July 4, 2017


News and Views


I DON’T HAVE MUCH FAITH IN TRUMP’S DOING ANY MODERATE TO LIBERAL THINGS, BUT I DO HAVE SOME FAITH IN HIS LEAVING OFFICE INVOLUNTARILY BEFORE HIS TERM IS UP. IT’S HARD TO TYPE THIS BLOG, BECAUSE MY FINGERS ARE CROSSED!

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-will-trump-raise-taxes-dont-bet-on-it/
By WILL RAHN CBS NEWS July 4, 2017, 6:00 AM
Commentary: Will Trump raise taxes? Don't bet on it

Photograph -- US President Donald Trump (L) congratulates Senior Counselor to the President Stephen Bannon during the swearing-in of senior staff in the East Room of the White House on January 22, 2017 in Washington, DC. / AFP / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images) MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

One of the many things the rise of Donald Trump revealed was how little Republican voters cared about conservative orthodoxy. As many perplexed right-wingers noted at the time, Trump won the GOP primary by singing the praises of big government, protectionism, and yes, even higher taxes on rich people.

"For the wealthy, I think, frankly, it's going to go up," he said on "Meet the Press," as the primary came to a close. "And you know what? It really should go up."

As a campaigner, Trump was shrewd enough to understand that the Republican Party's base wasn't really conservative anymore, at least in the National Review sense of the word.

Instead, it was what you might call "big-government libertarian" -- skeptical of new laws, but appreciative of the welfare state, and nostalgic for a time when the U.S. could do things like build a pipeline from Texas to New Jersey in a matter of months. To these culturally conservative voters, taxing the rich and redistributing seemed like common sense after decades of mounting -- and quite visible -- inequality.

What's next for health care and taxes?
Play VIDEO
What's next for health care and taxes?]

This way of thinking was soon branded Trumpism, and quickly discarded by Trump himself. Trumpism, in practice, requires bipartisanship because things like big infrastructure projects would need liberal support to overcome conservative objections; Trump, meanwhile, has embraced polarization and partisanship. Populists like Steve Bannon, the would-be chief ideologist of Trumpism, were shoved aside in favor of orthodox conservatives like Ryan and technocrats like Gary Cohn.

Trump's decision to govern like a normal Republican will probably [sic] looked back on as a great mistake. He's too weird to pull off the act, and it's not why he was elected in the first place. However, with tax reform soon to become the next big issue in Washington, there's a slim chance that he'll strike a blow for populism.

Bannon is letting it be known that he favors a higher marginal tax rate for people making over $418,000 a year, according to Axios. It's a rather modest proposal, but one sure to drive Trump's fretful handlers crazy if the president flirts with embracing it.

Bannon, though, would really just be doing what Republicans are already doing at the state level. As the New York Times recently noted, a number of GOP-dominated states are suddenly a whole lot less allergic to tax hikes as they once were. Kansas is probably the most dramatic example – Gov. Sam Brownback's massive tax cuts proved to be extraordinarily unpopular in that deep-red state, and had to be rescinded by the Republican legislature over Brownback's objections.

There are good reasons for the GOP to rethink its position on taxes in the long term. But Trump isn't really a long-term thinker, which is one reason it would come as a surprise if he embraced Bannon's proposal. Because in the short run at least, there's not much reason to think this White House will get much of anything out of a tax hike.

It's impossible to know what would have happened if Trump had governed like a big-government libertarian from the start. If Trump had found a way to play nice with Democrats and work with some of them some of the time, we might be in a very different place, and discussing the kind of populist solutions with bipartisan appeal Trump touted on the campaign trail.

Instead, Trump went the partisan route, and is dependent on institutional Republican support. He is reliant on the support of the Freedom Caucus and the GOP's uncompromising right wing, which would never support a tax increase. He needs the donor class, a group that has invested a lot of money in the promise of lower marginal tax rates for the wealthy, to cough up the money that protects the GOP's majorities in Congress. And he needs those Republican majorities, because otherwise he's all but certain to be impeached.

Who knows. In his heart, maybe Trump really does want to raise taxes on rich people, and will push for it. But given Trump's position, and his sense of his own self interest, its hard to think Bannon's tax hike idea is anything but dead on arrival.



I SAW A BALD EAGLE AND ITS’ NEST ON THE CHESAPEAKE BAY ON THE EDGE OF A PATCH OF WOODS ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO, AND I STILL REMEMBER IT. THEY ARE BEAUTIFUL AND VERY LARGE. I LOVE THE SMOOTH, GLIDING FLIGHT OF A RAPTOR. THEY ALSO DO THE WORLD SOME GOOD BY EATING RATS AND SUCH, BRINGING THEM LOVINGLY TO FUNNY-LOOKING AND GREEDY CHICKS, TEARING THEM INTO STRIPS WHICH THE BABIES CAN EASILY SWALLOW. SO, EVEN WHEN I MAY DOUBT IT, LIFE DOES GO ON AND THERE IS LOVE.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bald-eagles-comeback-brink-of-extinction-chesapeake-bay-virginia/
CBS NEWS July 3, 2017, 7:34 PM
Bald eagle soars back from brink of extinction

A bald eagle is receiving medical care this Fourth of July weekend after it was found on a Washington, D.C., street Saturday afternoon -- injured and unable to fly.

Not long ago, the symbol of America's strength and freedom was hard to find anywhere in the United States. Now, the bald eagle is back, CBS News' Chip Reid reports.

In southeastern Virginia near the Chesapeake Bay, expert climber Shane Lawler scales the highest trees in the forest, because that's where bald eagles live.

While their parents circle -- and complain -- high above, 5-week-old twins are gently placed in a bag and lowered to the ground, where wildlife biologist Bryan Watts and his team take over. They fit the dazed birds with ID bands and give them physical exams that most humans would envy.

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Wildlife biologist Bryan Watts and his team fit baby bald eagles with ID bands and give them physical exams. CBS NEWS
CBS News asked if the bird was in pretty good shape, and Watts replied, "Yeah this bird is great."

Watts is director of the College of William & Mary's Center for Conservation Biology. He has monitored the health of the bald eagle population in Virginia for 30 years.

The progress has been stunning, starting in 1972, when the deadly pesticide DDT was banned.

The bald and the bold: Eagles' resurgence comes at a price
Watch out, drones: This bald eagle can take you down
CBS News asked Watts where the bald eagle would be today if DDT wasn't banned and the Endangered Species Act wasn't passed.

"The eagles would be gone from the Bay," Watts said.

In 1970, there were only 20 breeding pairs left in Virginia. But their numbers grew on the James River. Last year, Virginia had 1,060 breeding pairs.

170703-en-reid-bald-eagles-05.jpg
Last year, there were more than 1,000 breeding pairs of bald eagles in Virginia. CBS NEWS
In all, 25-30,000 bald eagles visit the Chesapeake Bay region every year.

Watts says their recovery is one of the greatest conservation success stories in American history.

"The most gratifying part of that is the knowledge that we did that," Watts said. "You know, not the small 'we' at the conservation community but the large 'we' of the American people."

We the people should be proud, he told CBS News, that our national symbol has come soaring back from the brink of extinction.

170703-en-reid-bald-eagles-04.jpg
Wildlife biologist Bryan Watts told CBS News' Chip Reid that bald eagles' recovery is one of the greatest conservation success stories in American history. CBS NEWS



IF YOU THINK I GET PREACHY IN MY BLOG SOMETIMES, JUST READ THIS ROLLING STONE ARTICLE. PREACHY THOUGH IT IS, I AGREE WITH IT 100%. I DO HATE THE KIND OF INTELLECTUAL AND EMOTIONAL PABLUM THAT SO MANY AMERICANS CRAVE, AND HOLLYWOOD DISHES OUT BECAUSE IT BRINGS IN SO MUCH MONEY.

I LOVE MOVIES, AND I LIKE THOSE THAT DO SAY SOMETHING, BUT I WANT THEM TO BE COMPLEX AND EMOTIONALLY MOVING WITH NO SYRUP, SENTIMENTALITY, DOGMATISM OR IDENTIFIABLE CHUNKS OF PURE PROPAGANDA. I LIKE ANTI-HEROES, STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS, EFFECTIVELY DONE MEMORY FLASHBACKS, A NOTICEABLE INNER LIFE IN ALL OF THE CHARACTERS, AND STORIES THAT HAVE A LESS THAN TOTALLY DEFINED ENDING -- ESPECIALLY IF, AFTER ALLOWING IT TO PERCOLATE THOUGH MY MIND FOR A WEEK OR TWO, I WILL UNDERSTAND IT ON THE DEEPER LEVELS OF MY BEING. IF I STILL WANT TO HAVE MORE INFORMATION ON MY QUESTIONS, I MAY GO TO THE PUBLIC LIBRARY AND GET THE NOVEL OR NONFICTION BOOK FROM WHICH IT WAS TAKEN.

SUCH MOVIES GIVE ME A CERTAIN SATIATION. THOSE FILMS STAY WITH ME FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, AND TEACH ME SOMETHING. THE GREAT MOVIE “WINDS OF WAR,” STARRING ROBERT MITCHUM, IS AN EXAMPLE. THAT’S A WAR MOVIE, BUT NOT A VICIOUS OR IDIOTIC ONE. HIS MOVIE “TWO FOR THE SEESAW” WITH SHIRLEY MACLAINE WAS ALSO A GREAT AND BEAUTIFULLY ACTED DRAMA.

TAIBBI’S KEY SENTENCE SAYS IT ALL -- “IT'S THE FACT THAT THE MOVIE IS POPULAR, AND ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE TO SO MANY PEOPLE, THAT'S THE PROBLEM.” THIS RAPACIOUS FORM OF “PATRIOTISM” IS DOMINATING OUR CULTURE NOW, SADLY. SOCIETY SHOULDN’T TURN PEOPLE INTO AUTOMATONS OR PSYCHOPATHS. THERE WAS A NEWS ARTICLE SOME 15 YEARS AGO FEATURING AN INTERVIEW WITH A YOUNG GUNG HO MARINE SNIPER HOME FROM IRAQ, WHO WAS EXULTANT OVER THE KILLING ITSELF. SEEING DEATH THRILLED HIM. WE’RE NOT TURNING OUT WHOLE PEOPLE ANYMORE, I’M AFRAID. THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP IS JUST THE NATURAL PRODUCT OF THIS KIND OF CIVILIZATION. I WON’T BE AROUND MUCH LONGER PERHAPS, BUT I HOPE TO SEE OUR CURRENT TREND CHANGE BACK TO SOMETHING MORE HUMANISTIC AND GENTLE BEFORE I DIE.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/american-sniper-is-almost-too-dumb-to-criticize-20150121
'American Sniper' Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize
Almost.
By Matt Taibbi
January 21, 2015

I saw American Sniper last night, and hated it slightly less than I expected to. Like most Clint Eastwood movies – and I like Clint Eastwood movies for the most part – it's a simple, well-lit little fairy tale with the nutritional value of a fortune cookie that serves up a neatly-arranged helping of cheers and tears for target audiences, and panics at the thought of embracing more than one or two ideas at any time.

RELATED

'American Sniper' Movie Review
Clint Eastwood and a buffed-up Bradley Cooper bring Navy SEAL Chris Kyle's story to the big screen

It's usually silly to get upset about the self-righteous way Hollywood moviemakers routinely turn serious subjects into baby food. Film-industry people angrily reject the notion that their movies have to be about anything (except things like "character" and "narrative" and "arc," subjects they can talk about endlessly).

This is the same Hollywood culture that turned the horror and divisiveness of the Vietnam War era into a movie about a platitude-spewing doofus with leg braces who in the face of terrible moral choices eats chocolates and plays Ping-Pong. The message of Forrest Gump was that if you think about the hard stuff too much, you'll either get AIDS or lose your legs. Meanwhile, the hero is the idiot who just shrugs and says "Whatever!" whenever his country asks him to do something crazy.

Forrest Gump pulled in over half a billion and won Best Picture. So what exactly should we have expected from American Sniper?

Not much. But even by the low low standards of this business, it still manages to sink to a new depth or two.

The thing is, the mere act of trying to make a typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass that is/was the Iraq occupation is both dumber and more arrogant than anything George Bush or even Dick Cheney ever tried.

No one expected 20 minutes of backstory about the failed WMD search, Abu Ghraib, or the myriad other American atrocities and quick-trigger bombings that helped fuel the rise of ISIL and other groups.

But to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold (is there any film theme more perfectly 2015-America than that?) who slowly, very slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children – Gump notwithstanding, that was a hard one to see coming.

Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.

It's the fact that the movie is popular, and actually makes sense to so many people, that's the problem. "American Sniper has the look of a bona fide cultural phenomenon!" gushed Brandon Griggs of CNN, noting the film's record $105 million opening-week box office.

Griggs added, in a review that must make Eastwood swell with pride, that the root of the film's success is that "it's about a real person," and "it's a human story, not a political one."

Well done, Clint! You made a movie about mass-bloodshed in Iraq that critics pronounced not political! That's as Hollywood as Hollywood gets.

The characters in Eastwood's movies almost always wear white and black hats or their equivalents, so you know at all times who's the good guy on the one hand, and whose exploding head we're to applaud on the other.

In this case that effect is often literal, with "hero" sniper Chris Kyle's "sinister" opposite Mustafa permanently dressed in black (with accompanying evil black pirate-stubble) throughout.

Eastwood, who surely knows better, indulges in countless crass stupidities in the movie. There's the obligatory somber scene of shirtless buffed-up SEAL Kyle and his heartthrob wife Sienna Miller gasping at the televised horror of the 9/11 attacks. Next thing you know, Kyle is in Iraq actually fighting al-Qaeda – as if there was some logical connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

Which of course there had not been, until we invaded and bombed the wrong country and turned its moonscaped cities into a recruitment breeding ground for… you guessed it, al-Qaeda. They skipped that chicken-egg dilemma in the film, though, because it would detract from the "human story."

Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by Hollywood standards when one of Kyle's officers suggests that they could "win the war" by taking out the evil sniper who is upsetting America's peaceful occupation of Sadr City.

When hunky Bradley Cooper's Kyle character subsequently takes out Mustafa with Skywalkerian long-distance panache – "Aim small, hit small," he whispers, prior to executing an impossible mile-plus shot – even the audiences in the liberal-ass Jersey City theater where I watched the movie stood up and cheered. I can only imagine the response this scene scored in Soldier of Fortune country.

To Eastwood, this was probably just good moviemaking, a scene designed to evoke the same response he got in Trouble With the Curve when his undiscovered Latin Koufax character, Rigoberto Sanchez, strikes out the evil Bonus Baby Bo Gentry (even I cheered at that scene).

The problem of course is that there's no such thing as "winning" the War on Terror militarily. In fact the occupation led to mass destruction, hundreds of thousands of deaths, a choleric lack of real sanitation, epidemic unemployment and political radicalization that continues to this day to spread beyond Iraq's borders.

Yet the movie glosses over all of this, and makes us think that killing Mustafa was some kind of decisive accomplishment – the single shot that kept terrorists out of the coffee shops of San Francisco or whatever. It's a scene that ratified every idiot fantasy of every yahoo with a target rifle from Seattle to Savannah.

The really dangerous part of this film is that it turns into a referendum on the character of a single soldier. It's an unwinnable argument in either direction. We end up talking about Chris Kyle and his dilemmas, and not about the Rumsfelds and Cheneys and other officials up the chain who put Kyle and his high-powered rifle on rooftops in Iraq and asked him to shoot women and children.

They're the real villains in this movie, but the controversy has mostly been over just how much of a "hero" Chris Kyle really was. One Academy member wondered to a reporter if Kyle (who in real life was killed by a fellow troubled vet in an eerie commentary on the violence in our society that might have made a more interesting movie) was a "psychopath." Michael Moore absorbed a ton of criticism when he tweeted that "My uncle [was] killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards …"

And plenty of other commentators, comparing Kyle's book (where he remorselessly brags about killing "savages") to the film (where he is portrayed as a more rounded figure who struggled, if not verbally then at least visually, with the nature of his work), have pointed out that real-life Kyle was kind of a dick compared to movie-Kyle.

(The most disturbing passage in the book to me was the one where Kyle talked about being competitive with other snipers, and how when one in particular began to threaten his "legendary" number, Kyle "all of the sudden" seemed to have "every stinkin' bad guy in the city running across my scope." As in, wink wink, my luck suddenly changed when the sniper-race got close, get it? It's super-ugly stuff).

The thing is, it always looks bad when you criticize a soldier for doing what he's told. It's equally dangerous to be seduced by the pathos and drama of the individual solider's experience, because most wars are about something much larger than that, too.

They did this after Vietnam, when America spent decades watching movies like Deer Hunter and First Blood and Coming Home about vets struggling to reassimilate after the madness of the jungles. So we came to think of the "tragedy" of Vietnam as something primarily experienced by our guys, and not by the millions of Indochinese we killed.

That doesn't mean Vietnam Veterans didn't suffer: they did, often terribly. But making entertainment out of their dilemmas helped Americans turn their eyes from their political choices. The movies used the struggles of soldiers as a kind of human shield protecting us from thinking too much about what we'd done in places like Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos.

This is going to start happening now with the War-on-Terror movies. As CNN's Griggs writes, "We're finally ready for a movie about the Iraq War." Meaning: we're ready to be entertained by stories about how hard it was for our guys. And it might have been. But that's not the whole story and never will be.

We'll make movies about the Chris Kyles of the world and argue about whether they were heroes or not. Some were, some weren't. But in public relations as in war, it'll be the soldiers taking the bullets, not the suits in the Beltway who blithely sent them into lethal missions they were never supposed to understand.

And filmmakers like Eastwood, who could have cleared things up, only muddy the waters more. Sometimes there's no such thing as "just a human story." Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context, and this is one of them.



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