Month: September 2010
The Hamster Wheel
CJR details the modern media’s inability to say “Pass.” This paragraph more or less encapsulates everything you need to know about Village reporters too:
The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics (Bloomberg!). It is “Sheriff plans no car purchases in 2011,” (Kokomo Tribune, 7/5/10). […] It’s live-blogging the [Winter Olympics] opening ceremonies [with seven reporters], matching stories that don’t matter, and fifty-five seconds of video of a movie theater screen being built: “Wallingford cinema adding 3 screens (video),” (New Haven Register, 6/1/10).
Can I Finish? Can I Finish?
We can’t let the people who’ve been hit hardest by this recession and who we need to create the jobs that will get us out of it foot the bill for the Democrats’ two-year adventure in expanded government.
–Mitch McConnell
May as well unpack this idiocy, since I know there not a living Democratic strategist or seat-holder that will deign to do so.
We’re apparently meant to believe that those
“who’ve been hit hardest by this recession”
are uniformly located in that >$250k/yr bracket. And, I guess it’s true, Time tells us that:
A wealthy Boston matron has forsworn her weekly massage and canceled the family’s spring skiing trip to Utah.
A West Coast tycoon has sold one of his two yachts. A socially prominent Manhattan couple has switched from vintage to nonvintage champagne, while some of their affluent friends provide only California jug wine—in Waterford decanters. A Los Angeles millionairess, Elsie Pollack, now features chili at her dinner parties; another wealthy hostess has replaced cut flowers with synthetic centerpieces. A Chicago industrialist has turned in his Cadillac for a relatively miserly Mercedes 220 with a diesel engine that gets up to 32 m.p.g.
So they pretty much may as well commit suicide rather than face those living conditions. We can only assume that the lower-income individuals still blessed with jobs are likewise switching to different $70,000 cars with marginally better gas mileage. Or, I guess, we can look at silly things like the proportional tax rates by income, courtesy New York Times:
My God, it’s almost as if the poor (and relatively poor) are and have been bearing most of the weight of running this country (as measured by proportion of income) for a long time now. Who knew?!? We’re also meant to forget they are the group more likely to have lost homes, jobs, and every thing else as a direct result of this downturn. And will be more likely to end up in a lower-wage, lower-opportunity job as a result of long-term unemployment. But pity the very rich. They’ve had to get new cars and switch wines.
Then there’s this:
“the Democrats’ two-year adventure in expanded government.”
Has government increased in size over the last two years? Over the last 50 as a share of GDP? Again, let’s go to the charts, this one courtesy of Econobrowser, showing the non-defense consumption and gross investment (by government) as a share of GDP:
Astounding! How will the Republic survive that kind of Socialistic tidal wave?
This is why they fail.
Some people have already asked how an American like D’Souza disparages anti-colonialism, but it’s simple really: African self-determination is seen by many in the West, particularly conservatives, as tragic in comparison to the idealized “stability” of white rule. “Kenyan anti-colonialism” manages to say at once that Obama is a black, incompetent despot who is out for revenge against whites and who will destroy the country in the process. This is profoundly racist on its face. Yet it’s the cover story in Forbes magazine.
Adam Serwer, extending these comments for the American Prospect. I know Bob Somerby doesn’t want to hear it, but “the R-word” is the only rational way to describe this sort of thinking.
People who talk about our “materialistic society” and about getting back to “spiritual values” strike me as having a right sense of indignation and a poor sense of analysis. The delusion of our society is not so much its materialism as its faux spiritualism, its desire to make a heaven on earth, not as a place free of needless suffering and full of what Barbara Ehrenreich calls “collective joy,” but as one in which the elect live everlastingly and communicate telepathically while flying in disembodied splendor above the heads of the Mexicans mowing the lawn.
Garret Keizer in Harper’s
Stunning Development
A spokesman for Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that every Senate Republican has pledged to oppose President Barack Obama’s tax-cutting plan.
I am shocked beyond words. It’s almost as if the GOP is planning to oppose every measure or action before the Senate, no matter how popular, trivial, or necessary to basic function of government said measure or action may be. But we know that can’t be so. At any rate: Bad for the Democrat.
All of which to say is there’s no need to parse the ethnic origins or political philosophies of Obama’s parents to understand the ideology of Barack Obama. He is a center-left Democrat who supports mainstream Democratic policies. But some conservatives don’t want to talk about policy. They are unable to engage in an argument with liberalism on substantive terms; they know only argument by epithet. They want to talk about the fact that our blackety black president is blackety black.
Adam Serwer Archive | The American Prospect (via Balloon Juice)
Agreed, except this isn’t an “argument with liberalism.” It’s an argument with center-rightism.
Agreed, except this isn’t an “argument with liberalism.” It’s an argument with center-rightism.
This is why | Exhibit 4,251
“The Bush tax cuts are sunsetting by design, due to legislation that almost the entire Republican leadership supported,” one senior House Dem leadership aide says. “President Obama and the Democrats want to implement the `Obama tax cuts for the middle class.’ It provides a nice contrast between what the current administration is proposing and what Republicans did in the past.”
“We’re kicking it around,” adds one senior Senate Democratic aide.
You should have been “kicking it around” in January of 2009. Or earlier. What the fuck do you think a legislative majority is for?
This is why they fail.
Honestly, nobody deserves to lose as much as this lot does. Just completely beyond belief.
Maybe they should take a meeting on it and form an exploratory commission to establish the Blue Ribbon Panel of 2012 sometime in early December. Nothing but time, after all.
(h/t The Plum Line)
‘U.S. Trade Deficit Startles Markets.’ Now, we’ve understood the U.S. trade deficit for a while. Are the markets small children that are easily startled? The next day, they’ll get an unemployment number and go, ‘Oh, I don’t know why we were startled and lost 200 points yesterday; today, we realized the shirt on the chair wasn’t a monster, so we’re going to put 300 points back on the Dow because we’re fucking 5 years old.’
Jon Stewart, scanning the front page of the Washington Post. This simple insight is more than I’ve ever seen mustered from, say, NPR’s Marketplace, a program ostensibly entirely directed at helping people grasp this stuff. If only there were more Mountaintops around.
Jasen Comstock: S is for Senate
I want the Bush tax cuts to expire, totally. They were passed through reconciliation and designed to be temporary. If you are some butthurt citizen moaning about your missing $75* a year and a half from now in your tax return, you can blame the Republicans for designing a tax cut that was designed to last ten years.
Same here. Though the real play it seems to me would have been to come to the press conference the other day and say:
“The Bush tax cuts are and were a failed policy. Those days are over. Here are the Obama tax cuts, tied to expire as economic growth and recovery takes place over time (such that the deficit and debt impact will be minimized and limited to this period of crisis for the nation), and valued at the exact same amount as the entire Bush tax cuts, but pointed entirely at small business, start-ups, and those individuals and families earning below $250k/yr.”
You then torment the GOP every day between now and then about why they’re against tax cuts. What could be wrong with tax cuts?
Whether or not they pass: the GOP loses. Instead, and as usual, the administration and the Democratic party at large engages the GOP on their turf, and using the GOP’s own framing. Even if something gets done, the credit (such as it is) goes to Bush. When they expire, the blame goes to Obama. Yet these are the ground-rules “our side” chooses again and again.
Jasen Comstock: S is for Senate
Lemkin 