The percentage of American workers with virtually no retirement savings grew for the third straight year, according to a survey released Tuesday.
The percentage of workers who said they have less than $10,000 in savings grew to 43% in 2010, from 39% in 2009, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s annual Retirement Confidence Survey. That excludes the value of primary homes and defined-benefit pension plans.
Workers who said they had less than $1,000 jumped to 27%, from 20% in 2009.
Well, lessee. I was 29 before I worked for a company that had a 401k plan. Up until then, it could be fairly said my checking account was my retirement plan. And I can pretty well guarantee to you there was less than a grand in there, in “free” cash, the entire time.
That seems pitiful, but by Freeberg standards it’s affluent.
So I’m hoping these folks in the 27% are real young pups.
Still and all, that’s pretty damn bleak. The 43% figure worries me some more. Ten grand…in an age where you have better-than-even odds of reaching the century mark…and it is considered odd or eccentric to work past age sixty-five. Oh no wait, sixty-two-and-a-half. Oh no wait, six decades even. Oh no wait, fifty-seven and…well, at least we’ve already accounted for inflation.
I know you’re not supposed to, but I just love to say I told you so.
What I told you back on Sept. 28, 2008, was that within a year of the day he left office George W. Bush would come to be regarded with affection and a little nostalgia. The responses (over 300 before the comments were closed) to that prediction were overwhelmingly negative; even the very few who agreed with me attributed what they took to be a sad fact to the stupidity of the American people. The other 290 or so said things like “No way”; “Are you kidding?”; ”Are you mad?”;“What a ridiculous and insulting premise!”; “I’ll miss him like a rash”; “This must be a satire”; “Bush is a sociopath”; “George Bush has destroyed this country”; “History won’t forgive him”; and (a popular favorite) “I hate the man.”
Well it’s a bit more than a year now and signs of Bush’s rehabilitation are beginning to pop up. One is literally a sign, a billboard that appeared recently on I-35 in Minnesota. Occupying the right side (from the viewer’s viewpoint) is a picture of Bush smiling genially and waving his hand in a friendly gesture. Occupying the left side is a simple and direct question: “Miss me yet?” The image is all over the Internet, hundreds of millions of hits, and unscientific Web-based polls indicate that more do miss him than don’t.
You hate that guy who slept with your wife — who happens to have a pilot’s license. Until lately, he was flying your plane; now the cockpit is in the control of a bunch of hyperactive, sugared-up six-to-eight-year-olds.
So the low down dirty skunk does have his place after all, doesn’t he? That’s okay if it takes some time to admit it. Thirty-four months to go.
Blog-Uncle Gerard claims credit for the graphic, and we saw it at his place before we saw it anywhere else so we have no reason to doubt him.
Because that question is unconstitutional. Or at least extra-constitutional. Casting ballots against this ongoing absurd silo-ing endeavor has proven to be futile. They just overrule our mandates in the courts and continue to silo us.
Geez…we elected this guy President who’s really fun to watch and sounds kinda like Walter Cronkite, even though He doesn’t seem to know a damn thing about what He’s doing and we’re going to have to pay for His programs plus all the interest on the resulting debt for generations and generations…that doesn’t do the trick? What on earth is it gonna take?
A majority of Americans say the United States is less respected in the world than it was two years ago and think President Obama and other Democrats fall short of Republicans on the issue of national security, a new poll finds.
The Democracy Corps-Third Way survey released Monday finds that by a 10-point margin — 51 percent to 41 percent — Americans think the standing of the U.S. dropped during the first 13 months of Mr. Obama’s presidency.
“This is surprising, given the global acclaim and Nobel peace prize that flowed to the new president after he took office,” said pollsters for the liberal-leaning organizations.
Gee, you might even think that he didn’t deserve the acclaim and the awards.
Maybe the fact that Obama has yet to forge one strong relationship with a major world leader has helped further destroy our credibility around the world. Now, granted, this is a poll of Americans, not foreigners. So I guess we technically can’t put too much stock into this. But Americans aren’t feeling more secure in our place in the world, and we’re the ones who are supposed to be benefiting from all the hopey-changey-ness anyways, right?
The tee shirt I wore on Saturday has Obama’s face right on the chest, with the words “WELCOME BACK, CARTER” emblazoned underneath. Apparel like this is getting more and more popular, by the day. This time it was another shopper three places behind me in line, yelling out “I love it!”
This world communicates in the language of horse heads in beds. Not primarily, perhaps. Here and there, civility, restraint and good manners may and will get you what you want and need.
But very few have any genuine respect for the submissive. And when you don’t respect somebody, you act in his interest only when it is costless for you to do so. That other language involving decapitated equine creatures does have its place.
So this problem will get worse before it gets better.
The emails show that the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) coordinated their response to a damning Spanish report on “green jobs” with wind industry lobbyists and the Center for American Progress (the progressive think tank founded by John Podesta and funded by George Soros).
The report from Spain’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos — which was the subject of a George Will column in the Washington Post on June 25, 2009 — showed each “green job” that had been added by Spain’s aggressive wind energy program cost Spain nearly $800,000 and resulted in the loss of 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy.
Eight times, Obama had publicly referred to Spain’s program as being a model for a U.S. wind energy program.
The 900 pages of emails, obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Christopher C. Horner, show staff members from the DoE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the EPA developing a response to the report. They also show them coordinating the response with the Center for American Progress, plus the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) — two wind industry lobbyist groups.
Oh, so now the dealine is Easter, is it. Seems like just a few months ago it was by Christmas.
Dems are aiming to pass health care legislation, once and for all, by Easter recess. But for all their optimistic talk, one thing remains clear: They don’t have the votes just yet. Then again, they don’t have a bill yet, either.
The first step of what promises to be an arduous process will come when Dem leaders unveil the package of proposed measures to fix the legislation and make it more palatable to some House lawmakers. Once the Senate demonstrates it is able to pass the bill via reconciliation, the House will vote on the Senate legislation.
Still, the math for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Maj. Leader Steny Hoyer and House Maj. Whip James Clyburn isn’t adding up at the moment. In order to keep an ongoing tally, Hotline OnCall brings you our whip count, the list of Dems who may be vulnerable to overtures from Dem leaders and the WH — or to overtures from GOPers who continue to believe they can defeat the bill.
There are just a few important goals here. One, they want a Medicator society, chock full of helpless whelps with unchecked impulse drives and addictive personalities who feel their way around life’s challenges rather than thinking their way through them. They want dependence. That is the way it always has been, and always will be: Medicators, inherently controlling, want everyone else to be a Medicator, to become a Medicator, or go away.
Second, they want an accomplishment. That’s why there really isn’t any final bill as of yet. They just want something with the words “health” and “care.” That second thing is so important to them, that here & there it changes places with the first.
And as a third priority, they want more people to be covered. But that isn’t really honest. If the first two items are achieved, and in the end result there are fewer people covered than there were before, they’ll be happy. Champagne and scrambled eggs for breakfast, and a ticker tape parade down Pennsylvania Avenue from noon until three. Hope nobody gets hurt.
In fact, for a model of what is likely to happen, look no further than the “jobs created or saved” with the so-called Stimulus from a year ago. NET LOSS — but — it’s a good thing we got our bill passed, or the number of people losing their health care coverage would be even bigger. So don’t call it a failure, because our bill never was supposed to fix anything, it was just there to keep things from getting worse. Mission Accomplished.
Any one among them, Republican or democrat, could double his approval ratings in a single instant by taking to the floor of whatever house and saying — “Let’s make it a primary objective in this new bill of ours that whatever covers everybody else, covers Congress as well.” In fact, that’s probably the only proposal anyone could offer at this point that the electorate would generally find appealing and positive.
Somehow…in that mysterious universe called “The Beltway”…it seems such an idea is not likely to gain traction. I haven’t heard of anyone suggesting it just yet. Have you?
Update: Great minds think alike. James Lewis, writing at Pajamas Media, has exactly the same thought. And somehow I doubt like hell we’re the only two.
I noticed this myself awhile back, so it had to be obvious inside the Congress before:
My proposed motto for the 111th Congress, and it’s much bigger than health care: “Our approach to any given problem, is to make sure nobody can make a profit by finding a solution to it.” Go on down the list of things we need to do. Manufacture energy. Fund our retirements. Invent drugs and therapies. Finance houses. Sell cars. Save…the…planet.
They who have control of the Congress now, will just make sure nobody can make a profit first. And then figure out if they managed to solve the problem, second. Maybe they will have and maybe they will not have. But first, make sure no one is making any serious money.
Freedom begins with the freedom of think. Or, as Winston Smith put it, channeling the spirit of his author George Orwell (1984, chap. 7): “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Take what follows, more than anything else, as a commentary on the way I think about things.
One thousand one hundred and seventy paces from my front door is a Starbuck’s. Now, if you walk from that point an additional three hundred ninety paces across a busy boulevard, you get get to a large luxury supermarket. The supermarket has gourmet quality meats, vegetables, breads, seafood, frozen goods, flowers, vegetables, organics, liquors, condiments. It is not bag-yer-own. It is the kind of quality from which you would select if you were about to throw a party, with your very best friends in attendance.
The bank that maintained a branch in that supermarket, was my bank. They staffed it up with bright, competent ladies of all ages who I don’t think I ever once caught making a mistake. And if you showed up there just to pull twenty dollars from your account, they would politely direct you to the ATM machine thirty feet away — for next time — and then politely accommodate you. Oh and by the way, this branch had extended hours. Other branches would be open until six weekdays, maybe twelve-to-three Saturdays. This one was open until seven weekdays and ten-to-five on Saturdays.
As of a week ago, this massive supermarket has a big white wall where the bank used to be. Oh, and the machine is gone.
So I say this:
Some guy, who is very high up the food chain at that particular supermarket location, or perhaps its region, had some trouble with his wife. He separated and began dating a lady who is a highly placed executive with the bank. He patched up his differences with his wife. Now they’re back together. The homewrecker from the bank was given the heave-ho and she’s feeling pretty damn sore about it.
I look at people, generally, as high-drama people.
And the reason I got this checking account in the first place, was when I first moved to California I began dating a gorgeous, hot-blooded young widow who worked for that bank. She was more reasonable and rational than some of the girlfriends who came before, or who came afterward. But she was also a little bit…shall we say…impetuous.
But more than anything else…and maybe this is a bit of irrational selfishness on my part. But this does NOT look like a business decision. It just doesn’t.
An actual branch with some competent people in it, costs a certain amount of money to run. A machine? Eh…that costs some money too. But not nearly as much. That’s supposed to be the point of having a machine. The machine has to be pulled out?
Seems a tad vengeful to me.
Perhaps I’m inventing soap opera episodes where they aren’t actually taking place. I’m willing to allow for that possibility. But if I had to bet some money — I’d say nuh-huh. Someone’s pissed off at somebody. That, or what was once a thriving, exploding community of young opportunistic first-time home-buyers, is now becoming a ghost town and it’s not worth the trouble of dealing with our neighborhood.
But I don’t have too much faith in the ghost-town idea. I just don’t. Someone is teaching someone a lesson.
A “wealth gap” hurts an economy, and greater equality among the classes helps it. We measure the economic health of a society by how great the population is within its “middle class.” Evolution is responsible for everything we see in all living things. Global warming is real; those leaked e-mails don’t mean nuthin’. You hear that? They don’t mean nuthin’! Nuthin’, nuthin’, nuthin’!
Saddam Hussein was a harmless teddy bear who never would have have hurt anybody if he were left alone. The Constitution applies to terrorists who’ve never been in this country. Kids are unharmed, or even helped, when they are adopted by two mommies or two daddies. Socialism isn’t all that bad. Tea parties are racist. Any supposed “conservative” who opposes gay rights must be gay himself.
Keynesian economic theory works.
The Eighth Amendment was intended to empower judges to make up new laws as they go along, to codify our “evolving standards of decency.” The Second Amendment, on the other hand, has outlived its usefulness and should be ignored. It never was intended to apply to the people in the first place.
Have you ever noticed this about those frequent occasions on which left-wing suppositions contradict common sense — the subject at hand is always something that offers great difficulty in being refuted or proven? By which I mean compellingly proven. To a mindset initially hostile to that which is being proven. You can open your copy of the Constitution and turn to where the Second Amendment says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms”…which ought to be good enough. But it isn’t of course. You have to wait hundreds of years to find out if the oceans are really going to disappear…you don’t really know if God built things, or if it was all evolution. No telling what would happen if we left Saddam where he was. I was just thinking about other things that can be absolutely, positively, indisputably proven — easily. Liberals never seem to want to take those on with their condescending, bullying tactics.
I was just wondering what we’d see if that were to happen. So I made a little list. What if it was about…something immediately recognizable. Water being wet?
1. The clear and indisputable fact that water is wet, is found to have an obstructive effect — don’t ask me how, let’s just go with this, okay? — on some highly energized left-wing agenda item.
2. That same day, some darling intellectual attracts attention by announcing that, actually, water’s wetness has always been a myth.
3. Sarah Palin says water is wet, drawing from her experience helping out with Todd’s fishing business, and is promptly ridiculed all over the place for being an unsophisticated fish-gut covered crazy Eskimo whore.
4. Barack Obama delivers an inspiring speech, says water has never been wet, and manages to work in one of the “Let Me Be Clear,” two of the “Make No Mistake,” one of the “For Far Too Long We Have,” six “Uh”s and He manages to mention Himself an astonishing thirty-six times.
5. All kinds of Sunday morning pundits declare this latest one has got to be Obama’s BEST SPEECH EVAR!
6. Ann Coulter writes a column about Barack Obama’s speech. Several “conservatives” go on record saying they think the sarcastic comments were beneath Coulter’s stature, disrespectful of the office of President, and uncalled-for. Liberals make fun of her for being a skinny blond chick although some of them comment they wouldn’t kick her out of bed.
7. Glenn Beck goes on record saying water is wet.
8. Keith Olbermann says Glenn Beck is the worst person in the world.
9. With the issue becoming heated and controversial, the Reflecting Pool in the Washington Mall is drained.
10. Huffington Post publishes a column by some guy who surely must know what he’s talking about, being a Hollywood celebrity and all, stating that water is dry. His thesis proves this by denouncing people who’ve said it is wet and calling them all sorts of names pulled straight off the elementary school playground.
11. John McCain delivers a speech in the well of the Senate confirming that water is kinda wet and kinda dry.
12. A school teacher directs a class of children who, on their own of course, “wrote” a catchy song about water being dry and that anybody who says it is wet is quite stupid.
13. The New York Times publishes an unsigned editorial waxying lyrically on the dryness of water.
14. The United Nations passes a resolution that says water is dry. The Science Is Setted.
15. Meghan McCain tweets on her Twitter page that although she thinks the Republican party is just as cute as a button and she just wants to pick it up and give it a big hug and take it home — kisses! — it needs to be promptly ridded of all these ignorant rubes who think water is wet. Young people don’t like that.
16. Matthew Yglasias says water is dry. Hydrogen — DRY! Oxygen –DRY! Nothing else in there! Stupid conservatives!
17. TPMuckraker puts up a column that says water is dry.
18. Washington Post prints an editorial proving water is dry.
19. L.A. Times prints an editorial proving water is dry.
20. Fox News does an expose proving that water is wet.
21. PETA expresses outrage that Fox News’ segment the previous day was humiliating and unkind to the fishies.
22. Keith Olbermann says Fox News is the worst person in the world.
23. Some suicidal maniac shoots up a school or an army base or an IRS building, and several “news” organizations get ahold of some old writings of his, displayed on their web sites and then hurriedly pulled off after twenty minutes or so, implying that he was one of those deranged kooks who think water is wet.
24. Bill Clinton emerges from retirement to say water is dry, but that the really important thing is that we all learn to get along with each other.
25. DailyKOS puts up a post about water being dry, but most of it consists of disparaging comments made against people who think water is wet and how they also think dinosaurs walked the earth six thousand years ago.
26. Neil Cavuto does a segment asking if we’re making too much of a rush to judgment about water being dry?
27. Jon Stewart ridicules Neil Cavuto for ending too many of his statements with a question mark.
28. Keith Olbermann says Neil Cavuto is the worst person in the world.
29. Democratic Underground links to a story about some Republican who thinks water is wet, and within a few hours thousands of comments appear under it wishing death on him and his entire family. Nobody anywhere pays the slightest bit of attention to this.
30. Sean Hannity challenges liberals to take a shower before they go to work every morning, but not to bother drying off with a towel before getting dressed. Chris Matthews responds by (missing the point entirely) shouting, “No, you do it! You first!”
31. Keith Olbermann says Sean Hannity is the worst person in the world. 32. Jimmy Carter emerges from retirement to say water is dry and the Israelis are killing innocent Palestinian children.
33. The Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) takes the position that water is dry. Andy Stern, President of the Union, visits the White House five times in a single day to have some meetings about it.
34. Some prominent conservative commentator is forced to apologize for calling anti-war liberals a bunch of bed-wetting sissies, when it is thought (by no one willing to use their actual name) that he was making a side reference to this new hot controversial issue about pee being wet or dry. He apologizes two more times, and then his career is ended anyway.
35. Keith Olbermann says that conservative guy who lost his job is the worst person in the world.
36. Saturday Night Live does a skit on the issue of water being wet or dry. They have Sarah Palin’s look-alike, Tina Fey, say something abysmally stupid and by the end of the weekend millions of people are convinced Palin actually said it.
37. Janeane Garofalo says anybody who doesn’t immediately acknowledge the dryness of water is a racist who is just trying to get back at Barack Obama for being elected President.
38. The first Star Wars movie becomes a left-winger’s favorite, because Mark Hamill emerges from the fight with the garbage monster with his hair all puffy and blow-dried.
39. Because the issue has become so incendiary, all swimming events have been banned from the Olympics.
40. Berkeley becomes the nation’s capital of dead houseplants.
You know, there is a simple reason for why we are so damned contentious. We wish to be. We argue about stupid bullcrap that isn’t worth the arguing. Our liberals seize on purposefully ironic things that are antithetical to common sense and threaten us with social excoriation if we dare to call them out, and then we accommodate them.
It’s not going to get any better with time, you do realize. Not if we continue to tolerate it.
A woman in Germany phoned police after hearing “suspicious noises” in her flat…authorities said Friday.
The noise was so loud and strange, even over the telephone, that police in Bochum in western Germany decided to send a patrol car around to the “scene of the crime”, a statement said.
“Daringly, and with the occupier’s permission, one of the officers opened the drawer of a wardrobe where the noise was coming from.
“Underneath some clothes he found a very personal, battery-operated object which had obviously switched itself on… The tenant’s face abruptly changed colour.”
I saw this somewhere in Gerard‘s pages. I forgot to make a note of the date or to make a link to his archives. It might be in Evernote somewhere but I’m just too lazy to look, and a search of his archives has netted me butkus.
This is exactly the kind of counterproductive sniveling that the free e-book is all about: Just Stop Having Problems, Stupid! The Anti-Self-Help Guide.
Sally was a single mother with three children, all of them under ten. If that wasn’t bad enough, each of those children was from a different father, and each of those fathers was in jail or had been in jail. She was seriously overweight and had diabetes. She had a steady job, but she was underpaid and passed over for promotion again and again.
Now, when I met Sally and heard all this, I wanted to give her a big slap across the face. But because I am a professional, I decided to try a different approach.
I said to her, “Sally, look at all these problems around you. You’ve got to stop having them! Stop it, right now! Bad!”
Sally looked hurt…Sally got mad at me, insisting that it wasn’t easy to just stop having problems, that everything always happened to her, and it wasn’t her fault. Now, there’s a phrase I coined called “playing the victim.” Sally felt she was a victim of everything around her, so she was not responsible for her problems.
You know you want to crack this puppy open, and now. Because you know you know a Sally. Or two, or three, or six…and deep down, you’ve always suspected most of the problems we have in life, we decide we should have them without realizing we’re making that decision.
I’m going to call it right here and now: Future generations of high school and college students are going to be allowed to enroll in special U.S. History classes dealing with the last two-fifths of the twentieth century, specifically between 1965 and about 1980. And how incredibly, unbelievably wrong we were.
I’m not criticizing the widespread unified notion that history was heading in a certain direction. I am referring specifically to this toxic, companion notion that anyone on the wrong side of history should be driven out of whatever position of authority had been entrusted to them — and executed otherwise capably — and these offenders should be defrocked, isolated, ostracized, “disappeared.”
I was looking over this article about the National Organization of Women handing out their smug, condescending “awards” to advertisers and other mass media merchants who were unlucky enough to have NOW disagree with them with regard to their portrayal of women. And I suddenly realized: It’s okay we didn’t have blogs during that time. It is quite alright that we were not allowed to say out loud in any public venue, “you know, I’m not too keen on this part of feminism” or “maybe that guy shouldn’t be fired.” All fine and good that NOW secured their monopoly on free mass-media speech in the 1970’s, and got the first-word last-word all-words-in-between…all of the time…just because they wanted it.
Look at it this way: What if you found a newspaper article from much earlier. Say, from 1899…about the jail term a guy got for using a dirty word with no kids around, but a cop/constable overheard. Or for drinking a beer on a Sunday. Or for dropping what he was doing and helping a “colored” with some personal household chore.
You wouldn’t need to see an argument from the other side, would you? You’d just think “what a bunch of flaming fucking assholes.”
And that’s precisely what this article looks like to me. That is how our grandchildren will see it. What a bunch of unpleasant, nit-picking, controlling shrews.
According to Wikipedia, Paul Anka also won the “Keep Her In Her Place” award for his song, Having My Baby. I don’t recall a single instance of anyone requesting, let alone demanding, the feminists to elaborate on the point they were seeking to make with this. In Mr. Anka’s case I would want some specification on which among the lyrics were most oppressive. Ever listen to it? Not a single negative, oppressive or condescending syllable in it. Someone, somewhere got the idea that this number deserved scorn. That person should have been abducted and studied, because that’s nucking-futz.
Since then, feminism has evolved. It now zeroes in on two points of focus, one of which became prominent sometime in the 1990’s and the other of which started capturing attention in 1973: Gay marriage and abortion.
Gay marriage does not enhance the role of women in society. It diminishes it.
Ditto for abortion.
So in some ways, feminism is crazier now than it was then. But back then, it was much more accepted to force an entire nation to do things your way, by means of an energetic and highly visible campaign to destroy people who don’t agree with you. To go out looking for things that piss you off. And advertise that this is what you’re doing, so the people who make the decisions become frightened of you. That would not be quite so appealing now…I don’t think.
The era will be studied. Sometime. As soon as we have done a more thorough job of pulling our society’s metaphorical head out of its own ass. I would say, as I write these words, it is somewhere around…forty percent extricated. Depending on our collective mood from moment to moment.
Update: Here’s an example of a healthy way to deal with odious advertising. You don’t see some man’s-rights-group gathering together to hand out self-important, sanctimonious, scolding “awards” for dreck like this:
But everyone with two testicles, and a wife or girlfriend, would love to give that asshole a beat-down kinda like what Joe Pesci got in Casino. Depriving him and his bosses of a livelihood? Pretty fun to think about it.
But we don’t mobilize to actually get it done, because grown-ups know there is such a thing as having destructive thoughts, and there is also such a thing as acting them out. Those are two different things.
These otherwise-decent people we call “feminists”…they lack this adult sense of self-restraint. They think every impulse — provided it’s hostile — m-u-s-t be acted-upon. At least, they thought that 35 years ago. And I’m still making up my mind about today. The most militant ones seem to still have this problem.
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman takes note in his New York Times column of what he calls “the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties”:
Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.
“What Democrats believe,” he says “is what textbook economics says”:
But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”
Krugman scoffs: “To me, that’s a bizarre point of view–but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.”
What does textbook economics have to say about this question? Here is a passage from a textbook called “Macroeconomics”:
Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job. Generous unemployment benefits in some European countries are widely believed to be one of the main causes of “Eurosclerosis,” the persistent high unemployment that affects a number of European countries.
So it turns out that what Krugman calls Sen. Kyl’s “bizarre point of view” is, in fact, textbook economics. The authors of that textbook are Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Miss Wells is also known as Mrs. Paul Krugman.
It seems Krugman himself lives in two different universes–the universe of the academic economist and the universe of the bitter partisan columnist. Or maybe this is like that episode of “Star Trek” in which crewmen from the Enterprise switched places with their counterparts from a universe in which everyone was the same, only evil.
Like Spock, the evil Krugman is the one with the beard.
Rhetorical defense of a dumbass idea, offered by subtly re-directing the discourse from the merits and weaknesses of the idea itself, toward the appealing but meaningless attributes of the personality most prominently associated with it.
Starting in 2013 and soaring into the decades that will come and go after that year, this is what the name Obama is going to mean anyway. We may as well start recognizing it right now.
From Hot Air. Notice: This lady doesn’t seem to be trying to shut anyone else up, but it’s a definite that the Obama supporters around her derive a lot of sense of purpose from the mission of making sure she is not heard.
This has not been unusual at all.
I’m told fairly often that being opposed to this President has something to do with putting the hate on black people.
The evidence of my senses tells me that being for this President, has something to do with monopolizing the conversation. It’s not true of all of Obama’s supporters, of course, but there is certainly a correlation there: “I’m not here to debate your or check your facts, I’m here to throw them down the memory hole.” When I hear people object to the President’s policies, the objection is delivered in the spirit of now that the other side has had its chance to get their point across… And who, among intelligent people who have been paying attention, can doubt that it has?
But being an Obama supporter seems to have a lot to do with shut-uppery. More than being a supporter of one among most other democrats. Obama is more of a revolutionary figure than the average democrat politician, of course. But the revolution He led sixteen months ago does not have the feel of a “people’s” revolution and I don’t think it ever really did. It’s more like a private revolution. It’s motto might as well be “Free speech — only for cool people like me — not for thee.”
The effects of the policy changes, be they benign or otherwise, should be felt by everyone. That much is self-evident and non-negotiable. But only an exclusive club can have some input into what those policy changes should & should not be.
Xenia Seeberg beat Willa Ford, at least in my book and only just barely. Now she goes up against the other adjacent letter in the alphabet, aptly represented by alcoholic Baywatch beauty cokehead Yasmine Bleeth. Who to pick, who to pick…
Well, I’m still a little bit miffed that Xenia chopped her locks. And raw-beauty wise, this match-up looks like something of a draw, or at least a photo-finish, just like the last one. It comes down to something else. And this is rather interesting:
I don’t know either one of these women personally, but we seem to have here a case of a fairly normal actress playing a half-lizard tweaker weirdo alien chick, running up against a manic-depressive tweaker addictive-personality type who’s famous for playing a fairly normal person on teevee.
Which I should qualify: I know next to nothing about Baywatch, maybe Yasmine’s character isn’t that normal. And Xenia does sing for a rock band.
But ultimately, being a tweaker weirdo is somewhat sexy in fiction, and not appealing at all in real life. So the one from the weird British sci-fi Dr.-Who-Wannabe show takes the prize. Xenia is a two-fer-two, after going up against some formidable competition on both fronts.
Dennis the Peasant skewers ThinkProgress but good. Goes on to make an ass out of himself afterward, but the skewering is good.
What do you do when you have a degree in journalism but don’t have the brains to think for yourself? Well, if you’re a no-talent dickweed like Alex Seitz-Wald, you end up working for organizations like Think Progressspinning the news for dimwit partisans:
Last night, a California man armed with two semiautomatic weapons and “many magazines” of ammunition opened fire on police officers at the entrance to the Pentagon, wounding two before being killed by police. The shooter, 36-year-old John Patrick Bedell, was “well dressed in a suit” and “very calm,” walking “very directly to the officers” before engaging them, a police spokesman said.
Bedell “appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings,” the Christian Science Monitor reports, who traveled from California specifically to attack the Pentagon. While police were hesitant to assign a motive, “writings by someone with his same name and birth date, posted on the Internet, express ill will toward the government and the armed forces and question whether Washington itself might have been behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.”
In one posting, Bedell ranted against “big government.” In another, he wrote, “I am determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow” — a Marine whose suicide has been the subject of conspiracy theories — because it would be a “step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.
There you have it: (a) The Christian Science Monitor speculates right-wing extremism, (b) You’re paid by Think Progress to propagandize against the right, so (c) Bedell is a right-wing extremist. Never mind that the police are still investigating the facts, what’s important is spinning for your supper.
Of course, it’s worth pointing out that if Bedell had been a commie asshole on the level of Van Jones and raving truther ravings, he’d be a fucking left-wing hero. But as we all know, when it comes to left-wing trutherism, well, that’s different…
He goes on to indulge in wild conjecture about Michelle Malkin blaming everything that goes wrong on Muslims, then in an update provides a link to prove his point about her.
Dennis needs to read his links. Malkin made herself crystal clear on this incident:
Now, just for a moment, let’s set aside the false guilt-by-association game everyone’s always playing. We all know that John Patrick Bedell and Joseph Stack are basically insane, plain and simple — as are any number of similar whackjobs who periodically go loco and erupt into violence. Violent psychopaths often incorporate some seemingly random overarching theme into their mindset, and on occasion that theme involves politics. Whenever someone like Bedell or Stack goes ballistic, every pundit jumps into the fray and tries to spin the outburst as “exemplifying” the political viewpoint of those with whom the pundit disagrees.
But that only rises to the level of a valid argument when a distinct pattern emerges. If, say, 5,000 suicide bombers in a row are invariably Islamic fundamentalists — well, OK, we’ve got a problem with the belief system, not just with the individuals. Yet I don’t see a pattern in these “going postal” violent outbursts which seem to happen perhaps three or four times per year, every year, no matter who’s in power or who’s president: it seems that the “philosophy” (if you can even call it that) of each of the attackers is unique, idiosyncratic and just plain illogical. Even so, if he starts shooting or killing when a Republican is president, he is deemed a left-wing psycho (see: Charles Manson); if he starts shooting or killing when a Democrat is president, he is deemed a right-wing psycho (see: Joseph Stack). But the truth is, paranoid people simply feel threatened by the external power structure in general, so they lash out at any symbol of authority, regardless of its political affiliation.
So, instead of playing the blame game so unapologetically employed by the Left when they feel they can spin things to their political advantage, I’m not going to say that Bedell’s actions at the Pentagon epitomize the leftist worldview. Rather, he was just crazy, as clearly indicated by his belief in the craziest of modern crazy conspiracy theories, 9/11 Truthism.
Are most Truthers leftists? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that all left-leaning Americans are thereby just as crazy as the most extreme among them; it simply indicates that when a leftist goes crazy in the post-9/11 era, he often gloms onto Truthism as his paranoia of choice.
Put it this way: Leftism fails as a coherent philosophy on its own terms. We shouldn’t try to wring significance from the delusional outburst of someone who just happened to be leftist. There are plenty of ways to logically disembowel Marxism and its numerous noxious contemporary offspring without having to resort to an unnecessary round of political “gotcha!”
And Zombie speaks for me as well.
I’m sure somewhere out there, there is a right-wing blogger or hardcore conservative guy out there offering this as evidence that the lefties are dangerous psychopaths getting ready to tweak out and shoot things up. But my prediction is that it isn’t going to be quite as prevalent as what you just saw ThinkProgress do.
That’s because it is pointless. When your philosophy is something like “when you don’t have any money, stop spending” — you don’t need to cherry pick news items about non-believers acting crazy, in order to make your idea seem reasonable. Because it already is.
When you believe in crackpot Keynesian economics, that is when you have to sell this snake oil: “People who disagree with me are bonkers, nuts, crazy, stupid, got picked on in school, have syphillis, are stupid women, are repressed homosexuals, are Uncle Toms, are…are…are…”
If you’re in a position to argue your argument based on the merits of your argument — you’re somewhat likely to do exactly that. It’s not a hard rule but it works most of the time. And so the argumentum ad hominem approach is predominantly a left-wing approach. Not absolutely, not completely. But mostly.
Obama’s given 34 or 35 speeches now trying to resurrect His monster of a health care bill. Charles Krauthammer is ready to pull the plug and send Igor back to the graveyard to put the pieces where they came from.
…Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments) they are in favor.
Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?
Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.
However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed — say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?
Perhaps something like 3-1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry’s feeling about the current Democratic health care bills.
That would be the right-wing nutjobs like Yours Truly. I’m glad Hawkins does stuff like this now and then. It’s always interesting to see how one’s individual contributions stack up with, and contrast against, the prevailing viewpoint.
18. The Terminator: 4 (1984)
18. The Patriot: 4 (2000)
18. The Dark Knight: 4 (2008)
18. Serenity: 4 (2005)
18. Saving Private Ryan: 4 (1998)
18. On the Waterfront: 4 (1954)
18. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: 4 (2003)
18. Groundhog Day: 4 (1993)
18. Blazing Saddles: 4 (1974)
18. Animal House: 4 (1978)
18. 300: 4 (2007)
13. Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back: 5 (1980)
13. Schindler’s List: 5 (1993)
13. Patton: 5 (1970)
13. Monty Python and the Holy Grail: 5 (1975)
13. Gone with the Wind: 5 (1939)
8. The Godfather II: 6 (1974)
8. Jaws: 6 (1975)
8. Raiders of the Lost Ark: 6 (1981)
8. Pulp Fiction: 6 (1994)
8. Braveheart: 6 (1995)
6. The Shawshank Redemption: 7 (1994)
6. The Princess Bride: 7 (1987)
5. The Incredibles: 8 (2004)
4. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: 9 (2001)
3. Star Wars: 11 (1977)
2. Casablanca: 13 (1942)
1. The Godfather: 14 (1972)
Top Gun, on the other hand. I think one day Maddox was sitting around doing whatever it is he does…Top Gun came on that Turner channel that likes to hack decent movies up into pieces, and Maddox thought Wow that sure is a shitty movie and there sure are a lot of people who love it all to pieces. I’ll bet I can find four more just like it. Well, the other four don’t quite fit. Braveheart has a lot of elements that make it quite a great movie, that went sailing over Maddox’s head, Karate Kid isn’t that bad, and the other three have tumbled down the memory hole as they deserved to.
Anyway, I’ve often thought I should start a list like that.
It might seem a tad brutal to put Lord of the Rings in there. But I grow weary of the Peter Jackson monotony. Same ol’ story…you can’t trash this, it’s great film making. And it always is. Jackson is an exceptionally talented fellow. Just answer me this: How many times have you put that thing back in the DVD player and spent an evening in front of it? Yeah, I thought so.
Know why that is? Because everything consumes roughly five times as much of your evening as it justifies. The “You Shall Not Pass” scene? Thirty seconds worth of story, maybe. Forty if you count the hobbits crying at the end. But no. It takes longer to watch Gandalf’s great fall, than it takes for my kid to do a math problem when he doesn’t feel like doing it. Almost. When the whole movie grinds on like that, so the entire trilogy takes nine hours, I lose patience. What happens in just six hours of the old Star Wars movies? Just about everything that can be flipped around, at some point, is. What happens in six hours of Godfather movies? Ditto. These guys took a ring to a volcano and tossed it in. Yawn.
Yeah, I need to start a list like that someday.
Anyway. Here’s the list I submitted of the movies I liked. We were asked for ten, in no particular order, and I took the liberty of grouping some of them together. It seemed to me to make sense:
The Godfather I & II
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Rob Roy
From Russia With Love
Casino Royale
The Patriot
Braveheart
Die Hard
Jaws
Star Wars: ANH & TESB
I didn’t even think to put Patton in there until I saw the final. Pretty good choice. Terminator? I dunno. It is a fine piece of work, a fun flick. But as “list” material, it leaves me cold because you don’t pick up any deeper meaning from it, until you analyze it and by the time you analyze it you quickly pass the point where the story no longer makes any sense whatsoever. (The same problem hangs around the neck of Cameron‘s latest, lucrative as it may be.) It seems to me “just for fun” vehicles belong on a different list. You’d have to skip over all kinds of wonderful, meaningful, thoughtful works like The Incredibles before you got to something like Terminator.
“When everybody is special, then nobody is.” They worked that in twice without getting preachy about it. Strong story, lovable characters, unforgettable villain, subtle, thought-provoking message. Perhaps “movies with exactly the right balance” would be another worthy list.
Update: I’ll just plant this as a seed in the smartphone, see if it sprouts into something. A list of movie lists.
1. Movies I would like to take with me to a deserted island.
2. Movies that, when I was young and available, got me some action and will probably work for you too.
3. Movies with a simple and powerful message.
4. Culturally significant movies.
5. Great movies made great by their characters and not by their stories.
6. Great movies made great by their acting and directing and not by their characters or stories.
7. Movie tropes, thoroughly worn out and ground into the dirt, given a brand new lease on life through brilliant execution.
8. “He’s the traitor” moments I absolutely, positively did not see coming.
9. “Dragon” moments (physical contests between hero and bad guy’s second-in-command) that redeemed the entire movie.
10. Sequels better than the original.
11. Movies that are really two movies.
12. Really, really, really bad moments for going out to get popcorn.
And what would be the dumbass move of the decade? If we held a vote, of course a popular nominee would be the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And I would not support that, since I consider the move to have been about a decade overdue.
I’m referring to trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York City in a civilian court. Which, in the tournament for Dumbass Move of the Decade, I would hope like the dickens would win. Bush administration officials, after all, were repeatedly called upon to explain themselves for invading Iraq. Their dumbass move was to formulate answers that might possibly make sense to those who were opposed to invading Iraq. Who, in turn, are made up mostly of the peace-at-any-price types who’ve been brought up by aging hippie mommas with hyphenated last names…people who think, bizarrely, that there are no fights between good guys and bad guys, because not-fighting is what makes a good guy good.
People who think every conflict can be negotiated, ever single violent offender can be rehab’d. People who simply cannot wrap their minds around that common and ancient situation in which one guy starts a fight and the other guy finishes it.
The last administration tried to relate to those people, and flubbed up the public relations. The P.R. always was a disaster on this thing, all the way back to Day One.
But bad P.R. doth not a bad idea make.
Eric Holder was called-upon to explain his debacle to Congress…and he did far, far worse. His answer wasn’t even coherent (hat tip to PowerLine).
President Obama’s advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s plan to try him in civilian court in New York City.
The president’s advisers feel increasingly hemmed in by bipartisan opposition to a federal trial in New York and demands, mainly from Republicans, that Mohammed and his accused co-conspirators remain under military jurisdiction, officials said. While Obama has favored trying some terrorism suspects in civilian courts as a symbol of U.S. commitment to the rule of law, critics have said military tribunals are the appropriate venue for those accused of attacking the United States.
If Obama accepts the likely recommendation of his advisers, the White House may be able to secure from Congress the funding and legal authority it needs to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and replace it with a facility within the United States. The administration has failed to meet a self-imposed one-year deadline to close Guantanamo.
The administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the president’s legal advisers are finalizing their review of the cases of Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators.
Practically speaking, the White House has no other realistic options. New York City refused to hold the trial there, and no other federal jurisdiction would be likely to volunteer itself. In terms of jurisdiction, the only other court choice would be the district which includes Washington DC, which would mean a circus atmosphere in the nation’s capital for the better part of two years at the same time the federal government needs to keep operating. Note well that this option never did get floated out as a serious trial balloon. That leaves the military commissions — and an embarrassing retreat for the Obama administration.
Oh well. Embarrassment is the price to be paid for pinning your name and your reputation on ironic ideas that only capture your attention because they have never before worked.
We grant constitutional protections to everybody who attacks our country and tries to kill the people in it? Everybody? Ever since the disastrous stewardship of the Earl Warren Supreme Court, we’ve been stocking our justice system full of these little games…all of which run the same way…”you didn’t cross this t or dot this i, and so this murdering asshole that you know darn good and well is guilty, and nobody anywhere is contending otherwise, well ya just gotta pretend he never did it.” It’s part of our global human rights campaign that all murdering assholes all over the world enjoy these same advantages? That makes us a decent people?
Wrong. That would make us a suicidal people. And you’ll notice, for all the energy we put into that whole misguided mindset, all over the planet it nets us not one single new friend. That’s supposed to be the entire point of the exercise isn’t it? When we do it some other way, all these “allies” despise us so much. Well hey, AG Holder embarked on this dumbass move amid great fanfare. Did we get any new pals, even temporarily? Did anyone holding a grudge make an announcement that golly, America must not be all that bad? Did that ever happen?
FrankJ notices our current President doesn’t command much respect these days. There are ten giveaway signs…
7. The Secret Service has Obama open their mail for them to make sure it’s safe.
:
4. The White House tour guides are always ordering [H]im to clean stuff.
:
2. When Obama visited a classroom, the kids mistook [H]is purpose there and kept asking [H]im to make balloon animals.
Ingenious headline for this post shamelessly stolen from commenter #3, zzyzx.
My wife and I signed a marijuana decriminalization petition one evening around 1980 for a group that acted like they had fallen out of a Cheech and Chong movie. They asked if we could contribute a joint or two to the cause. They were utterly shocked when we told them: “We don’t smoke pot.” They just could not imagine that anyone would support decriminalization without a more personal interest.
There’s no question that making drugs illegal creates serious problems for our criminal justice system. It clogs the courts, it corrupts police officers and government officials, and it funds some really sleazy people. All of this is true — but it turns out that there are some substantial social costs on the other side that simply don’t get any attention…
A surprising number of scholarly studies in the last 25 years have demonstrated that marijuana use seems to cause an increase in psychoses such as schizophrenia, and somewhat less dramatic mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder.
I’ve long been of the opinion that marijuana’s effect as a “gateway drug” has been discredited and dismissed prematurely, much like the Laffer Curve, the communist infiltration of the U.S. Government, and the eminent terrorist threat of Saddam Hussein’s regime. When, where and how did it become laughable and chuckle-worthy to view pot this way? Can any of the chucklers tell me? Where and how is this line drawn between Mary Jane and the “tougher” stuff?
I have also been of the view that this hallucinogen creates a lot more of what we already have in abundance, and whittles down what is unappreciated and scarce. It thrives off of, and in so doing fortifies, an addictive personality.
The arguments I hear in favor of legalization only enforce this. Statements like “We could tax it and pay off the deficit overnight” demonstrate, to me, an obvious lack of appreciation for mathematical realities and magnitudes (in addition to a lack of interest in using the proper terms). Normal people would present the same argument as something much, much milder, like “With the economy the way it is now, those tax dollars sure would come in handy.” That would inspire some Thing I Know #328 inspired indignation from Yours Truly, along with other bristling inspired by Thing I Know #335. But at least it would not carry such a palpable scorn against the timeless essential of measuring things.
As it is, I carry the uninformed opinion — and it’s been tested and re-tested, so how uninformed is it, really — that this substance knocks the Architect/Medicator balance way out of whack. It is an elixir that turns Architects into Medicators. We need more of this — how?
I still support states’-rights on this issue. But in my own little corner of the world, I’m a-votin’ no.
Some of these were a bit lame, but the last one was pretty good. For the record, throughout most of what I jotted down yesterday morning, I had Joe Biden on my mind. Maybe it shows.
When there is a genuine consensus among the electorate that Sarah has overstayed a welcome and her fifteenth minute is really done — and that’s more an if than a when — I have every confidence she’s going to go away.
And I also have every confidence she’s not going away any time soon. So her antagonists are in a dicey position here. And aren’t they always? They have to find a way to bitch and scream and piss and moan about her not going away, at the same time as bitching and screaming and pissing and moaning about her quitting the Alaska job. Sarah’s no good because she quits, and Sarah’s no good because she doesn’t.
I know you’re not supposed to, but I just love to say I told you so.
I was just wondering what we’d see if that were to happen. So I made a little list. What if it was about…something immediately recognizable. Water being wet?
32. Jimmy Carter emerges from retirement to say water is dry and the Israelis are killing innocent Palestinian children.