February, 2011 archive
QOTD 0
Oliver Wendell Holmes, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me.
Dustbiters 0
When will the FDIC run out of banks to shut down?
Only one in tonight’s crop:
This isn’t even news any more.
It is merely routine testament to the incompetence of an industry.
Stray Thought 0
Spring must be near.
The joggers are in bloom.
Mythbusters 0
Connie Schultz busts myths in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A nugget:
A wise man once wrote, “The working classes didn’t bring this on. It was the big boys that thought the financial drunk was going to last forever and overbought, overmerged and overcapitalized.”
That came from Will Rogers on Oct. 25, 1931.
Today, he’d be accused of engaging in class warfare.
I am reminded of the union mantra: They only call it class warfare when we fight back.
Break Time 0
Off to drink liberally.
Driving While Brown 1
Shorter Connie O’Brien (Republican member of Kansas House):
I know she’s illegal because of how she looks.
Longer version:
“My son, who’s a Kansas resident, born here, raised here, didn’t qualify for any financial aid,” according to a recording of her statement to the committee. “Yet this girl was going to get financial aid.”
“My son was kinda upset about it because he works and pays for his own schooling and his books and everything and he didn’t think that was fair. We didn’t ask the girl what nationality she was, we didn’t think that was proper. But we could tell by looking at her that she was not originally from this country,” she says on the recording.
During the meeting, Rep. Sean Gatewood, D-Topeka, asked O’Brien to clarify her remark.
“Can you expand on how you could tell that they were illegal?” Gatewood asked.
“Well, she wasn’t black,” O’Brien said. “She wasn’t Asian. And she had the olive complexion.”
Representative O’Brien denies any racist content in her words, characterizing it as an “innocent remark.”
But, you see, that’s the thing about racism. By and large, most racists don’t consider themselves as racists; they think they are normal and that everyone else is wrong.
It’s just part of how they were taught to view the world, to them as natural and innocent as an April shower.
Via Tapped, where Julianne Hing provides excellent commentary.
Update from the Foreclosure-Based Economy 0
Keeping home prices within reach (of the moneyed minority):
A “bloated supply of foreclosures and weak demand from homebuyers” are depressing the market, James J. Saccacio, RealtyTrac’s chief executive officer, said in the statement. Residential real-estate prices dropped 4.1 percent in the fourth quarter from a year a earlier, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index of home values in 20 cities.
Beer Giggles 0
I’m waiting to see the video on World’s Dumbest:
A video surveillance tape released Wednesday shows the men entering the Chevron Food Mart in La Mirada just before 4 a.m. on Jan. 23 and rushing out with $18.76 worth of snacks and beer.
The deputies, however, noticed them.
Not Your Father’s Oldmobile 0
The Oldsmobile was a middle-of-the-road middle of the price range car, sort of a Pontiac without any of that GTO pizzazz.
The Oldsmobile is no more. So too is your father’s Republican Party.
I believe that many persons, especially older persons (a demographic that includes me) who consider themselves Republicans (a demographic that excludes me) don’t realize how little today’s Republican Party shares with the Republican Party of their upbringing, the party that included Everett Dirksen, John Heinz, and Edward Brooke, just to mention a few.
I sense a longing for their fathers’s Oldsmobiles among leading members of the professional commentariat, especially the two Davids (Brooks and Broder).
Broder, indeed, has given a name to an condition: High Broderism, a syndrome which includes the willingness to sacrifice moral outcomes on the altar of the appearance of conciliation. As the Booman points out, High Broderism postulates that compromise is a one-way street: Democrats give; Republicans take.
Nothing I have read recently so illustrates how delusional is their faith in the existence of their fathers’ Oldsmobiles than Shaun Mullen’s remembrance of Russell W. Peterson, Republican Governor of Delaware from 1969 to 1973. Shaun’s conclusion:
Russ Peterson was 94 when he died on Monday night at his Wilmington home. It is sadly ironic that as a moderate Republican he would have stood no chance of being nominated today in a state where Christine O’Donnell was the party’s 2010 standard bearer, let alone become an environmental torchbearer for a party that eschews moderation and is an avowed enemy of the environment.
Several years ago, before it became a real prospect, I heard someone propose, “General Motors should just stop making Oldsmobiles and see whether anyone notices.” (Eventually, General Motors did and car buyers didn’t, but that’s another story.)
The Republican Party no longer makes Oldsmobiles and lots of folks still haven’t noticed.
Virginia Beach Democratic Committee Fourth Saturday Breakfast 0
Date: Saturday, February 26th
Time: 9-11 a. m.
Special Guest Speaker: Louisa Strayhorn, the last African American to serve on the Virginia Beach City Council
Location: Bubba’s Deli & BBQ, 3600 Dam Neck Rd, Virginia Beach (Map).
Cost: Adults $10.00, Under 12 $6.00 for all-you-can-eat buffet (it’s a pretty good buffet, too–plenty of variety).
More information here.
Dis Coarse Discourse, Twits on Twitter Dept. 0
I think part of the problem is that some of these clowns have watched too many Dirty Harry movies and really do believe that solutions flow from the end of a gun.
Mother Jones had the twit’s twits in a twist:
According to the online article , Jeff Cox tweeted “Use Live Ammunition” in response to a Mother Jones tweet reporting riot police had been called into the state capital to remove protesters.
Via Balloon Juice.
The Tea Is Out of the Bags 0
Michael Tomasky explains in the Guardian that it’s all about the monied. A nugget (emphasis added):
At the state level, most notably in Wisconsin but in other states too, conservative governors are using the financial crisis – created by Wall Street bankers and the deregulation-mad politicians who serve them – to give the bankers even more power, in effect, by trying to crush the strongest countervailing force against them in our political system – unions.
Lucy Johns, a letter writer in The Nation (vol. 292, no. 9, Februay 21, 2011, p. two, letters available online only to subscribers), discusses, a bit cynically perhaps, the movement of jobs and markets overseas as interpreted by the plutocracy. An excerpt:
Whatever motive impelled Henry Ford to pay a living wage or others of his status to tolerate government subsidies of middle-class life (the GI Bill, mortgage deduction, college tuition aid, union protection), it’s gone now. We’ve all thought such subsidy is what America was about. Not. It was about maintaining demand . . . Don’t need that demand anymore. The policies that enabled its growth are nothing but a diversion of profit to the undeserving.
