual effects of the actual bill? After all, this may not be rocket science, but it certainly isn’t easy to look at something as complex as our tax code and as iffy as how it will actually play out in the real world and know the effects of this legislation. That’s one of the reasons I don’t do my own analysis and tend to rely on experts. I pick my experts carefully, though, based on previous track records of those experts and my own perceptions of their relative objectivity.

I’m not even going to link to most of the Democratic analysis, because unless you’ve been living under a rock recently, you’ve seen it. Here’s a roundup of those saying it’s “theft,” just as an example. And here’s one link about the “People will die!” folks. A counter to that appeared in the WaPo, of all places. And of course periodicals on the right have a host of articles that try to explain why the bill will be good (see this, for example).

But bills like this play out on two levels: their practical financial consequences and their political consequences. And right now the perception the majority of Americans have has been formed by the Democrats and they believe it will hurt them:

According to a recent CNN poll, only 33 percent of Americans support the GOP bill, while 55 percent oppose it, a figure that has grown by ten points since early last month. Several other major polls have put approval ratings for the tax plan in the same low ballpark.

One obvious reason for this unpopularity is our almost equally unpopular president. Donald Trump’s approval rating hovers around 37 percent, unprecedentedly low for a president just a year into his first term. And because the tax-reform bill is a GOP initiative, it is inextricably tied to our GOP president, which means that Americans who dislike Trump are automatically inclined to dislike the GOP tax-reform effort.

But another crucial component of the bill’s stunning lack of popularity surely stems from the amount of misinformation floating around about the substance of the bill, perpetuated by biased media outlets. Just this morning, for example, the New York Times opinion newsletter called the bill “a huge handout to corporate America,” completely ignoring the fact that the bill will lower taxes for a shocking 80.4 percent of Americans, according to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center.

Ah, but once the bill goes into effect, won’t people revise their opinions? Maybe. (That’s the sort of reasoning that those who passed Obamacare used, by the way.) It really depends on how positive the effects of the bill are, and how easily people can perceive those effects and connect them to the changes enacted by the bill. Perhaps (as Bill Clinton used to say) it all comes down to the economy, stupid. But I’ve been very impressed in recent years by how powerful propaganda is, and how it can shape perceptions even in the face of reality.

And of course it all depends on the effects of the bill actually being good for people in the real world. Another factor is when people might actually notice those effects. Some have taken place already; see this. Some are delayed, and some are very delayed—till after the 2018 election takes place. It’s complicated, like almost everything connected with our federal tax laws —and those complications make the entire topic especially ripe for propaganda.

Best movie dance sequence ever

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a rousing demonstration of dance as male competition. As part of 1954’s “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (which has a plot that would never, never fly these days) it features actors who were mostly dancers, and thrills and chills via daredevil stunts. Stick with it—it just builds and builds and builds, and the risks they take are phenomenal.

Choreographer Michael Kidd was a genius. But without the virile energy of Tommy Rall (red shirt) and Matt Matox (yellow shirt) in particular (both of whom I’ve seen on Broadway in later roles) it wouldn’t be nearly as successful. Russ Tamblyn’s (blue shirt) acrobatics are wonderful as well, and Marc Platt (purple) is excellent but not as acrobatic. Some of the townie guys are no slouches, either. The great ballet dancer Jacques D’Amboise (green shirt) is underused; it’s really not quite his genre, I guess. You may notice that the guy in the orange shirt (Jeff Richards) barely dances. That’s because he’s not a dancer, so he’s shoved to the back or way on the side or off-screen. (More here.)

Enjoy:

Choreographer Kidd is the smaller dark-haired guy dancing in this next video.. I’ve searched and searched, but couldn’t find whether he choreographed this number or whether it was Kelly:

I’m getting nervous about 2018

The New Neo Posted on by

New Year’s Eve is coming up. But it’s not that transition I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the election of 2018. Every single day when I look at the news I see the articles about how well-positioned the Democrats are for the next election—how they are poised to take over both houses. I have no idea whether that will happen or whether this is just more of the relentless propaganda we see in the MSM. November is many months away, and there are a lot of events that could intervene—including a soaring economy, which could make people more favorably-disposed to the GOP by then.

You might ask why I care—after all, the GOP in Congress hasn’t exactly been a shining example of what I’d want to see. Nevertheless, I believe that a Democratic-run Congress would be far worse. Of course, we still have a Republican president who is more disposed than I thought he would be to promote and sign conservative laws (and, perhaps more importantly for this discussion, to veto liberal ones). But he’d better be quick at appointing more and more judges (and Congress had better be quick about approving them) because if Congress falls into the hands of the Democrats that entire process is likely to shut down.

A great many people on the right don’t seem to care what happens in Congress and/or to actively wish to punish the GOP members of Congress by not voting for them. But the right only hurts itself that way and one only has to think of the judges to realize that. This is an old argument we’ve had on this site for years (probably over a decade), and I’ve never changed my mind about it at all.

President Trump can veto any bill passed by a Democratic Congress—until 2020, that is, when all bets are off for the presidential election. He can also go about continuing to dismantle some of the more onerous examples of Obama’s executive orders, and Trump can do it by executive order. But that’s not the same as passing legislation, and then there are those all-important judges.

But the larger question—the one that troubles me—is the phenomenon of these wide swings in the behavior of the electorate. I still consider that we’re moving in a leftward direction. Each seeming victory by the right seems more temporary than ever, and the stock of the left keeps rising. The Gramscian march continues apace, and has been mostly victorious, as the young people who are the product of our educational system and a propagandist MSM grow to voting age.

Maybe I’m just having a gloomy day, which often happens at this time of year. But there’s good news—we’ve passed the day of the earliest sunset, and the sun is setting a tiny bit later each and every day. Hope.

Baby, it’s not cold outside anymore

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Hat tip: Instapundit.

The title of this post’s a riff on my recent piece about the Frank Loesser song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” But this topic is very different.]

It was a long and frozen wait—twenty-four years, to be exact:

A Tennessee woman gave birth last month to a baby girl who was frozen as an embryo in 1992, when her mother was just a year old.

Tina and Benjamin Gibson became the proud parents of Emma Wren on Nov. 25. Emma weighed a healthy 6 pounds, 8 ounces and measured 20 inches long.

According to staff at the University of Tennessee Preston Medical Library, Emma holds the all-time record for the longest-frozen embryo to come to birth.

In case you’re confused by the way that was written (some of the commenters at the site certainly were), Emma is not the Gibson’s biological child. Emma (who was not yet “Emma”) was conceived twenty-four years ago when her biological parents underwent treatment—most likely for infertility—that resulted in extra embryos that were frozen for possible future use and never implanted, and then apparently donated. In the case of Emma, this meant that her non-biological mother Tina Gibson (who, as far as I can tell, can now be called Emma’s birth mother, since she did give birth to Emma) happened to have been eighteen months old herself when Emma was originally conceived and frozen.

Freezing of unused embryos is a relatively common thing during the process of in vitro fertilization, and the frozen embryos present a dilemma:

IVF doctors must try to find a balance between retrieving enough eggs to give a couple a reasonable chance of obtaining a pregnancy and running the risk of potentially creating so many embryos that many are destined to remain unused by the couple that created them…

Hence, infertile couples are often faced with the dilemma of what to do with their remaining frozen embryos. Unlike England, where a deadline for storage of frozen embryos was implemented, the United States has no criteria for disposal…

There are 5 options to be considered by couples:

Keep the embryos frozen because you intend to use them in an IVF transfer sometime in the future.

Discard them

Donate them to another recipient

Donate the embryos to research

None of the above

At the link you can find a fairly lengthy discussion of some of the practical, legal, ethical, and philosophical considerations for each move. One also wonders whether there are medical ramifications of the long storage process. The frozen egg dilemma is an enormous responsibility that most couples undergoing infertility treatments have probably not considered before they start the process, and it’s one I’m glad I never had to face.

The embryo that developed into Emma was taken out of storage by a faith-based group called the National Embryo Donation Center. Couples such as the Gibsons have taken a leap of faith, as well. I wish them and Emma the best.

“Credible” allegations, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve previously written about the problems with believing allegations that are merely “credible,” and I’d like to revisit that for a moment.

Yesterday and today I’ve had on ongoing back-and-forth with commenter “Bill” that you can follow by starting here. My very last comment to Bill in that thread so far is this one:

You might think I’m picking on you. It’s not personal, but this sort of rush to judgment has always made me angry…If that sounds harsh, sorry, but I’ve seen it too many times and I’ve seen it destroy people.

Not just in the political arena by any means. I’m thinking of people such as the Ramseys.

The Ramseys were the parents of JonBenet Ramsey, the little girl who was murdered in Colorado back in December of 1996. The media immediately went into high gear and covered the case obsessively, and for a while it was topic number one in the country. The hype was that the parents had murdered her. Later, they were completely exonerated, but their lives had been ruined not just by the hideous murder of their daughter but by what the media and public did to them.

That’s a far cry from Roy Moore (or any other person accused of sexual harassment), of course. But I bring it up as an example of my reaction to mob judgments fanned by the MSM into a frenzy and based on little evidence and/or suspect evidence.

The discussion I had with Bill in that thread yesterday and today is too long to summarize, but I’ll offer excerpts from a few of my comments here to give you the gist of it:

All “credible” means is that the story might be true—that it’s not incredible.

For example, if I said “John Smith sexually abused me when we were drifting in outer space while flying to Mars under our own power,” that would be an incredible story. Not believable. Literally impossible. But to craft a credible story, all I’d have to do is have a history that involves some proximity to the accused, and do a bit of research as to where he worked, etc.. Stuff that would be easy to find out.

Even better if I’d had some connection to him.

People who are out to get a politician in trouble through false accusations have a lot of information to work with. It also helps if it was long enough ago that there is no way to fact check. For example, with the restaurant where Moore’s accuser Nelson had supposedly met Moore, there is an extreme lack of information about the restaurant itself. Newspapers tried to research it or at least talk to the person who had owned it when the incident was supposed to have taken place, or find a photo to document the layout, and they had no success. The only people who came forward to talk about it said that the layout was not as the accuser described, the hiring practices were such that she would not have been hired at 15 (when she said she started), and no one ever remembered seeing her there or seeing Moore there for that matter. Quite a few people said they worked there or frequented the place and no one remembered him.

Couple that with the controversy about the yearbook signature and inscription and you get, in my opinion, a story that is credible in the sense of possible but a story that I think is most likely a lie.

You don’t convict people or condemn them or think them guilty merely because a story told about them is possibly true. That’s not my standard, and I don’t think it should be anyone else’s.

By the way, Moore has only 2 accusers. The other women have a very different story—that he dated them when they were young but of age, and acted respectfully to them. The fact that the teenage girls who apparently really did date Moore (when they were of legal age) all say he was basically respectful argues against Nelson’s (the yearbook lady) story being true, because his alleged behavior with her was so different.

I believe you are letting your dislike of Moore color your belief about his guilt or innocence. By the way, you are using the word “pedophile” incorrectly. That word is reserved for pre-pubescent children, and even if you accept the allegations about Moore as true they do not involve that group of victims at all. You need to get your terms straight, at the very least, before you make accusations.

Bill had also written this:

Roy Moore can, of course, take legal action against these ladies if he’d like. Won’t get him a Senate seat but might clear his name, if he’s innocent.

I’ve seen that sort of sentiment expressed by many other people, not just Bill. My reply is the following:

Your final paragraph shows a lack of understanding of how the law works. It would be almost impossible for Moore to clear his name in a court of law even if he is 100% innocent. Do you understand that if he were to sue his accusers, that the standard he would need to meet to win his case would be enormously high? Take a look. See also this.

The bottom line is that politicians almost never sue for defamation, and if they do they rarely win. That has nothing whatsoever to do with proving themselves innocent of the allegations, it has to do with the law of defamation against public figures, which works very strongly against them.

Bill also wrote:

An election is not a court trial. How many times does this need to be said? You can vote against someone if you have qualms a bit their character. You don’t have to prove it in court.

Taking Neo’s admonitions above into account, if this is such a slam-dunk conspiracy against Moore he should be able to unmask it.

I never said, nor did I imply, that it was a “slam-dunk conspiracy” against Moore. I am merely saying that there’s a good chance it is a conspiracy, every bit as good as the possibility that his two main accusers are telling the truth. In reply to Bill I wrote:

Now you say that if there’s a conspiracy he should be able to unmask it. Oh, really? Do you really think it’s that easy? Do you really think – once again – that if a person can’t prove his/her innocence, he/she is guilty?

And no, your proof doesn’t have to rise to the level of courtroom proof to believe someone is probably guilty. But credible accusations doesn’t cut it and shouldn’t cut it. Persuasive accusations would be better. What “persuades” you sure doesn’t persuade me.

Bill also wrote:

What you are suggesting is a conspiracy among several women to “take down” Roy Moore. There’s been plenty of condemning of Nelson, Corfman and the others, largely based on arguments from silence, even though he had a pattern of trolling underage girls. Not sure why any woman would want to come forward, ever, against a politician because she’s going to get dragged through the mud.

My reply was this:

I’m not suggesting a conspiracy of “several women” to take Moore down. I’m suggesting a political tactic by which the opposition (on the left in particular) conspires to find people willing to take Moore down. And if you don’t believe that sort of thing occurs, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn and several other things I’d like to sell you.

There are two women we’re talking about, by the way. The others merely seem to be alleging that he dated them with their mothers’ permission when they were of age but young. So what? What happens is that the operatives follow rumors, spread the word about what they’re looking for, find the women. They already knew their were rumors about the dating of the legal-aged teens (rumors I believe are true), and they start with that and then spread the word around that they’re looking for people who can say even more than that. The women’s motives are varied, but fame is a potent one, actually. Politics could be another (saying you’re a Trump voter doesn’t make it so). Still another is this (Lisa Bloom is Allred’s daughter, by the way, and I have read – don’t have time to find the source now – that this is a tactic of Allred’s as well):

A well-known women’s rights lawyer sought to arrange compensation from donors and tabloid media outlets for women who made or considered making sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump during the final months of the 2016 presidential race, according to documents and interviews.

California lawyer Lisa Bloom’s efforts included offering to sell alleged victims’ stories to TV outlets in return for a commission for herself, arranging a donor to pay off one Trump accuser’s mortgage and attempting to secure a six-figure payment for another woman who ultimately declined to come forward after being offered as much as $750,000, the clients told The Hill.

Women who do this sort of thing have often have led chaotic and troubled lives (sometimes they have also made multiple accusations against different people), and they have plenty of reason to need financial help.

Let me reiterate that I’m not trying to pick on Bill. But this sort of rush to judgment presses my buttons and always has. As I’ve said many times, I don’t like Moore, and was displeased when he won the primary, even before the allegations came out. It doesn’t matter to me, though, in terms of the issue of the allegations of sexual misconduct.

Nor does any of this mean I think the women are liars. As I’ve also said many times, they may indeed be telling the truth. But women and men lie at times, for many reasons, and it’s not even all that unusual. Sometimes they lie very credibly. Sometimes they lie while demonstrating a lot of emotion. I’ve seen it many times; so have you. Sometimes they even believe their own lies—or come to believe their own lies. I think we should be very very careful about coming to conclusions unless the evidence for something is very powerful.

The MSM: Obama? Iran? Cocaine? Hezbollah?

The New Neo Posted on by

Never heard of em.

Crickets chirping.

The MSM shapes the news in two ways. It shapes it by what it decides to cover. For example, any rumor about Trump raging about someone or something, reported by anonymous sources, is good for headlines. But a lengthy article with named sources in a respected media outlet is deep-sixed if it reflects poorly on Obama. If they are forced to cover it because the clamor of a story becomes too loud to safely ignore, they turn themselves into pretzels trying to debunk it and/or minimize it.

We’ve seen this before, over and over and over. Don’t think it doesn’t work as a propaganda technique, either. It does.

Other papers have covered this story about Obama, but they are sources on the right such as the New York Post (the Post has covered it pretty heavily, actually, here, here, and here).

Outlets on the left know their readers rarely read people on the right (Faux News and all that), and so they know that they often can protect their readers from dangerous news (“dangerous” in the sense of being harmful to the cause of the left) by simply ignoring it.

That’s why it was somewhat puzzling that Politico broke the Obama/Hezbollah story in the first place. Politico is a bit hard to characterize, because it sometimes does publish something that would seem to be more simpatico with the right although its basic orientation seems to be towards the left.

Let’s see whether the regular MSM (such as the Times et al) ever decides that this story is news. I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove till it happens. If it was Trump (or anyone else on the right) who had done what Obama is alleged to have done vis a vis Hezbollah, you can be sure the MSM would be on it immediately, loudly, prominently, and repetitively.

Obama, Hezbollah enabler

The New Neo Posted on by

Politico has issued an in-depth report on how the Obama administration put the kibosh on a task force against Iranian-backed Hezbollah’s cocaine operation, as part of its efforts to make a nuclear deal with the Iranians.

It’s a complex story, better read than excerpted. But here are a few quotes, to give you an idea:

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies…

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests…

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher, who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”…

“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher said. “So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations ”” even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission ”” it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”…

As a result, the U.S. government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and Russian governments ”” all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and former U.S. officials…

… the damage wrought by years of political interference will be hard to repair.

For Obama-watchers and those who followed the Iranian deal and the years-long leadup to it, there is nothing surprising here. The Obama administration was focused on the Iranian deal from the start, and were doing everything they could to be nice to the powers that be in Iran and not ruffle their feathers. If it took winking at Hezbollah, that would have been considered to be a very small price to pay for the wonderful wonderfulness of the deal.

I haven’t yet read the entire article; it’s very long. In fact, I believe it’s one of the longest articles (if not the longest) ever to appear in Politico. It’s certainly the longest I can ever recall. Politico is not a right-wing site, and not a Trump-supporting one. It leans far more to the left, and yet every now and then it puts up something that isn’t the usual Democratic party line. This would certainly be one of those things, and I wonder why so much time and effort was put into it.

Whatever the reason, it’s always refreshing to see something in a publication that goes against the usual talking points. When I see something like that I think it has more of a tendency to be true, because of what the editors and/or authors had to overcome to decide to publish it.

I have little doubt that Obama-supporters will brush it off with assertions that the deal was worth it—or, alternatively, that the report’s a lie.

[ADDENDUM: More here:

While [according to the Politico article] it looks like the Obama administration neutralized efforts to stop a terrorist group from funding its operations through criminal enterprises in the United States ”” which should be a major scandal itself ”” according to Josh Meyer’s source-heavy reporting, it also decided to let a top Hezbollah operative named Ali Fayad, who had not only been indicted in U.S. courts for planning to kill American government employees but whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, to skate free.

You can, I’m sure, imagine what the reaction would be if this story had Trump’s administration rather than Obama’s secretly released Putin’s Middle East arms dealer?

This story should be highlighted in every newspaper, as it would be if it concerned Trump. I did a search at the site of the NY Times, and nothing showed up. When I did a Google search to see who was talking about the article, only sites on the right (and RealClearPolitics, which showcases both sides) appeared.]

What are the odds of Franken actually leaving the Senate?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure what the odds are, but I do think that with the defeat of Roy Moore (remember him?), they’ve become a great deal less than they were before.

Franken’s resignation always seemed to be motivated by the need to get Moore—to make him less likely to be elected, and/or to make him easier to censure or toss if elected. If Moore had won, Franken would have had to be sacrificed for the Cause.

But now, maybe not:

At least four senators are urging Al Franken to reconsider resigning, including two who issued statements calling for the resignation two weeks ago and said they now feel remorse over what they feel was a rush to judgment.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who urged Franken not to step down to begin with ”” at least not before he went through an Ethics Committee investigation ”” said the Minnesota senator was railroaded by fellow Democrats.

“What they did to Al was atrocious, the Democrats,” said West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin in an interview…

Franken’s unusual timeline ”” in his departure announcement he said he’d go “in the coming weeks,” without setting a date ”” has fed the fleeting hopes that there’s still time to reverse course. However, Tina Smith, Minnesota’s Democratic lieutenant governor, was named last week as his appointed successor.

People familiar with Franken’s plans said he has not changed his mind and intends to formally resign in early January. He praised the selection of Smith and has begun working with her on the transition.

It certainly was an “unusual” timeline. But when Smith was picked to succeed him, it seemed to me that this was really going to happen. Now, I wouldn’t bet on it. And you may recall that I didn’t think Franken should resign. Here’s what I wrote when Franken gave his sort-of-resignation speech:

It’s difficult to escape the sense that Al Franken is resigning under pressure from the Democratic Party due to their hopes that they can occupy the sexual assault high ground vis a vis Roy Moore, and also expunge the ghosts of Ted Kennedy and Gary Stubbs (for those with long memories, which most people don’t have), not to mention Bill Clinton…

I can’t stand Al Franken as senator (although I happened to like some of his comedy bits on SNL many a long year ago). I can’t stand his politics and a lot else about him. Looking at the accusations, if I had to bet, I’d say most of them are true, or at least enough of them are true to establish him as a slyly opportunistic sexual scumbag of a minor sort.

Note that characterization: minor sort. I believe in proportionality, and even if all the allegations against Franken are true they don’t rise to a very high (or very low) level. If they are true, the proper remedy is a hearing and possibly censure (or expulsion, if that’s the decision), IMHO, and then if the people of Minnesota don’t want to re-elect him (or he doesn’t want to run again) when his term is up, that’s their decision. I’m uncomfortable with forcing people out because of allegations without any sort of due process at all””and I do believe in having at least some sort of official forum in which the allegations are heard and evaluated.

I also believe that those Democrats who supported his resignation and now feel “remorse” don’t feel a particle of remorse. They feel that since Moore lost there’s no more need for Franken to resign.

Baby, It’s Unplayful and Ahistorical Outside

The New Neo Posted on by

The song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was written in 1944 by the brilliant Frank Loesser, composer and lyricist for the musical masterpieces “Guys and Dolls,” “The Most Happy Fellow” (performed less frequently because of its operatic requirements, but absolutely gorgeous and tremendously touching), and the lesser (pun, ha ha) but still great “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.” He also wrote the songs to the movie “Hans Christian Anderson,” a favorite in my youth.

Note that Loesser wrote the music and lyrics to all those musicals and to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as well. That’s quite unusual, although not completely unique: Irving Berlin and Cole Porter come to mind as composer/lyricists, too.

And speaking of lyrics—no doubt you’ve heard about the current drive to ban “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for being insufficiently PC in the sexual assault/harassment realm. After all, the song tells the tale of a man who is trying to persuade a woman to stay for the night, and he uses the cold weather outside as an excuse. But if you actually look at the lyrics, it’s clear that the woman wants to stay, and that her protests are merely for the sake of propriety, and that the whole thing is a flirtatious little game of seduction. In her objections she keeps mentioning what other people will think, not her own feelings. So you might say she’s striking a blow for autonomy and throwing off fusty old custom when she acquiesces at the end.

The entire exchange described in the lyrics is reflective of a previous era when reputation was a big big thing, causing quite a few women to say “no” when they were thinking “yes” and could be persuaded by men who were reading their wishes correctly—as is the man in the song. For young women today, that’s not a description of their mothers’ era, and maybe not even their grandmothers’ era—it’s their great- or great-great grandmother’s era. But that’s the way it often was.

When I was a child—pre-internet, of course—my friends and I used to amuse ourselves in various archaic ways. We not only listened to musicals on a primitive record player that played scratchy 33s, we also played the piano. That is, my friend (who went to Julliard at a very young age and was an excellent player and sight-reader) played the piano, and we both sang. Her family had copies of the Fireside series of songbooks, and so I learned a lot of songs that were considerably older than “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” In one of the Fireside Books (I think this one) you could find this song, written in 1897 (performed here by Johnny Cash):

That’s history, too.

Frank Loesser used to perform “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” with his wife at parties. Here’s the story:

Loesser wrote the duet in 1944 and premiered the song with his wife, [the singer] Lynn Garland, at their Navarro Hotel in New York housewarming party, and performed it toward the end of the evening, signifying to guests that it was nearly time to end the party. Loesser would introduce himself as the “Evil of Two Loessers”, a play on the theme of the song, trying to keep the girl from leaving, and on the phrase “lesser of two evils”. This was a period when the Hollywood elite’s chief entertainment was throwing parties and inviting guests who were expected to perform. Garland wrote that after the first performance, “We become instant parlor room stars. We got invited to all the best parties for years on the basis of ‘Baby.’ It was our ticket to caviar and truffles. Parties were built around our being the closing act.” Garland considered it their song and was furious when Loesser told her he was selling the song. Garland wrote, “I felt as betrayed as if I’d caught him in bed with another woman.”

Well, that was a foretaste of things to come, because while working on “The Most Happy Fella” (1956), Loesser took up with the show’s leading lady Jo Sullivan and left Garland (as told by his daughter Susan):

My mother did a lot of the casting for “The Most Happy Fella.” She was co-producer with Kermit Bloomgarden, and when she heard Jo sing, she said, Boy, this is a voice – this is a voice and a personality Frank would just love.

So she sent Jo to audition for my father, sealing her fate. It was a very hard time for everybody. I – my brother and I were uprooted from our California suburban lifestyle and brought to New York City. We at first stayed with friends and then moved to a small apartment.

My mother was not happy and was drinking more and more, and I had never lived in such close quarters with her before, and that was when I began to see that she was – she had big problems.

Everything changed for all of us. My father was living across Central Park in an apartment of his own and having his affair with Jo, and everybody was – he wasn’t real happy either. It was a very – a time full of turmoil, although for him, I think, it was mitigated a great deal by the great success of “The Most Happy Fella.”

If you ever get a chance to see a decent production of “The Most Happy Fella,” run, don’t walk—before the entire Loesser oeuvre gets erased by the Thought Police.

[NOTE: Here’s a song by Loesser with very clever lyrics, one I’d never heard before. It was written during WWII. In it, the female singer is assuring her boyfriend who’s overseas in the military that she’ll be faithful, because the guys who remain behind are slim pickings:

…I’m either their first breath of spring
Or else, I’m their last little fling
I either get a fossil or an adolescent pup
I either have to hold him off
Or have to hold him up
The battle is on, but the fortress will hold
They’re either too young or too old.

Would it pass muster today?]

The similarities between Obama and Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

I have long thought that this sort of thing may be true (the link is to a piece by Rich Lowry):

But every indication is that Obama and Trump are similar in that their modes of operating work much better for them than their parties.

Both pioneered a different way of doing presidential politics, and built a new coalition for victory. But no one could replicate Obama’s model, and so far, no one has shown any signs of successfully adapting to, let alone copying, Trump’s…

As a result, the only Democrat left standing after the Obama years was Obama himself. Trump could be creating a similar dynamic.

Lowry goes on to criticize the Bannon approach:

This gets to the idiocy of Steve Bannon’s project to try to run Trump-like insurgents everywhere. Bannon is trying to recapture the magic of 2016, without the one indispensable ingredient ”” Trump himself.

I agree about the similarity between Trump and Obama in this respect. But I disagree with Lowry in that I don’t see it as really being about Trump or about Obama. I believe that the election of each of these untested newcomers (Trump even more of a newcomer than Obama) to the highest office in the land was a symptom of a change that had already happened in the US and in the electorate itself.

“We are more polarized now” is a cliche. But it’s true, and it didn’t just happen—it’s been building and building for at least two decades (and almost certainly longer that that). I would add that we are more cynical now, more conspiracy-minded, more disgusted with institutions that used to be more admired: the press, Congress, the FBI, and the “establishment” of both parties. The entire system by which party leaders came up through the ranks and were at least somewhat respected is broken; the electorate isn’t buying it, for the most part. Outsiders and/or charismatic extremists are elected, and then they are found wanting and the pendulum swings to someone seen as an outsider and/or charismatic extremist on the other side.

Obama and Trump (and Bannon, for that matter) didn’t cause this—they are the results of it.