The actor and comedian Jonathan Winters passed away last week, but his advice on paying your income taxes, delivered 50 years ago in the 1963 movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, should live forever. Or at least as long as there is an income tax.
"What do you mean tax-free? ... Sure, if we find the money we still have to pay taxes. Otherwise, it's like stealing from the government. ... Everybody has to pay taxes. Even businessmen who rob and cheat and steal from people every day - even they have to pay taxes!"
A lot has changed in the last 50 years, but not death and taxes. The U.S. income tax has moved away from the self-assessment system that was its hallmark. Nowadays more and more third-party reporting is required with each passing year so that everything than can be is verified.
Golf, the last sport where you keep your own score is having it's own identity crisis with the controversy concerning Tiger Woods's scorecard at this year's Masters tournament. One can only look back wistfully at the days when signing your own scorecard was good enough.
"They haven't yet passed any bills to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people."
Francine Wheeler stood in for President Obama in his weekly YouTube address. Her six-year-old son Ben was murdered last December. I don't ordinarily expect a grieving family to be articulate or even rational, but Francine has cut to the heart of the problem facing legislators.
How to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people is the legitimate object of new legislation. Doing so without infringing on the right to keep and bear arms is the constitutional limitation. Background checks, getting dangerous people into the background check system earlier, and getting treatment for those people who can be helped is essential.
My 1993 Jeep Cherokee has been on the fritz since roughly Hurricane Sandy at the end of last October. I drove around a bit in the storm, which admittedly was not quite a Hurricane by the time it got up to Massachusetts, to help a friend whose car got whacked by a tree, totaled as we found out later. By the next weekend, my Jeep battery was stone cold dead.
I got the Jeep jumped and charged up, but it died again a week later. So I had the 5-year-old battery replaced, and it was dead again a week after that. All this hassle was getting to be very draining. Since I don't drive a lot in the winter, with only 47,200 total miles in 20 years, I left the Jeep parked on the street for a few months (yes, I am that guy).
The AAA guys ran the diagnostics
says more alternator has a flutter,
Anyway, the Jeep spent last week in the shop, where for the low, low price of $175, it was determined that the battery drain was being caused by the glove compartment light. I desperately need that light to find the flashlight I keep in there. Now I'm back on the road.
I had cleaned out most of my stuff, as I am operating these days on the principle that any trip the shop is potentially a one-way trip. So, in putting back, I decided to do an inventory:
(1) Spade
(2) Long-handled ice scraper with brush
(3) Small ice scraper
(4) Window washer and squeegee
(5) Quarter gallon of anti-freeze
(6) Water bottle
(7) Funnel
(8) Jumper cables
(9) 9 ft, 24 ft, and 33 ft tie ropes
(10) Work gloves
(11) 2 towels
(12) 4 rolls of toilet paper
(13) Plastic milk crate
(14) Flashlight
(15) Emergency survival blanket
(16) Deck of playing cards
(17) Clip-on sunglasses
(18) AAA bail bond certificate
(19) Registration certificate
(20) Insurance certificate
(21) Office parking permit placard
(22) Mass. Audubon, MFA, and ACE rewards membership cards
(23) Sony Walkman CD player
(24) Cigarette lighter power adapters for cell phone and CD player
(25) Cassette adapter
(26) Lens wipes
(27) Pocket comb
(28) Pen
(29) $10 in quarters
(30) Token for the Somerville car wash
I have the token because I vacuumed the Jeep out, which claimed one of the 2 pens I usually have. Aside from that, I think I'm ready for the Zombie Apocalypse.
Gun control advocates, like Michael Moore and Piers Morgan on his CNN show tonight, are charging Democrats in the U.S. Senate with cowardice. That's in response to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's very blunt announcement today that the assault weapons ban introduced by California Senator Dianne Feinstein will be relegated to an amendment to be voted on separately and fail:
"Dianne has worked so hard on this. She understands going back to the day she found the mayor dead in his office. Right now her amendment, using the most optimistic numbers, has less than 40 votes. That’s not 60. I have to get something on the floor so we can have votes on that issue and the other issues that I’ve talked about. And that’s what I’m going to try to do."
Michael Moore called Harry Reid a "little weenie," a follow-up on what he called Reid a month ago, "the biggest weenie leading a party of wimps." Is it better to be a little weenie or a big weenie?
Interestingly, Michael Moore does not accuse Republicans of cowardice on this issue. Instead he professes to admire them and the NRA for standing firm on their position. Democrats, however, must believe what Michael Moore and Piers Morgan believe, or they are cowards.
There are 53 Democrats in the U.S. Senate, and we don't know for certain yet which 13 or more are unwilling to vote for the assault weapons ban, but we do know the names of the 22 Democrats who signed on as cosponsors. It's not that hard to figure out who the 31 were that would not sign on, and that of course must necessarily be the list of cowards.
U.S. Senator
State
Relection
President
"Hero" Democratic Senators who cosponsored assault weapons ban
Barbara Boxer
California
2016
Obama
Dianne Feinstein
California
2018
Obama
Richard Blumenthal
Connecticut
2016
Obama
Chris Murphy
Connecticut
2018
Obama
Tom Carper
Delaware
2018
Obama
Brian Schatz
Hawaii
2016
Obama
Mazie Hirono
Hawaii
2018
Obama
Dick Durbin
Illinois
2014
Obama
Barbara Mikulski
Maryland
2016
Obama
Ben Cardin
Maryland
2018
Obama
Mo Cowan
Massachusetts
2013
Obama
Elizabeth Warren
Massachusetts
2018
Obama
Carl Levin
Michigan
2014
Obama
Al Franken
Minnesota
2014
Obama
Amy Klobuchar
Minnesota
2018
Obama
Frank Lautenberg
New Jersey
2014
Obama
Robert Menendez
New Jersey
2018
Obama
Charles Schumer
New York
2016
Obama
Kirsten Gillibrand
New York
2018
Obama
Jack Reed
Rhode Island
2014
Obama
Sheldon Whitehouse
Rhode Island
2018
Obama
John Rockefeller
West Virginia
2014
Romney
"Coward" Democratic Senators who declined to stand with Feinstein
Mark Begich
Alaska
2014
Romney
Mark Pryor
Arkansas
2014
Romney
Mark Udall
Colorado
2014
Obama
Michael Bennet
Colorado
2016
Obama
Chris Coons
Delaware
2014
Obama
Bill Nelson
Florida
2018
Obama
Joe Donelly
Indiana
2018
Romney
Tom Harkin
Iowa
2014
Obama
Mary Landrieu
Louisiana
2014
Romney
Debbie Stabenow
Michigan
2018
Obama
Claire McCaskill
Missouri
2018
Romney
Max Baucus
Montana
2014
Romney
Jon Tester
Montana
2018
Romney
Harry Reid
Nevada
2016
Obama
Jeanne Shaheen
New Hampshire
2014
Obama
Tom Udall
New Mexico
2014
Obama
Martin Heinrich
New Mexico
2018
Obama
Kay Hagan
North Carolina
2014
Romney
Heidi Heitkamp
North Dakota
2018
Romney
Sherrod Brown
Ohio
2018
Obama
Jeff Merkley
Oregon
2014
Obama
Ron Wyden
Oregon
2016
Obama
Bob Casey, Jr.
Pennsylvania
2018
Obama
Tim Johnson
South Dakota
2014
Romney
Patrick Leahy
Vermont
2016
Obama
Mark Warner
Virginia
2014
Obama
Tim Kaine
Virginia
2018
Obama
Patty Murray
Washington
2016
Obama
Maria Cantwell
Washington
2018
Obama
Joe Manchin
West Virginia
2018
Romney
Tammy Baldwin
Wisconsin
2018
Obama
But are all those Democrats who declined to stand with Feinstein cowards? Yes, 13 of 31 are up for reelection in 2014, but that's not the whole story - 11 are from states that Mitt Romney carried in the 2012 election and 9 are women. Cowardly women, in the eyes of Michael Moore and Piers Morgan.
The real issue is geography. Most people from cities don't see much use to owning a semi-automatic rifle. You can't carry it around the neighborhood. You can't take it down to the nearest city park for a little target practice. Sure, you can go to an indoor shooting range, but that's so claustrophobic. On the other hand, if you live in the country or know someone who has land you can use, then owning a semi-automatic rifle can be a great way to pass a pleasant afternoon.
So, when you look at the coward's list and see progressive western states like Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, and Colorado with plenty of wide open spaces, that's the real story. It's not cowardice at all. A great many of these 31 Democratic Senators just don't believe in the assault weapons ban or know the constituents at home they are elected to represent don't support it.
Dianne Feinstein is from San Francisco, and the mayor she found dead in his office was George Moscone, who along with supervisor Harvey Milk was killed by former supervisor Dan White. Here's how Senator Feinstein described that in a recent Senate committee hearing exchange with Texas Senator Ted Cruz:
"I walked in, I saw people shot. I’ve looked at bodies that have been shot with these weapons. I’ve seen the bullets that implode."
Dianne found Ted's remarks in that exchange to be patronizing, and said so. She probably found Harry's "Dianne has worked so hard on this" tone patronizing too, although she hasn't said so yet.
But it should be pointed out that the phrase "shot with these weapons" implies that Moscone and Milk were killed with an assault weapon of the type that Senator Feinstein had proposed to ban. They were not, Dan White used a revolver.
Dan White, however, like the other high-profile killers that prompted Feinstein's call for the ban, was mentally unbalanced. One purpose of a good background check system would be to identify people like that, and prevent them from buying weapons, whether they are trying to buy semi-automatic rifles or revolvers.
We're not going to stop them all. In Dan White's case, he had been a policeman before becoming a San Francisco supervisor, and he used his old service revolver, not a newly-purchased gun. That's why it makes sense to limit magazine size. So that the ones that get through the system have some limit on the damage they can do. The 100-round drum magazine that the shooter used in Aurora last summer is too much firepower in the hands of a criminal or deranged individual. Fortunately, it jammed, or the carnage might have been much worse than 12 dead and 58 injured, horrible enough.
And what about your Constitutional Second Amendment right to a 100-round drum magazine? The Supreme Court has ruled there is no right to unusually dangerous weapons. You can have just as much fun on a Saturday afternoon in the country with a 10 to 20 round clip, and save money on bullets.
Dan White served five years, as he was convicted only of manslaughter having escaped the murder rap with his famous twinkie defense. This is why many gun owners complain that the laws we have are not being enforced. A couple of years after being released, Dan White killed himself. Fortunately, he did not take anyone else with him. If he'd been given life in prison, he might be still alive today.
Another outrage is that very few people who fail the current background check are prosecuted. According to The New York Times, only 44 of nearly 80,000 who failed in 2010 were prosecuted even though 47% of that 80,000 had felony arrests and 19% were fugitives.
Update 3/20/2013: The news today is that those cowardly Colorado Democrats put in place a new state law requiring background checks for online and private gun sales and banning magazines that hold more than 15 rounds. I suggested that back on January 18. It only took two months for Colorado to catch on. How long will it take Congress?
The federal budget sequester has taken effect, Detroit has been declared insolvent, Dennis Rodman has returned from his friend for life tour of North Korea, Venezuelan President and no friend of America Hugo Chavez has died, a baby has been cured of AIDS, and the Dow Jones average has just recovered to the level of its October 2007 high.
It took 5.4 years to erase the precipitous stock market slide that started slowly in 2007, picked up speed in September 2008, and finally hit bottom in March 2009. That doesn't seem long compared to the 25 years it took to erase the stock market crash of 1929, or the 17 years of stock market misery from 1966 to 1983.
If you count from January 2000, when the stock market peaked before the dot-com bust, it's been 13 years of economic misery. And we can't say there won't be more. Both the stock and bond markets are still propped up by historically low interest rates, so we won't know what we really have until those props have been knocked out.
Still, we may be ready to have an economic spring. I suspect that it will be a New England spring, overcast and chilly, with a $16.6 trillion cloud hanging over our heads. Just a couple of warm, sunny days here and there would be great.
I've been looking at a retirement plan calculator this evening. It tells me that if the market performs poorly I still have quite a number of years to work. I don't mind working, it's the having to work that I mind. On the other hand, things don't look so bleak if the market performs on average. But what if the market performs above average? My retirement plan administrator won't tell me that.
I suppose I could retire now if I move to Detroit, where the median listing price of a house is $21,000. Detroit has some beautiful two-story brick homes built back in the heyday between 1910 and 1940. My mother's family is from Detroit and I still have cousins in the area, who've moved to the suburbs, California, or Florida. My cousin Tom was the last out. He joined the Detroit police force in the late 1960s and was required as a condition of employment to live in the city.
The city of Detroit peaked in 1950 with a population of 1,849,568. It's now down to a population of 713,777 as of the 2010 census, a loss of 61%. It's wrong to think that is only white flight. The whites were gone by 1970. The city lost 25% between 2000 and 2010. There's a lot of black flight too.
It's easy to look at Detroit as a harbinger for what could happen to America if we run up our debts too high and succumb to drugs, crime, and poverty. But there is more to Detroit than the city. I've spent a number of very pleasant afternoons boating on the Detroit River. The Detroit metro region has had some setbacks but has held steady over the last 40 years. The outdoor culture is still very strong. The husband of another of my cousins, who took early retirement from the auto industry in 2006, just passed away after spending much of the last 7 years at his hunting lodge in mid-state near Mount Pleasant. As the Michigan saying goes, "if you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you."
The new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was only partly right when in January 2007 he called the Iraq troop surge "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." The surge strategy was ultimately bipartisan, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there is no question in my mind but that the cost of the two surges brought down the domestic economy. I remember the debates of fall 2002, and the Bush/Clinton/Kerry idea was to make quick work of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and then turn to Iran and North Korea. You can't say that worked when all we have to show for the grand strategy is Dennis Rodman. I'm not asking whether it was worth it, just when it will finally be over.
My grandparents made it through the Great Depression of the 1930s. My parents got displaced in the recession of 1969-1970 and made it through the 1980s farm crisis. What does it matter, so long as you can remain productively employed and maintain a few harmless pursuits? That said, I should put aside this harmless pursuit and get back to my productive employment, in case the stock market does continue to perform worse than average.
An Oscar is the ultimate participation trophy. Once you understand that, you don't have to get too angry when your favorite movie or favorite actor or actress misses out, and some mediocre offering worms its way in.
To demonstrate this stark fact, let's take a look at this past year's movies on the objective basis of total box office take worldwide:
#
Movie
Worldwide Box Office in Millions
1
Marvel's The Avengers
$1,511.80
2
Skyfall
$1,108.30
3
The Dark Knight Rises
$1,081.00
4
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
$980.60
5
Ice Age: Continental Drift
$875.30
6
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
$829.00
7
The Amazing Spider-Man
$752.20
8
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
$742.10
9
The Hunger Games
$686.50
10
MIB 3 (Men in Black 3)
$624.00
Yes, that's $1.5 billion at the top of that list. I've seen The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Hunger Games, and Men in Black 3 and they were all great movies, as good or better than the Oscar winners.
The James Bond movie Skyfall is the only Oscar winner on that list, for Best Original Song and Best Sound Editing. I haven't seen it yet, but am sure that I will and that I will like it, because I've enjoyed every movie in the 007 franchise. The Hunger Games was quite novel and might have gotten a nomination or even an Oscar trophy, but they showed their hand by having two sequels already in the works.
That's the problem, these are all franchise movies and franchises don't win awards. The Hobbit got three nominations for technical awards and the Avengers got one. No wins. And that's it for the top 10 worldwide movies of 2012.
Now let's drop out the franchise and animated films and the foreign money, and just count the top 20 by domestic box office receipts:
#
Movie
Domestic Box Office in Millions
9
Ted
$218.82
14
Lincoln
$178.60
16
Django Unchained
$158.78
17
Snow White and the Huntsman
$155.33
19
Les Miserables (2012)
$146.70
21
21 Jump Street
$138.45
22
Argo
$129.65
24
Safe House
$126.37
25
The Vow
$125.01
26
Magic Mike
$113.72
27
Life of Pi
$113.53
29
Silver Linings Playbook
$107.18
32
Flight
$93.77
33
Think Like a Man
$91.55
34
Zero Dark Thirty
$91.54
35
The Campaign
$86.91
38
Dark Shadows
$79.73
39
Jack Reacher
$79.47
40
Parental Guidance
$75.77
41
John Carter
$30.18
Now we start to see some Oscar-nominated films. Lincoln at #14 got twelve nominations and Life of Pi at #27 got eleven. Ted at the top of this list got none, well it got a token nomination for Best Original Song.
Can you blame Oscar host Seth MacFarlane, who not coincidentally happens to be the writer, director, and producer of Ted, for making a big joke of the whole proceedings? My favorite was his We Saw Your Boobs sketch, introduced by William Shatner who himself has never received an Oscar nomination despite his great string of Star Trek movies:
You see, the fundamental formula for a good Oscar night show is to have all the great Hollywood stars who make the movies we want to see mocking the lesser lights who win all the awards. The New Yorker didn't see it that way:
Watching the Oscars last night meant sitting through a series of crudely sexist antics led by a scrubby, self-satisfied Seth MacFarlane. That would be tedious enough. But the evening’s misogyny involved a specific hostility to women in the workplace..."
...
What made it worse was that most of the movies mentioned, if not all (“Gia”), were pretty great—“Silkwood,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Monster’s Ball,” “Monster,” “The Accused,” “Iris”—and not exactly teen-exploitation pictures. The women were not showing their bodies to amuse Seth MacFarlane but, rather, to do their job. Or did they just think they were doing serious work? You girls think you’re making art, the Academy, through MacFarlane, seemed to say, but all we—and the “we” was resolutely male—really see is that we got you to undress. The joke’s on you.
Actually, most of those serious movies were pretty dull. Did you notice that Seth gave a thumb's up in his supposedly misogynistic sketch to Jennifer Lawrence, who did win an Oscar for her performance in #27 Silver Linings Playbook? Well, she was also in #9 The Hunger Games, which makes her an up-and-coming franchise player.
Another big performer on Oscar night was Channing Tatum, who did some dancing as well as introducing. Channing had the lead in three movies in the top 20 domestic, 21 Jump Street, The Vow, and Magic Mike. No awards for Channing, who just got to entertain the more deserving. Magic Mike is said to be loosely based on Channing's experience as an eighteen-year-old stripper in Tampa, Florida. Wow, that's powerful Oscar-worthy stuff, except that Channing is a man. Do you think Seth and Channing might have been chiding the Academy for its double standards?
That brings us to Argo, which won Best Picture. I saw Argo and I liked the 1970s feel and the tension of getting six U.S. diplomats out of Iran after more than 50 other U.S. diplomats and staff were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, but the plot was pure Hollywood BS. Somehow, in taking some very liberal dramatic liberties, the movie has managed to offend former President Jimmy Carter, former Canadian Ambassador to Iran Ken Taylor, and the nations of Canada, Britain, and New Zealand, as well as Iran.
The central conceit in Argo is that the U.S. diplomats were spirited out of Iran under the watchful but gullible eye of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard using a cover story that they were Canadians filmmakers scouting locations for a Hollywood movie. It's true that was the cover story if they were challenged at the Tehran airport. But in real-life they cleared the airport security checkpoints just using the passports Canada so kindly issued after secretly harboring them for several weeks.
In the movie, however, the whole plan rests on real-life Hollywood make-up artist John Chambers (played by John Goodman) and a washed up film producer (played by Alan Arkin in a role not based on anyone in the real life rescue). So Hollywood became the unsung hero of the story, and if you don't like it, you can "Argo f*ck yourself":
That has become the theme not only of Argo but of this year's Academy Awards. The screenwriter Chris Terrio claims that line is true, and he won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay to prove it.
Sure, Argo director Ben Affleck played fast and lose with the facts. That would matter if Argo were a drama, but it is actually a comedy masquerading as a drama. Hollywood doesn't give Best Picture to comedies, this one snuck by the censors. Having Michelle Obama award the Oscar in a low-cut gown flanked by dressed out American soldiers was the final joke. The insulted mullahs in Iran were predictably outraged, unpredictably insisting that Lincoln was actually Best Picture. An Iranian news agency even photoshopped Michelle to add a higher neckline and sleeves. Yes, Hollywood tricked the Iranian zealots into showing us their boobs, again.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
That's the philosophical question that many with nothing better to do have long pondered. A more practical question is this: Did the tree fall on a fence? If you've got cattle running up against that fence, you're going to have to fix the fence, even if you weren't there to hear the tree fall.
I had that assignment when I has back at the family farm in Iowa this past December.
There's a steel post you can barely see sticking up through the middle of a fallen tree branch that is being held up by by the remaining barb wire after breaking the top two strands.
Here are my tools. A hammer, a green-handled pair of pinchers, a yellow handle for tightening fence cheaters, and some wire.
After I tossed the fallen tree limb off the wires, you can see there is not much fence left. Even a small calf could step over this fence. What the old-timers say you are supposed to do now is take all these wires loose from all the posts down the fence line to the next corner post, splice the barb wire once at the break, use the wire stretchers to pull each strand tight, and then restaple or reclip the barb wire to each post. That's a lot of work.
Here you can see a fence cheater in action. The official name is fence tightener, but my grandfather always called them cheaters. The company website says they came out in 1971, and he was using them by the middle of the decade. I used one on the bottom strand which had been loosened by the tree limb to tighten it back up, using the long yellow handle as leverage to ratchet from hook to hook. As I look at this picture, I see that the wire didn't pull lose properly from the last hook. It should be wrapping straight around the inner prongs. The backside of these prongs form a U over which you put the slot in the handle (see picture above), which is what gives you leverage.
Next we come to my grandfather's favorite cobble to fix broken barb wires, what he called the Honey Crick splice. Honey Creek is a stream that flowed through part of his farm, and the brush and trees got a little wild along the crick. All the farmers with land along it he called Honey Crickers. It was understood that you were allowed to do things down on Honey Crick as a matter of course that might not be strictly up to accepted practice near the farmhouse.
To start the Honey Crick splice, I used the pinchers to make a loop at each end of the broken wire. Pinchers come in pairs, like pliers, scissors, and pants. This idea of brightly colored handles is a great innovation. I spent my my teenage years hunting up all-metal pinchers in the tall grass at the end of each fence repair job.
Pinchers are officially called a fencing tool, and you should buy one if you've never had one, as it's a very versatile multi-function tool.
Once I put in the first loop, the too ends will no longer reach, so next I tie in my new wire. Here, I've got a heavy gauge galvanized wire. My grandfather liked to use a lighter gauge No. 16 wire and double it. He sometimes used barb wire, but that's trickier in the next steps.
Now I run the other end of the new wire through the other loop, over the side of the hammer head, pull it tight, and anchor it in the claw of the hammer.
Then I can just use the hammer as a winch, and turn the handle to pull the wire through the loop, wrapping it around the hammer head. If I were using barb wire for the gap, the barbs would catch as they are pulled through the loop, but you have my pinchers to deal with that.
Once I've pulled the wire tight, I bend the wire around the hammer head back, being careful not to lose the tightness, and unroll it. Then I can pull the hammer out, and wrap the end of the wire back around itself to finish the splice.
Here's the finished Honey Crick splice. It's not pretty, but I was close enough to Honey Crick, as my grandfather would say.
My second Honey Crick splice may not look not that pretty either. But for an old Honey Cricker, it's a thing of beauty. And, of course, if after a while it gets a little lose, we'll just put a cheater on it too.
The fence is fixed and ready to turn cattle.
While we're on the subject of fences and turning cattle, here's a testament to one that got away.
