House of Eratosthenes

If you’re unemployed and hoping to land something, you’d better hope to hell some uncharacteristic magnitude of leadership emerges from, of all places, the beltway. Otherwise you’re completely screwed.

Elections mean things – the donks are getting a taste of the cluebat.

Hopefully, things will stabilize soon and companies can move forward.
- HoundOfDoom | 12/05/2010 @ 08:13
On the question of whether the voters have gotten the cluebat (which matters more, I think — dems will be dems will be dems, from this point until the world stops spinning), I have some encouraging news. The grizzled old trucker in Battle Mountain who liked my shirt, struck me as the angry, inarticulate type. Could be wrong. But I got the impression the whole thing got away from him well before we began discussing free enterprises versus let-the-commies-take-over-how-bad-could-it-be. Seemed to dislike O-man on a personal level. Maybe you could speculate that’s just racism. I’d rather think he wanted to see the candidates come up with solid plans, and here comes Anointed One with all the empty cliches.

The pixie girl down in the clubhouse who pretties herself up every day so she can lease out apartments and doesn’t look a day over twenty-five (back here in California), also took the time to let me know she liked my “One Big Ass Mistake America” shirt. She is fed-completely-freakin’-up. This was yesterday, the day after we found out unemployment was up to 9.8%, effectively pounding the last nail in the coffin of “Teh Stimulus Werked.” Anyway, she understood what was gong on. She was hip to the issues. I detected some self-directed anger there; maybe she voted for Him? Kind of doubted it though. But there was not a trace of “Republicans==good democrats==bad” — she was able to talk intelligently about Obama arriving in our capitol, with a big ol’ bushel full of plans that do not work. And maybe the Nevada trucker was in that camp too. Just not the talkative type.

I am daring to hope, or begin hoping anyway, that Obama has managed to add His name to our lexicon as a noun and a verb, in a way Jimmy Carter never did. I suppose a flesh wound looks much more serious while the blood is still gushing from it, compared to when it has 33 years of scar tissue on it. But it seems to me, if you’re in a business meeting with people with whom you’re sufficiently comfortable to lend visibility to your political opinions, and you say “this plan looks like something Jimmy Carter would come up with,” your meaning might be clear at a general level but you’d still be left with some explaining to do. What aspects of the plan do you not like? With what specific event in the Carter presidency are you correlating this plan? And, just to remove all ambiguity that might pose a problem…you are expressing some kind of disapproval, right?

Now. You sit in the same meeting and say “this plan looks like a real Obama” — you don’t have to explain any of that.

My hope is that it stays that way. There is such an erosion of credibility involved with Stimulus, with such a magnitude and within a razor-thin window of time that Jimmy Carter really can’t point to any one fail-blog experience of his that compares. We don’t have long-winded bloggers like Morgan Freeberg saying “let’s not do that ever, ever again; let’s use our brains; let’s learn something.” I’ve been outsourced from that job. Now, we have the man in the street saying that. And the man in the street seems pretty goddamn determined to make sure he can remember it for the long term. This is where, in the long run, I think Barack Obama has performed a valuable service for this country. He’s written the first page of the last chapter in the book of “let’s mix communism with free enterprise together, as a compromise…what could possibly go wrong with that?” FDR, who wrote the intro and the first paragraphs, might be spinning in his grave — but oh well, that’s the way it is.
- mkfreeberg | 12/05/2010 @ 08:52

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It’s All or NothingSaturday, December 4th, 2010

It’s All or Nothing
Saturday, December 4th, 2010