Get Rich By Running For Office

I'm not sure I have a huge problem with this, but there is definitely something about it that stinks just a little.

“All candidates publish books and they offer them as premiums to donors, but most candidates aren’t buying them from their own companies,” he said. “It raises the question of his campaign contributions ending up in his own pocket.”

Read all about it over at Bloomburg.

Occupy Dylan Ratigan

Here's an old-ish rant from a Dylan Ratigan show that aired a few months ago.  I dunno if this is really what it's all about, but it's pretty close.  The corrosive influence of money has to be addressed.   And I love the passion - reminds me of what I get criticized for all the time.  I kinda like the overly dramatic soundtrack too.

Signage

(From Occupy Wall Street) A couple of indications that this was definitely not a Tea Party rally:
1) The message is a bit long, so it requires some higher brain function to process the meaning.
2) All the words are spelled right.

Signage

From Occupy Boulder - an important message from an important bunch of voters.  (hat tip to JR)

My Kinda Veteran

As long as the protesters fit the hippie/hipster stereotype, the police can function within a comfortable frame of reference. But throw 'em a curve, and they're lost - it blows their programming all to pieces.

Bunny Hitler

It's a good idea to mock these assholes for a thousand eternities.  This is what hell is about for a nonbeliever like me.  If there's any possibility of an afterlife, then it's important to make sure that every time Adolf tunes in to find out what's happening, what he sees is many many people reiterating what a fuckin' jerk he was.

James Fallows - Again

The guy is fast becoming one of my faves.

Critical of a recent WaPo article, Mr Fallows writes:

- It reflects so thorough an absorption of the idea that the filibuster-threat is normal business that it describes the latest cloture vote as a vote on the bill itself: "Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Jon Tester (Mont.), who are both up for reelection next year, took to the Senate floor and delivered a sizeable blow to the bill's prospects by voting against it." No, they voted against the cloture measure, which they knew had zero chance of getting the necessary 60 votes. Several other Democrats with doubts about the bill itself nonetheless were persuaded to vote for cloture, so that it would end up with a symbolic but ineffective 51-vote majority.

Yay James Fallows

From The Atlantic:

'Enabler' problem: The reluctance of the mainstream media to call this what it is, and instead to talk about "partisanship" and "logjam" and "dysfunction." Yes, those are the results. But the cause is intentional, and it comes overwhelmingly from one side.

I tend to read Fallows as a "goodguy conservative".  ie: He has a point of view that's generally "more right-of-center" than mine, but he understands (and has begun insisting) that policies have to be in line with facts and not ideology.

I think I see many more signs that a real shift could be taking place.

Yay David Frum - Kinda

From truthout:

This is not a moment for government to be cutting back. … Right now we’re watching state governments try to balance all of their budgets at the same time in the middle of this crisis. We’ve seen half a million public sector jobs disappear. Now, if these were good times, I would applaud that. We need to see a thinner public sector — especially at the state and local level. But we’re seeing what happens when you do that as an anti-recession measure and you make the recession worse. And even though we’re in a technical recovery, incomes and employment — all of that remains lagging for people — I think that we’ve rediscovered in this crisis something that I think we all knew. Which is, there’s a reason why the people of the 1930s built some kind of minimum guarantee — unemployment insurance, health care coverage and things like that. And it’s not because they wanted to be nice. It’s because in a crisis when people lose their jobs, if there is no social safety net they loose 100 percent of their purchasing power.

Even tho' I agree with him on the basics of keeping Government under control, I've not been much of a fan of Lil Davey Frum because there was always something in the way he spoke that sounded hollow.  The piece from truthout goes a good way to explaining it.  Maybe it's just that it's always good to find out there are others who think like me. Dunno, but Frum has a decent-sized audience, and while he won't be delivering them to the Dems, leading them away from the Extreme Right should be a good thing.

A Gentle Reminder

The New Colossus

By Emma Lazarus, 1883

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Victoria Jackson - Super Genius

I remain unconvinced that she's not making a fairly lame attempt at satire.

Signage

From my quick trip last Thursday up to DC to check on Occupy K Street.

Elizabeth Warren

I'm a Capitalist because God's a Capitalist.  And I favor regulation because God favors regulation.

Signage

The Jobs Bill

Obama asked the Senate to put aside their rancor for a moment in order to try something that might help get a coupla million Americans a little help finding work.  And the Senate replied:

Tech Solutions For The Revolution

Whenever the rabble get a little riled up and start to do that icky and unsanitary thing called "a protest", the establishment (or powers that be, or whatever you choose to label them) always try to tamp the thing down by interfering with the crowd's ability to communicate.  In Iran and Egypt and practically every other arab state where protests sprang up, the governments took down the internet, or they suspended cellphone service or they blocked twitter - they did whatever they thought would be the most disruptive to the protestors' need to communicate and coordinate.  It's a primary tactic in every conflict, and every government does it whenever they feel threatened.  Remember that the USSR banned fax machines for years, and when they finally allowed them, each machine had to be registered and each transmission was monitored and recorded.  That's how threatening free and open communication is to any government, including here in the good ol' USofA.

Occupy Wall Street has struggled with NYC's prohibition on the use of amplification in public spaces.  Their work-around has been to use humans to relay the speakers' words out to the crowd by simply repeating what the speakers are saying.  Semi-brilliant in that it's organic and cheap and very "community-ish".  I imagine it also tends to work in favor of keeping the oratorical blather to a minimum.

I'm wondering, tho', if maybe there's a better solution that serves the purpose and stays within the law.  What if you just put together a conference call?  One quick pass thru Google and I found a company offering "free" conference calling, allowing up to 1,000 listen-only participants.  If you had a thousand cell phones scattered thru the crowd (on external speaker), it'd be like one of those church services at the old drive-in theater setups.

There must be other tech solutions too.  Get thinkin', you guys.

This Is What You Call A Recovery?

To go along with Bush's Jobless Recovery, now we get Obama's Wageless Recovery.  And it kinda makes sense in a weird, Compendium-of-Official-Horse-Shit kind of way.  We already have the Non-Denial Denial, and the Non-Apology Apology - now we can add the Non-Recovery Recovery.

NYT

Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent.

It gets harder and harder for me to justify voting for Obama again.  I'll probably stick with him because the alternative (so far) just seems too terrible to contemplate.  That could change tho'.  Everybody has to decide; at what point are you willing just to let the fuckin' thing burn?

OWS Statement

Oo-rah

And what would you like to say to Sean Hannity?

Megan And Me

Megan McArdle in The Atlantic:

I spent quite a lot of time on the "We are the 99%" website last night and this morning. There's been a considerable amount of carping about it from the conservative side, and to be sure, some of the stories strain plausibility (the percentage of people in the sample who have either taken up prostitution, or claim to have seriously considered doing so, seems rather high, for instance, and as far as I could tell, not a single person on the site had been fired for cause). Many of the people complaining made all sorts of bad decisions about having children, getting very expensive "fun" degrees, and so forth.

But quibbling rather misses the point. These are people who are terrified, and their terror is easy to understand. Jobs are hard to come by, and while you might well argue that any of these individuals could find a job if they did something different, in aggregate, there are not enough job openings to absorb our legion of unemployed.

When the gap between the number of job openings and the number of people who are out of work is so large, there are going to be a hefty number of unemployed people. Maybe these people individually could have done more to get themselves out of their situation, but at the macro level, that would just have meant that someone else was out of work and suffering.

I think it's hard to read through this list of woes without feeling both sympathy, and a healthy dose of fear. Take all the pot shots you want at people who thought that a $100,000 BFA was supposed to guarantee them a great job--beneath the occasionally grating entitlement is the visceral terror of someone in a bad place who doesn't know what to do. Having found myself in the same place ten years ago, I can't bring myself to sneer. No matter how inflated your expectations may have been, it is no joke to have your confidence that you can support yourself ripped away, and replaced with the horrifying realization that you don't really understand what the rules are. Yes, even if you have a nose ring.

I'm not sure that this constitutes the seeds of a political movement, however. For all the admiring talk about bravery and perseverance, it's not really al that difficult to get young, unemployed people to spend a couple of weeks camping out somewhere. They have a low cost of time, they're in no danger, and yes, I have to say it, demonstrating is fun. No, don't tut-tut me. I was at the ACT-UP die-ins, the pro-choice marches, the "Sleep Out for the Homeless" events and the "Take Back the Night" vigils. It's fun, especially when you can see yourself on television. This is not the Montgomery bus boycott we're talking about here.

So my question is, how does this coalesce into a broader platform? Does someone have a coherent, plausible answer for someone whose pricey liberal arts degree has not equipped them for a tough job market? And is it a coherent, plausible answer that they will believe? I don't think those kids in Zucotti park are waiting to hear about QE3 and the American Jobs Act.

My posted comment:

Nice try, Ms McArdle.

Was this supposed to make yourself sound almost human? ("Many of the people complaining made all sorts of bad decisions about having children, getting very expensive "fun" degrees, and so forth.") 

And almost kinda bright? ("When the gap between the number of job openings and the number of people who are out of work is so large, there are going to be a hefty number of unemployed people.")

They pay you for this?

Let's be really clear on a couple of points. First, the people who do the hiring and set the policies in practically every business are not overly troubled at the prospect of having 15 or 30 or 100 applicants for every job posted, because it means they can pick up some pretty great talent at ridiculously low prices. It's called Free Market Economics, and it's exactly the kind of Labor Market most of the big players have been working towards for at least 30 years. Do you have any research help at all, or do you simply choose to ignore it?

Second, your little puff piece here is a classic example of how you Press Poodles have become completely disconnected from what's happening. Mocking the choices people make does nothing about the effects of those choices. You say you don't want to sneer at these people, and then you sneer at them anyway. Typical of the snobbery of Corporate Media, you build a false reality by trying to substitute 'what if' for what actually is.

Also typical - your reporting is so lousy that your analysis has no credibility at all.