In the coming days we will force members of Congress to vote on the individual proposals in the American Jobs Act. They’ll have a chance to vote on whether they believe we should keep teachers out of work or whether we should put them back in the classroom where they belong. They’ll get to vote on whether they believe construction workers should stay unemployed while our roads and bridges fall apart, or whether we should put these men and women back to work rebuilding America. They’ll be forced to decide whether we should cut taxes for middle class Americans or let them go up next year.

Barack Obama talks tough. Finally. Imagine if we’d had this guy (and every other Democrat) out there saying words like these starting on January 21, 2009 and then continuing to say them every day since, each and every time a microphone turned on. The economic and legislative situation might well be very much the same, but the political situation would be very different indeed.

Skynet once again uses its (apparently not all that limited) time-travel device, this time to send a far more advanced liquid metal T-1000 Terminator back to 1990s L.A., this time to kill the ten-year-old John Connor (played by the extremely annoying Edward Furlong [13], whose voice keeps cracking pubescently and who’s just clearly older than ten), and that the intrepid human Resistance has somehow captured, subdued, and “reprogrammed” an old Schwarzenegger-model Terminator – resetting its CPU’s switch from TERMINATE to PROTECT, apparently [14] – and then has somehow once again gotten one-time access to Skynet’s time-travel technology [15] and sent the Schwarzenegger Terminator back to protect young J.C. from the T-1000’s infanticidal advances. [16]

David Foster Wallace again provides a singularly descriptive sentence; this one for T2. Imagine if all capsule descriptions read like this.

Most Republican voters believe, with good reason, that Romney stands a strong chance of winning the nomination and beating President Obama. The question is whether he would put repeal front and center—whether he would emphasize it in the general election campaign, and whether he would go to the mat for repeal once in office. Would Romney’s campaign build enough momentum for repeal to achieve 60 votes in the Senate and defeat a potential filibuster? If not, would Romney be willing to advance repeal in the Senate via reconciliation, the complicated and unconventional process that takes only 50 votes but which would also require a far greater expenditure of political capital?

Jeffery H. Anderson makes me wonder if he’s even been paying attention. If we assume that the posited chain of events occurs: GOP holds some kind of House majority and gains a new but non-60 vote majority in the Senate (and, of course, President Mittmentum) then it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to derive the complex psychohistorical formulas for what happens next?!?!?
The GOP eliminates (by simple majority) the filibuster on the first day of the new Congress. The MSM declares this an entirely reasonable, “sensible center” approach to governing. Wholesale dismantlement of the New Deal follows, coupled to and justified by the oncoming tax revenue collapse from a 0% effective tax rate on the rich and consumption-based, maximally regressive tax on everyone else.
It’s what they’ve been talking about for years. They are entirely serious. They mean to do it at the first opportunity, and this would be it. There will be no fiddling with reconciliation or anything approaching “normal order” as we define it in 2011. How many times do they have to say this stuff before someone in the MSM takes them seriously and asks a follow-up or two? Or, for that matter, before The Democrat starts using these positions against them. (Shrill! Class War!!).
The far-right GOP candidates and elected officials are not “blowing smoke” or “providing red meat” for the “true believers.” This is who they are. Everyone else can kindly go die in the streets.

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage.

Paul Krugman, hosting another edition of Krugman Explains it All in 200 Words or Less. Shrill.
Source: The New York Times

Fox wants to cut our salaries in half because it says it can’t afford to continue making [The Simpsons] under what it calls the existing business model. Fox hasn’t explained what kind of new business model it has formulated to keep the show on the air, but clearly the less money they have to pay us in salary, the more they’re able to afford to continue broadcasting the show. And to this I say, fine — if pay cuts are what it will take to keep the show on the air, then cut my pay. In fact, to make it as easy as possible for Fox to keep new episodes of “The Simpsons” coming, I’m willing to let them cut my salary not just 45% but more than 70% — down to half of what they said they would be willing to pay us. All I would ask in return is that I be allowed a small share of the eventual profits.

My representatives broached this idea to Fox yesterday, asking the network how low a salary number I would have to accept to make a profit participation feasible. My representatives were told there was no such number. There were, the Fox people said, simply no circumstances under which the network would consider allowing me or any of the actors to share in the show’s success.

Harry Shearer makes a fantastic point in his statement about the ongoing negotiations around the 24th (sigh) season of The Simpsons.
I post this because it fairly precisely captures one of the core issues that’s grown quite pervasive in the country at the moment and is a key fact of current US society that the MSM categorically refuses to admit about the dirty fucking hippies, er, Occupy Wall Street folks.
The voice talent on this show self-admittedly make good money under the current contract terms; however, it’s a fraction of what the folks “upstairs” make off the back end of the show, a back end to which they, the folks upstairs, have contributed nothing (or at most: vanishingly little).
Faced with an entirely reasonable request that would a) keep the gravy train going –and– b) dramatically cut current salaries in exchange for a vanishingly small sliver of the real profits of the enterprise, they respond: “Nooo, I’d still prefer not.”
I guess it’s very hard to hear anyone when you’re wearing a jacuzzi suit…

I didn’t go to Harvard. You know, I went to the school of hard knocks.

Scott Brown, describing his time in the urban hellscape that is the Medford campus of Tufts University. Later in life, he took on the mean streets of Boston College Law School. Chestnut Hill is about to get real.
Also worth noting that Harvard tuition is ~$39,849. Tufts: $42,962. Warren’s actual alma mater, University of Houston? That would set you back $9,211.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

Rick Perry’s candidacy is stuck up to its wheel-wells because he once did something decent for people unlike himself and, when challenged about it, on stage, by the rest of lightweights in his party, he told the truth. If you’re attempting to get the Republican party’s nomination for president of the United States in 2012 — or any time in the future, judging by the Triple-A Ostrogoths currently populating the country’s state legislatures — and if there is anything in your background that indicates that you were once decent to people unlike yourself, you should identify that problem immediately and then lie your ass off for the balance of your presidential campaign.

By the way, have you met Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney?

Charles Pierce, getting it exactly right at his still newish blogging perch.

Recall that it’s A.D. 2027 and that there’s been a nuclear holocaust in 1997 and that chip-driven machines now rule, and “Skynet,” the archonic diabolus ex machina, develops a limited kind of time-travel technology and dispatches the now classically cyborgian A. Schwarzenegger back to 1984’s Los Angeles to find and terminate one Sarah Connor, the mother-to-be of the future leader of the human “Resistance,” one John Connor [3]; and that apparently the Resistance itself somehow gets one-time-only access to Skynet’s time-travel technology and sends back to the same space-time coordinates a Resistance officer, the ever-sweaty but extremely tough and resourceful Kyle Reese, to try desperately to protect Ms. Sarah Connor from the Terminator’s prophylactic advances [4], and so on.

David Foster Wallace turns in the most complex single sentence that ever was or ever will be written about the film Terminator.
Source: tetw