Shots in the Dark

How can it be that a film ostensibly about fairy tales is also an ambitious and powerful drama about the things people do to survive during wartime? And yet that is exactly what Pan’s Labyrinth achieves. This is a beautiful, astonishing, brilliant film. Its creativity is staggering, its insights into human nature truthful, its originality rare. Even to try to describe its plot is to do it an injustice.

And because everything is political, I should mention that it is the work of a Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro, and therefore is one more way in which many non-Latino citizens of the United States will be exposed to a Mexican imagination, and perhaps change their impression of a nation and a neighbor many of us do not know as well as we should….

See Pan’s Labyrinth. And after that, if you’re really interested, take a look at Del Toro’s previous film, “The Devil’s Backbone,” to see an earlier exploration of children, war, and monsters…..

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* A new blog feature….

You’ve been reading about the tightening bonds between hedge funds and Democratic politics on this blog for months. Now the New York Times has taken notice. Yesterday Landon Thomas, Jr. weighed in with “Hedge Fund Chiefs, With Cash, Join Political Fray.“

Some of the most aggressive donors have been Democratic supporters like George Soros, David E. Shaw of D. E. Shaw and James H. Simons at Renaissance Technologies, as well as younger executives like Thomas F. Steyer at Farallon and Marc Lasry at Avenue Capital, all of whom gave generously during the 2006 election cycle.

You will recognize D.E. Shaw as Larry Summers’ boss…..

With the rapid growth of their money and stature, an increasing number of the hedge fund wealthy are not just putting their money to work, they are forging personal and professional ties with a generation of politicians who have come to spend as much time raising money as they do drafting legislation.

The article does not make the obvious point that these hedge funds are not only contributing to Democrats, they are hiring them.

These are all perfectly legal activities, of course, and far be it from me to discourage anyone from participating in the democratic institutions of fundraising and campaigning. I’m sure there are plenty of ways in which these folks are genuinely altruistic and concerned citizens.

That said, their contributions are also intended to advance their financial interests, and this is another way in which our political parties are being bought and paid for by society’s wealthiest….

Crying Wolf

What an astonishing piece of footage this is! Dick Cheney appears on CNN; Wolf Blitzer asks him a question about his lesbian daughter having a baby. Only Wolf asks it in a kind of backhanded, gutless way, and Cheney instantly bitchslaps him into submission.

It’s really quite remarkable to watch, particularly Cheney’s complete willingness to tolerate “dead air”—the worst crime on TV.

And after Cheney rebukes him, Blitzer completely collapses into a sniveling, sycophantic heap. “We like your daughters very much…I wan to congratulate you on having another grandchild.”

Sometimes you can understand why Cheney is so contemptuous of the press….

Speaking of Larry Summers…a few tidbits.

…he’s in Davos, where a Bloomberg press release describes him as “Harvard Professor and D.E. Shaw & Co,” c.f. this blog’s previous discussion of how hedge funds are hiring politicos for their access, particularly with international powerbrokers. Was it part of Summers’ contract that he co-byline himself? And has anyone ever seen a Harvard professor co-brand in such a fashion? John Smith, Harvard professor and J.P. Morgan…..

Summers is now saying that the nation’s financial markets “have been handicapped by post-Enron overreach,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Could there be any connection between this anti-regulatory point of view and his new state of employ?

And while Summers is in Switzerland, alleged anti-Semitism—the kind Summers famously decried—has returned to campus: a Stanford group, Students Confronting Apartheid in Israel, is calling for the university to selectively divest from companies with ties to Israel. Will this issue take on new life, thanks to Jimmy Carter (who yesterday signed books in Harvard Square)?

Finally, some of you will remember just how bizarre I found the phenomenon of undergraduates asking Larry Summers to sign dollar bills—and Summers doing it. The image of a Harvard president signing money for the undergraduates struck such a ghastly note about what Summers was really teaching them. (Can you imagine Bok’s reaction to such a request? One suspects he’d be simultaneously mortified and appalled.)

But perhaps I am old-fashioned. Because watching the State of the Union, I gather that there’s a new tradition in Congress: As Bush left the House chamber, members of Congress, like jejune, desperate supplicants—or college freshmen—thrust their programs toward the president for him to autograph.

Next, Congress will line up outside the Today show and hold up signs in the hopes that Al Roker will notice them……

The Task Force on Teaching and Career Development, led by GSAS dean Theda Skocpol, has released a landmark report on the quality of teaching at Harvard.

While praising the contributions of many professors, the report eloquently describes an academic culture in which teaching is not rewarded, but is de-valued and de-emphasized. Again and again graduate students and junior professors get the message that, if they want to get ahead at Harvard, they should blow off the teaching and focus on research.

(This is reflective of a larger issue at Harvard, where individual success is generally valued more than contributions to the larger community.)

Skocpol’s committee delineates this phenomenon with uncomfortable specificity. As best I can tell on a quick skim of the 86-page document, it does not go into issues in particular departments—hello, economics?—but the anonymous quotes it includes from people who try to teach well yet are discouraged from it are pretty damning.

The report has a number of recommendations, but the one that will really rock the Harvard world suggests linking pay to teaching performance. That is a watershed at Harvard, a truly fundamental shift in the way that teaching is valued at the university.

It will be interesting to see how the faculty reacts to it.

A final note: This task force began its work in September ’06, a few months into the Bok interregnum. Those undergraduates who aren’t sure what Derek Bok has been up to should take note. Those who revered Summers because he came to pizza feeds and signed dollar bills might consider the fact that there is no inherent reason why such a report could not have been issued during the five years of the Summers’ presidency…

The North Carolina state bar has now added ethics charges to its earlier complaint against the nefarious and incompetent prosecutor—former prosecutor—in the Duke “rape” case, Mike Nifong.

The charges have to do with the withholding of evidence….

Eyeing Rudy

Two things about this interview with Rudy Giuliani.

First, note how he tries to “contextualize” Iraq. It’s a serious problem, but, well, let’s look at the bright side.

And two, Giuliani has had his eyes done. Apparently image does matter if you want to be president…

Anyone else see the State of the Union last night?

I found it a very odd speech—not so much because of its content, but because of its delivery. Bush looked and sounded tired. He gave the impression that he would happily—very happily—be somewhere else. It was as if he were thinking, “You know that you’re not going to change your mind on Iraq, and I know that you’re not going to change your mind on Iraq, but I have to go through the motions, okay?”

The president looked like a man on the verge of giving in.

It was remarkable how much the speech reflected the Democratic takeover of Congress. There’s Bush talking about universal health insurance, saying that if individual states have universal health insurance plans, the federal government should help fund them. (Never mind that that, of course, massively contradicts his “plan” to balance the budget.) And Bush also proposed a tax cut so that people wouldn’t be taxed on either the value or the cost of their health insurance.

It’s a start. But Bush still seems to think that the only people who lack health insurance are “the poor and the sick,” which suggests that he underestimates the scope of the problem and the measures needed to address it.

Bush has always been unusually decent on the issue of immigration—I think it comes from his hands-on experience as governor of Texas, and perhaps the fact that his family includes “little brown ones“—and the temporary worker program sounds like a fair compromise on a tough problem.

Unfortunately, the House chamber was so quiet when he mentioned immigration, you could have heard Mark Foley writing a text-message.

So…guess that’s not going to happen.

Meanwhile, I’m glad the president is finally talking with some measure of seriousness about energy. But his ideas are scattershot and poorly thought-through. More oil drilling! Reform CAFE standards! Use wood chips to create alternative fuels!

One of the most honest moments of the night came when he spoke of the need for a massive boost in ethanol production, and ABC’s camera showed Iowa senator Charles Grassley practically jumping up and down in his chair. Ethanol, of course, has some pretty serious environmental byproducts, and it’s hardly the solution to our energy problems; some writers have suggested that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than ethanol generates. Grassley couldn’t care less—his corn-growing state just hit paydirt.

Then, finally, came Iraq. And it was pathetic. Bush’s language was pleading, anxious. At the same time, it was profoundly dishonest.

With the distance of time, we find ourselves debating the causes of conflict and the course we have followed.

“We find ourselves debating the causes of conflict”? That’s a nice way of cloaking the lack of WMDs under the “essential” debates of “a great democracy.”

And next, a line that struck me as not just wrong, but actually dangerous.

From the start, America and our allies have protected our people by staying on the offense.

In fact, it could be argued that going on the offense in Iraq has actually made the country (this country) considerably less safe, in the long run. And going to war in Iraq was hardly taking the offense against Al Qaeda, anyway. So it was horrifying to see the rapidity with which members of Congress jumped to their feet to affirm the power of “going on the offense.”

People, football analogies are not a good way to deal with terrorism and its origins.

Bush then invoked terrorist attacks that we supposedly prevented…and 9/11, of course.

Just five years after that day, the president’s reference to it now sound hollow, powerless, and—sadly—cliched. He has gone to that well too many times for policies that had nothing to do with it. And I don’t know all the details of the attacks we may have prevented, but I no longer automatically believe Bush when he discloses them. He has cried wolf too often.

Bush continues to insult our intelligence by turning terrorists into stick figures.

To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and to come and kill us.

What every terrorist fears most is human freedom — societies where men and women make their own choices, answer to their own conscience and live by their hopes instead of their resentments.

Yes, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred. Unfortunately, in Iraq, we are creating them. And terrorists are not all driven by a blind hatred of American freedom. Sometimes, as in the case of Osama bin Laden, it’s just American policies that they hate.

The president’s new rationale for Iraq: We can’t quit now, because if we did, it will become a hotbed for terrorism. So depressing. We have essentially started a war for the wrong reason…and now we must “win” it to stave off the horrific consequences arising from our start of it.

However, I did like one thing about the speech: the shout-out to Wesley Autrey, better known as the subway guy. That man is a true hero, and he seems like a super-nice guy as well. He deserves all the attention that has come his way.

A few thoughts on the Democratic responses. Jim Webb was so serious that I can’t imagine anyone watched, but I thought he was actually pretty good. And he invoked my pet issue, the growing inequity of wealth in America, noting that when he graduated from college, the average ceo-to-employee pay ratio was 20:1, and today it is 400:1.

As Webb puts it, the average American worker now has to work for over a year to earn what the average CEO makes in a day. And that’s just wrong.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both appeared on ABC and were interviewed by a (sort of lame) Charles Gibson. Hillary was terrific—articulate, smart, knew the issues incredibly well, looked good. Obama was also strong, although not as fluent in policy stuff as Hillary was. (She really is an extremely smart woman.)

But all three Democrats seemed more substantive and more serious than did President Bush.

And finally, John McCain also came on and defended the troop surge. I will tell you one thing right now: John McCain is not going to be the country’s next president. He sounded awful, he looks old, and he flat-out admitted that the troop surge is going to lead to more American deaths. Stick a fork in him, he’s done.

“That would test anyone’s resolve, being a fish lunch.”

—Diver Dennis Luobikis after his friend, Eric Nerhus, had his head swallowed by a great white shark.

I’ve been critical of Nancy Pelosi in the past, but recently she did something that took some guts: she created a select committee on energy independence and climate change. Why was that ballsy? Because it effectively cut out John Dingell, chair of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, from oversight of the Democrats’ work on climate change.

Dingell, who comes from Detroit, is a political hack who stands for little except a knee-jerk defense of the American auto industry. (His wife, Debbie, is a lobbyist for GM.) But he is a powerful and crafty hack. And if it were up to him, the Democrats’ dedication to cleaner air would probably result in subsidies for Hummers.

As the Washington Post puts it….

Dingell represents the other side of the debate, the side that is quick to point out that overzealous restrictions on emissions could decimate the U.S. economy. He wants to hold extensive hearings on climate change, to investigate the problem, if in fact it is a problem, and what it might cost to try to address it. That is the way he has dealt with issues since he came to Congress during the first Eisenhower administration. He says global warming will be a priority for his committee, but clearly not the only priority.

“We’ve got Medicaid, Medicare, health insurance, prescription drugs,” Dingell said. “We’ve got leaky underground storage tanks.”

(An aside: This is actually a genuine problem, albeit of smaller scope than climate change. I know because my sister used to work in an EPA department committed to the problem of leaking underground storage tanks—although the name of the section group was changed after some bureaucrat realized what the acronym spelled. Seriously.)

I’m still not convinced that Pelosi has what it takes to lead the Dems to the promised land…but this is definitely a step in the right direction.