The daily gossip: The plan to unite the Senate with a Lincoln screening, and more

1. Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell attempt to unite Senate with a Lincoln screening
The real Abraham Lincoln united the nation once before, and Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are counting on a Senate-only screening of Lincoln, hosted by director Steven Spielberg and star Daniel Day-Lewis, to do it again. The Hollywood Reporter says that Reid and McConnell invited Senators to see the film together, arguing that it's particularly relevant because it "depicts the good which is attainable when public servants put the betterment of the country ahead of short-term political interests" and/or use their political clout to score an exclusive screening.

2. Taylor Swift doesn't know how to make relationships last
Watch out, Harry Styles: Your days as Taylor Swift's beau may be numbered. In an interview with Cosmopolitan, Swift admits that when it comes to relationships, she "doesn't know how to make them last," reports Taste of Country. One small piece of advice: Stop writing vindictive songs about your ex-paramours.

3. Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen have a baby
Today in celebrity babies: New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Bundchen have a new daughter, reports the Los Angeles Times. As Bundchen announced on her Facebook page, "She is healthy and full of life" — which is code for "She is full of awesome DNA."

4. Dan Aykroyd says he "can't wait forever" to make Ghostbusters 3
Warning to Hollywood: Dan Aykroyd is really serious about Ghostbusters 3 this time, and if you don't make it soon, he'll walk. "We can't wait forever," Aykroyd, who has already waited over 20 years, tells Esquire. "It's time now to sit down and make this movie, or you will lose your main principals" — a powerful threat given that no one is more in demand in Hollywood right now than Aykroyd, Rick Moranis, or Ernie Hudson.

5. A&E earns record ratings for Duck Dynasty
A&E's Duck Dynasty — a reality series about a family who makes duck calls in Louisiana — has set an all-time ratings record for the network (6.5 million viewers), despite the fact that the show doesn't qualify as either "arts" or "entertainment." Entertainment Weekly reports that Duck Dynasty outperformed ABC's Nashville and Fox's The X-Factor, proving that Americans prefer even the squawking of ducks to another show about people singing.

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WEATHERMEN AND CLIMATE SCIENTISTS LIVE ON DIFFERENT PLANETS

Here in Atlanta, we've had a string of days in which the temperature has hovered around 70 degrees -- more representative of late spring than late autumn. The balmy weather has left me in a funk.

Sure, I've enjoyed the chance to put my toddler on the back of my bike and take her out for a ride. Yes, it was pleasant to don a short-sleeved shirt to put up my outdoor Christmas lights. Of course, I like the long chats with my neighbors, who walk their dogs at a leisurely pace instead of rushing to get out of the chill.

But I fear the unseasonable temperatures are a harbinger of a slow-moving disaster -- a serious threat to my child's future. What will it take to get people focused on the crisis of climate change?

It would certainly help if TV weather forecasters at least noted the possibility of a link between the un-December-like weather and disastrous global warming. They are popular figures who are embraced by their local viewers as climate authorities. If they helped the public understand the dangers of global warming, the voters, in turn, would demand solutions from their elected officials.

But there's a troubling dynamic that helps to explain why you're unlikely to hear about global warming when you're watching the weather report on the 6 o'clock local news: Many TV weathermen -- and weather women -- dispute the science of climate change, believing it's a "scam," according to a recent study. Their ignorance has contributed to the public's apathy.

Even though cooler weather is expected soon, 2012 is still on track to be among the hottest years on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency. With the exception of 1998, the hottest years on record have occurred since 2000, climate scientists say. The longstanding consensus among scientists is that greenhouse gases are warming the Earth, melting the polar ice caps, raising sea levels and creating untold environmental havoc.

Yet, many television weather forecasters -- who are not climate scientists -- remain skeptical. Only about 19 percent believe that human activity is the primary cause of climate change, according to a 2011 study by George Mason University and the University of Texas. A similar fraction -- 18 percent -- knows that scientists have concluded that human activity is warming the planet, the study said.

Quiet as it's kept, you don't have to know much science to be a TV weather forecaster. Those with science degrees tend to be meteorologists with expertise in short-range climate models. They can predict the weather a week from now with relative accuracy, but they know little about long-term climate trends.

By contrast, climate scientists usually have graduate degrees and are associated with research institutions and universities. They use complicated models to study long-term weather patterns.

But there is hope the two groups can come to a consensus that elevates the discussion: TV weather forecasters are often members of the American Meteorological Society, which represents a broad range of experts in atmospheric sciences. Marshall Shepherd, the group's president-elect, wants to help to educate "our colleagues in the broader community," including TV weathermen, he told me.

A former NASA researcher who currently heads the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia, Shepherd said: "We want to forge an environment where all viewpoints are welcome. At the end of the day, though, our position will be based on the science."

That rankles some in the ranks. Earlier this year, when the AMS issued a strongly worded statement on human-caused climate change, Glenn Burns, the popular weatherman for the Atlanta ABC affiliate WSB, was flippant in response to a question about it.

"Our climate has been changing since the beginning of time. Only the civilizations that adapted to it have survived. That should be our goal," he said. And Burns is by no means alone in downplaying climate change.

Here's hoping that Shepherd and the AMS can persuade TV forecasters to accept the scientific consensus. If they engaged their viewers on the subject, they could help to elevate climate change as a political concern. We're running out of time before those balmy December days prove costly.

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ANOTHER OVERTIME ELECTION

This is a peculiar season in American politics. The big game is over, the score is in the record book, yet there are more innings to be played. A lame-duck Congress and an exhausted president cannot leave the field.

This is the eighth time since the Nixon years Congress has gone into overtime to address pressing budget issues. Each time the crisis was described as the worst ever, though rarely has that been true. But with so much at stake, so much contention in the political system and so few easy options, it may actually be the case this time.

Yet there is a sense of unreality surrounding the pas de deux in which the principals are engaged, much like the ones the Prince and the Sugar Plum Fairy are undertaking in holiday productions of "The Nutcracker" this month.

For now, the White House and the Republican House are playing to the wrong audience. They are behaving as if they are trying to win an election, rather than sculpt a solution. The beginning of wisdom in this crisis is that neither side should win. The goal is political resolution, not political absolution.

Maybe this is the time to take a deep breath and dig deep into the fiscal Cliff Notes, using this sober time of reckoning to take on the vital national questions we almost always skirt. For we need to recognize that even after the election, the big national questions have not been answered. In fact, they have not been asked. Since this is going to be a wrenching season anyway, here are some questions we would prefer to evade but shouldn't:

-- Should the budget be framed as a moral balance sheet or a financial balance sheet?

This question prompts important debates about income inequality, social mobility, financial rectitude and national economic health. The greatest dodge in American civic life is the facile view that good economics are good politics. How do we know that will be true in the current case -- not a garden-variety contretemps but a raging crisis -- even in the unlikely event that it was true in the past?

Elements in both parties believe the tax system should be an expression of American values, but they have vastly different values. Some liberals believe -- though they deny this is their view -- that the purpose of the tax system is primarily to foster fairness. Some conservatives believe -- they're in denial, too -- that the tax system should be designed only to create jobs and foster entrepreneurship. Again, neither side should win, or lose, completely.

-- Is the tax system designed to raise revenue or shape economic behavior?

This question is seldom raised, never answered, in part because the pugilists want to answer one way some of the time, the other way the rest of the time.

Some want to use the tax code to shape behavior, whether to conserve energy or encourage home ownership, almost always with phony arguments that distort the economy but please powerful interest groups. Others want to use the tax system to spur growth or, while lowering rates, to promote freedom -- although four of the five nations with the highest tax rates as a percentage of income (Belgium, Germany, France and Sweden) arguably are as free as we are.

-- Have the legal definition of "entitlements" and the popular meaning of the word been so confused that we are on a path to economic disaster?

Tens of millions of aged and infirm Americans are legally entitled to Social Security and Medicare benefits as currently constituted. But just because these social benefits are called "entitlements," does that mean everyone has to be entitled to them or that they have to be distributed at current levels, even if the ratio of money being diverted into the system already is out of whack with the money pouring out of it?

Medicare has not strayed much from its 1965 moorings. And it is not surprising that, with the population aging and medicine advancing, Medicare costs are growing. But these costs can be contained -- by adjusting reimbursement formulas and eligibility requirements. Changing conditions require changed regulations.

Social Security is a slightly different matter, though Democrats are chary of acknowledging that. Its role in American life has changed substantially since 1935. It was designed as an income supplement, not a pension, though today that difference has been lost. During the salad years, the county was happy to ignore that distinction. Now, the notion that Social Security is an entitlement in any way other than in the legal sense needs a full debate.

If nothing else, the country needs to recognize that if it were permissible to enhance these entitlements, as they have been with cost-of-living adjustments, then it's also possible to reduce them.

-- Has our political rhetoric so perverted our political system that our words get in the way?

We have just completed a presidential campaign in which the Democrat employed the most virulent class-warfare language of any major-party candidate at least since Franklin Roosevelt, perhaps since William Jennings Bryan. Obama partisans inevitably will argue that the high pitch of the president was promoted by a shocking, dangerous level of income inequality in the country. Perhaps so.

But the Republicans -- especially the new-style, middle-class conservatives, who have nothing in common with the malefactors of great wealth that Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, deplored in 1907 -- aren't the economic royalists that FDR, a Democrat, deplored 29 years later. Obama needs to sound like a president looking for a solution to a crisis, not a candidate seeking votes in a campaign.

Obama was not alone in excess. His opponents described him as a European social democrat if not an outright socialist, which would be news to real socialists, who would instantly dismiss Obama as a feckless, spineless moderate with a hopelessly innocuous petit-bourgeois outlook.

So, first step: We need to clean up the language before we can clean up the economic mess. Then tackle these questions.

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After Hurricane Sandy: Is flood insurance bad for taxpayers?

Why does the government sell flood insurance?
When the National Flood Insurance Program was established in 1968, it was seen as a way to save taxpayers money. Instead of paying out massive emergency funds whenever a coastal area or river floodplain was inundated, the government figured it was more prudent to identify risky areas and force people who lived there to buy insurance and assume some of the risk themselves. But the insurance industry wanted no part of the tricky business of calculating flood risk — "it's like rat poison to them," says insurance industry lobbyist Tony Bullock. So the government had to underwrite the policies itself. By law, everyone who has a federally backed mortgage and lives within an area designated as prone to flooding once a century has to buy the insurance. There are currently 5.7 million flood insurance policies, covering $1.27 trillion in property. But critics say the program, part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has backfired, creating huge debt for taxpayers even as it rewards homeowners for trying to defy nature. Thanks to federal flood insurance, says Duke University coastal geologist Orrin Pilkey, "we are subsidizing, even encouraging, very dangerous development."

Why is flood insurance hurting taxpayers?
It pays out far more than it takes in. The program currently collects $3.5 billion in annual premiums — a total that falls chronically short. The cost of damage from major hurricanes can be five or more times that, and as sea levels rise, weather becomes more extreme, and the value of flood-prone properties continues to soar nonetheless, massive payouts are becoming more frequent. Many policyholders, moreover, still pay subsidized premiums that reflect less than half of the true risk value. Even for vacation homes with prestigious addresses like Hilton Head Island, S.C., annual premiums are capped at $3,300. Flood claims from Hurricane Katrina alone totaled $21.9 billion, putting the U.S. flood insurance program $18 billion in the hole to the U.S. Treasury. That was before it began processing claims from Hurricane Sandy.

How does it pay for Sandy?
Only by taking on more debt. Sandy is expected to generate up to $12 billion in claims, but only $2.9 billion remains on the flood insurance program's line of credit. That makes it almost inevitable that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will soon have to ask Congress to bail the program out again — at a time when all federal expenditures are under intense scrutiny. When Congress voted in July to extend the program through 2017, it eliminated some subsidies and authorized premium hikes of 20 percent per year in high-risk areas, and up to 25 percent per year for vacation properties. But many critics say those reforms are inadequate, and that the government should get out of the flood insurance business altogether.

What's their argument?
Subsidized flood insurance, they say, is a classic example of moral hazard: encouraging people to take foolish risks by relieving them of the cost of bearing those risks. "If we allowed market forces to dictate at the coast, a lot of the development in the wrong places would never have gotten built," said Jeffrey Tittel, head of the Sierra Club's New Jersey chapter. Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a longtime critic of FEMA and no friend of the Sierra Club, agrees. "The market would never provide insurance in flood-prone areas at an affordable price," he said. "If it's a losing proposition, should taxpayers subsidize the inevitable losses?"

What are the alternatives?
One would be to strategically retreat from flood-prone regions in a major way. "Get appraisals for their homes, write them a check, knock the homes down, and just let it go back to its natural state," said Steve Sweeney, president of the New Jersey state Senate. Not surprisingly, Republican Gov. Chris Christie has spurned that approach. "I don't believe in a state like ours, where the Jersey Shore is such a part of life, that you just pick up and walk away," he said. Without insurance subsidies, he and others argue, lower- and middle-class families simply could not afford to live on much of the Jersey Shore, and coasts and riverbanks elsewhere would become even more exclusive enclaves of the ultra-rich.

Don't coastal residents get sick of rebuilding?
They do, but they forget. After Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida in 1992, property values even in "near-miss" counties dropped sharply, but with time the sense of danger faded. Now far more people live in its path than did 20 years ago. "If you look at it over the long term, people will still be attracted to the water," said Terence Beaty, a real estate market researcher. That eternal attraction will continue to lead people to build close to the shoreline, with or without government insurance. "I certainly love shoreside living," author and Long Island, N.Y., coastal resident Carl Safina recently wrote. "I love walking the beach in the morning with my dogs. I have federal flood insurance, thank you. But really, it's time you considered cutting me off."

The payouts that never stop
Over the years, the federal government has shelled out a total of $2 million to repeatedly rebuild a flood-ravaged home in Humble, Texas, assessed at just $116,000. Another home, in Wilkinson County, Miss., worth $69,900, has been flooded 34 times since 1978 and collected $663,000 in insurance payments. The National Flood Insurance Program has made efforts to stop paying out on such "repetitive-loss properties," which account for more than a third of its costs. But somehow they keep showing up on the books, especially in the Gulf of Mexico states from Texas to Florida. For David Conrad of the National Wildlife Federation, such outlays are the purest example of the folly of flood insurance. "It does seem to fit Albert Einstein's definition of insanity — to somehow expect something different when you do the same thing over and over again."

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Microsoft is back: Why the dorky Apple rival is suddenly cool

Oh man that new commercial for Internet Explorer 10  has me dorkily cackling at every pixel in it, and then replaying the ad to laugh again, and harder. OK, maybe you’re too cool for it. But I am not.

Here’s what happens: A trolly commenter dude—he looks like the old groovy Apple kid turned puffier, more caffeinated and housebound—keeps trying to tweet and post about how IE sucks until he’s overwhelmed with the realization that Microsoft’s new browser might be kind of good. The way the brilliant actor’s pupils register his increasing coffee intake and his excitement at his holy mission (typing “IE sucks” at every opportunity) is lovely—a great new archetype for the Internet 2013.

It’s been a long time since a commercial worked so well. The promo does true magic: It sends up IE’s critics, by exposing the OCD fury of the smug hacker pose. The anti-Microsoft type as no longer that neato Apple guy standing with the middle-aged PC nerd, but a shut-in maniac who has long since lost sight of his would-be artsy path. That lil’ hipster, when we last saw him in Apple’s anti-PC campaign, was supposed to be blogging about indie bands. But now he’s rapping out “IE sucks” the way Jack Torrance wrote “All work and no play” in “The Shining.”

Furthermore, the ad sets the stage for a comeback for Microsoft. AdAge gives the “work”—I love how ad people reverently call advertisements “the work”—high-enough marks, though it points out that the troll’s conversion from IE-hater to IE-agnostic pivots on a “very thin plot device.” (This high-handed critical judgment made the ad all the funnier, in my view.) AdAge also files the ad, titled “Do you know this guy?,” in the TV/Video category, though the Web video also directs to a robust website called browseryoulovedtohate.com that really introduces the specs and features of IE 10.

Now I can’t even remember what I used to hate about Internet Explorer. I dimly recall font sizing being chronically off, and developing an entirely superstitious resistance to that “e” logo. Years ago, while I was still using it, someone told me about Firefox—and then Safari—and then Chrome, which I use now. Internet Explorer, down to its lumpy literal name, just became an uncool thing of the past. It, I guess, “sucked.”

Like Microsoft Word. And Microsoft Office. And the whole PC scene, embodied in that middle-aged schmo. But now the Internet is middle-aged, and the Apple/Google war is starting to seem like a more grueling showdown for consumers than whatever happened between Microsoft and the federal government. (What was that again?) And Microsoft is Xbox now, and Seattle seems kind of sleeper-cool again: not drippy Portlandia or cutthroat NorCal. People have always said Microsoft is an amazing place to work, and it won World’s Best Multinational Workplace last year, which does not—to put it conservatively—happen at Apple. Microsoft is greener than most electronics companies, too.

The company got a new logo in August. It has Bing, Xbox, Windows 8, the Surface tablet and that indispensable no-matter-how-you-slice-it Office suite. And now it has a winning new ad campaign. Maybe a comeback really is possible. After a decade of the hip-ification of the Internet, it might be time to root for the squares.

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