Author: lemkin

Chair yells at old man

Excellent questions all:

  1. Mr. Eastwood, you called the failure to close the Guantanamo Bay penitentiary a broken promise. President Obama was prevented from closing Guantanamo by the Republican Congress, which refused to allocate the funds necessary to end it. Do you remember this this Washington Post headline, “House acts to block closing of Guantanamo”?

  2. Mr. Eastwood you called “stupid” the idea of trying terrorists who attacked New York in a civilian courtroom in New York. But what would have better vindicated the strengths of America’s rule of law, the thing about the US most admired abroad? Mr. Eastwood, perhaps you spent so many years playing vigilantes who just blew people away (people who in the real world we would have needed to try to establish their guilt or innocence) that you want to run our judicial system as a kangaroo court.

  3. You complained that there are 23 million unemployed Americans. But there are no measures by which W. created more jobs per month on average during his presidency than has Obama, and there is good reason to blame current massive unemployment on Bush’s policies of deregulating banks and other financial institutions, which caused the crash of 2008.

Read the whole thing.

Chair yells at old man

Steve Jobs: Truly Gone

To me, this is the first real sign that the shine could come off, and quickly:

The report also noted that [Apple Retail VP John] Browett said Apple’s retail outlets need to “learn to ‘run leaner’ in all areas, even if the customer experience is compromised.”

During fiscal 2011, Apple’s retail stores generated $14.1 billion in revenue and $3.1 billion in profits. The chain has operated at around a 22 percent profit margin over the past five years

Were Steve Jobs alive and running the company, this guy would be gone before he got back from lunch. These sorts of paper gains that put the long game in hock to better favor a slight quarterly bump, all just ahead of what would appear to be the biggest, most important launch in the company’s history? Utter lunacy. You should be adding employees, my friend. The money involved is completely and utterly beside the point at your margins (and, no: forget Apple’s margins for the moment, I mean just the margins of the Store). Would the cuts even cover your own salary? Will they help you at your new job? I certainly hope so.

But here’s some unsolicited advice: the Apple Store isn’t a store like Best Buy. It’s equal measure retail operation and, critically, brand identity. The experience of it needs to be every bit as delightful as the latest iDingus. If it’s not, you’ve damaged the brand. And once that’s gone, it ain’t coming back at any price. I feel certain Apple would operate the store at break-even or as a slight loss leader; it’s more valuable as an icon and an experience than it is as a raw profit center churning out new doodads for the masses. Apparently Browett didn’t get the memo. Time will tell…but I’d say the Store is now officially the leading indicator for the company. As it goes, so goes Apple. When it starts seeming like Best Buy in there, sell short.

Perhaps his raw, slightly unkempt suit balances out Romney’s snazzier, controlled appearance. Ryan’s Midwestern sensibilities and baggy pants may appeal to swing voters who think cuff links are wasteful expenditures. The man believes in trimming budgets, not pant legs.

Katherine Boyle delivering what must be the finest non-Onion sourced political quotation ever written. The Washington Post, everyone. Cannot imagine why that’s an industry in bad decline. Just a tough environment out there for Serious People; it’s not the content at all. No way.
Source: Washington Post

The proposition that Barack Obama was actually saying — literally — that business owners don’t build their own businesses doesn’t make a lick of sense. Unless, that is, you’re already convinced that he believes this, and only now has he finally tripped up and admitted it. In that case, it makes all the sense in the world. And what does this contempt for business owners translate into, policy-wise? An increase in the top marginal tax rate from 35% to 39.6%. Apparently this is the rallying cry of today’s socialist revolutionaries.

Kevin Drum touching on just how hard it is to deal with what Paul Krugman calls “invincible ignorance.”
The ultimate wages of absolute epistemic closure on the modern GOP unfortunately extend far beyond simply causing them to nominate national embarrassments like Christine O’Donnell every now and again and into actual peril for the Republic.
The two political factions officially have their own “facts.” One of those factions has a 24/7 news organization, the most popular such outlet in the country, dedicated to using anything and everything as “indisputable evidence” of their set of facts; when usable material doesn’t show up on a given day, they resort to creative editing and outright fabrication. That’s what’s happening here. Obama made comments about infrastructure; creative editing makes it into a comment about business in America. Next thing you know, the Boston Globe runs a story on their front page implying there is no empirical evidence (e.g. the text of Obama’s speech as delivered); therefore “GOP says Obama hates business; Democrats say otherwise…” and no conclusion about the veracity of the claims is made or even implied. Unacceptable.
Research has repeatedly shown that once this inaccurate information such as this is “out there,” there’s just no stopping it. Primacy always wins. Even people who know the information in question is false in hindsight have difficulty accepting the “new” and correct information.
How then does Obama “prove” he isn’t a secret socialist? When did he stop beating his wife? These and other questions will plague us until the non-FOXnews contingent of the American media wakes up, realizes there’s no there there, drops this view from nowhere approach that gives us only unusable he-said-she-said nonsense, and starts thinking and acting critically (but without malice, obviously) in all dealings with figures public and semi-private. Short of somebody utterly and unexpectedly disrupting the media as it stands today, I see no other way out.

Just a Splash, Too

Apparently IOKIYAR extends to food choices:

Mitt Romney has a complicated relationship with fast food. He likes pizza, but insists on scraping off the cheese before he ever takes a bite. He likes fried chicken, but only when the skin has been removed. He likes Big Macs, but only after removing the middle bun. He likes Coca Cola because, he explained in his 2004, book Turnaround, it reminds him of polar bears, but he rarely drinks it because he can’t have caffeine. On the trail, Romney has name-dropped Carl’s Jr. and spoken of the wonders of WaWa, but subsists mainly on granola he carries around in one-gallon ziplock bags.

Yes, I understand this is all in service of a broader piece on Mitt’s relationship to Big Food. But, let’s just pause to compare this treatment to that of Candidate Obama in matters gustatory:

SHUSTER: Well, here’s the other thing that we saw on the tape, Chris, is that, when Obama went in, he was offered coffee, and he said, “I’ll have orange juice.”

MATTHEWS: No.

SHUSTER: He did. And it’s just one of those sort of weird things. You know, when the owner of the diner says, “Here, have some coffee,” you say, “Yes, thank you,” and, “Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?” You don’t just say, “No, I’ll take orange juice,” and then turn away and start shaking hands.

You just don’t say “I’ll take orange juice.” It just isn’t done. When in a diner, one must drink the coffee. Everyone knows this. Scraping the cheese off your pizza? Couldn’t be more normal. Remove middle bun of BigMac? No problem, not even worth mentioning, actually. Carry around a few pounds of flavorless mush you call Rootmarm, diff’rent strokes &c. But order orange juice. In a diner?!? Unimaginable. The most shocking thing since (as MoDo told us) “John Kerry sank himself by windsurfing in spandex and ordering a cheese steak in Philly with Swiss instead of Cheez Whiz.” Truly, Candidate Kerry was history’s greatest monster.
And, frankly, can you imagine the level the emasculation meter would go to if it came out that Obama “subsists mainly on granola” out on the trail? Surely the Republic would fall to pieces. More, I mean.

If we’re going to focus relentlessly on the idiotic, can’t we at least apply the beloved false equivalency principle to that as well? Mitt removes middle bun; Democrats for middle bun. Opinions differ. Or, can we simply agree that everyone on this Earth has an odd eating preference of some stripe and just stop mentioning them. All of them. I, for one, just don’t care how my President (past, present, or future) takes his cheesesteak, or if he or she likes them at all, or if Rootmarm is what really turns their crank.
Likewise: diners. Find someplace new, media. There are a million doors in the naked city, and lots of them lead to rooms full of “common” people and are not, in fact, diners. Pie is even served in many of those rooms. So you know. Just imagine the possibilities.

Krugman Nails It

New York City Romney Donor in Land Cruiser: “We’ve got the message. But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”

Krugman: “So I was curious: what do “nails ladies” earn? The answer, according to the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics, is that in 2010 the mean annual wage of Manicurists and Pedicurists was $21,760. Among other things, this means that nails ladies probably face a higher marginal effective tax rate than Romney donors.”

Lemkin: A truly agile messaging arm in a tight election year would have had Krugman responding to this linkage, not making it. This is why we fail.