But he still can’t make himself not seem like an aristocratic nitwit. Case in point, his recent comment that he is “not concerned with the very poor.” Really? Mittens is smart, yet still manages to say stuff that should just never come out of a candidate’s mouth, regardless of context. There seems to be something missing from his brain – some synapse that is not firing, some empathic instinct he just does not have.

It bugs me. Which makes this video compilation of some of his recent missteps all the more satisfying. Give it a quick view and tell me that this guy isn’t off on some other planet. This pretty much says it all.

My take is that Romney is not crazy, he’s just very ambitious and extremely abnormal. That is not a knock on him being Mormon; I’m talking mostly about what you might term his EEQ – his Emotional Economic Quotient. The guy just plain sucks at identifying, assessing, and understanding the economic state of others. To a really startling degree, actually – he’s like a stranger in a strange land, some extraterrestrial anthropologist trying hard to integrate with the natives, but never quite connecting. Except the natives are pretty much everyone who’s not a multimillionaire private equity titan with $21m in investment income and a 13.9% income tax rate.

I’m not sure precisely when it happened, but nowadays it seems that the defining feature of the far-right conservative movement is an obsession with unconstitutionality – and what an ugly, revealing obsession it is.

Begin with abortion, a classic right-wing infatuation. For movement conservatives, much of the abortion issue revolves around the notion that a crooked, too-big-for-its-britches Supreme Court condoned baby killing through Roe v. Wade. (That’s why in 2007 John McCain said the decision should be overturned in order to curry favor with the Christian Right). True, pro-lifers oppose abortion on moral grounds, but many of them also argue that Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional and should be stricken from the books. As they see it, the Roe decision is a prime example of “liberal activist judges” who “legislate from the bench” and corrupt our nation’s founding principles.

This isn’t news, of course. But fast forward to more recent measures, such as health care reform – different words, same tune. Conservatives want to overturn reform , with top Republican leaders in the House backing a repeal of the law – in part because the individual mandate baked into reform (which requires people to purchase health insurance) is,  you guessed it, unconstitutional.

In the case of health care, it’s not the Supreme Court, but rather Congress, that has supposedly overstepped its bounds. That’s two major progressive wins of the past few decades branded as unconstitutional. But why stop there? According to far-right extremists, you know what else is supposedly unconstitutional? The Census. U.S. membership in the United Nations. Also, Social Security. And  the 14th Amendment (!).

In crazy right-wing activist world, anything remotely progressive is condemned as unconstitutional, whereas something like Proposition 8 is completely kosher – even though Prop 8 was recently stricken down as unconstitutional in federal court. Similarly confounding is the fact that limiting freedom of religion – as evidenced by some of the more radical comments surrounding the Ground Zero mosque controversy – appears to be a-ok in conservative land. But the Census? Totally fascist!

Reforms don’t even have to be recent to be rebranded as unconstitutional by mega-conservatives. After all, Social Security passed in 1935, and the 14th Amendment in 1868. Which begs the question: how far back were the “good old days” to which conservatives want us to return, exactly? Back to a British colony?

The hubbub among conservatives over the constitutionality of the 14th Amendment – which expands the definition of citizenship to incorporate everyone born or naturalized in the U.S., and reaffirms the rights and privileges of U.S. citizens – is particularly alarming. Back in the 19th century, the amendment was passed to give blacks citizenship after the Civil War by overriding the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision (which stated that blacks could never be American citizens). It’s stipulations of due process and equal protection were meant to protect the welfare of blacks because at the time, many Southern states were enforcing “Black Codes” to restrict ex-slaves’ basic freedoms.  In short, this is an amendment rich with historical and moral meaning. The 14th Amendment captures our institutions’ capacity to redress wrongs and expand freedom. Yet here are House Republicans, sponsoring a 2009 bill that violates the amendment by advocating the deportation of immigrant children born on U.S. soil. Deporting people born in the U.S. without due cause is clearly unconstitutional. But once again, because it’s politically desirable to conservatives, the Constitution suddenly becomes irrelevant.

Enough is enough. Playing politics with the Constitution is dirty pool. The foundational documents of the United Stats are not props. But as conservatism gets more conservative – and Republican leaders gravitate rightward to grab votes – right-wing politics has become increasingly fixated with self-serving claims of unconstitutionality in order to further its own aims and strike down progressive successes. This perversion of the Constitution for naked, political self-interest is alarming – and is really and truly a trend among modern conservatism, even beyond the cases I’ve mentioned here.

Here’s what I say: for a bunch of self-professed patriots, these conservatives are being downright un-American. Seeking to curtail civil liberties and religious freedom while rolling back health care, womens’ rights, and citizenship? That’s not why my parents came to this country. The U.S. was not build on hypocrisy, paranoia, and regressive thinking. So to the Tea Partiers, the House GOP, and the rest of the extremists that sacrifice our national spirit for the sake of conservative messaging: don’t piss on my Constitution and tell me it’s raining.

Good idea, says Nate Silver, progressive statistician extraordinaire, but don’t expect it to be a silver bullet. Using IRS numbers to craft a back-of-the-envelope assessment of how much revenue a millionaire’s tax would raise, he comes in around the $33 billion a year mark. Not enough to fix every problem in the U.S. (not that money could fix all of our problems…), but still enough to cover:

• about one-third of the annual costs of health care reform
• a major boost in operations in Afghanistan
• a significant job creation incentive plan
• the entirety of the BP oil spill
• Google’s bank account if the company loses its ATM pin number. (Seriously – Google has $30 billion in the bank!)

So it’s worth discussing. Naturally, this is a slippery slope – whenever you start talking about “what we could do if we only taxed people more!” it’s not an entirely realistic conversation. Taxing too much will in fact affect productivity at some point – the question is where that point actually resides on the “Work Hard to Keep What I Make/If You Take It All Why Should I Even Work?” scale. Conservatives think the threshold is a lot lower than progressives. But either way, it’s reasonable to think that there is some threshold. So sky-high tax rates isn’t really a panacea for anything – ever. Further, as Silver points out, there just aren’t that many rich people in the U.S. Sure, they hold a hugely disproportionate share of the income and wealth in this country, but it’s hugely disproportionate in part because there’s not that many of them (7.8 million households in 2009, or 5% of all U.S. households).

But.

Plugging gaps in the tax brackets when the tippy-top has been as successful as it has been recently  isn’t a bad idea. And by “recently,” I don’t mean only over the last twenty years,  during which the ascension of the super-duper rich has been stunning, even when compared to the pretty rich, but even last  year, when millionaires bounced back during a period of super-high unemployment. It’s honestly a different world for those in the upper echelon, and our tax system needs to recognize that. Not because high-income people deserve to be punished, but because a progressive taxation system is based on the principle that when you make a lot more than someone else, you pay considerably more taxes than that person. And even by standards of well-to-do America – hell, even by the standards of pretty damn rich America – millionaires and billionaires make a lot more than everyone else.

Earlier today our illustrious VP called a custard store owner in Wisconsin a “smart-ass” during a see-how-the-regular-folks-live pit stop. Why? ‘Cause the custard dealin’ fool had the nerve to crack wise about taxes being too high. Shit dude, Joltin’ Joe just wants some custard (…even though he initially thought it was an ice cream shoppe)! Leave the man alone.

A regular–or, let’s face it, more disciplined and professional–politician would have good-naturedly deflected Custard Man’s snide comment (which was along the lines of ‘I’ll give you free custard if you lower our taxes’). Not Joe Biden. He called the punk out. Conservative commentators are already likening Custard Man to Joe the Plumber for his talking truth to power schtick and jumping on the incident as proof that the Administration is disconnected from “average, every day Americans.” But that’s not fair: this was a classic Bidenism, emblematic of the man’s loose lips and propensity for calling out d-bags. Remember in 2007, when he publicly said that then-presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s entire political vocabulary was “a noun, a verb, and 9/11″?

More generally, this is Joe Biden we’re talking about–the guy subsists entirely on his own foot. And you know what? I love it. In this over-scripted age, it’s refreshing to have an old-schooler like Biden. The way I see it, his two main faults are actually endearing: first, playing things too straight when he should be more delicate (as with Custard Man, the Giuliani comment, and his admission that Hillary Clinton might have been a better VP pick than him); and second, introducing mischief into serious situations (as when he said health care reform was a “big fucking deal” into an open mike, or joked about Chief Justice John Roberts’ bad memory at an otherwise-high-falutin’ ceremony to swear in Obama’s senior staff).

Naturally, there are other screw-ups, like when Biden mistakenly told a guy in a wheelchair to stand up and called Obama “clean” a few years ago. But show me an old, white Senator not out of touch with the social conventions of 21st century America and I’ll show you John McCain awkwardly taking his own photo with an iPhone.

No, the really trademarked Biden muck-ups are (1) generally being rough around the edges and (2) saying inappropriate things in stuffy settings. Basically, Joe Biden is your crazy uncle, but he holds the second-highest office in the land. What’s not to like? You get the sense that he farts at state dinners and doesn’t even have the good sense to let the incident pass without comment (“Oh man, silent but deadly, am I right, Karzai?”).

Critics could say that it’s unfair to praise Biden for being a knucklehead when George W. Bush was the king of all fools and mercilessly mocked for his array of flubs. But there’s a big difference: Biden grasps policy. When he finally buckles down to talk shop, he tends to have pretty complex and nuanced positions. I don’t agree with all of them, but there’s a logic to them–and, importantly, an evolution to them as well. Dubya never seemed to change his mind about anything, and if you disagreed with him you immediately became the enemy; Biden has shifted on some major issues, and usually in a more progressive direction. For example, he voted for “don’t ask don’t tell” but now wants to see it repealed, and he supported the Iraq invasion but now calls it a mistake.

Despite this, I’d probably be lying if I claimed that Biden’s politics have nothing to do with my affection for him. It’s a lot easier to chuckle at the mishaps of someone in whom you have fundamental faith as a public figure from an ideological and intellectual perspective.  Indeed, I suspect somewhere out there, some die-hard Republicans love George W’s folksy mishaps for the same reason I’m amused by Biden’s. But I’d also propose that Biden’s gaffes are much less worrisome than those of Bush from a basic capability standpoint. Bush  seemed to have trouble stringing together a sentence and lacked basic awareness of where he was speaking or what he was talking about; Biden is just socially tone-deaf.

Either way, here’s to Joe Biden, another public figure who is a constant source of intrigue and amusement. Let’s hope that Nicolas Cage plays him in the biopic.

But anyway, you’ll notice that Google offers up suggestions when you begin typing in a search term. I’m not sure the exact science behind this process, but it’s a good bet that they are indicative of the most relevant or frequent searches stemming from whatever characters you’ve inputted. Recently I’ve found some surprising auto-finishes in the top spot when searching for stuff, and it raised some unexpected insights into what people on this planet search for.

Numbers

It’s safe to say that if your brand corners the market on a numeral, you’re in pretty good shape as a business or product. So hats off to to the following, all of which are the first auto-suggest in Google (at least for me–I think, depending on your cookies and location, you might get different results…but sound off in the comments if you do!)

(1) The unbearable CW drama ‘One Tree Hill’ (if you type out ‘one’) and NYC radio station 1010 WINS (if you type ’1′).

(2) ‘Two and a Half Men’ and ’2010 calendar’

(3) Three Village School District (in Long Island, apparently…) and NBC’s ’30 Rock.’

(4) The mobile start-up Foursquare and 4Chan, an image-based bulletin board.

(5) Five Guys burgers & fries and the movie 500 Days of Summer.

(6) Six Flags amusement parks and ’60 Minutes.’

(7) The mathematical equivalence of seven pounds=3.17514659 kilograms (which strikes me as an odd weight to be so frequently searched) and 7-zip, a Windows file archive program. Assuming the seven pounds thing is some sort of algorithmic glitch, next would be Seventeen magazine.

(8) The show ‘Eight is Enough’ and 880 AM, another NYC radio news station (this one plays the Yankee games too).

(9) Nine West shoes and handbags and 92.3 FM, yet another NYC radio station, this one a hit music station (anyone else remember when this used to be KRock?). Regarding these radio stations, it’s probably that Google auto-fill function is somehow geographically targeted, and that’s why I’m getting a lot of New York auto-fills. Or it might just be that New Yorkers listen to a lot of radio (generally speaking, more people listen to radio than you might think).

Hot Topics

So what do we learn from all this? Mostly that people love to search for entertainment. Google Trends confirms it, with a current top 10 that consists mostly of entertainment topics, albeit with a smattering of current affairs. As of the moment of writing (this stuff changes really quickly):

1. calista flockhart ['cause she just got married to Harrison Ford]
2. rock band 3 ['cause it just came out]
3. small people ['cause BP continues to put its big, oily foot in its mouth]
4. harrison ford [see #1]
5. nba game 7 ['cause it's going to freaking rock and the Lakers are going to lose]
6. iphone 4 pre order [duh]
7. world cup spain ['cause Spain lost in a big upset]
8. raavan [an upcoming Hindi film, apparently]
9. oval office ['cause we have a president]
10. 3ds [Nintendo's upcoming handheld device]

Easter Eggs

Last but not least, some of the more noteworthy Googlisms:

“average” gets you an autofill of “average penile length” (Very delicately put, Google–something tells me this is pretty sanitized. But that’s understandable, I suppose…if autofill and Google trends hewed to what people were really looking for, most of what’d be presented would be dirty)

“I don’t think” gets you “I don’t think, so Tim,” which is the catch phrase of Al Borland from ‘Home Improvement.’ Really, America?

“demo” doesn’t get you “democracy” or “Democrats”–at least, not first. #1 auotfill goes to “demonoid.” Thanks a lot, geeks!

1. The most female professions amongst the 20 occupations that employ the largest number of women are secretaries (97% female), childcare workers (95%), nurses (92%), accounting clerks (92%), teacher assistants (91.6%), and receptionists (91.5%). In other words, the jobs you think of as being “girly” are still largely female. Depending on your point of view, this is either problematic proof of persistent patriarchy (say that three times fast) or just the way the world is–either due to female preferences or historical developments. But either way, it’s a pretty interesting tidbit.

2. Women still earn less than men. In 2008, the median female wage was 80% of the median male wage. The good news is that back in 1979, women only earned 62% as much as men, so women are faring better than they once did relative to men. Of course, 80% still isn’t 100%, and some people still attribute this gap to sexism. Others–including the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’ investigative body for social issues–say that working patterns partially describe the difference. The argument here is that women are more likely to leave the workforce or work part-time for family reasons, thus suppressing aggregate wages. Statistics do show that women tend to have less work experience than men. It’s interesting to note, however, that even GAO says that pure economics can’t seem to explain away all of the gender gap.

3. The male-female earnings ratio changes across occupations. Women CEOs make 80% of what their male counterparts make; wholesale retail buyers make 97% of what their male peers make; female computer support specialists make 97% of what their male counterparts make; female special education teachers make 3.8% more than do males, and females in construction make almost 9% more. On the flip-side, the crappiest deals for women include legal occupations (56.7% of men), being a stock broker (where a woman makes 59.7% of men), and being a janitor (59.9%). This is certainly a confusing jumble of numbers, but it speaks to how complex and confounding the gender equality issue is across industry fault lines.

4. More than one-quarter of wives earn more than their husbands. Twenty-six percent of wives in dual-earner households bring home more bacon than do their men. In 1987, this proportion was just under 18%. The good news is that the husbands of tomorrow seem fine with the prospect of a breadwinning wife. A Center for American Progress survey found that 65.3 percent of women and 61.2 percent of men strongly agreed with the idea that they are comfortable with women earning more than men in a household.

So what’s the take-away here? I wish I knew. Clearly, total gender equality still eludes us, but at the same time there has been some progress. One interesting contextual point to consider: women make up about one-half of the workforce today. That might change the way we process some of this data. Sure, it’s nice if 26% of women earn more than their husbands; but do we really think that the other 74% of married women all objectively deserve less pay than men, when together they make up 50% of all Americans working today? Sounds fishy; but untangling the complexities of gender in the workforce is never easy.

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Photo by gbaku

Part of the reason for this is that more people want to escape Nicolas Cage than they do Sam Jackson. To a lot of folks, Cage is unforgivably ridiculous, in part because he’s just so…Nicolas Cage-ish. The man’s incorrigibility is noteworthy enough to inspire websites dedicated to imagining “Nic Cage as Everyone” and a New York Times profile–not on Cage the individual, mind you, but on Cage the screen presence, who evokes a “mixture of genuine appreciation and more than a touch of bewilderment.”

The NYT profile does an admirable job of trying to distill what makes Cage Cage, and how on Earth someone who has starred in so many ridiculous movies (have you seen him in The Wicker Man?) continues to get work. It’s basic conclusion is right on: Nic Cage is a car crash of self-assertion, constantly projecting himself to the audience regardless of the film or scenario, and often with catastrophic results from which you can’t look away.

Put less pretentiously, Nicolas Cage is always playing Nicolas Cage. Soft-spoken, slightly spacey/mildly confused, and demonstrably troubled, regardless of what’s happening in-scene. His patented drawl never wavers; the Cage accent is a part of every character he’s ever played. The only thing that ever really changes is his hair.

I know what you’re thinking: isn’t the fact that he can’t ever convincingly slip into a role the mark of a bad actor? Well…yes. But I don’t care. Watching Nicolas Cage act is like watching a sweetheart kid with severe dyslexia trying to read: the little tyke is trying so hard, so visibly throwing himself into the act, that it’s endearing. You can’t help but root for him.

In this vein, it can’t be said that Cage makes acting look easy; time and again, you can see the strain on his face as he delivers his lines. You get the sense that he’s worked all night in his trailer to perfectly deliver even the simplest bit of dialogue, obsessing over how to imbue it with painfully obvious emotion. Rarely does he ever say something that isn’t overwrought; even when he’s playing a reticent tough guy like in Con Air, it’s still somehow over the top, even though he’s supposedly a man of few words.

In contrast to Cage, slicksters like George Clooney or Tom Hanks effortlessly deliver on screen. If Cage is the earnest kid with a learning disability, these guys are the braniacs that never study for a single test and always get As. Sure, they’re nice guys;  they’ll always claim that they’re going to do poorly on that big test and won’t brag about their grades afterward. But you can just tell that it comes easily to them. Cage, on the other hand, is like a workhorse of mediocrity. He’s so invested in seemingly ridiculous roles and films that it’s downright impressive.

So cheers to Nicolas Cage: the actor who can never not be himself and the guy who seems to want to have fun as an actor rather than be a teacher’s pet beholden to the Soft Tyranny of Quality Acting. Indeed, despite having a film career derided as crappy by probably everyone you know, Cage recently told Empire magazine that he has “no regrets.” And why should he?  He gets paid millions to be himself; the rest of us suckers do it for free.

Photo by rscrobinmx99

Start with Tim James, one of the Republicans running to replace Riley as Alabama governor. James is an earnest real estate developer and son of a former governor who–somewhat uncreatively–touts himself as “Republican Businessman for Governor” in his campaign ads. Over the course of these ads he also drops such gems as “This is Alabama. We speak English. If you want to live here, learn it,” and clumsily casts his eyes downward throughout the commercial to convey the profound pensiveness of Big Ideas. (In practice, it just looks like his brain is about to explode due to sheer confusion–but you get the idea.)

James isn’t leading in the polls heading into the Republican primary–that honor goes to Bradley Byrne, a conservative who at least had the smarts to support a science curriculum in Alabama, to the dismay of vocal creationists in the state. (Ultimately, the two sides compromised). Byrne is a lot more natural than James, who constantly seems like he’s one breath a way from pulling back and decking you; on the other hand, Byrne lists “Government-Controlled Health Care” and “State’s rights”–that is, the fight to oppose the “increasingly troubling trend by the federal government to invade [peoples'] lives in unprecedented ways”–as issues on his campaign web page, so let’s not anoint him Sir Reasonable Republican just yet. If anything, Byrne is another example of hardcore GOPism: the guy has an “Alabama Values” credo declaring that “I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every word of it is true,” that marriage is between a man and a woman, that gambling and abortion are wrong, and that guns are frickin’ sweet.

The most likely Democratic opponent facing Byrne in November: Artur Davis, a forty-two years old African-American Harvard Law School-trained lawyer who worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center and as a civil rights attorney, and has been a member of Congress from Alabama since 2003. Yes, that’s right–a black lawyer-legislator is going up against a white-bred Southern white dude who’s campaign is straight out of the Conservative Candidate Cookbook. More amazing still, Davis serves on subcommittees dedicated to Social Security and Family/Income Support in Congress, so the dude is a welfare-lover as well. (Though it’s worth noting that he voted against health care reform along with the rest of his state’s delegation–largely to score points with the Southern anti-fed crowd, according to insiders).

In every general election poll I’ve seen, Davis gets spanked by the Republican, even if it’s James. This isn’t super-surprising given Alabama’s conservatism, but it is worth noting that Davis is very much an Obama-esque type figure: black, young, Harvard lawyer, life of service, dedication to social policy. In the grand scheme of things, maybe it doesn’t matter if Alabama smacks down this guy because, hey, it’s Alabama; but there’s a certain purity in the roles and conflicts that are framing the race down there that makes for a compelling morality play.

First thing’s first: I used to blog only about health care; but then health reform passed. Nowadays the major issues surrounding health care are mostly about implementation, and the excruciating details of reform laws–save for the so-conventional-that-it’s-uninteresting-to-debate question of whether or not voters will punish Democrats in November over health care (answer: no). Obviously implementation of health care is a super-important, but that’s an issue better left to high-falutin’ news organizations and technical experts–not rag-tag bloggers like myself with a pathological need to get snarky about contentious issues.

With that in mind, the wise brain trust at TFT has allowed me to blog about…stuff…related to, um, Self and Society. Yes, it’s kind of broad–but just go with it, okay? A good number of posts are going to be political in the traditional sense–dealing with parties, policy, and so on. But a lot of others are going to be more sociological or anthropological, looking at how we behave as citizens, consumers, and humans; how technology is developing and changing our lives; and how institutions evolve and interact.

Or, to put it more directly: I paid my dues with health care; now you’ve got to tolerate my pontificating on everything else.

Suckah!