2008 archive
First Son Is Home 0
and still in one piece.
I was wondering today, was the Current Federal Administrator not allowed to play with Army men when he was younger?
Is that what’s behind all this playing with others’ lives for a lie?
A Scientific Explanation for “Republican Districts” 0
By extrapolation, bet this occurs in the voting booth, too:
In other words, they were practicing the error, reinforcing the incorrect pattern of brain activation that originally caused it.
Humphreys’ advice: If you just can’t figure something out, “stop trying; you’re just digging yourself in deeper.”
Final Four 0
Who cares.
College basketball went to hell when it instituted the shot clock.
Now, Where Was I before I Was So Rudely Interrupted . . . 1
A little enforced vacation from blogging this week. I’m juggling three projects, one of them winding down and two of them starting up. My cold has, in the way of this bug, settled into a cough that doesn’t want to go away. Something had to give, and what gave was what doesn’t put food on the table. . . .
So, who missed me? One person I can name (I won’t, to protect the innocent). Otherwise, my little vacation had, I am sure, no effect on the blogosphere, or, for that matter, on anything else.
So, what have I missed? Not much.
The economy has spun a few more rounds down the toilet, thanks the the NeoCon delusion that making the rich richer does anything other than, well, make the rich richer.
The Current Federal Administration continues to fail in its effort to spin silk from its sow’s ear in Iraq, while the so-called Iraqi “government” (which, remember, hardly exists outside the Green Zone) demonstrated its toothlessness.
Meantime, the realities on the ground were brutally laid bare over the last two weeks by the fighting in Basra: Iraq’s security situation is better than in its darkest days, but remains fragile. The hope has dimmed that improved security will enable Iraqi factions to reconcile, and the Iraqi army is far from ready for prime time.
At the same time, the Current Federal Administrator continued to demonstrate its allegiance to special effects in touting a “missile defense shield” that has everything going for it except the Laws of Physics:
But I’m back . . . .
Delaware Repels Boarders 0
A very long while ago, I wrote about New Jersey’s attempt to invade Delaware with an LNG port.
The Supreme Court has ruled. Delaware’s boundaries are, well, Delaware’s boundaries.
As I mentioned at the time, all New Jersey has to do is more it a couple of miles upriver, and it will be within New Jersey.
Misspeak 0
Contrary to my beliefs, there is such a word, and it has a history that predates political apologias.
Howsomever, what it means is not how it’s being used today, which seems to be defined as “I didn’t think my lie would be caught out and I’m not going to admit I was lying“:
But we all know what went on in Hillary’s case, don’t we? I’m not sure there is a word that specifically means ’embellishing an anecdote in order to make oneself sound more interesting’, but we need a word for that and ‘misspeak’ will do as well as any. (‘Embell-self-glamming’ would be more fun, but its construction sounds a little German. And the Germans probably don’t do it. They’re more likely to need a word which means ‘downplaying an anecdote in order to make oneself sound slightly less efficient’ and I expect they’ve got one. Coined years ago, neatly prepared in case of future-use requirement.)
Are You Being Served? 1
Looking for an investment? Here’s a growth industry:
Last month, 7,499 foreclosure actions were filed in Miami-Dade and Broward counties alone.
(Via McClatchy.)
You get to meet nice people like this lady:
Walter Sellers, who arranged financing for the car, was moonlighting as a mortgage salesman and dangled a $1,220 monthly payment in front of her until the night before closing last May, she said, when he told her it would really be $1,790.
“He floored me,” she said. It got even worse the next day at closing, when she learned that the $1,790 payment did not include taxes and insurance, which amount to $310 a month.
“I guess if it had been $1,790, I wouldn’t have” applied for the loan, Keeley said recently at her dining room table in Aston, Delaware County, with her 6-year-old granddaughter at her side.
Sellers, who said he could not remember Keeley, declined to comment on her situation.
Why didn’t she run? Read a little further into the story:
“I trusted this man so much. He seemed like my friend,” Keeley said of Sellers, recalling how he sat at her dining room table last April to gather information for the application.
(snip)
“People who are in the business of bait-and-switch marketing know what they are doing,” Ackelsberg said. “They wait to change the terms until the transaction has progressed to a point where they know that it will be nearly impossible, psychologically, for the consumer to say no.”
Meanwhile, back on the preserve
Light Blogging 0
This cold just won’t go away.
Kangaroo Courts 0
If they speak Arabic, they are guilty until proven innocent. From Josh Marshall:
3
A while ago, I linked this post from Phillybits concerning a rightwing teacher’s spreading wingnut poison in public school.
Now comes another chapter in the story:
In a letter to the editor, the girl’s two older sisters — who described themselves as American Muslim kids who love their country — said the teacher told the fifth-grade class that she is a Republican and that Obama “believes in different things and is scary.”
Obama, a Christian, has been trying to dispel myths about his religion across the country.
What his camp calls “smear e-mails” have circulated nationally for months claiming the Illinois senator is Muslim. His campaign Web site notes Obama’s response in a January debate on MSNBC: “In the Internet age, there are going to be lies that are spread all over the place. I have been victimized by these lies. Fortunately, the American people are, I think, smarter than folks give them credit for.”
The Indian River teacher’s remarks allegedly occurred prior to a mock Feb. 5 Super Tuesday primary vote at Lord Baltimore Elementary School.
This is what separation of church and state is about. It is not right to have an agent of the state (that is, a public school teacher) attempting to influence political choices.
Well, we could stop there, couldn’t we? But let’s finish the thought:
It is not right to have an agent of the state (that is, a public school teacher) attempting to influence political choices to further a particular religious point of view.
Even if it weren’t–as in this case–based on a lie.
Dragging the Economy Down 1
And anyone who tells you that middle income families can easily find reasonably-priced health insurance on the open market has never had to pay for his or her own health insurance.
My new health insurance policy that I am happy to have and which, frankly, will never be any use to me unless my son or I end up in the hospital (which means I hope it will never be any use to me) is equal to almost half my mortgage payment PITI–more than half my mortgage payment PI–(30 year straight 5.75%) per month.
The main reason: spiraling health-care costs have been whacking away at their wages. Even though workers are producing more, inflation-adjusted median family income has dipped 2.6 percent — or nearly $1,000 annually since 2000.
Employees and employers are getting squeezed by the price of health care. The struggle to control health costs is viewed as crucial to improving wages and living standards for working Americans. Employers are paying more for health care and other benefits, leaving less money for pay increases. Benefits now devour 30.2 percent of employers’ compensation costs, with the remaining money going to wages, the Labor Department reported this month. That is up from 27.4 percent in 2000.
Drinking Liberally 0
Tomorrow, 6-9 p.m., Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia. Another month and it will be warm enough to dine al fresco, assuming Al shows up, of course.
Stand in for me.
I’m on Day Nine of the Worst Cold I’ve Had in Five Years.
The doctor told me it’s been hanging on as much as three weeks with some people. Sort of like Bush Cheney–just won’t go away even with you are sick to death of it.
Sacrificed for a Lie 0
See the full-sized image here (it’s very large).
Image from Huffington Post via Phillybits.
Brendan has a personal reflection.
Delaware Liberal has some thoughts.
Bushonomics 0
The Guardian:
“1931,” was his answer.
Oh, so we’re going to be two years past the worst of the worst, I said, assuming he meant we’d be heading away from our equivalent of 1929, when Wall Street crashed and the go-go economy ground to a halt.
Wrong. What he meant was that we’d be in the true dog days. For although 1929 marks the start of the economic malaise that gripped the world through the second world war, as Paul Krugman wrote recently in the New York Times, it wasn’t until 1930-31 that the full effect of the aftershocks was felt, ultimately resulting in runs on banks and wholesale unemployment. The event that history records as the Great Depression was, at least initially, only a severe recession. Not until the banks failed did the basic working premises of a complex market economy actually cease to function.
Wooden Anniversary 0
The Demon Princess looks back:
Follow the link. There’s much worth reading.
Bushonomics 2
Making the rich, richer; the poor, poorer.
Robert Reich on “Moral Hazard”:
CEOs get away with stupid mistakes all the time. Some, like Robert Nardelli, the former CEO of Home Depot, drive their company’s stock low that their boards eventually oust them. But they leave with eye-popping going-away presents nonetheless. (Nardelli got several hundrd million dollars on his departure.) If you’re an average American who gets canned from his job, even through no fault of your own, you probably won’t even get unemployment insurance (only 40 percent of job-losers qualify these days). Conservatives tell us that unemployment insurance reduces their incentive to find a new job quickly. In other words, moral hazard.
Some CEOs use bankruptcy as a means of getting out from under pesky labor contracts they might have “known they could not afford” when they agreed to them (Northwest Airlines most recently, for example). Others use it as a cushion against bad bets. Donald (“you’re fired!”) Trump’s casino empire has gone into bankruptcy twice — most recently, last November, when it listed $1.3 billion of liabilities and $1.5 million of assets — with no apparent diminution of the Donald’s passion for risky, if not foolish, endeavor. After all, his personal fortune is protected behind a wall of limited liability, and he collects a nice salary from his casinos regardless. But if you’re an ordinary person who has fallen on hard times, just try declaring bankruptcy to wipe the slate clean. A new law governing personal bankruptcy makes that route harder than ever. Its sponsors argued — you guessed it — moral hazard.
Bush’s “ownership society” has proven a cruel farce for poor people who tried to become home owners, and his minuscule response to their plight just another example of how conservatives use moral hazard to push their social-Darwinist morality. The little guys get tough love. The big guys get forgiveness.