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Tired of Remembering Passwords? Try Swallowing Them Instead.

by Keenan11Mzrcnj Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Chances are you’re bad at passwords. Most of us are. A recent statistic offered up by Jonathan LeBlanc, the global head of developer advocacy at PayPal, suggests that nearly 10 percent of people have a password consisting of 123456, 12345678, or, simply, “password.”

LeBlanc has some bold thoughts on improving this state of affairs. As he told the Wall Street Journal last week, “embeddable, injectable, and ingestible devices” are the next step companies will use to identify consumers for “mobile payments and other sensitive online interactions.”

From the Journal:

While there are more advanced methods to increase login security, like location verification, identifying people by their habits like the way they type in their passwords, fingerprints and other biometric identifiers, these can lead to false negative results, where valid users can’t log in to their online services, and false positives, where invalid users can log in.

Mr. Leblanc pointed to more accurate methods of identity verification, like thin silicon chips which can be embedded into the skin. The wireless chips can contain ECG sensors that monitor the heart’s unique electrical activity, and communicate the data via wireless antennae to “wearable computer tattoos.”

Ingestible capsules that can detect glucose levels and other unique internal features can use a person’s body as a way to identify them and beam that data out.

To be fair, LeBlanc told the paper that these specific technologies aren’t necessarily things that PayPal is planning, but he’s been raising the possibility in a presentation he’s been giving, and has said the online dealbroker is “definitely looking at the identity field” as a means of allowing users a more secure way to identify themselves.

You don’t have to be a “mark of the beast” person or a conspiracy theorist to have concerns. Indeed, what could possibly go wrong with a little implanted device that reads your vein patterns or your heart’s unique activity or blood glucose levels just so you can seamlessly buy that cup of Starbucks? Wouldn’t an insurance company love to use that information to decide that you had one too many donuts—so it won’t be covering that bypass surgery after all?

As the Wall Street Journal cautiously notes, “Mr. Leblanc admits that there’s still a ways to go before cultural norms catch up with ingestible and injectable ID devices.”

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Tired of Remembering Passwords? Try Swallowing Them Instead.

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What if Al Gore ran for president, again?

by Damon40Dkvzh Posted on March 18, 2015

What if Al Gore ran for president, again?

By on 18 Mar 2015commentsShare

Al Gore’s an important guy to the climate movement. Back in 2006, he helped focus America’s attention (briefly) on the threat of climate change, and he’s been fighting the good fight ever since without attracting the same amount of attention (or ire). Until, maybe, now. The media is paying attention again — and some are even suggesting he run in the Democratic primary against Clinton in 2016.

Ezra Klein argues that a Gore candidacy would put climate change at the top of the agenda, where it should be. While income inequality, which many Democrats are currently focused on, is a “serious problem,” Klein writes, “climate change is an existential threat.” Also, a president can do more on his or her own to fight climate change than to fight inequality.

When it comes to climate change, there’s no one in the Democratic Party — or any other political party — with Gore’s combination of credibility and commitment. Bill McKibben, founder of the climate action group 350.org, calls Gore’s work on the issue “the most successful second act of any political life in U.S. history.” Perhaps that’s hyperbole, but it speaks to the regard in which Gore is held by climate activists. Though he’s been out of office for 15 years, he’s never left the climate fight. Gore has proven himself the opposite of those politicians who love the game more than they care about the issues.

Moreover, in an era in which very little moves through Congress, climate change is an issue where the president has real unilateral authority. The Environmental Protection Agency has the power to aggressively regulate greenhouse gas emissions — a process the Obama administration has begun, but that the next president will need to continue. Much of the crucial work on climate change requires coming to agreements with India and China — and that, too, is an arena where the president can act even if Congress is paralyzed.

Klein notes that running on climate change alone probably wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, Americans just don’t care that much about an issue they think of as a future threat (though by the end of the next president’s term, the American public might come to see that the threat has moved firmly into the present). But Klein points out that Gore, historically, has been more in line with the Democratic base than Clinton on other issues as well. “He opposed the Iraq War and endorsed single-payer health care, for instance. His Reinventing Government initiatives, mixed with his Silicon Valley contacts and experience, look pretty good for a post-Healthcare.gov era.”

So, according to Klein, a Gore presidency should sound pretty good to climate hawks. But some argue that Gore’s high-profile involvement with the climate movement keeps climate change a partisan issue, hurting the movement. From a New York Times profile on Gore this week:

Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, says Mr. Gore has become a symbol of climate change, which is both good and bad. He energized Democrats on climate issues, but alienated many conservatives, with the eager help of groups like the Heartland Institute and its allies like [Sen. James] Inhofe, who demonize Mr. Gore as part of their campaign to undercut the scientific consensus on the human role in global warming.

“Al Gore cannot ever reinvent himself from the fact that he became one of the country’s most polarizing political leaders,” Dr. Leiserowitz says. “Even as he is trying to explain climate change, he is reminding people, amplifying the conservative response around him.”

Maybe Gore did contribute to making climate change a partisan issue way back in 2006. But unfortunately, that ship has sailed. No matter what action Obama, Clinton, or any other Democrat might propose to take on climate change, conservative politicians won’t be on board. The Republican Party has moved further and further to the right, and become more and more unwilling to work with Democrats on solutions to anything. Gore’s degree of visibility — whether he decides to run for president repeatedly or become a hermit in Mongolia for the rest of his days — won’t change that.

Another problem with a Gore candidacy could be the money he’s made while championing climate science, and the supposed hypocrisy involved in the lifestyle he’s lived with that money. As Luke Brinker writes at Salon, deniers tend to see Gore’s wealth as tantamount to proof that climate change is a hoax — a hoax intended to enrich Al Gore and those sniggering scientists at the IPCC:

You may remember that during the rollout of his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and for years thereafter, climate skeptics have proven all too keen to pounce on Gore’s hypocrisies — his sky-high utility bills, his fondness for private air travel, and so on — as if his own bad habits somehow debunked climate science; Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) even cited Gore’s marital troubles in explaining his about-face on the issue. It’s all patently ridiculous, but even the patently ridiculous helps shape our political discourse. So those of us who acknowledge climate change as an existential threat must also own up to the fact that the anti-science crowd relishes the idea of Gore as their foil. Laudable as Gore’s climate work has been, his political reemergence would risk debasing the climate debate at least as much as it would offer hope for moving that debate forward.

This whole debate is moot, for now, because Gore hasn’t publicly expressed any interest in running another campaign. But it does seem that, by merely continuing to exist and talk about climate, Gore has prompted at least a small discussion about how global warming will figure into the 2016 campaign. And that can’t hurt.

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What if Al Gore ran for president, again?

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Hero Mom Has the Perfect Response to Son Begging to Join ISIS

by RosariaRan Posted on February 27, 2015

Mother Jones

Everyone of us can relate to having once been a stupid teenager, irrationally whining to our parents about needing to hang out with that group, wear this outfit, etc.

Such is the case of 19-year-old Akhror Saidakhmetov of Brooklyn who had a burning desire to join club ISIS, like all the cool kids seem to be doing these days. But despite having all the gear to prove he was ready to commit to the band, Saidakhmetov’s dreams were ultimately crushed by a very adolescent roadblock—his mom. From the Times:

Mr. Juraboev and Mr. Saidakhmetov bought tickets, planning to travel to Turkey and then sneak into Syria, court papers say, and as the date of their departure neared, they seemed eager.

But Mr. Saidakhmetov still needed his passport, and on Feb. 19 he called his mother. In a conversation recorded by federal agents, he asked for it. She asked him where he was going. He said to join the Islamic State.

“If a person has a chance to join the Islamic State and does not go there, on Judgment Day he will be asked why, and it is a sin to live in the land of infidels,” he told her, court documents say.

She hung up the phone. It is unclear if he managed to get his passport back. But the government’s informer helped Mr. Saidakhmetov secure travel documents. In the days before he left, he told the informer that he felt that his soul was already on its way to paradise.

Trust us, young Saidakhmetov, you’ll thank your mom one day. We already do.

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Hero Mom Has the Perfect Response to Son Begging to Join ISIS

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Republicans Are Cutting Taxes on the Rich and Raising Them on the Poor

by ArethaWortman Posted on February 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Shaila Dewan surveys the tax policies of actual Republicans who are governing actual states:

A number of Republican-led states are considering tax changes that, in many cases, would have the effect of cutting taxes on the rich and raising them on the poor.

Conservatives are known for hating taxes but particularly hate income taxes, which they say have a greater dampening effect on growth. Of the 10 or so Republican governors who have proposed tax increases, virtually all have called for increases in consumption taxes, which hit the poor and middle class harder than the rich.

Favorite targets for the new taxes include gasoline, e-cigarettes, and goods and services in general (Governor Paul LePage of Maine would like to start taxing movie tickets and haircuts). At the same time, some of those governors — most notably Mr. LePage, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and John Kasich of Ohio — have proposed significant cuts to their state income tax. In an effort to relieve some of the added pressure, Mr. LePage’s plan includes a tax break for the lowest-income families.

This gets back to what I was talking about a couple of days ago. Contrary to what Republican reformicons are proposing, Republicans on the ground continue to focus most of their attention on cutting taxes on the rich. Or, in a pinch, if they have to raise revenue, they’re raising it from the poor and middle class. This is despite the well-known fact that virtually all of the income gains in recent years have gone to the well-off.

There are ways to make consumption taxes progressive. It’s not impossible. The problem is that Republicans simply don’t want to. Their goal is, and always has been, to reduce taxes on the wealthy. Any other tax agenda just isn’t on the table.

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Republicans Are Cutting Taxes on the Rich and Raising Them on the Poor

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California Gov. Jerry Brown gets more ambitious about tackling climate change

by VirgilioWjd Posted on January 6, 2015

California Gov. Jerry Brown gets more ambitious about tackling climate change

By on 6 Jan 2015commentsShare

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) wants to make his state even more of a climate leader during his fourth and final term. In a wide-ranging inaugural speech yesterday, he laid out plans to go out with a bang.

He quoted E.O. Wilson — “Surely one moral precept we can agree on is to stop destroying our birthplace, the only home humanity will ever have” — and then called for California to pursue ambitious climate goals for 2030 that build on those the state has already laid out for 2020. Brown said that California’s “impressive” 2020 goals, which the state is “on track to meet,” still “are not enough” for California to lead the world on the path to containing climate change to 2 degrees Celsius of warming, a target that the U.N. hopes will keep the worst effects in check.

From The New York Times, an overview of Brown’s new plans:

Gov. Jerry Brown began his fourth and final term on Monday proposing a broad reduction in California’s energy consumption over the next 15 years — including a call to slash gas consumption by cars and trucks by as much as 50 percent — as part of what he said would be a sweeping campaign to heighten the state’s role in the fight against global warming.

Mr. Brown, a longtime champion of electric cars and limiting greenhouse gas emissions, called in his inauguration speech for 50 percent of California’s electricity to come from renewable energy sources by 2030, up from the current goal of one-third by 2020, and doubling the energy efficiency of existing buildings.

Mr. Brown was in effect proposing that California, which is already viewed as at the forefront in the battle to curb emissions, greatly expand cutbacks put in place in the state’s landmark 2006 greenhouse gas emission bills. And he made clear that he would use his final years in office to try to make this happen.

Brown’s time in office has seen tremendous pushback from the fossil-fuel industry, which has opposed implementation of the state’s cap-and-trade program, put in place by that landmark 2006 climate bill, and other measures. The political money battle will likely only intensify now that Brown’s environmental initiatives are more ambitious, with Brown’s own well-heeled allies — notably environmentalist-billionaire Tom Steyer, who was present at the state Capitol for Brown’s speech — pushing back.

The Western States Petroleum Association, one of the primary industry lobbying groups active in California, told the Associated Press that it was reviewing Brown’s proposals.

Environmental groups, on the other hand, told the AP that Brown should have gone still further — they want the governor to ban fracking in the state during his final term.

Source:
Gov. Jerry Brown Begins Last Term With a Bold Energy Plan

, The New York Times.

Jerry Brown seeks new green regulations in historic fourth term

, Los Angeles Times.

California governor toughens climate-change goals

, Associated Press.

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Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

by RitaCantor Posted on December 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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In his yearly press conference, Vladimir Putin appeared to be trying to cool down the rhetoric over Ukraine:

Mr. Putin recognized the efforts of President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine in ending the conflict in the southeast of that country, but he suggested that others in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, may be trying to prolong the conflict….“We hear a lot of militant statements; I believe President Poroshenko is seeking a settlement, but there is a need for practical action,” Mr. Putin added. “There is a need to observe the Minsk agreements” calling for a cease-fire and a withdrawal of forces.

Russia has toned down its talk on the Ukraine crisis in the past month, and some of its most incendiary language, like “junta” and “Novorossiya,” a blanket term used for the separatist territories, is no longer used on state-run television news. Mr. Putin also notably omitted those terms, which he had used in other public appearances, on Thursday.

So does this mean Putin is adopting a more conciliatory attitude toward the West? You be the judge:

In general, he blamed “external factors, first and foremost” for creating Russia’s situation — accusing the West of intentionally trying to weaken Russia. “No matter what we do they are always against us,” Putin said, one of a series of observations directed at how he said the West has been treating Russia.

Putin attributed Western sanctions that have targeted Russia’s defense, oil and gas and banking sectors for about “25 percent” of Russia’s current difficulties.

But Putin stood firm over the actions that brought on the Western backlash, including Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula after pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine began an uprising earlier this year….“Taking Texas from Mexico is fair, but whatever we are doing is not fair?” he said, in comments seemingly directed at the United States.

Putin also suggested that the West was demanding too many concessions from Russia, including further nuclear disarmament. Likening Russia to a bear — a longtime symbol of the country — he chided the West for insisting the Russian bear “just eat honey instead of hunting animals.”

“They are trying to chain the bear. And when they manage to chain the bear, they will take out his fangs and claws,” Putin said. “This is how nuclear deterrence is working at the moment.”

For what it’s worth, I’d say Putin is probably right about sanctions being responsible for around 25 percent of Russia’s economic problems. As for his guess that those problems will last two years before Russia returns to growth? That might not be far off either, though I suspect growth will be pretty slow for longer than that.

It’s hard to render a real judgment here without being fluent in Russian and watching the press conference in real time, but based on press reports I’d say Putin’s anti-Western comments were milder than they could have been. My guess is that events in Ukraine really haven’t worked out the way he hoped, and he’d be willing to go ahead and disengage if he could do so without admitting that he’s conceding anything. The anti-Western bluster is just part of that. (Of course, the bluster is also partly genuine: Putin really does believe, with some justification, that the West wants to hem in Russia.)

Oddly, then, I’d take all this as a mildly positive sign. The rhetoric seemed fairly pro forma; Putin obviously knows that sanctions are hurting him; and there were no serious provocations over Ukraine. I’ll bet there’s a deal to be made with Putin as long as it’s done quietly.

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Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

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Now that China and the U.S. have a climate deal, will India step up next?

by SusannahGiles Posted on November 14, 2014

Going for a hat trick?

Now that China and the U.S. have a climate deal, will India step up next?

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14 Nov 2014 2:48 PM

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Now that China and the U.S. have a climate deal, will India step up next?

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In the wake of news that China and the U.S. have struck a deal behind closed doors to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s third largest emitter, India, is asking itself where it stands on the issue of emission caps, and whether it should be ready with a commitment for the U.N. climate conference in Paris in late 2015.

In past conversations about an international plan to tackle climate change, India often got lumped in with China. It has a similarly large, billion-plus population and a similarly growing appetite for fossil fuels. In the past, the two countries have together resisted emissions caps. So for India especially, China’s new commitment to peak its emissions by 2030 is a game changer.

Now that China has changed course, Indian policymakers are expected to try and distance their country from China in these discussions about carbon emissions. India still pollutes far less than China on the whole, the argument goes, and far less than countries like the U.S. and Australia per capita. At the same time, roughly a third of the country’s 1.2 billion people lack electricity, and the country’s carbon budget needs room to allow them to get it. An editorial in The Times of India argues today:

For [the] agreement to be implemented it is imperative that the US takes the lead in climate change mitigation. That’s not only because the US is among the highest per capita as well as historical emitters, but also because, more than any other country, it has the resources and innovative capacity to develop green technology. That said, the US-China deal also puts pressure on India to commit to emission caps of its own. India should accept the challenge while also decoupling itself from China.

Given that India’s share of global carbon emissions last year was only 7% compared to China’s 28% and the US’s 14%, and that India is the lowest per capita emitter among major economies, New Delhi has a strong case for pitching for different standards.

India’s official thinking on climate change is a policy advanced by Manmohan Singh, who served as the country’s prime minister until earlier this year. Back in 2007, he declared at a G-20 summit in Germany that India’s per capita emissions will never exceed the average per capita emissions for developed countries. Right now, that affords India quite a bit of elbow room. If the U.S. and the European Union pull off the cuts they’re talking about, India would have a bit less leeway, though some in the Indian government believe that even then the country could continue increasing its emissions for 15 or 20 years beyond the 2030 cap China’s agreed to, and still be below the developed world’s per capita average.

Global Carbon Project

via

Vox

So emissions cuts, at the moment, don’t seem to be a policy priority for India. Here’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s environmental minister, Prakash Javadekar, in an interview with The New York Times immediately after the September U.N. Climate Summit in New York:

“What cuts?” Mr. Javadekar said. “That’s for more developed countries. The moral principle of historic responsibility cannot be washed away.” Mr. Javadekar was referring to an argument frequently made by developing economies — that developed economies, chiefly the United States, which spent the last century building their economies while pumping warming emissions into the atmosphere — bear the greatest responsibility for cutting pollution.

Mr. Javadekar said that government agencies in New Delhi were preparing plans for India’s domestic actions on climate change, but he said they would lead only to a lower rate of increase in carbon emissions. It would be at least 30 years, he said, before India would likely see a downturn.

But there are also signs that India is looking for another path forward. Though the country’s coal use is increasing, it aims to double the amount of energy it gets from renewables by 2020. The new prime minister has shown a predilection for sustainable energy, particularly solar. Earlier this month, he reconstituted an almost-defunct panel tasked with guiding how the country deals with climate change adaptation and mitigation. On that panel is Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which recently advised that tackling poverty and tackling climate change are not mutually exclusive — in fact, it is difficult to do the former without doing the latter.

And the Modi administration has dropped hints that its position going into the U.N. Lima climate conference in a few weeks has not yet been finalized. “We are consulting experts, former negotiators, and civil society organisations in order to craft our position in Lima,” one government source told India’s Economic Times. So there may yet be room for cautious optimism that the third-biggest polluter will soon step forward with its own timeline for peaking and reducing emissions.

And if it doesn’t? A recent U.N. report modeled a way in which the world could avoid 2 degrees Celsius of warming while India’s emissions continue to grow as it hooks its impoverished people up to the grid. But for that to happen, China would have to stick to its commitment to let emissions peak at 2030, and the wealthier major polluters — the U.S., the E.U., Japan, and Russia — would have to take big steps to shift their sources of energy. Don’t bet on all that happening on schedule.

Regardless, the U.S.-China deal unexpectedly thrust India into the hot seat. Now, whether India likes it or not, the world will be watching closely — first, at the G-20 meeting in Brisbane this week, then at Lima next month and in the run-up to Paris next year — to see what steps it might take to turn down the temperature.

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Mitch McConnell Puts His Finger on the Pulse of the American People

by KCBCorinne Posted on November 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mitch McConnell says that repealing Obamacare outright is probably unrealistic, but Republicans will nonetheless try to chip away at it:

But with Mr. Obama sure to block any repeal bill passed in the Senate and Republican-controlled House, Mr. McConnell indicated that Senate Republicans will turn their attention to peeling back “pieces of it that are deeply, deeply unpopular with the American people.” He cited the law’s tax on medical devices, its requirement that big employers provide insurance to all workers clocking 30 hours a week or more or pay a fee, and its mandate that most Americans carry insurance or pay a fee.

Let me get this straight. McConnell thinks a 2.3 percent tax on manufacturers and importers of medical devices is deeply, deeply unpopular? He thinks a requirement that employers provide insurance for anyone who works more than 30 hours a week is deeply, deeply unpopular? He thinks the individual mandate is deeply, deeply unpopular?

OK, I’ll give him the last one. The individual mandate is moderately unpopular. Of course, it’s also crucial to the functioning of the law, and McConnell knows perfectly well that Obama won’t allow it to be repealed. So that leaves the device tax and the 30-hour rule. The former is mostly opposed by medical device lobbyists, while the latter is mostly opposed by medium-sized businesses who want the ability to cancel health coverage for workers merely by reducing their workweek to 39 hours. My wild guess is that neither of these things is deeply, deeply unpopular with the American people.

But they are unpopular with interest groups that Republicans care about. So they’re on the chopping block.

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Mitch McConnell Puts His Finger on the Pulse of the American People

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The Weather Channel founder is the climate-denying grandpa you never had

by ModestoM47 Posted on November 3, 2014

Grumpier old men

The Weather Channel founder is the climate-denying grandpa you never had

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3 Nov 2014 5:18 PM

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Climate denier and The Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman has been getting a lot of media attention lately. It all started when Coleman appeared on Fox News’ The Kelly File, where he spouted off about climate change being a hoax. Watch the clip:

Didn’t feel like watching? Here’s a taste of his interview with Megyn Kelly:

There are 9,000 and 31 [thousand] scientists that have signed a petition that say that [CO2] is not a  significant greenhouse gas — oh, it’s a teeny, weeny itsy-bitsy greenhouse gas, but it’s not an any way significant — and we are sure of it. It’s not like something I’ve made up, or just thought of, I’ve studied and studied and studied.

We’re sure you have, John. And we’re also sure that those scientists who signed the petition you’re referring to — the now-discredited Oregon Petition — studied hard, too. I mean, Charles Darwin was on the list, after all, along with Ginger Spice and fictional characters from Star Wars.

Oy. Even though Coleman was dismissed from The Weather Channel just a year after helping get it started more than 30 years ago, we’re not surprised that the channel is still scrambling to distance itself from Coleman. In an effort to side-step this potential image-tainter, The Weather Channel publicly issued its position statement on climate change. Not that its position has changed; the organization has supported climate change science for years now. Or, in Coleman’s words, “they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.”

After the Fox interview, Coleman and the current CEO of The Weather Company, David Kenny, aired their opposing views in a debate on CNN. If you have 10 minutes to waste, you can watch Coleman deliver climate denial lines on (not-so) Reliable Sources:

Here’s a thorough debunking of Coleman’s talking points. Now, for the love of God, would someone please fetch Mr. Coleman a glass of Kool-Aid?

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How Harry Shearer Discovered the Soul of Richard Nixon

by OliveGreenfield Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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The renowned satirist, actor, author, and musician Harry Shearer—you might know him as the bassist of Spinal Tap, the voice behind a panopoly of Simpsons characters (Mr. Burns and Flanders among them), host of Le Show, and a former Saturday Night Live player—has done his share of presidential impersonations, but no subject has captured his imagination like Richard Nixon.

In Nixon’s the One, a series that first aired on British television and premieres October 21 as a YouTube series, the 70-year-old Shearer reenacts the follies of our 37th president word for word from Nixon’s secret Oval Office recordings. (In the exclusive clip above, Nixon and an aide discuss how to destroy the networks, and come up with something that sounds a lot like Fox News.) The “comedy-drama,” co-written by the distinguished Watergate historian Stanley Kutler, is pure unadulterated Nixon. And Shearer, a talented impersonator, has nailed the cringe-inducing, can’t-help-but-watch pathos of perhaps our oddest and most paranoid Oval Office inhabitant. I caught up with the actor last week to discuss his comic attraction to Tricky Dick, his favorite Simpsons character, and the one thing he can’t stand about The Daily Show.

You also can listen to the unabridged audio version* (~46 minutes):

Mother Jones: You spent a great deal of time researching and developing this project. What draws you to Nixon?

Harry Shearer: I’m drawn to him like a bunch of flies to a pile of fascinating comic characteristics. I grew up in Southern California, and Nixon was omnipresent. I have dim memories of actually seeing the “Checkers” speech, where he saved his vice-presidential bid by making a very mawkish, lachrymose speech. He was accused of taking—here’s a quaint concept—illegal campaign contributions, and defended himself by saying, oddly enough, somebody gave us this dog, black and white checkered, and we’re gonna keep her. And that saved his bacon! And then, you know, he had this silly kitchen debate with Khrushchev; in 1958 he runs for president at the first televised debates and loses to John F. Kennedy; runs for governor of California two years later and has this remarkable press conference after he loses where he says, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” and then, of course, spends the next six years running for president.

MJ: Being kicked around!

HS: And kicking around. And so he sort of stood above and beyond the normal creepy politician. The first thing I was aware of as a kid was his hardball, if not mudball, politics. You may remember this cartoon by Herblock in the Washington Post which had Richard Nixon crawling up from down below in the sewer, followed shortly after by a picture of Nixon with just the words, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Nixon with his endemic five o’clock shadow!

MJ: So it was essentially his creepiness that attracted you?

HS: That was the first thing. But then it became obvious that there were really funny characteristics about this guy, chief of which would be that he seemed to devote about 85 percent of his waking energy to suppressing any sign of his emotional response to anything that was going on around him, and the other 15 percent blurting out those authentic responses in the silliest and most inopportune ways. And he had these smiles that would come at the most inappropriate times—just flashes that there was an inner life screaming to get out.

MJ: Are you saying that he had more pathos than the average president?

HS: No, not more pathos. More—if the cortex is just a series of twists and bends and folds, he had more folds. Laughter.

Listen to an unedited audio clip of the previous exchange:

MJ: How long did it take you to feel you really had him nailed?

HS: I’ve been doing Nixon pretty much my whole professional life. I was in this comedy group called The Credibility Gap in Los Angeles when he was president. I was doing Nixon on the radio, and when we did live shows I physicalized him—if that’s a word—for the first time. And then I did a Nixon sketch on a very short-lived NBC show called Sunday Best. It was Nixon as a guest on an infomercial, where he was demonstrating a teeth-whitening miracle product. It was an opportunity to do full Nixon make-up and do the whole body, and a really great moment for me to see how far along I was.

MJ: Did you see any traits this time around that you hadn’t captured in your earlier impersonations?

HS: Yeah. I did emphasize more something that I’d never seen anybody capture, which is, for a guy who is always banging on about the masculine virtues, he had this remarkable proclivity for very dainty gestures. If you go look at that iconic moment where he’s standing on the bridge of the helicopter about to get in after he’s resigned, and he gives a salute, it isn’t a crisp, military salute at all. His hand is sort of like this butterfly flying away from his forehead. And he would purse his lips, he would flutter his eyelashes—there were a lot of these kinds of gestures.

MJ: Nixon has been satirized by Philip Roth in Our Gang. Anthony Hopkins played him in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, Frank Langella in Ron Howard’s Frost Nixon. Dan Aykroyd did him early on in SNL.

HS: With a mustache!

MJ: Indeed.

HS: For added verisimilitude.

MJ: Who do you think has done him best or worst, mustaches aside?

HS: I’m not going to get into that. I saw a little bit of Anthony Hopkins after we did our show out of curiosity—I’m not a big Oliver Stone fan. But even sighted men have different versions of the elephant. And this is my version.

MJ: One of your most harrowing scenes covers the minutes before Nixon’s televised resignation speech. It really makes you cringe as Nixon nervously attempts to make jokey small talk with the television crew. Did you do anything special to prepare for that very emotional scene?

HS: It’s interesting. That is the one scene that is not from the White House taping system he installed. It was videotaped by an anonymous CBS engineer, and that tape circulated around in many bootleg versions of really dire video quality. When I went to the repository of the Nixon tapes at the National Archives, I befriended one of the guys there, and I said, “You know that tape?” And he said, “Oh, yeah, we have a great broadcast-quality version of it.” And so I managed to get a copy. And for years I would watch that tape with friends, and I’d memorized that scene long since. We’d recite it along with watching it—it was just such a wonderful moment.

MJ: Laughs. Is that what you do for fun in the Shearer household?

HS: Instead of betting on football! But—this sounds like goofy actor talk— having lived with that scene for all these years, the closest I could come to understanding it was the following: Here’s a guy who had no gift for small talk, never liked to be around strangers, was physically awkward, and he goes into the one business that calls for ease with strangers and a gift for small talk. And he manages through sheer determination—let’s be Horatio Algeristic about it—to rise to the top of the greasiest pole in America. And now he has to climb off that pole in humiliation and mortification. And what does he do in this room for these eight minutes? He engages in small talk.

I just thought it was ironically goofy. Then, while we were making this series, I happened upon a memoir by a mid-level White House staffer, and he had been in the room that night. This guy’s memoir told me what Nixon’s last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: “Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!” That was just so bizarre.

Now we’re rehearsing the scene, and suddenly it came to me what was going on. This was the beginning of his next campaign! This night was to become the beginning of his campaign for rehabilitation. In his mind, all those crew members were going to walk out of there saying, “He wasn’t bothered. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t upset. He was the nicest guy. He was making jokes, he even wished us a Merry Christmas!”

MJ: Christmas in August?

HS: He wanted them to remember him at Christmastime. He was planning little seeds of his rehabilitation. That’s my theory.

MJ: Listening to so many of these Nixon tapes that never made a lot of news, what other new gems did you discover?

HS: I wasn’t looking for newsworthy material. My partner, Stanley Kutler—the historian whose life has been steeped in these tapes and who filed the lawsuits that made them public—we were looking for the character stuff, the stuff that made us laugh. I’m not sure there are any bombshells left.

MJ: Well, did you learn anything new about Nixon?

HS: I couldn’t help but be struck that this guy I had thought was the embodiment of everything wrong with American politics, a lot of his domestic policy was mind-numbingly, head-spinningly to the left of Obama’s. It was under Nixon that the EPA was created. It was under Nixon that OSHA was created. Under Nixon that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed. He wasn’t necessarily leading the parade, but they did happen during his administration. And he actually gave a speech late in his truncated second term advocating a guaranteed annual income for all Americans.

MJ: Sounds like a Commie!

HS: Imagine the number of drugs you’d have to administer to Obama to get him to make that speech!

MJ: Or any Democrat. Nancy Pelosi. Harry Reid. Even Paul Krugman wouldn’t advocate that, or at least I don’t think so.

HS: Even Bernie Sanders probably wouldn’t! If Nixon were a Republican senator today, he would have been primaried out.

MJ: Did you feel any sympathy for the man as you spent hours putting on make-up to look like him and produce these hours of reenactments?

HS: I wouldn’t say sympathy. Because sympathy implies you’re taking his side in things.

MJ: Empathy?

HS: Empathy gets a little closer to it. You know, I came up working for Jack Benny—I was a child actor. I think through osmosis I kind of got what his comic genius was about. If one recalls Jack Benny’s comic persona, he was not a nice man. He was vain, he was miserly, he was a bad boss, all characteristics we would regard as unlikable, and yet he was a lovable performer, because he was portraying the very flawed humanity of that character. And I wasn’t playing Nixon’s satirical stick figure. I was playing Nixon the man. As an actor, I felt I had to get to the deeply flawed humanity of the guy. Here’s the eerie part: We were word accurate. We did our own transcripts. We actually hired John Dean’s transcriber.

MJ: And some of these tapes are hard to make out.

HS: Oh, they’re incredibly difficult. We hired someone who is skilled at that and even she had “inaudibles” and guesses at words. I have these digital sound-processing tools so, as we were rehearsing, the cast and I would discuss these phrases that just didn’t sound quite right. And I’d run the tape again through more of these tools, and almost magically words would pop out. And all of a sudden, Oh my God, that’s what he’s saying!

We had more script revisions than a troubled sitcom. The script supervisor would come around after what we thought was a great take and say, well, you moved this word or you paraphrased this. And I would curse her, but we’d do it again. And strangely enough, the takes where I got the words absolutely right, true to the transcript, were the performances that I felt and looked most Nixonian. Getting to his weird word choices and the weird word order and the repetitions and the backtracking that make it impossible almost to memorize got me closer to that guy.

MJ: Did you find that he had his own unique internal logic?

HS: Absolutely. When Nixon died, on my radio show I started doing sketches with three basic conceits: One, there’s a place called Heaven. Two, Nixon got in. And three, he’s still taping. I was writing these sketches and trying to approximate the way he and Haldeman would jump over each other and race to confirm each other and then race to negate each other, and Nixon’s way of expressing himself. So by the time we’re doing the real stuff, I felt so familiar with that inner world of his. The relationship with Kissinger is so funny and goofy we made a whole episode out of it. Kissinger was everything Nixon hated: a Harvard professor and a Jew and an intellectual. And Kissinger knew it. But the offer to be in a position of power was so intoxicating that he put up with all that shit.

Especially in the Kissinger scenes, Nixon would repeat the word “never” as if on a loop: “There’s never gonna be people from Harvard invited into this White House ever again. Never. Never. Never.” And he’s saying this right to Henry’s face, knowing that every time it’s a little pinprick into Kissinger’s gut. He did that on several occasions. You hear the “never, never, never” partly, I think, because Nixon knew that so many of the crazy things he told his staff to do they would ignore. There’s a scene in the pilot episode where he tells Haldemann flat out, “Destroy the tapes!” and he says “Can you do that?” and Haldemann nods and says, “Yes.” Of course, the tapes aren’t destroyed.

There’s another scene where he’s bitching about how he never got invited to a social occasion at the White House when Kennedy was president. Now, Kennedy is long dead by this point, and this is still burning deep within Nixon. That’s one of the things that I think is one of the darkly comic parts of his character. He just couldn’t let go of these resentments.

MJ: What was the response to the series in England?

HS: It got a great critical response.

MJ: You know how they love to feel superior to us.

HS: Yes, and sometimes they’re right. But I was thinking about why the show could get made there with this sort of creepy accuracy and couldn’t get made here. I just imagined if I’d been in the office of an American highfalutin’ cable channel, there would’ve been meetings that started with, “We know he didn’t like black people, but did he have to hate Jews too?” And I wanted to avoid those meetings. I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.

MJ: Who are easy to caricature.

HS: Drawing as well as acting. So in some ways, Brits just saw him as another one of those, except without a crown. Whereas in this country, at least when I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, “Oh, Jefferson had slaves?” It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn’t somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.

MJ: Does the fact that Nixon attained the highest office in the land say something about America?

HS: Every president that makes it up there says something about the country. I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the ’90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s—a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I’m sure, though there’s no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.

MJ: He should’ve trademarked it.

Harry Shearer Mark Sullivan/WireImage

HS: But now, in the grip of a very similar wave involving terrorism, we’ve succeeded in a far greater receding of our civil liberties in the name of avoiding an enemy much less powerful than the enemy when we were afraid of with Communism. Yet that fear propelled Nixon to the White House. Nixon’s genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam war. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election—but he didn’t tell us that then.

MJ: Is there any other president you’d like to play?

HS: Well, I’ve, on my radio show I’ve played every one since—

MJ: How’s your Garfield?

HS: Poor. But who’s to know?

MJ: Good point.

HS: My Franklin Pierce is spot on. But I’m not sure that there’s anybody else that’s as psychologically complex and who’s given us this window into his soul that Nixon gave us. That’s what I find absolutely addictive and seductive.

MJ: You’re the voice of many characters on The Simpsons: Mr. Burns, Smithers, Flanders, and probably 27,000 others. Stupid question: Do you have a favorite?

HS: Stupid answer: C. Montgomery Burns. Watch the following clip of Shearer reading a scene:

MJ: Is there a Nixonian quality to Mr. Burns?

HS: Burns is much purer evil than Nixon was. I think it’s the purity of his evil that attracts me as a comic character.

MJ: Will The Simpsons ever end, and if so, what should happen in the finale?

HS: As they say in Washington, above my pay grade. But I’ve long had an answer to the first question, which is that The Simpsons will end as soon as Fox is able to find an 8 p.m. comedy hit to replace it—so I give us another 50 years.

MJ: Long may you wave.

HS: Thank you.

MJ: Is it true that Spinal Tap is reuniting to do a collection of Crosby, Stills & Nash covers?

HS: It’d be great! But sadly, no. I think you can look for a Crosby, Stills & Nash reunion doing Spinal Tap covers before you look for the other.

MJ: I’d like to see that! So, looking around at the state of political satire—SNL, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, etc.—how would you say the form is faring today?

HS: Well, I will say one thing that all those shows have in common, which I find sad, if not reprehensible. Satire is an art best practiced behind the back of the intended target. I think inviting politicians on a satirical show becomes a very big trap. Because one of two things happen: Either you have to kind of unsharpen your fangs because you can’t be quite as cruel to people to their face as you are behind their backs…

MJ: When you have the Pakistan dictator on, you kind of yuk it up with him.

HS: Yeah. Or you don’t defang, and those guests get the word and they stop coming. I think the former has happened in all three cases. I remember when Christopher Guest and Marty Short and I joined SNL in 1984. And we said to Dick Ebersoll, then the producer, “This show is established. We can get our own ratings. We don’t need these guests that can’t do comedy and are often politicians—everything kind of gets distorted by that.” In fact, the first show of that season had no guest host. And we thought “Okay, great!” And by show three, our guest host was Jesse Jackson, and he had moved half of Operation Push into our office so they could make free long-distance calls.

MJ: He did Green Eggs and Ham on SNL and it was very funny.

HS: Yeah, I just think everyone knows you go on those shows if you’re a politician to, “humanize yourself”—to show, “Hey, I can take a joke.” Well, why should satire be in the service of humanizing these people who are supposed to be the target of our venom and vitriol? I think that’s unseemly.

MJ: So many political satirists seem to be on the liberal side of the equation. Are there any great humorists out there with a conservative bent?

HS: Yeah, sure. PJ O’Rourke has been funny and conservative for years. I find myself being lumped in with the left, though I’m as critical of Obama as I have been of any president. I think it’s the satirist’s job to be critical of—the cliché—the guys with the monopoly on the guns. In the United States you have to amend it to say the guys with the majority of the guns. Or the bigger guns. But I think that’s the gig. Otherwise you become a court jester. You become the satirist who ended up writing jokes on the side for one of the recent presidential candidates. Well, now you’re really a hired gun. You’re just comedy oppo research.

*In the audio version, Shearer got a few facts wrong: Nixon is emerging from the sewer in the Herblock cartoon, but he isn’t actually peeking out from under a manhole cover. Also, the “Would you buy a used car…?” poster was created by Nixon’s Democratic opponents, not Herblock.

Original link:  

How Harry Shearer Discovered the Soul of Richard Nixon

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