Author Archives: MelodeeLum

You Can Go Watch "The Interview" On Christmas After All

Mother Jones

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Update, 12/23/2014: Sony has confirmed the Christmas Day release of “The Interview.”

It looks like “The Interview” may actually be released on Christmas Day!

Independent theaters in Texas and Atlanta are saying that they’ve received the go-ahead to show the film Thursday.

The Dallas Morning News has more: “Sources familiar with this morning’s conference call say Sony is also going to make the movie available to theaters at a reduced rental rate, as well as put it on a streaming service (not yet named) and video on demand by no later than Christmas.”

This is fantastic news for America and for freedom of expression and blah blah blah blah. However, on the downside, it does mean we may actually have to see this stupid movie now. Still, overall, fantastic news!

God bless America. God bless George Washington. God bless all the Founding Fathers. God bless Thomas Edison for inventing the movie camera. God bless Seth Rogen and James Franco. God bless Kim Jong Un…wait, don’t God bless Kim Jong Un.

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You Can Go Watch "The Interview" On Christmas After All

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Chart of the Day: The Super-Rich Spend a Ton of Money on Politics These Days

Mother Jones

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What do you do when you have so much money you don’t know what to do with it anymore? Well, you can buy a bigger yacht, or gold-plated bathroom fixtures, or throw lots of fabulous parties. Or you can take up an expensive hobby. Collecting old masters, say, or sponsoring NASCAR drivers.

Or politics. Seth Masket points today to a fascinating study from a team of researchers who have been investigating political polarization and political contributions. As you can see in the chart on the right, the super-rich used to account for about 10 percent of all political contributions. Then, starting around 1990, that started to rise steadily, reaching 30 percent by 2010. Then came Citizens United, and the sluice gates really opened. Within two years, the share of contributions from the super-rich had skyrocketed to 40 percent.

But there’s an interesting wrinkle. Based on other data in the study, Masket concludes that the super-rich are less polarized than the electorate as a whole:

The 30 wealthiest donors in the country are actually pretty moderate, at least judging from this measure. Apart from some extremists like George Soros and the Koch brothers, most exist between the party medians.

This presents an interesting conundrum. We know Congress has grown more polarized over the past three decades. And we know that the very wealthy are donating more and more each year. But the very wealthy aren’t necessarily that polarized. If they were buying the government they wanted, they’d be getting a more moderate one than we currently have.

This deserves more study. I’m not so sure that wealthy donors are quite as moderate as Masket thinks, since they often have strong views on one or two hobbyhorses that might get drowned out in broad measures of ideological extremism. The Waltons hate unions and Sheldon Adelson is passionate about Israel, but they might be fairly liberal about, say, gay marriage or Social Security reform. But does that make them moderate? If they spend all their money on the stuff they care about and none on the other issues, then no. They’re single-issue extremists.

This is pretty common among the anti-tax business crowd, for example. They might not care much about the hot buttons that animate the tea partiers, but they’re perfectly willing to support them as long as they oppose higher taxes on businesses and the rich. In practice, this makes them pretty extreme even if their overall political views are fairly centrist. If you’re willing to get in bed with extremists, then you’re effectively an extremist regardless of whether you publicly share their views on everything.

In any case, this is hard to get a handle on and requires more detailed research than we have at hand. Still, Masket’s observation is an interesting one and deserves a closer look. Are America’s rich really getting their money’s worth? Or has politics simply become an expensive hobby that they’re not very good at?

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Chart of the Day: The Super-Rich Spend a Ton of Money on Politics These Days

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