The Yin Blog

Rachel Maddow mocks Mitt Romney for . . . having worked hard and invested well???

Tonight on "The Rachel Maddow Show," the hostess -- in her once charming but now smug snarky tone -- said that Mitt Romney's tax returns showed some interesting things, like the fact that he makes "$57,ooo a day for . . . not working."

Now, I get the theme that Romney is a 0.0001%er, that he can't understand the problems of the average person, etc. I also get the desire to paint him as a destroyer of jobs from his time at Bain.

But now Maddow is mocking Romney for, what? That he made a lot of money (not inherited, but earned himself) before, and invested it well, and now that he's 64 and able to live very well off his past hard work and wise investments? Under this approach of mocking people for making money while not working, should we also mock the elderly who draw Social Security, on the theory that they get (admittedly, much less) money for doing nothing???

To be clear, I'm not saying there aren't lines of criticism to be leveled against Romney's wealth. But this line of snark just seems pretty lame to me.

Confirmation bias and the latest Republican primary debate

While waiting for my TiVo to start recording "Castle" with enough buffer so that I could skip the commercials, I found myself settling in to watch the latest Republican primary debate. (I gather it actually started earlier; apparently NBC was kind enough to tape-delay it for those of us on the West Coast.)

Based on the parts I watched, it seemed to me that Mitt Romney did a much better job than Newt Gingrich did. Romney seemed more coherent and sensible, but I freely admit that is no doubt a product of confirmation bias; I find Romney to be an acceptable candidate, whereas I'm somewhat flabbergasted that Gingrich has survived this long.

What startled me, however, was that I found a decent chunk of what Ron Paul said to be not just coherent, but somewhat persuasive. I don't think there's any confirmation bias there . . . . It does scare me, though.

Prof. Bainbridge on a reason to support Gingrich

Prof. Bainbridge writes:

Newt versus Barak, however, could be vastly entertaining. Two really smart guys, both of whom are good speakers, and both of whom will be at least affecting being really pissed off at the other and the other's base. If the Newt who tore into John King the other day shows up at the debates, they will be truly great TV.

Since I don't think anybody in Washington or running to be in Washington can fix the problems we face, why not vote for the circus?

My usual heuristic is to vote for divided government, though that's sometimes tricky in Presidential elections when Congress might be in play. And I do sometimes override it, such as in 2008, when I ultimately could not bring myself to vote for a McCain/Palin ticket.

But I'll admit that at times, I've pondered the "Jay Leno factor," which is similar to what Prof. Bainbridge has in mind. The difference is that he's thinking about the general election campaign season, whereas I'm thinking about the next four years. Now come on, for those of you who remember the Clinton years, there was incredibly entertaining fodder for late night talk shows. Who can forget the awesome job that the late Phil Hartman did as Bill Clinton on "The Tonight Show"? I've been trying to find a YouTube clip of the skit with Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5" and all of Clinton's . . . women.

Can you imagine if Bob Dole had won the Presidency in 1996? Dole would not have provided anywhere near the same entertainment value!

Yes, I'm not proud to admit that I see our Presidency reduced in part to how much fun comedians can make of the President. . . .

 

"UCLA's Berkeley campus"????

So far, I'm enjoying John Birmingham's Without Warning, in which some mysterious event wipes out all of the people in the continental U.S. except for a small swath in the upper northwest (i.e., Seattle, but sadly, not Portland), along with half of Canada and a good deal of Mexico.

However, I encountered the abominable phrase that's the title of this post.

UCLA's Berkeley campus? Really?

Fox's "Alcatraz" -- worth keeping the Season Pass?

I'm watching the second hour of the premeire of Fox's "Alcatraz" after having the first hour last night. The premise of the show is that when the prison facility on Alcatraz was closed in 1963, there were actually 300 hardcore bad guys who mysteriously disappeared . . . and now they are re-appearing one at a time in the present, free, and intent on committing all kinds of mayhem. Fortunately for us, two sinister government agents (one a former Alcatraz prison guard, the other some kind of scientist), a SF detective, and a comic book fan/supergenius team up to catch them.

It's kind of like "The 4400" but instead of coming back with mutant powers and ambiguous intentions, they just have homicidal tendencies. . . .

The show comes from JJ Abrams, who's responsible for the recent "Star Trek" movie, "Mission Impossible 3" (and has producer credit on the excellent "Mission Impossible 4"), "Fringe," "Lost," and "Alias," among others. That buys him some slack from me. On the other hand, Abrams also created the promising but ultimately boring "Undercovers," and it's not like "Alias" and "Lost" were flawless.

Anyway, I found the first hour kind of boring, which was not a good sign. Since pilot episodes have a lot of set-up to do, I thought I'd give the second hour a try, but if it's not better, I may end up canceling the season pass on it.

One reason I write new exams every class

Writing exams can be kind of fun. Grading them, much less so. But in any event, horror stories like this about old exams being recycled and found by some students would be enough to make me write a new exam every time I teach a course.

As for old exams, I put them up on the TWEN site for my course. That way, every student has access to them. Well, if they bothered registering for the TWEN site.

High tech fitness

I'd be curious to try running on one of these "alter-G anti-gravity" treadmills to see what it feels like being at 20% of your body weight, but I don't think I'd want to get used to it. I mean, not unless my knees got completely wrecked so that I couldn't run otherwise. Fortunately, after a year of running -- where I'm now up to 25-30 miles a week -- I haven't had any recurring injury issues.

 

Mitt Romney and Lindsay Brigman's death-defying solution from "The Abyss"

Chances are, Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee for President. A lot of things would have to go right for any of his opponents, but it's certainly not impossible.

Still, Romney is benefitting from having multiple opponents fighting for a share of the social conservative vote. He's better off having Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrinch in the race still (well, maybe not Gingrinch if the latter is going to go kamikaze on Romney), rather than facing only one of the three, because then, all the social conservative vote will go to that one remaining candidate.

Romney's situation kind of reminds me of the (incredibly well-filmed) scene in James Cameron's "The Abyss," where Ed Harris' and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's characters are trapped in a damaged submersible that's filling up with freezing water. Harris is wearing the only wetsuit. Without one, Mastrantonio can't make it back to the deep sea station. Harris offers to give her the suit, but she says it's too late, because she's already freezing.

Her solution is that he should let her drown. She points out that the water is so cold that it will keep her body preserved long enough for him to drag her corpse back to the sea station, where he can revive her(!). In other words, it's a war between the two kinds of death: by hypothermia and by drowning. There's a middle ground where she dies but can be revived later, because one form of death keeps the other from totally killing her off too quickly.

If Romney could dispatch all of his opponents at once, of course, that would be best for him. But until then, having them all keep one another at bay, even inadvertently, seems to be working best for him.

How to survive a zombie apocalypse, nerd style

Okay, I have the nerd part of this "How to survive a zombie apocalypse" guide down, and I've been working hard on the fitness part. 

Bearish on NBC's "The Firm"?

This does not make the upcoming "The Firm" on NBC sound very good:

Is there an audience so attached to "The Firm" brand name - 18 years after the movie, and 20 since the book was published - that they'll tune into any generic legal drama working under that title? Probably some, but not enough to make the new version a hit on its own. (The dismal performance of TNT's "Innocent" last month can't have given NBC a lot of confidence, even though the circumstances aren't exactly the same and Lucas was considered a movie star much more recently than Bill Pullman.) Brand names can sometimes help with awareness - or, in the case of "Prime Suspect," they can hurt your show among anyone who remembers the original - but ultimately you need a show that will stand up on its own merits and not on people's hazy memory of a story they enjoyed back when Amy Fisher was still a big deal.

Oh well, I might still give it a shot, but with a lot of potentially good midseason replacements coming up ("Alcatraz" and "Touch" on Fox; "Missing" and "The River" on ABC), it may not survive the inevitable culling.