TL;DW:
Rick Santorum: “I’m a lawyer, I’m Rick Santorum, I’m running for president, God hates fags.”
College student: “You’re a fucking idiot, go read some science, you fucking idiot.”
Rick Santorum: “Science is just what a bunch of gay scientists say it is.”
Everyone sane: facepalm.
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A homeless guy bummed a cigarette off of me today and sat down beside me to chat, during which time he saw a woman and her husband taking their granddaughter out for a stroll in the afternoon sun. He said, “Hey, Christina,” and then went over and chatted with her for a minute or so, returning to me after he tried, and failed, to get the baby to shake his hand.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“She works at the church down the street,” he said, and proceeded to list off some of the things she’d done for him, including providing him with shoes and boots for the various New England seasons. “I asked her for her phone number once,” he continued, “but she wouldn’t give it to me. She’s got a very jealous husband.”
No, no, no, Ron-my-new-homeless-friend. Bill O’Reilly is a very jealous husband.
Last summer, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly came to believe that his wife was romantically involved with another man. Not just any man, but a police detective in the Long Island community they call home. So O’Reilly did what any concerned husband would do: He pulled strings to get the police department’s internal affairs unit to investigate one of their own for messing with the wrong man’s lady.
The story gets more salacious, if “NO ONE RESPONDED TO REQUESTS FOR INTERVIEWS” can be called “salacious” (and it can, as I just proved). Anyway, fuck Bill O’Reilly. May all his future wives have illicit sexual relations with police officers forever and ever and ever. Amen.
But, hey, at least these foreign guestworkers are organizing. It’d be nice if Americans organized their workplaces every once in a while.
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From First Read today:
In New Hampshire at 4:30 pm ET, Jon Huntsman will unveil his jobs/economy plan. According to excerpts his campaign has released, Huntsman will say, “The president believes that we can tax and spend and regulate our way to prosperity. We cannot. We must compete our way to prosperity. When I was born, manufacturing comprised 25% of our GDP; today, it’s down to 10%.” Huntsman continues, “This does not reflect a decline in American ingenuity or work ethic; it reflects our government’s failure to adapt to the realities of the 21st century economy. We need American entrepreneurs not only thinking of products like the IPhone or Segway; we need American workers building those products. It’s time for Made in America to mean something again.”
Holy shit, where to begin. First of all, America was already admirably (if not historically) prosperous before a bunch of naive home buyers, unethical bankers, and bespoke-suited gamblers with leveraged access to hundreds of billions of dollars of other people’s money came within a few deals of torpedoing the entire global economy for decades, rather than years. After the dot com bust in 2001, GDP rose from 1.1 percent to 3.1 percent by 2005 [cite], with manufacturing making up 14.4% of GDP at that time [cite]. To say that the continued decline in our manufacturing sector “reflects our government’s failure to adapt to the realities of the 21st century economy” is to admit that you have no idea what comprises a 21st century economy.
See, the way economies work is, Jon, the more prosperous and innovative a country becomes, the more leeway it has to offload the shitty, menial, repetitive, dangerous jobs like those that make up a manufacturing sector onto more desperate workers in other countries, while our own workers continue to educate themselves to the point that they don’t need to pull a lever for ten hours a day while risking the occasional digit or limb. Likewise, the invention of machines (or “magic robots,” if that’s more to your liking) that do the work of 10, 100, or 1,000 men more safely and efficiently than any human ever could may be painful in the short run to the individual worker whose job has been displaced, but in the long run, this allows that same worker to, again, educate himself into another job or field — perhaps one that didn’t even exist a few years earlier — thus preventing the job market from stagnating and curtailing the cycle of innovation.
So yes, Jon, manufacturing has declined since you were born. But you know what else has declined since then? Lots of shit. See, for example, the percentage of white people in this country. Or living members of the Beatles. Or smallpox. But as the great Stuart Smalley wonderfully illustrates in his seminal polemic, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, it’s all about context:
The point is, Jon, if we start making iPhones and Segways ourselves again, it means we’ll have taken a step backward, not a step forward, so unless you wanna start manufacturing cotton gins and LaserDisc players again too, I suggest you brush up on the 21st century economics that you feign such a concrete grasp of, because otherwise concrete is the only place your ideas will find any traction. Which is to say, concrete boots, though I suppose we could start manufacturing those too. Now that’s what I call a win win!
No power
Hour after hour
I cower in the dark
I shower in the dark
I cower in the shower
in the dark like a shark
A powerful, power-less, cowering shower shark in the dark
***
The power returns
A solitary kitchen bulb burns
The refrigerator condenser churns
As do my guts, for I yearn to return
to previous pre-electric concerns
Nonetheless: dusk adjourned
Now, if you could just do
something about my
fucking internet,
that’d be great.
Panera’s wifi is
kind of pissing
me off today.
His name is Ted, and he’s my friend. STFU. Anyhow, we got to talking about debts and deficits, and I proclaimed loudly, “The fucking deficit doesn’t matter! You didn’t care about it when Bush was president, why should you care about it now?” And I forget what he said in response, but it was surely dumb. I said, “Look at these goddamn roads,” and pointed — the road in front of us, littered with potholes and divots — “You travel all over the world for a living, do you see this shit in Europe?” Ted said nope. “Why aren’t we just saying, ‘Fuck it,’ and fixing this mess?”
Another gentleman chimed in and said something stupid (a plutocrat, through and through), and we got to talking about the capital gains tax, which he whined was a “double tax.” Wah, wah, wah, he said, I’m being taxed twice, wah. I replied, “So what? I get taxed twice, too! Everyone gets taxed a number of different times depending on what they do! I smoke cigarettes, for crying out loud! I get taxed sixty times before I even light up!”
Nah, nah, yo. Decifit, decifit, decifit. Even if they’re socially liberal New England Republicans, these fucks have bought into Teh Decifit line hook, line, and sinker. So, it’s good to read a little truth every once in a while – to wit, economically speaking, now would be a pretty great time to rebuild our shitty country, guys:
Our infrastructure is crumbling, and we know we’ll have to rebuild it in the coming years. Why do it later, when it will cost us more and we very likely won’t have massive unemployment in the construction sector, as opposed to now, when the market will pay us to invest in our infrastructure and we have an unemployment crisis to address?
As Drum, from whom I stole this link, sez:
Some decisions are hard and some decisions are easy. When someone offers you a thousand dollars on the condition that you pay back $900 in seven years, that’s one of the easy ones.
Our long-term borrowing rate is -0.34%. Unemployment is above 9%. Let’s stop pretending we have a deficit problem, please, and start realizing we have an unemployment problem.
Perhaps I wasn’t entirely fair to Vermont, as there seems to be a rather serious flooding situation going on a bit north of me (you’ll pardon our skepticism after all of the brouhaha, won’t you?). That said, this video of the National Guard driving into a flood and creating a bigger problem than the flood itself is somewhat… telling? I don’t want to sound like a glibertarian, or like Ron Paul, but the hype around this storm, while probably saving lives, was so ridiculously out of proportion to its real-world effects as to be almost laughable in hindsight. Emphatically here, the precautionary measures taken to prevent the loss of life were both admirable and sound. But equally emphatically, the frenzy stirred up by the media was hysterical and nonsensical. Realistically, there was no way the Eastern Seaboard was going to go without power for weeks on end. Television personalities had no qualms whatsoever about painting that as a very real possibility. They took a Category 1 storm and projected Category 4 results up and down the coastline through Portland, Maine.
Someone somewhere else on the Internet said it better than me, but if weather forecasters spent a fraction of the time they do reporting anomalous events to report on issues like Climate Change, we’d have a far more robust dialogue about the issue.
On to the video!
Submitted without comment:
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According to his new memoir (which I will not be linking to here, waterboard you very much), Dick Cheney offered to resign three times back in 2004, to no avail.
“If President Bush felt he had a better chance to win with someone else as his running mate, I wanted to make sure he felt free to make the change,” Cheney wrote.
[...]
Bush dismissed the first two immediately, Cheney said. But the third time Cheney offered, Bush took some time to think it over.
“I really pushed hard and said, Mr. President, you really need to sit down and think about this,” Cheney said. “And that time, he did. And then he came back and he said, ‘No, I’ll leave it the way it is, Dick.’ ”
So close. Soooooooooooo close.
On one shelf near a rack of pea coats, there was actually a real book, a fiction novel. A quote inside said:
“We have to distinguish between playing by the rules and making the rules”
- George Soros
I didn’t say anything out loud, I just kept looking for decent coats my dad might enjoy and might even feel compelled to pay for. But after getting ice cream (but no coat), walking through the park, and driving home, I looked up the full context for the quote.
A New York Review of Books article captures Soros, investor-philanthropist, citing himself from a book he wrote in 1998. Continuing from the above, he improvises: “…Playing by the rules, one does the best one can, irrespective of the social consequences. Whereas in making the rules, people ought to be concerned with the social consequences and not with their personal interests — in other words, not to bend the rules to their benefit or their advantage. This is a principle which I have certainly observed.”
The original, extended text is a bit more refined… but at any rate, the key insight Soros offers is that democracy is not a partner for capitalism, but rather, a counterbalance.
A few hours earlier, my parents and I went to the Boston Public Library. In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, they had a fiddle duet playing in the courtyard — dancing Bacchus fountain shut off — while an elderly black man in a grey shirt, and red suspenders and necktie read selected poems and verses into a microphone. We ate sandwiches in the shade and, annoyingly, out of the direction in which the tinny amplifiers projected his voice.
The library had a modest exhibition set up, consisting of maps of the United States in the time leading up to the war’s beginning. From what I gathered, the gist of the exhibit was to show geographic disparity underpinning great differences between the north and south. This includes much more than classic images of industry and agriculture, and it is best embodied in the hand-written missives of a plantation man whose family owned land for generations. The 57-year old was quoted as saying, “… they label us slave-mongering demons, but they trap factory workers in a life of debt that never ends. Their workers have no freedom, and my slaves are better treated than any factory girl of theirs. My workers are fed well and kept healthy, while theirs starve and freeze to an early death from their working conditions. And if we have not the right to govern ourselves, they want us to throw away the Constitution of these United States. We have no reason to be united with them any longer and would well be rid of them.”
Stumbling upon Soros’ quote inked 138 years after the landowner’s seemed to bookend a thought: that incompatible political views of freedom will always exist in America — but also, some people will be trapped under any view. Are wage slaves today or yesterday really more free than plantation slaves? And, did the Union army successfully steamroll over the debate?
In a way, my parents carry the tension with them. We saw a black boy in a straw hat peddling a swan boat full of plucky tourists back to the wooden dock where other crew and tourists were setting out for a tour of the duck pond. I said to my mom that the scene looked like a distant time and place before the Civil War, to which she and my dad both replied, “Well, it’s a job.” I never like hearing that, and we launched into talking about why some groups of people are given less of a fair economic hand than others. On one hand, my mom made a comment about black students having less confidence, commitment, stick-to-it-ness, and so on. I tried to string together a reply about many black people finding less access to opportunities through rings of barriers put up by biases. On the other hand, as we were walking out of the park, my mom offered up a story that she said did indeed show bias. A black woman who was a vibrant gospel choir expert interviewing for the music director position at her school was passed over for a clumsy white woman with unimpressive training. My mom found this to be an injustice and a loss for the woman and the students, too. I said, Yes, that’s exactly the kind of bias creeping up everywhere, and not just in major moments in a life, like getting hired for a job, but in more subtle, constant ways that influence a life outlook for the person on the receiving end of things.
I’d say my parents generally play by the rules. But, in doing so, they also enforce the rules made by others. I had picked up one of the blank books and put it down on a table of shirts, but it was gone when I turned around and I didn’t give it a second thought — I assumed someone roving the store put it back on a shelf, neatly out of place. But my dad thought it was mine and carried it with a newspaper out of the store. We all got a laugh, and I got a new sketchpad with a white elephant logo on the spine.
