How to Get Our Democracy Back

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That is the title of an essay by the always interesting Lawrence Lessig in The Nation. In my last post, I was pessimistic about the state of our government in its current form, drunk on funds from special interests. Jonathan Rauch, James Fallows, Paul Krugman, and a whole host of other commentators have been beating this drum hard recently. It's by no means a fresh source of discontent, the symptoms of this disease have been clear for years now, but even if it's just that my antenna are on heightened alert about this topic, the frustration among many seems to have reached a crescendo.


Whereas I may have sounded bowed by cynicism in my last post, I'm heartened by Lessig's essay. His expertise in law and government allow him to go further than others in proposing very specific possible treatments.


First, a restatement of the problem:


We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity. And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense. That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution "dependent on the People," the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress. And it answers--as Republican and Democratic presidents alike have discovered--not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests that fund the key races that determine which party will be in power.


This is corruption. Not the corruption of bribes, or of any other crime known to Title 18 of the US Code. Instead, it is a corruption of the faith Americans have in this core institution of our democracy. The vast majority of Americans believe money buys results in Congress (88 percent in a recent California poll). And whether that belief is true or not, the damage is the same. The democracy is feigned. A feigned democracy breeds cynicism. Cynicism leads to disengagement. Disengagement leaves the fox guarding the henhouse.


Lessig deviates from some others in his diagnosis of the root problem. Some blame Senate rules, like the filibuster, but he notes that even if a filibuster-proof majority went from 60 to 51, lobbyists would just readjust their efforts to reach the higher bar. The filibuster loophole does seem to me an arbitrary violation of the general "majority rules" ethos of democracy, but Lessig's point is fair.


He also doesn't pin the blame on lobbyists, and as others like Rauch have noted, there's not a ton that can be done to rid the world of lobbyists. In fact, many lobbyists fight for useful causes. The key is to limit their sphere of influence so they can remain backseat drivers rather than the ones holding the steering wheel of Congress.


Lessig had hoped Obama would capitalize on his unique magnetism to deliver on true political reform of Congress, but after the first year, Lessig sees no signs that Obama and his team are willing to tackle such a historically ambitious agenda (to do so, Lessig notes, "would have made Obama the most important president in a hundred years"). Nothing I've heard from Obama thus far gives me much hope that he'll try to change the game. He seems to be trying to play by the rules of the game and reform from within, and that's what's frustrating those who voted for him on his reform rhetoric.


Lessig proposes two changes to restore integrity to Congress. The first is citizen-funded elections which could take any of a number of forms. One might be a bill that's currently on the table and that's titled Fair Elections Now Act. Essentially, candidates could opt in to fundraising system that would give them significant funds to run their campaign while also being free to raise money from individual Americans at a max of $100 per citizen. The idea would be to allow candidates the financial viability to campaign without having to turn to special interests.


The second change would be to ban any member of Congress from working in any lobbying capacity for seven years after the end of their term. By the time seven years were up, few firms on K Street would still find the Congressmen relevant enough, and candidates would stop thinking of their term in Congress as a stepping stone to being paid 6 to 7 figures on K Street.


Given the Roberts Court's recent ruling on Citizens United, the hurdle to reform is even higher. In so many Japanese science fiction stories, the most powerful entities in the future are corporations and not governments or states, and that recent ruling at least points to a possible path towards that type of future.


The Lessig article is well worth a read, and those in agreement can sign a Change Congress petition online. I don't know what effect that has, but perhaps as one more signal it has utility. As the saying goes, we all get the government we deserve.


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Junot Diaz wants to hear a story, but is that enough?

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In The New Yorker's look back at Obama's first year, Junot Diaz urges Obama to be more of a storyteller.



All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of his presidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. It should necessarily be a story eight years in duration, a story that no matter what our personal politics are will excite us enough to go out and reëlect the teller just so we can be there for the story’s end. But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all. I heard him talk healthcare to death but while he was elaborating ideas his opponents were telling stories. Sure they were bad ones, full of distortions and outright lies, but at least they were talking to the American people in the correct idiom: that of narrative. The President gave us a raft of information about why healthcare would be a swell idea; the Republicans gave us death panels. Ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.



On the one hand, I empathize with Diaz. One way Obama can exert the full power of the White House is by employing his rhetorical skills to sway public opinion towards his causes, whether it's healthcare reform or his stimulus plans. No doubt, that's hugely difficult when most of the public has healthcare and might not see any immediate benefit or change in their coverage. I'd love to think the public would find the lack of universal healthcare to be a moral travesty for a nation of our means, but I know that's a pipe dream. Obama's wonkish approach to selling healthcare reform has failed to stir the hearts of much of the public.


On the other hand, Diaz's essay, while an elegant narrative, seems naive when one considers the structural blockade that the Senate Republicans have formed with Scot Brown's election. If bipartisanship is dead, and the Senate Republicans seemed to have effectively throttled any hope of that, then all the speeches and stories by Obama won't push anything through unless he can regain a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.


I had long since given up hope in the government of enacting sweeping, meaningful reform. It has less to do with my faith in who occupies the Oval Office and everything to do with the irreversible ascent of special interests to becoming the fourth branch of our government, more powerful than any of the other three. That in and of itself need not be a bad thing, but this loose coalition of lobbies does a poor job of representing the needs of the country as a whole and instead excels simply at entrenching the payouts to the narrow interest groups they represent. Subsidies whose conditions for creation have long since disappeared are able to stay alive like leeches on the walls of the U.S. Capitol because of the monetary pressure directed towards members of the House and Senate. If this health care bill ever passes, it will be akin to a modern miracle.


Last last year I finished Jonathan Rauch's Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working, and anyone with a passion for understanding the problems with our current government's structure and how we might combat them should read it (if you've fallen on hard times, it's available at Google Books). It's the most important book I read last year.


Rauch writes of a phenomenon he calls demosclerosis, or postwar democratic government's progressive loss of the ability to adapt. He argues, convincingly, that it's nothing less than the most critical government issue of our time. Essentially our government has become mired in special interest gridlock, and what's most frightening is that Rauch believes it may be inevitable and irreversible, the natural evolution of our government and its structure. Like a ship whose hull has become crusted over with barnacles, our government has slowed to a crawl.



What demosclerosis means for conservatives is that there is no significant hope of scraping away outmoded or unneeded or counterproductive liberal policies, because nothing old can be jettisoned. What it means for liberals is that there is no significant hope of using government as a progressive tool, because the method of trial and error has broken down.


For Washington and for the broad public, demosclerosis quite possibly means that the federal government is rusting solid and, in the medium and long term, nothing can be done about it. The disease of democratic government is not heart failure but hardening of the arteries.



This doesn't mean the U.S. doesn't have institutions that can't make meaningful progress. Take the business world, and consider what corporations like Google and Amazon and others have been able to do in our free and competitive markets. When people in the U.S. look to government for help, more often than not, they should look to capitalism and free markets for a business solution first (take education as one example).


In many ways the Obama backlash was predictable along many dimensions. Working on his campaign, I encountered more than my fair share of Obamania, starry-eyed supporters with a naive faith that one man could, on the sheer basis of force of personality, rise above the limitations of our government structure and enact reform and legislation with a wave of his hands. I wouldn't give that back, it helped to put my man in the race into the White House (oh McCain, what happened to you?). But this group, especially its numerous young supporters catching political fever for the first time, seemed attached, in many ways, to a man, not an issue, and was bound to have unrealistic expectations.


There's also the natural regression to the mean after the election victory, and the reality of governing in a recession and having to enact unpopular legislation like the Wall Street and automotive bailouts. It seems likely the Democrats will lose seats in the mid-term election, and the press will find a way to spin that, again, as a rebuke of Obama, even though the party holding the Oval Office always loses some seats in their President's first mid-term election (the lone exception being in 2002 when Bush and his Rove-led team rode the crest of the wave of 9/11 anti-terrorism sentiment).


As Maria Kalman notes in And the Pursuit of Happiness at the NYTimes, our bicameral legislature is stacked against the passing of legislation. What if the structure of government is most effective at crushing the dreams of the well-meaning and idealistic people who work all their lives to get into office?


This might all be read as being the rants of an Obama apologist, but though I campaigned for him, I'm not going to give him a free pass. As canny a politician as he is, he has room to improve. First and foremost, I've been dismayed at how buttoned up his Administration has been on many issues, with many a press conference seeming to come a week or a month late. For all the talk of transparency during the campaign, the current Administration has seemed much too cryptic at times, and it's hurt them.


Just a few weeks back I read another article by James Fallows in The Atlantic on just this issue with our government's structure. His article notes that America isn't nearly as bad off as so many articles would have you believe, but that the single greatest obstacle to its future success is the same issue his Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch identified: an ineffectual government.



Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,

Peter Gabriel covers, gets covered

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Peter Gabriel is releasing an album of covers on Feb 15th. Titled Scratch My Back, it will include covers of tracks from indie band heavyweights from Arcade Fire, Radiohead, and The Magnetic Fields to Bon Iver and David Bowie.


The twist is that these artists will, in turn, cover some Peter Gabriel songs on a future album. Covers of favorites are no guarantee of quality, but hit that first link for a preview of Gabriel's cover of Arcade Fire's "My Body is a Cage" and a tracklist; count me intrigued.


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Progress bars everywhere

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What if there were progress bars everywhere, like on stoplights? I like seeing progress on downloads when in my browser, and real world extensions of online progress bars, like subway station displays that indicate when the next train arrives, are pleasing. We display when the ad will end on Hulu. What if we had displays that showed when the trailers/pre-show-ads would end at the movie theater? A countdown clock to when your flight was scheduled to lift off, displayed on your seatback TV?


At Amazon, we contemplated a world where RFID chips could give you a near real-time status check on where your package was, physically, to the point where you could see it flying towards you in a UPS truck on an online map. When is it too much info, and when is it useful? My guess is that we haven't gone far enough yet. Just having the option there is often enough to soothe the mind even if you don't need to access the status.



Unhappy hipsters

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Yet another new niche blog. This one, Unhappy Hipsters, grabs images from Dwell magazine and recasts them by giving them a caption. It's not F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the conceit is like a clever joke.


2009 felt like the year of the themed Tumblr. Every month I hear of a new one, visit once and dive through a few pages worth of posts, chuckle, and then never visit again. They're the food trucks of the internet.



Worst commutes in America

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The Hollywood freeway (the 101 from 134 to the 110) in Los Angeles ranks first in this list.



Anthony Downs, author of Stuck in Traffic has identified four reasons for America’s congestion problem, also applicable to most European and Asian economies: first, most of us work during the same hours of the day; second, the country’s economic success has allowed households to buy multiple cars; third, there are more people now than when most roadways were conceived; fourth, more cars means more accidents which means more delays.



If we take these four issues at face value, then some creative solutions suggest themselves if we really consider traffic to be a problem of significant economic impact:



  • Time shift certain jobs, perhaps by offering financial incentives to companies which do so. The LA highways are pleasant to drive...at 4 in the morning. What if we incentivized more graveyard shifts for jobs that don't require high degrees of collaboration with other people who are awake?

  • A more obvious one, which some cities like London and Singapore already enforce, is highway tolls that vary by time of day. Try to even out the traffic patterns.

  • Financial penalties for multiple cars, a bit like they have with the one child policy in China (yeah, that's right Jay Leno, we're going to get our bite).


I leave out telecommuting as that is already an accepted model in many industries, though one could argue it's still underleveraged for certain positions (contained tasks that don't require much coordination or the type of on-the-fly adjustments that face-to-face interactions are so useful for) given improvements in technology. There's probably also still somewhat of a stigma attached to telecommuting that ends up hurting those who do it more than others, if only because the "out of sight, out of mind" ethos still dominates modern corporate value systems.


The traffic problem is a thorny one. On the one hand, increased public transportation seems like something only the government or public institutions can pull off. But the likelihood of some civic solution in a place like LA seems so unlikely that one is tempted to turn towards the free markets and the business world for some economic imperative to make it happen. The truth is probably that some private and public cooperation is necessary to make this work on any large scale, as with commercial flight, and that is daunting.



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Weinstein feedback to Errol Morris

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From the entertaining Tumblr blog Letters of Note is this letter from then Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein to Errol Morris at the time The Thin Blue Line was in release.


Without the full context of their correspondence up until then, and having not seen Morris's performance on NPR, it's difficult to interpret fairly. But a few thoughts:



  • As feedback goes, it's efficient. Learning to give and receive honest feedback is critical in business, and being overly sensitive is a barrier to achieving good work. We're all human, of course, and it's perhaps impossible to take criticism of one's work with complete impartiality, but given enough repetitions, one can cultivate a professional receptivity that leads to more efficient interchanges. I like to think of standup comedians honing their routines in the most brutal of environments, the small comedy club, receiving instant feedback in the form of laughter or, in the worst case, jeers. There's a certain courage and maturity required to submit to unmoderated feedback, and more of the world needs it in the age of the internet, where anonymous feedback through mediums like email and blogs and Twitter comes with zero cost.

  • Plenty of successful executives have a cultivated the personality of an enfant terrible. But is the sarcasm really necessary? "If you have any casting suggestion, I'd appreciate that." That needless dig doesn't ease the reception of any useful feedback in the note. Just on a purely economic basis, I've never understood the fascination on the part of so many people in the entertainment business with being assholes, it would seem like a bad move in a world where it's difficult to predict who you might need to work with again given the variability of success on the part of even the industry's brightest talents.


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Logorama

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The movie that provided me the most chuckles per minute at Sundance was one of the shorts that played in the Shorts Program I, perhaps the best shorts program I've ever seen at Sundance (which may have been why they chose it as one of the opening night screenings). It contained four shorts, one of them being the latest Spike Jonze film I'm Here.


But the short I'm referring to is the one called Logorama, and the best way to see it is to not read anything about it beforehand. Normally that's all I'd say, keeping this post spoiler free.


But there's a decent chance this short never gets picked up and released, and so I'm inclined to explain why, and those of you who don't want to know more can stop reading.


The difficulty of securing a release is not just that it's a short movie (and who watches shorts except at film festivals and on compilation DVDs) but that the filmmakers, French directing collective H5, madeit almost entirely out of corporate logos and brand characters, over 2,000 in total, without asking permission. Not only that, many of the brand mascots are depicted in ways their companies would likely choke on. Ronald McDonald as a machine gun toting, f-bomb dropping bank robber? Mr. Kleen as a gay tour guide at a local zoo? It's not just a satire of our branding-saturated society, it's a funny spoof of Hollywood movie tropes.


There is a full, albeit fuzzy version of "Logorama" online on this blog. I can't imagine this embedded copy is a legal one, but even with an army of lawyers this short might not see the light of legal distribution again, so a low-res stream may be better than nothing at all.


Ironically, the filmmakers did seem to have cleared the music which seems like putting a dab of sunscreen on your nose while jogging in the nude on a sunny day.


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Some perspective

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If you measure number of tickets sold and not movie gross (even adjusted for inflation, which it often isn't), Avatar is still only the 26th most popular movie ever. It's hard to imagine any movie, actually, any single media product, regardless of what it is (book, CD, videogame) ever coming within binocular viewing distance of Gone With the Wind, and that's fine. I am much happier with the diversity of entertainment options in this modern age and find most grumbling about the glory days of media past to be a function of clinging to outdated modes of production and distribution on the part of both artists and consumers.


Still, what has been impressive is Avatar's ability to get people to pony up $17, $18, even $20 a ticket to don 3-D glasses to watch a 3 hour movie. I had my doubts after seeing the extended trailer, but whatever its ultimate take, Avatar has become far more of a mainstream phenomenon than I imagined.


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Avatar-inspired reading

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What's surprising to me about Avatar is the corpus of critical writing it has inspired. With all apologies to Michael Haneke, whose White Ribbon would seem to be the frontrunner in inspiring critical discussion, what with its promise of tracing the origins of evil and World Wars I and II and the Nazis, no movie has generated as much fascinating reading for me this year as Avatar (Inglourious Basterds and A Serious Man, perhaps, are runners up).


It's unexpected, all this serious analysis for a James Cameron-penned screenplay that is largely derivative of familiar Hollywood tropes. Why Avatar has generated this back and forth and not other big Hollywood movies is curious; for one reason or another it has become a global cultural touchstone.


Here's just a short list of writings about Avatar that I enjoyed:


Avatar and the American Man-Child


When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?


Avatar: "Totally racist, dude."


Avatar and American Imperialism


Obligatory Avatar Post


I hated Avatar with the Fire of a Thousand Suns


"They Killed Their Mother": Avatar as Ideological Symptom


A Chinese Take on 'Avatar'


This is just about the movie itself and doesn't even factor in how the movie was shot. When the inevitable $99 10-disc Blu-Ray Na'Vi Ultra Edition with 12" bronze figurine of James Cameron's penis is released, there will be enough making-of featurettes to make the movie's 3 hour runtime seem like a movie trailer.


The technology Cameron developed to allow him to look at live actors on a soundstage but see them as Na'Vi figurines in a digital landscape sounds like a George Lucas wet dream and may be itself a metaphor for the idea of American cultural imperialism, that is, Cameron wears goggles that allow him to see what he wants to see, a fantasy which uses reality as a mere skeleton. That Americans only see the world through their own red, white, and blue goggles; that's an argument I've heard many a time while traveling abroad, or that I read a couple times each day when answering user e-mails to Hulu (to those people I'll just say this; the reason we don't stream our content outside of the U.S. yet is because the rights we were granted were for U.S. streaming only. Content distribution rights in entertainment have long been sold geography by geography, and the global nature of the Internet doesn't change that overnight. This isn't some U.S.-centrism at play, Americans are just as locked out when it comes to streaming content from other countries, much to my dismay when trying to watch the latest season of MI-5/Spooks on the BBC website).


If you find other Avatar-inspired articles of note, please pass them along.


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Bundling

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James Surowiecki, as he usually does, provides a good overview of a topic that many people never think about, and that is bundling in cable pricing. He's right that most people prefer the convenience of bundling and that in an unbundled world, it's not certain that prices just wouldn't be reshuffled to maintain overall profits for cable companies, but in the current environment, where cable subscriptions are still increasing and profits still high, there is an opportunity at the margins for enterprising customers to try to mix and match their own entertainment lineup for cheaper.


As long as they remain a minority, companies won't bother trying to rejigger their prices and packages to catch them. It's not an endeavor for the lazy, though, as it can require buying special boxes, plugging computers into TV's, subscribing to multiple services, etc.


I'm glad that the convenience of bundling still works for most people, though. One of the simple benefits of Hulu is its aggregation model, which is just a form of bundling. It's one reason that even content providers who want to maintain their own online distribution presence should consider joining us, and one reason I think most online sellers with their own storefront would benefit from a simultaneous listing on Amazon.com.


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Perry v. Schwarzenegger

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Margaret Talbot sets the table for Perry v. Schwarzenegger in this week's New Yorker. The stakes are high.



If the Perry case succeeds before the Supreme Court, it could mean that gay marriage would be permitted not only in California but in every state. And, if the Court recognized homosexuals as indistinguishable from heterosexuals for the purposes of marriage law, it would be hard, if not impossible, to uphold any other laws that discriminated against people on the basis of sexual orientation. However, a loss for Olson and Boies could be a major setback to the movement for marriage equality. Soon after Olson and Boies filed the case, last May, some leading gay-rights organizations—among them the A.C.L.U., Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights—issued a statement condemning such efforts. The odds of success for a suit weren’t good, the groups said, because the “Supreme Court typically does not get too far ahead of either public opinion or the law in the majority of states.

The Late Night Melee

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I was in mourning over the collapse of the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight, but the Conan drama this past week has filled the void in my heart for televised combat.


I've been able to watch this battle with more detachment than emotional angst as late night talk shows no longer have the same cachet they once did. s for many of my generation (and Hulu's popular video list bears this out), the talk show hosts that resonate most are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Toss in Sportscenter and my after-work, sit-on-the-sofa-and-eat-my-dinner dance card is full. It was more understandable when Letterman and Leno battled so fiercely to gain the vacated Johnny Carson throne given Carson's status as Hollywood royalty and the limited fraternity of late night personalities back then. Now there are so many late night talk shows (where there were once two or three late night talk show hosts of note, now we have not just Leno, Letterman, and O'Brien but Kimmel, Fallon, Ferguson, and Daly) and so many other TV shows period, not to mention time-shifting with DVRs and internet video viewing that the idea of The Tonight Show at 11:35pm as a sacred institution feels dated.


But I'm still a big Conan fan, and I can understand his reverence for that chair. Like most younger people and a lot of "pure" comedians, I've never found Jay Leno to be funny or his interview style to be particularly effective. TV interviews in general are a depressing affair, a setup for celebrities to pitch their latest project at the request of some PR department. The questions are light-hitting, pre-screened, and spoon-fed, and no one does that like Leno. With his huge collection of vintage cars and motorcycles, his real-life caricature of a face, the oddly insecure way he delivers jokes during his monologue (never content with the first laugh, he almost always follows the punchline by repeating it or explaining it to try to grab another laugh), he's like an alien to me, like nobody I know.


Conan, coming off his days writing for The Harvard Lampoon, SNL, and The Simpsons, has a comic sensibility more in tune with my generation. I never felt comfortable with his move up to 11:35pm to present his more absurdist comic style to what people like to generalize as "Middle America" but which I'll just call the Leno crowd. I liked Conan the way he was at 12:35, loose and free, but if The Tonight Show was what he wanted, I was glad he was getting it. But my fears seemed to be confirmed by the early ratings on the show, which weren't what Leno was pulling in the same time slot. The few times I watched him, he seemed himself and yet not himself. Something, it was hard to pinpoint what, was missing.


That is, until this past week, when, after rumors of NBC's proposed reshuffling surfaced, he finally seemed to say, "F*** it, this is how I feel." This was his Jerry Maguire manifesto moment. All the resentment over the shifting of Leno to 10:00 (poaching premium LA guests) and now the shifting of Leno back to 11:35 honed Conan's humor to a razor's edge, and with the end of his time at NBC all but sealed, he seemed liberated of the burden of The Tonight Show mantle. It is ironic, if not tragic, that what is likely the last week or two of his time at NBC will see his strongest ratings. It must be at least some consolation to have Kimmel and Letterman unleashing on Leno this week on his behalf (Letterman's dislike of Leno is not surprising, but it was only via Bill Simmons that I learned that Kimmel has held Leno in nothing but disdain since Leno and his team told everyone that was anyone to blacklist Kimmel's show when it launched).


His resurgence this week reminded me of the Apatow movie Funny People. Many people found the movie's sudden plot shift partway through the movie disconcerting, but what I enjoyed was Apatow's depiction of the sadness behind the humor of the standup comedian, the pain and spite and anger that drives the court jester. Failure, jealousy, pettiness, pride, ego - all of these are the fuel that comedians use to power their craft.


That dynamic has been on given full demonstration by Letterman, Leno, Conan, and Kimmel this past week. Not only has it been compelling to watch late night show hosts take off the gloves and throw verbal haymakers at each other, it's been surreal to watch Conan tearing into NBC from his show airing on...NBC. Just tonight, Leno for some reason had Kimmel on his show for 10@10, and Kimmel tore into Leno, and Leno seemed either strangely oblivious or gracious, it's not clear which. I was reminded of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.


Ultimately, it may work out for the best for all involved, even if Conan has to drop off the air for some period of time. If Conan walks across town to Fox, he may get to come back with a renewed vigor on a network more suited for his comedic style. What's more, at Fox he might be able to come on the air at 11pm, a half hour before The Tonight Show which would likely be helmed by a reinstated Jay Leno. Given that the current plan was to bump Conan a half hour behind an 11:35pm Leno show, that would seem a satisfying reversal for the man they call Coco.



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Weeeeiiirrrddd

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Last night's opening segment of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart cracked me up and puts the revelations from Game Change in perspective, though I'm still going to read the crap out of it. It's difficult to tell how readers are receiving it as the reviews for the book on Amazon are skewed by dozens of 1-star reviews from users who haven't read the book but are angry that a Kindle version wasn't issued. Amazon does show when a user was a verified purchaser of a book; it would be useful someday if they could allow you to see only the average rating and reviews from that subset of readers.


Also, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are up in widescreen on Hulu now. We had to work through that workflow with the Comedy Central folks, but we were able to retain captions in the widescreen files which was important for us.







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Tony Judt

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From a profile of the historian and political essayist Tony Judt, who suffers from ALS.



Judt called attention to America's and Europe's worship of efficiency, wealth, free markets, and privatization. We live, he said, in a world shaped by a generation of Austrian thinkers—the business theorist Peter Drucker, the economists Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Joseph Schumpeter, and the philosopher Karl Popper—who witnessed liberalism's collapse in the face of fascism and concluded that the best way to defend liberalism was to keep government out of economic life. "If the state was held at a safe distance," Judt said, "then extremists of right and left alike would be kept at bay." Public responsibilities have been drastically shifted to the private sector. Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans have forgotten how to think politically and morally about economic choices, Judt warned, his fragile, British-accented voice growing louder. To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—"is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come."



From an interview with Judt:



What, then, should people in Eastern Europe know about the United States' position toward them and their region?


Judt: This is not an area of great interest to the United States, whereas Russia is a great power, which could be useful to the United States, or a great nuisance to the United State. Either way, we will deal with Moscow. And listening to Warsaw is something we shall only do for the purpose of politeness. I do feel that it's important to say this, which is so obvious to me when I go to Washington, and it's a reason why the East Europeans will do much better to invest in a stronger EU, because only a strong EU -- because it's on Russia's borders -- will be forced to think about what it means to deal with Russia, territorially.


Remember, when Americans think about Russia -- just as when Americans think about the Middle East -- they think about "over there." It's a long way away; it's a foreign policy problem.


When Europeans think about Russia, or the Middle East, it's right next door. It's not a foreign policy problem, it's a domestic problem. Islam, immigrants, gas, memories of empire, it's all right next door.


This matters to Europe in a quite different way. Dreaming about Washington is one of East Europe's great mistakes. And they would be advised not to indulge it. Washington is not about to run to their rescue against Russia.



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