Year: 2011

Stage Two of the Phone Hacking Scandal

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It looks like the government and the police are using Britain’s odious Official Secrets Act in an attempt to ferret our the leakers:

The Metropolitan police are seeking a court order under the Official Secrets Act to make Guardian reporters disclose their confidential sources about the phone-hacking scandal.
In an unprecedented legal attack on journalists’ sources, Scotland Yard officers claim the act, which has special powers usually aimed at espionage, could have been breached in July when reporters Amelia Hill and Nick Davies revealed the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone. They are demanding source information be handed over.
The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, said on Friday: “We shall resist this extraordinary demand to the utmost”.

Tom Watson, the former Labour minister who has been prominent in exposing hacking by the News of the World, said: “It is an outrageous abuse and completely unacceptable that, having failed to investigate serious wrongdoing at the News of the World for more than a decade, the police should now be trying to move against the Guardian. It was the Guardian who first exposed this scandal.“

The first rule of law enforcement is that the Cops will go after you if you embarrass them, and so now they are going after the paper that broke the story.

They haven’t invoked the Act againt the Murdoch papers, where police took bribes for information, but they are going after the Guardian, where police misconduct was revealed.

The fact that they are bringing out the big guns indicates that this is going to be getting a lot worse very soon.

Obama Loses Frank Rich

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For not prosecuting the banksters. This is significant because, as Matt Taibbi notes, was “one of Obama’s great supporters in the punditry world,” and Rich’s latest piece is positively brutal:

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they “are burnt and purged away.”

After the 1929 crash, and thanks in part to the legendary Ferdinand Pecora’s fierce thirties Senate hearings, America gained a Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Glass-Steagall Act to forestall a rerun. After the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties, some 800 miscreants went to jail. But those who ran the central financial institutions of our fiasco escaped culpability (as did most of the institutions). As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama’s watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers. The Justice Department’s bally­hooed Operation Broken Trust has broken still more trust by chasing mainly low-echelon, one-off Madoff wannabes. You almost have to feel sorry for the era’s designated Goldman scapegoat, 32-year-old flunky “Fabulous Fab” Fabrice Tourre, who may yet take the fall for everyone else. It’s as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in.

………

The fallout has left Obama in the worst imaginable political bind. No good deed he’s done for Wall Street has gone unpunished. He is vilified as an anti-capitalist zealot not just by Republican foes but even by some former backers. What has he done to deserve it? All anyone can point to is his December 2009 60 Minutes swipe at “fat-cat bankers on Wall Street”—an inept and anomalous Ed Schultz seizure that he retracted just weeks later by praising Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein as “very savvy businessmen.”

Obama can win reelection without carrying 10021 or Greenwich in any case. The bigger political problem is that a far larger share of the American electorate views him as a tool of the very fat-cat elite that despises him. Given Obama’s humble background, his history as a mostly liberal Democrat, and his famous résumé as a community organizer, this would also seem a reach. But the president has no one to blame but himself for the caricature. While he has never lusted after money—he’d rather get his hands on the latest novel by Morrison or Franzen—he is an elitist of a certain sort. For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.

………

Obama soon retreated into the tea-party mantra of fiscal austerity. Short-term spending cuts when spending is needed to create jobs make no sense economically. But they also make no sense politically. The deficit has never been a top voter priority, no matter how loudly the right claims it is. At Obama’s inaugural, Gallup found that 11 percent of voters ranked unemployment as their top priority while only 2 percent did the deficit. Unemployment has remained a stable public priority over the deficit ever since, usually by at least a 2-to-1 ratio. In a CBS poll immediately after the Democrats’ “shellacking” of last November—a debacle supposedly precipitated by the tea party’s debt jihad—the question “What should Congress concentrate on in January?” yielded 56 percent for “economy/jobs” and 4 percent for “deficit reduction.”

Geithner has pushed deficit reduction as a priority since before the inauguration, the Washington Post recently reported in an article greeted as a smoking gun by liberal bloggers. But Obama is the chief executive. It’s his fault, no one else’s, that he seems diffident about the unemployed. Each time there’s a jolt in the jobless numbers, he and his surrogates compound that profile by farcically reshuffling the same clichés, from “stuck in a ditch” to “headwinds” (first used by Geithner in March 2009—retire it already!) to “bumps in the road.” It’s true the administration has caught few breaks and the headwinds have been strong, but voters have long since tuned out this monotonous apologia. The White House’s repeated argument that the stimulus saved as many as 3 million jobs, accurate though it may be, is another nonstarter when 14 million Americans are looking for work.

………

(emphasis mine)

If he’s losing (possibly already lost) someone like Frank Rich, who was  treating like the 2nd coming, he’s losing a lot of people.

About the only silver lining for this is that Rich, unlike myself, or Yves Smith, is unwilling to call him and his administration corrupt over this.

And the Republicans War on Organized Labor Continues

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The House just passed a bill which would castrate the National Labor Relations Board:

The House voted on Thursday to approve a Republican-backed bill that would prohibit the National Labor Relations Board from trying to block Boeing from operating a new $750 million aircraft assembly line in South Carolina. The largely party-line vote was 238 to 186.

Republicans denounced the labor board’s case against Boeing, asserting that the board was overreaching its authority and should not be dictating where companies can locate their operations. But many Democrats and union leaders condemned the legislation, arguing that it undercut an independent federal agency and favored Boeing, a potent lobbying force and prominent political donor.

Under the bill, an unusual effort to curb a federal agency’s actions in a pending case, the labor board would be barred from seeking to have an employer shut, transfer or relocate employment or operations “under any circumstances.”

The bill, called the “Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act,” is expected to face a battle in the Democratic-controlled Senate. In the House vote, the partisan divide was clear: only eight Democrats voted for the bill and only seven Republicans voted against.

Republicans have repeatedly criticized the board’s acting general counsel for filing a complaint against Boeing last April, accusing the company of building an assembly plant in North Charleston, S.C., as a form of retaliation against unionized employees in Washington State who have engaged in five strikes since 1977, including a 58-day-walkout in 2008.

The National Labor Relations Act prohibits companies from taking any actions, whether firing employees or relocating a factory, against workers for exercising federally protected rights that include forming a union or going on strike.

“F%$# the law, we’re for rich pigs,” so say the Republicans.

The management at Boeing Publicly Stated that they were establishing a factory in South Carolina in retaliation for earlier (legal) strikes.  If there is no sanction allowed for blatant and admitted law breaking, it will get worse.

Then again, the Republicans don’t think that rich people should be prosecuted for breaking the law.

Why Our Economy is Going to Continue to Suck

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First, because consumer expectations for the future just hit a thirty one year low, and second, because this fear is justified, because this feeling is an accurate reflection of a reality where your net worth is falling:

Consumer sentiment inched up in early September, but Americans remained gloomy about the future with a gauge of expectations falling to the lowest level since 1980, a survey released Friday showed.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s preliminary reading on the overall index on consumer sentiment edged up to 57.8 from 55.7 the month before, which had been the lowest level since November 2008. It topped the median forecast of 56.5 among economists polled by Reuters.

“Overall, the data indicate that a renewed downturn in consumer spending is as likely as not in the year ahead,” survey director Richard Curtin said in a statement.

“Even without a downturn, consumer spending will not be strong enough to enable the rapid job growth that is needed to offset reduced long-term expectations.”

The gauge of consumer expectations dipped to 47.0 from 47.4. It was the lowest level since May 1980. The economic outlook for the next 12 months fell to 38 from 40, the lowest since February 2009 when the world economy was gripped by the credit crisis.

…………

It’s understandable if Americans feel poorer. It’s because they are.

The net worth of American households decreased nearly 0.3% in the second quarter as the value of their homes and stock portfolios slumped, according to data released Friday by the Federal Reserve.

Household wealth fell to $58.5 trillion, as home values skidded 0.5% and financial assets, including stock holdings, slipped 0.3%.

And consumers’ balance sheets may get worse before they get better, courtesy of declining stock prices over the past three months.

Half measures, and a fetish with punitive austerity do not make for either a recovery or consumer confidence.

1000 Words On Raising the Medicare Eligibility Age

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I think that one of the reasons that Obama took raising the Medicare eligibility age off the table is this report, which gives us this little picture:

For the non chart pr0n inclined, the first thing that you notice is that it costs society twice as much to move these folks off the Medicare rolls.

The next thing to notice is that almost almost half of that cost is born by people who are under 65, who, because of community rating, will have to cover much of the increased expenses.

And then there is the huge hit on 65-66 year olds and their employers.

What isn’t listed here is the loss in market power that would result, with an associated increase in costs.

It’s bad policy, it’s bad politics, and thankfully Obama realizes this ……… For a while, at least.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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And not only were the numbers worse than expected, but they are the worst numbers since June, with claims closing by 11,000 to 428,000, with the 4 week moving average rose by 4,000 to 419,500, though continuing and total claims both fell slightly.

We are not in a recovery, as the latest Philadelphia Fed’s Survey of manufacturing showed, with the numbers indicating contraction.

Why people aren’t running around like their hair on fire over this, I do not understand.

Lovely, Just Lovely

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If you ever wondered why we need civil liberties, this story about how the FBI decided to explicitly teach its agents Islamophobic bullsh%$:

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”

At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”

These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity.

“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.”

The FBI isn’t just treading on thin legal ice by portraying ordinary, observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism agents say. It’s also playing into al-Qaida’s hands.

………

In this case, the FBI’s Allen says, the counterterrorism agents who received these briefings have “spent two to three years on the job.” The briefings are written accordingly. The stated purpose of one, about allegedly religious-sanctioned lying, is to “identify the elements of verbal deception in Islam and their impacts on Law Enforcement.” Not “terrorism.” Not even “Islamist extremism.” Islam.

(emphasis mine)

The nickel tour is that they turned over rocks and invited the most repugnant bigoted wingnuts to develop a curriculum to train their agents.

After all these years, they are still J. Edgar Hoovers merry band of thugs with a badge, and I don’t want these folks taking a piss without a judge reviewing this, which is why things like the judicial review free National Security Letters are such a bad idea.

What we won’t see happening here is someone getting fired over this, because law enforcement will only police itself when there is absolutely no alternative.

Everyone in the chain of command who knew about this should be fired, and those who should have known should be transferred to the FBI office in Nome, Alaska.

Oh Crap

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As Dave Weigel, notes, “Pennsylvania Ponders Bold Democrat-Screwing Electoral Plan,” which would serve to award most of the states electoral votes to the Republican regardless of the vote count:

Laura Olson reports on the happenings in Harrisburg, where Republicans now control all of the branches of government:

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi is trying to gather support to change the state’s “winner-takes-all” approach for awarding electoral votes. Instead, he’s suggesting that Pennsylvania dole them out based on which candidate wins each of the 18 congressional districts, with the final two going to the contender with the most votes statewide.

In other reports, Pileggi sounds awfully sanguine about the effect this would have on PA as a swing state. Why even bring that up? Pennsylvania is typically a closely-divided state, and while it’s gone Democratic in every election since 1992, it’s been heavily campaigned-in every year.

So, let’s pretend this is a totally political neutral decision. If the next Republican candidate breaks the streak and wins the state, it would be horrible for him — he’d shed electoral votes. But if the president wins, he’s down at least nine, possibly ten electoral votes, because congressional districting is slanted towards the GOP.

When Democrats come to power, they try to do things and mend fences, and when Republicans come to power, they try to tear things down and use the political process in the relentless pursuit of power.

Considering that the American public generally considers Terri Schiavo to have better ideas to Republicans, but they remain competitive politically seems to indicate that they play the game a lot better than the Democrats do.

I think that it’s likely to happen, the idea of shaming Republicans into doing the right thing is laughable, though there is opposition, both from the Pennsylvania Republican Congressional delegation, as well as people who feel that the state would be ignored, as it would lose its swing state status.

Elizabeth Warren Announces Run for Massachusetts Senate

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Elizabeth Warren has officially declared her run for the Senate.

I understand why she feels the need to run, but I am pessimistic.

First, whatever you say about Republican Scott Brown, he is a very good campaigner, second, the Dems are rooting for her to lose almost as much as the Republicans are, because they can then argue that people don’t want real consumer protections.

And if she wins, she ends up in the Senate, where she would enter a seniority driven and hidebound old boys club that would do their level best to keep her away from any meaningful voice on finance.

I wish her luck, but it’s a lose-lose for her us.

Well, at least she’s better than Brown, who’s a smarmy right wing ratf%$#.

Her campaign web page is here.

Thanks Barack

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So, the Dems just lost the special election to replace Anthony Weiner, losing the Congressional district to the ‘Phants for the first time im almost 90 years. (!)

While the Democrat, David Weprin, by all accounts ran a horrible campaign, we also need to understand that that the Republicans aggressively tried to make this campaign national rather than local, and it does not bode well for keeping the White House, or the Senate, or retaking the House in 2012.

I understand that no will save it publicly, but this is not good news for Barack Obama or the Democratic party.

Unfortunately, particularly inside Obama administration’s reality distortion field, they are telling themselves that it’s not about them, and so will not learn from this.

I’ve Had it With These Motherf%$#ing Republicans on This Motherf%$#ing Plane!M

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Alligator 0, Snake 0, Let’s call it a tie.

The latest regulation that the Republicans are objecting to and trying to repeal, is one that literally forbids snakes on a plane.

I’m not kidding here. They are literally trying to roll back regulations on the transportation of snakes on airplanes:

Democrats and Republicans all agree that the nation needs to move on a jobs agenda. And Republicans have a new plan: unleash the reins of snake commerce.

GOP members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today called attention to a proposed regulation that would restrict the transportation and importation of nine types of snakes, including the Burmese Python.

In a new report entitled “Broken Government: How the Administrative State has Broken President Obama’s Promise of Regulatory Reform,” GOP members cited the proposed snake ban as one of seven examples of red tape choking off job growth in an already ailing economy.

One witness invited to testify, snake breeder David Barke, told lawmakers that the rules “threatens as many as a million law-abiding American citizens and their families with the penalty of a felony conviction for pursuing their livelihoods, for pursuing their hobby, or for simply moving with their pet to new state.”

Politico reports that Florida officials, led by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), are pushing for the new rules because the Everglades are under attack by 100,000 gigantic Burmese pythons who have been accidentally introduced by negligent pet owners. The outside invaders have been on a rampage, devouring native birds and other creatures. One python grew so big that it managed to devour a six-foot alligator before exploding. No really. This actually happened. There’s a photo.

No, this is not The Onion, and I wish that I didn’t live in a world where I cannot tell the difference between reality and satire.

Have I Mentioned that I Love Barney Frank?*

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He’s calling for a major restructuring of the Federal Reserve:

U.S. Representative Barney Frank, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, is renewing a push to remove Federal Reserve regional presidents from voting on central bank interest-rate decisions.

Frank, of Massachusetts, will submit a new version of legislation to cut the voting rights of five rotating regional representatives from the 12-member Federal Open Markets Committee, he said today. The revision of Frank’s May proposal calls for replacing them with four presidential appointees, according to a position paper released by his office.

Eliminating regional presidents, who are selected by board members of their banks and approved by Fed governors, will make interest-rate votes more democratic, Frank said in the paper. The 7-3 vote at the last FOMC meeting in August underlined the need to replace the presidents, who have become a “significant constraint on national economic policy making,” he said.

Regional presidents “are neither elected nor appointed by officials who are themselves elected,” Frank wrote in the paper. “They are part of a self-perpetuating group of private citizens who select each other and who are treated as equals in setting federal monetary policy with officials appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.”

He’s right, of course. The regional Feds are not governmental organizations, they are quite literally owned by the regional banks they nominally regulate, and these people are therefore the employees of the regional banks.

Anything that to any degree takes any governmental (or in this quasi-governmental) agency out from under the thumb of the banksters is a good thing.™

*In a 110% purely heterosexual kind of way, of course, as the General would say.

What’s the Pashtun Word for Tet?

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Because the Taliban was all over Kabul today, and hit the US embassy:

Heavily armed insurgents wearing suicide vests struck Tuesday at two of the most prominent symbols of the American diplomatic and military presence in Kabul, the United States Embassy and the nearby NATO headquarters, demonstrating the Taliban’s ability to infiltrate even the most heavily fortified districts of the capital.

As the insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades, Westerners sought shelter — one rocket penetrated the embassy compound — and Afghan government workers fled their offices, emptying the city center. NATO and Afghan troops responded with barrages of bullets. At least 6 people were killed and 19 wounded.

Early Wednesday morning, occasional explosions could still be heard, and the Kabul police said they were continuing to count the number of dead insurgents. The Interior Ministry said Tuesday that it appeared that at least seven had entered the city. At least five took positions in a 14-story building under construction with clear sight lines to the targets.

As the gunfire pounded, loudspeakers at nearby embassies kept repeating: “This is not a drill, this is not a drill. If you are in a secure location, do not move.”

Winning hearts and minds much?

Another Nail in the Bank Sellout Settlement Deal Coffin

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Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson has sent a letter to the Attorneys General of New York and Iowa (The Iowa AG is leading the negotiations) saying that any settlement that grants immunity to the banks on areas that have not been thoroughly investigated will be unacceptable to her:

In a letter sent to the attorneys general of New York and Iowa on Friday, Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson said that banks shouldn’t be protected from liability in connection with the nationwide foreclosure settlement.

Swanson said that banks should not be released from liability for mortgage securitization, securities claims or the use of a mortgage registry known as MERS, Bloomberg News reported.

“The banks should not be released from liability for conduct that has not been investigated and is not appropriately remedied in any settlement,” Swanson wrote, according to Bloomberg News.

State and federal officials are negotiating a settlement with the five largest mortgage services in the U.S. – Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., JP Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Ally Financial Inc.

I think that it has become increasingly clear to people involved with the negotiations that Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller and the Obama administration are primarily interested in shielding the banks, and creating the appearance rather than the reality of accountability for the banksters.

Note also that Swanson has some serious consumer protection cred, as she was the one who uncovered the fraudulent and self dealing behavior of the National Arbitration Forum, and forced the organization out of consumer arbitration.

I don’t think that there has been an outbreak of ethics in the case of the banks, it’s just that the AGs who oppose this deal realize that not only are the settlement talks a corrupt endeavor, but they are a transparently corrupt endeavor, and they don’t think that they can defend it to the voters.

Another Gift from the Austerity Confidence Fairy

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Thankfully, it’s the UK, and not us, but this is unbelievably grim:

George Osborne’s austerity programme will cut the living standards of Britain’s families by more than 10% over the next three years as those on the lowest incomes suffer most from the tax increases and spending cuts designed to reduce the budget deficit.

A study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the UK’s leading experts on the public finances, concludes that the chancellor’s strategy will result in greater inequality and rising child poverty, throwing into reverse progress made in the final years of the last Labour government.

The bleak picture painted by the IFS will be used by opponents of the chancellor’s austerity measures to call for a plan B to generate faster economic growth. There is likely to be further pressure on Osborne on Monday as the head of his independent commission on banking, Sir John Vickers, outlines measures for banking reform.

I’m more of a cynic than the author, Larry Elliott, economics editor of The Guardian, because I believe that part of the reason that Osborne is supporting this is because of the, “greater inequality and rising child poverty, throwing into reverse progress made in the final years of the last Labour government.”

They are determined to roll back whatever minor progress occurred under Blair and Brown, and move back to where Thatcher and Major left the nation.

And once they’ve done that, they want to take Britain back to the Dickensian standards of the middle of the 19th century.

And the French Are Probably the Best in the World at Nuclear Safety

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But they just had an explosion at their nuclear reprocessing facility in Marcoule:

One person has been killed and four injured, one seriously, in a blast at the Marcoule nuclear site in France.

There was no risk of a radioactive leak after the blast, caused by a fire near a furnace in the Centraco radioactive waste storage site, said officials.

The owner of the southern French plant, national electricity provider EDF, said it had been “an industrial accident, not a nuclear accident”.

The cause of the blast was not yet known, said the company.

This has not been a good year for nuclear power, but the idea of dismissing the recent problems with nuclear power (Japan, Virginia, and now France) as some sort of Black Swan event is not rational.

The problems, at least those in Japan and Virginia, the jury is out on Marcoule, are an artifact of old, under-designed nuclear facilities, not simply a triple witching day for nukes.

Bummer, But the Movies are a Business

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A movie based on HP Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness, has been canceled:

The film-world was thrown into a frenzy yesterday regarding Universal’s cancellation of Guillermo del Toro’s personal passion project, a $150 million, R-rated adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. We live in an era where even the once-brave Warner Bros. has gone from the sort of studio that would roll the dice on The Matrix to the kind of studio that will likely reboot/remake The Matrix, where Pixar seems content to become a sequel factory (Cars 2, Monsters Inc 2), where studios are so terrified of big-budget originality that they seem to merely be parading an never-ending stream of unwanted sequels (Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief: The Sea Monsters), needless remakes (Total Recall), and inexplicable ‘reboots’ (Tomb Raider), the news was the film-news equivalent of us lefties hearing that President Obama had caved into GOP budget demands… again. There are plenty of reasons why executives are reluctant to spend blockbuster-dollars on original ideas. But the (temporary?) death of At the Mountain of Madness isn’t quite representative of the end of original thought in Hollywood. But it is a good time to stop and ask why every major studio genre picture needs to cost to bloody much?

Film Blogger Scott Mendelson is right. When one considers the fact that this film would have to be almost exclusively CGI, and a decent Linux based server farm for the rendering would cost well under $50,000.00, the idea that you need spend $150M to make it is ludicrous.

After all, the 6 minute long CGI extravaganza short subject The Raven cost under $5000.00.

Simply put, this film would not make money unless it shattered box office records for the R-Rated horror genre:

The highest-grossing R-rated film of all-time is The Matrix Reloaded, at $742 million worldwide. After that, you get The Passion of the Christ ($611 million), Terminator 2: Judgment Day ($519 million), Troy ($497 million), Saving Private Ryan ($481 million), The Hangover ($467 million), The Matrix and Pretty Woman ( both $463 million), Gladiator ($457 million), The Last Samurai and 300 ( both $456 million), The Exorcist ($441 million), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machine ($433 million), The Matrix Revolutions ($427 million), Sex and the City ($411 million), and The Bodyguard ($410 million – which is arguably why that one is getting remade). That’s just sixteen films in all of modern-motion picture history that have grossed $400 million or more worldwide with an R-rating. The second-highest-grossing R-rated horror film (after The Exorcist) remains Hannibal, with $351 million. I can’t even think of an insanely successful R-rated supernatural horror picture off the top of my head… can you? Point being, even with the once-surefire Tom Cruise allegedly at the helm, an R-rated $150 million supernatural horror film would basically have to become the most successful supernatural R-rated horror film of all-time just to break even.

(Emphasis mine.)

Could someone out in Hollywood explain to me why every film seems to have to cost something north of $100 million?

Even with PR and distribution costs, it seems to me that this could be a $50 million movie, and given the relative cheapness of modern CGI this is very doable, and at that cost, you might clear a profit on the initial theatrical release.

H/t (unsurprisingly) Cthulhu at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

It Looks Like I’m Not the Only One Bearish on Obama in 2012

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A lot of Democrats are worried that toast in 2012:

Democrats are expressing growing alarm about President Obama’s re-election prospects and, in interviews, are openly acknowledging anxiety about the White House’s ability to strengthen the president’s standing over the next 14 months.

Elected officials and party leaders at all levels said their worries have intensified as the economy has displayed new signs of weakness. They said the likelihood of a highly competitive 2012 race is increasing as the Republican field, once dismissed by many Democrats as too inexperienced and conservative to pose a serious threat, has started narrowing to two leading candidates, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, who have executive experience and messages built around job creation.

And in a campaign cycle in which Democrats had entertained hopes of reversing losses from last year’s midterm elections, some in the party fear that Mr. Obama’s troubles could reverberate down the ballot into Congressional, state and local races.

“In my district, the enthusiasm for him has mostly evaporated,” said Representative Peter A. DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon. “There is tremendous discontent with his direction.”

The president’s economic address last week offered a measure of solace to discouraged Democrats by employing an assertive and scrappy style that many supporters complain has been absent for the last year as he has struggled to rise above Washington gridlock. Several Democrats suggested that he watch a tape of the jobs speech over and over and use it as a guide until the election.

At it’s core, the problem is that people who choose a bad something over a not-bad nothing.
.
The money quote is that, “Polling suggests that the president’s yearlong effort to reclaim the political center has so far yielded little in the way of additional support from the moderates and independents who tend to decide presidential elections.”

There is another name for these voters, low information voters.  They don’t tend to vote on policies, they don’t vote on “changing the tone”, and while they may tell pollsters that they don’t like all that partisanship, they say that because they don’t think what it means.

These are voters who vote on buzz, and the buzz is generated by the bases, to the benefit Reagan and Bush II, and to the detriment of Carter and Bush I.

If the phrase “Sane Republican” had not become an oxymoron, and if the Republican party were not determined to alienate Hispanic voters, he would have no chance at all.

If one is inclined to look on the brighter side, it should be noted that it would be much less politically tenable for a ‘Phant to gut social security and Medicare.  (It’s an “Only Nixon could go to China” thing)