Joe the Plumber - working class hero?

Joe the Plumber.

Hannity, currently protraying himself as a wild-eyed loner on the last freedom moped out of Nowhere City (baby), had Joe the Plumber on the show today.  It proved interesting.

Joe is apparently an ordinary guy; he has money troubles, an estranged wife and son in said wife's custody.  He's studying to better himself, he's working hard and he just happened to be in the right place at the right time to ask Senator Obama a question.

Everyone has since started flapping like a good'un. 

The basic answer should have been that if Joe earned $260,000 a year his first quarter million would be taxed at 36%.  The next ten g's would be taxed at 39%.  This would mean that Joe would have had to withhold $93900 to pay his taxes, leaving him with a measly $166400 to live off.  So he might have to hold back on buying a Bugatti Veyron that year.

The real question is how Obama's tax plan affects Joe's business, because Obama is planning to put up things like Capital Gains tax and so forth, but if the business is going so well that it can afford to pay Joe over a quarter of a million a year, it can certainly afford a decent accountant.

In retrospect, Obama did not answer the question at all well.  In fact he couldn't have caused more glee in the Right if he'd said he was going to nationalise plumbers (or set the guy on fire).

Joe's question is hugely important, not because it wasn't well answered but because he asked it at all, and the media attention the poor guy has since caught has been completely out of order.  This is a country where you should be able to ask your presidential candidates just about anything (and good lord, it was an economic question and nothing to do with extremist connections or Islam) without fear of having your life dragged through the mud afterwards.

The Right has been screeching about how the Journalists are under the thumb of the liberal media elite, and this sort of behaviour plays directly into their hands.  Joe's personal finances are not a matter for debate or discussion here, nor is his private life a matter of public interest.  He's not a celebrity, he's not a candidate.  But by their treatment of him, the media has turned Joe into a poster-boy for the Republicans.  Joe is, by all accounts, just a hard working guy trying to make his way in the world.  Now, he's a minor celebrity.

Was it planned?  Oh, I hope not.  If he was a McCain plant, I fear for National Security under a McCain presidency.  He couldn't have chosen a less good spokesman for people's tax fears.

Never mind.  Colin Powell has endorsed Obama and cited Sarah Palin as one of the reasons he can't support McCain.  I think, unless John McCain does something really special, this one might be all but over.  Still, we find out in two weeks.

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That Darned Election

1: Acorn.

They have been accused of enthusiastically registering people to vote.  Perhaps too enthusiastically, given that we hear of them registering people multiple times (one homeless guy allegedly 72 times), registering the under-age (as young as seven), businesses (as in the actual building) and the dead.

It's nice that all these groups should be represented in the democratic process, although registering multiple personalities and the inanimate is taking things a bit far.

Not that any of these people could actually have voted.  Or at least one would hope not.  So it's not actually electoral fraud being perpetrated.  Actually, it's just monumental stupidity.  Don't employ Acorn, folks, they couldn't find their corporate arse with both hands, a road map and a satellite imaging.

My feeling is that somewhere down the line we're going to find out that the company was being paid to register voters -per voter-, which is just an opportunity for any qualified scamologist to ply their trade.  Someone will have pocketed the money and be off across the nearest border while the bewildered and somewhat challenged folks now being pilloried on Fox News have had a chance to work out what went wrong.

Voter registration should be really simple.  The IRS knows how many people pay taxes and the DHS knows how many of those people are actual citizens, so why not work out your list of voters from there and mail them a happy little card that says "would you like to vote this year?" along with a return envelope.  It seems to work for Netflix.  Or is that too easy?

And apparently my initial thoughts might be wrong.  Have a look at the accusation from the dear old Guardian that it might be a Neocon Put Up Job

2: Right Wing Media.

It is at once disturbing and comforting to listen to what the various conservative broadcasters are up to.

Robert Anton Wilson, a very smart man who said a lot of interesting things, once suggested that you should always read at least one publication that you disagree with, to see what the other side are thinking.  I think he might have been asking us to test our assumptions and give our prejudices a kick, too.  So I do this by occasionally watching Fox News and listening to KFYI 550.

The current propaganda can be boiled down to:

• Barack Obama consorts with known terrorists.
• His associations with Acorn mean that he is in some way responsible for their behavior.
• He has radical and anti-American friends.
• Journalists are not telling the whole story when they report from Republican rallies.
• Journalists are not telling any story about Democrat rallies, which are filled with hate.
• Sarah Palin is being judged unfairly.
• Obama will raise taxes and make you poor.

They're fearmongering, and stating that their listeners should not trust journalists.

Of course, no one should trust a journalist; journalists don't necessarily tell the utter objective truth all the time, look at Hunter S. Thompson.  However, some journalists are better at producing facts than others, and some are better at suppressing their naturally subjective filters than others.  Our yardstick for which is which generally turns out to be "this voice reaffirms what I was already thinking, therefore I trust it".

But if you know this about journalists, and you know this about people in general, then you can read nearly anyone and draw some measure of truth from what they say.  This is a skill that you learn and have to practice.

The Conservative Broadcasters - they aren't journalists, they're just people with microphones airing an opinion that they then don't have to support with facts - you know, like gradeschool children who have been taught that it's wonderful to just have an opinion and this makes them special and wonderful.

Part of their game is something rather cunning.  They "go to the phone lines" in order to create a sense of Vox Populi.  Typically, the Populi that attempt to Vox are allowed to say how wonderful the host is, and then they are allowed to say something short about the topic of the day. Normally, the host then cuts them off and runs a speil on that same topic, hitting a short list of talking points (generally the same list for each call) and loading up with jingoism.  The effect is quite clever: the host appears to be talking to the country, appears to be engaging with the population and appears to be fielding their questions and comments.  That he appears to be is a piece of craftsmanship on the host's part. Let's not underestimate how good they are at it, either.

Sean, and those like him, are not telling us anything new.  Instead, what they provide is a form of reinforcement.  Listeners and viewers are tuning in because they already agree with what's being said and want to feel OK about it.

This takes nothing away from Sean.  He's still a very effective broadcaster and, to be honest, he's only doing what other media outlets on both sides of the debate are also doing.

Hang on a minute.

This two party system in the USA, and in other parts of the world: thesis and antithesis, really, isn't it?

Where's the synthesis?

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The US "Life on Mars"

I missed it, and I am cursing myself.

For one thing, I wanted to see how Harvey Keitel handled the Philip Glennister role.  Gene Hunt is so closely linked with his manner and mannerisms that I wondered whether the character would work for me when played by someone else.

By all accounts, it's good.  Better than the first pilot.  Yes, let's be honest, it'll have to go some in order to be better than the original - but Ashes to Ashes had to work for a similar place in my affections and it managed it.

The thing that makes me want to watch the show, though, is how they handle the basic question.  Is Sam Tyler mad?  Back in time?  In a coma?  If they follow the story as set out in the UK version, we know the answer.  But if they do, there are elements of the show that might not work and I am fascinated by the prospect that they might have decided to take one of the other two routes.

Here's why:

In the original, Sam Tyler comments that he's just going to walk until he can't make up any more faces.  His theory, at that point, is that if his mind is coming up with his 70s Manchester surroundings there must be a limit on the details and complexity that his brain can generate.  It's a good point.  One of the things about the original LoM was the occasional and apparently deliberate inclusion of anachronisms.  If Sam is really making it all up as his brain struggles for life, he's be bound to get things wrong.  Plus, it explains Gene and the Boys - as Sam grew up he would have watched TV shows like The Sweeney (and say what you like, Gene Hunt is definitely in the Regan mould); Sam's brain papers over assorted cracks in his memory and mental landscape by filling this stuff in with whatever it can.  It strip mines his memory for "70s stuff" and that includes Regan and Carter.

Historically, the Sweeney were a response to the changing face of crime.  At the end of the 60s there were far less old London Gangsters and far more small groups of armed robbers turning over banks and the like.  The Flying Squad, and the TV show based on them, were a response to that change of playing field.  Prior to The Sweeney, the most realistic TV depiction of policing had been Z Cars and the two shows were poles apart.  For one thing, The Sweeney was cooler, but the important thing is that it couldn't have happened at all without definite changes in the real world.

Does LoM America have the same kind of backdrop?
How does the American Sam paper over his mental gaps?  Assuming, of course, that he's not mad or back in time?

The cop shows of the time included Charlie's Angels, Cannon, Starsky and Hutch, Police Woman and Kojak.  If Sam is still in '73, he's a year too early for The Rockford Files (which is a shame, because if they'd stuck with L.A. we might have seen Sam living in a trailer near the beach).  The landscape of police shows is very different to the on in the UK at the time.  How will the American production team cope with this?  Which direction will the show move in?

For once, an American remake which has already risen from the ashes once, has a lot to offer; a genuine sense of "I wonder how they're going to pull this off?"

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This is a test. No, seriously.

I'm posting this with ScribeFire, which is an addon for FireFox.
I used to use an offline stand alone piece of software for this sort of thing, but it's been so long since I posted to my LiveJournal account that it seems silly to fire that back up just to get to Blogger.

Besides, I seem to spend more and more time with FireFox these days.  If it had a word-count and a simple text editor, I think I'd probably uninstall MS Office.

The intention here is just to see whether it works and how it looks.  Is it easy to use?  Is it clean and simple?  Does it function as I need it to?

The answers so far are "Yes", which is comforting.  I even have an option here to "monetize" - which I will explore shortly.  The interface seems to be working pretty well with 'Fox, including the dark theme I've got the browser using.  I also have options to link from YouTube and Flickr, as well as the normal hyper and image links.

This might come in handy.  It's also nice to be able to slap F8 when I have an idea and be able to post something to the Blog.

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Sarah Palin

I'm English, I'm intending to remain so and I live in the USA. I am not a citizen, but I do pay taxes and that - whatever some Americans think - at least allows me to air an opinion on the current political process.

Sarah Palin, whatever her abilities and her real skills as a politician, is a satirists dream. Tina Fey's caricature of her on SNL is very, very funny. So funny that you start to wonder whether it's all a bit too easy. People are saying she's dangerous; I've been invited to join a group on Facebook that claims she's the most dengerous woman in the Western world, or somesuch hyperbole.

I don't agree that she's dangerous. The reflex of the American political system is to Fearmonger as soon as something unexpected happens. We're seeing it with the Right's insistent harping about Barack Obama's links to "unrepentant domestic terrorists" and "extremists", and with a variety of people drawing undue attention to the possibility that there are root vegetables (long the bane of Vice Presidents) smarter than Sarah Palin.

Fine. She's not bright. We were spoiled by President Bartlett.

She is also far too easy to satirise. I don't think it's a good idea to have politicians who are this easy to make fun of.

Not because we shouldn't satirise our politicians. That's our right, and as an Englishman I have come to regard it as a sacred trust. We put them in power and we should do our utmost to remind them of this at every single opportunity to keep them honest and humble. They do not deserve our respect or admiration, they need to be called on every decision and every utterance, until putting the interests of the people ahead of their own becomes second nature.

Nope, it's because we shouldn't be thinking about the personalities in this election at all.

The human race is, and this is a technical term so brace yourselves, in the shit.

I could take the time to rattle off the things that are looming over us right now, but if you watch the news (oh please, do watch the news!) you already know what those things are.

OK, if you're an American, please watch something like CNN or somewhere with international news, instead of depending on Fox and Local news.

Anyway. You should know what's looming over us. Given that all this stuff is definitely looming, but has not yet reached the "oh *^$@!!!" point where it tips over and becomes a doom, we need to know what our darling politicos are going to do about it. I haven't heard too much about that, as yet.

I feel we should be told.

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