Democratic Debate Nov.14,2015

Bernie Sanders was passionate and answered questions, Martin O'Malley seemed like a reasonable guy but did not have much to say, Hillary Clinton was vague and kept invoking her husband, for reasons unclear.

Sanders made three important points:  he supports single-payer healthcare, he supports free college tuition for state colleges, and he would tax the rich, the way that "old socialist" Eisenhower did, when the tax rate was as high as 90%.  He would also break up the big banks, just as Teddy Roosevelt would --emphasizing community banks and credit unions -- and reform the "corrupt campaign finance system."

Clinton was unable to successfully get out from under her big Wall Street contributors, other than to make the dubious claim that she had once been a Senator from New York who saved the banks on 9/11!  Clinton also said that wages have not risen since her husband's administration, suggesting that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton had somehow raised wages.  She wants to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour, Sanders supports $15. Again, no one in the debate said anything about unions, their role in raising wages, and how unions could be strengthened.  Clinton does not want single-payer healthcare, wanting to continue Obamacare and allow the insurance companies to continue to make huge profits.

Sanders correctly said that the war in Iraq was one of the causes of the current crisis in the Middle East and Clinton apologized for supporting it, though she gave no reason why she did so, suggesting that the Middle East was too complicated for her to figure out.

Sanders and Clinton both supported bringing back Glass-Steagall, though neither bothered to explain what it was. It separated commercial banking from investment banking and the repeal was signed by President Clinton.

My personal take on the debate was that Sanders was passionate about getting things done and that Clinton is more of a politician, bending with the wind. Her big triumph, she said , was that 60% of her campaign contributions come from women, which is both unsurprising and irrelevant.

Republican Debate Nov 10,2015

One expects imbecilities and outright lies from politicians running for office, but not so much undisguised meanness and desire to hurt people. Many of the conservatives we saw seemed moved by nothing as much as hatred.  Women, young people, blacks, immigrants, gays, liberals, teachers -- the list could go on for pages.  The impression I had was that there was a wish to see the lives of millions and millions of their fellow citizens made miserable.
--Charles Simic on the Republican debates, The New York Review of Books.

Last night's debate was a combination of voodoo economics, Clinton and Obama bashing, and saber rattling.  In other words, more of the same.

Chris Christie gave up defending his record to claim repeatedly that he was the only one who could beat Clinton.

Carly Fiorina kept constantly saying "take our government back!" by returning to free market healthcare.

Ben Carson seemed half-asleep most of the time and said he did not mind being vetted, but please vet everyone else, too.

Trump said "let's make America great again" by deporting all illegal immigrants.

Rick Santorum almost made sense when he suggested better jobs for those not going to college, but did not want to raise the minimum wage; none of the other candidates wanted to raise it either.

Bobby Jindal said he was the only one who can stop, and even reverse, our current path to socialism.

Mike Huckabee wants to do away with the income tax altogether and replace it with a sales tax, or what he called a "fair tax."

Marco Rubio wants more welders and "less" philosophers (presumably he meant "fewer", though like many of the candidates he had some trouble with syntax).  Rubio also said that in 35 of 50 states childcare costs more than college, something he wants to change by giving more tax credits to families.  The idea of subsidized daycare I'm sure never occurred to him.

John Kasich wants everyone to live up to their "God-given" potential and was the only participant to use the argumentum ad auctoritatem, i.e, Michael Novak.

Ted Cruz wants to raise the retirement age, without mentioning that this could be harmful to blue-collar workers.

Jeb Bush seemed flustered throughout and was concerned about the Russian presence in Syria.  He wants to have a "free fly zone," though he was no better at explaining what that was and how it worked than were some of the other candidates in explaining Dodd-Frank, inveighed against almost as much as Obamacare.

Rand Paul did make a good point that if you want to increase the military, as everyone does but him, you will need a way to pay for it.

Few of the candidates responded directly to the questions, preferring to talk about cronyism in Washington and severe unemployment.  Once again no one asked about unions or talked about them, even though the decline of unions correlates directly with the increase in inequality.

Stephen Colbert and the Late Show

Last night I watched Stephen Colbert's The Late Show and was appalled at what I saw and heard:  primitive jokes and inane conversation.  You may wonder why I tuned into a show that seems to appeal to inebriated high school students who watch while they eat their meatball subs and drink beer.  I did so last night because The New York Times said that author Karl Ove Knausgaard was going to be on. Knausgaard did not appear; instead they had Bryan Cranston talking about his new movie, Trumbo, as he and Colbert seemed to know nothing about the Hollywood Ten or even in what decade WW II took place!  So they quickly switched to more primitive humor, about looking at the stars and thinking about God, humor that would have been considered too primitive for Abbot and Costello!  Colbert seems as witless as they come and his musical guest, one Shamir, was as primitive musically as Colbert's "jokes" about Guinness and Mexican restaurants. 

I should have known that an intelligent writer such as the neurotic Knausgaard would not feel comfortable in this crude setting, which included a tour of New Orleans bars and streets with The Late Show's musical director, Jon Baptiste, which told us exactly nothing and included additional unfunny jokes. Whatever happened to intelligent discourse?  Even Johnny Carson had an opera singer on occasionally and Ed Sullivan had ballet dancers.  David Susskind had "Open End," where he would talk with writers and artists.  Perhaps I am an old fart, but it seems to me that the audience for these current late night shows (I also sat through Jimmy Fallon's show once) don't have enough intelligence to realize that their intelligence is being insulted!

Cable TV and What I Am Watching These Days.

Last week the cable guy came --we have Time-Warner -- and gave us a new box.  The box we had for several years could no longer get a picture from HBO or Showtime and the cable guy said it was just the start of the box's failure.  The new box will now record twice as much on the DVR as the old box, which somewhat makes up for the fact I can no longer record on VHS tapes (of which I threw out many, mostly unwatched, when we moved two years ago).  Previously when I ran out of room on the DVR I would record those movies (mostly) on VHS tapes and then delete them.  When I could no longer do that (for reasons that were never truly explained to my satisfaction) I had the dilemma of deleting or watching when I may not have been in the mood for that particular film.  Why have cable at all I am sometimes asked.  Mainly for Turner Classic Movies, I reply.  For one who loves classical films it would be a difficult channel to do without, for Turner shows movies uncut, uninterrupted and in the proper aspect ratio,  It also shows many classical films that are otherwise unavailable.  Someone recently asked me if it wasn't the case that all of the movies on Turner were available on DVD.  Would that it were so!  I did a count on a random month and determined that 80% of what Turner shows is not available on tape or DVD!  Sure, most of Hitchcock is available on DVD, but for those of us who love Borzage, Ulmer, Joseph H. Lewis, Frank Tashlin and many other relatively unheralded geniuses of classical film it is an entirely different matter.

My 17-year-old son Gideon and my wife Susan have little interest in TV, though Susan does like the movies of John Ford and Raoul Walsh and watches them with me, as well as using her limited time to watch more obscure movies by Val Lewton and others who make impressive films in sixty to seventy-five minutes.  And we do allow our four-year-old to watch an hour of TV a day; she has moved from Scooby-Doo to Sofia the First to, currently, Looney Toons, recorded from Boomerang.  Many of these are mediocre. of course (we always watch with her) but some by Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng are quite brilliant indeed.

I do watch some shows that are not movies.  Currently these include:

On broad cast TV:  The Good Wife and Blindspot.  The Good Wife, produced by Michelle King and Robert King, stars a low-key Julianne Margulies as a lawyer with a politician husband, with a complex Perry-Mason-style approach.  Blindspot, created by Martin Gero, is the kind of secret conspiracy programmer for which I have a weakness, i.e, I wouldn't recommend to others the way I would The Good Wife.

Showtime:  The Affair and Homeland.  The  Affair, produced by Sarah Treem and Hagai Levi (who did the fascinating In Treatment for HBO) is an effectively class-conscious melodrama about love and money, though it does include some irritating time-jumping, as too many shows these days do.  Homeland is produced by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, who did 24; one season of Homeland is equivalent in plot to one episode of 24.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, and Mandy Patinkin and Clair Danes are both effective, each neurotic in their own way.  Still, there is too much mysterious plotting, even for a spy drama.

HBO:  The Leftovers.  I had read Tom Perrota's original book but the first season lost me along the way, though the episodes that focused on individual grief were powerful.  This season Damon Lidelof, who sent us over a cliff with the originally promising Lost, is leading the league in obscurity, which he seems to confuse with profundity, though he is no Antonioni. The theme song, by Iris Dement, is quite wonderful.