August, 2012 archive
Football uber Alles, Stoking the Machine 0
The local rag has a breathless gee-whiz story with a banner headline, backed by five-inch high color pictures, on the front page of today’s sports section. The story itself takes up two full inner pages with no ads.
It’s about the prospects of rising senior football gladiators, what kind of years they might have, what their prospects are for this season and for their futures following graduation.
Rising high school seniors.
And later this season there will no doubt be many columns agonizing about how this college football program or that high school football program or this player or that player went so far wrong with some transgression or other.
Not that there could be any relationship, oh no, not at all, move along now, nothing to see here.
“What’s the Plan?” 0
The week in #RomneyShambles. It’s 20 minutes of worth it.
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Ryan’s Smoke 0
Oh, my, what is poor Paulie Ryan to do: Confess lying about not requesting stimulus funds or claim ignorance of his subordinates’ actions?
“After having these letters called to my attention I checked into them, and they were treated as constituent service requests in the same way matters involving Social Security or Veterans Affairs are handled,” Ryan said in a statement late Thursday. “This is why I didn’t recall the letters earlier.”
Betting on ignorance, I see.
Probably a safe bet.
Indeed, some voters seem to think of ignorance as a qualification.
Facebook Frolics, Take the Money and Run Dept. 0
The voyage to AOL land continues.
Shares in the world’s largest social-networking service fell 4.1 percent to $19.05 at the close in New York yesterday. Facebook had dropped to as low as $19, after the number of shares available for trading increased 60 percent two days ago.
I saw in Readers Digest that there’s a new term to describe a stock that opens with great hype and, like Humpty-Dumpty, falls from the hypes:
Zucked.
A Pox on Both Their Houses 0
At Tampa Bay dot com, Robyn Blumner considers Mike Lofgren’s new book.
Lofgren is a long-time Republican operative who is fed up with both parties. A snippet:
As to Republicans, Lofgren’s book is a foghorn warning, an open-mouthed scream that would scare even Edvard Munch. He says his party has been hijacked by opportunists and true believers who have transformed it from the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower into one of “crackpots” like Eric Cantor, Steve King, Michele Bachmann and Allen West.
In Lofgren’s experience, the new Republican Party wants to remake the country as “an upside-down utopia in which corporations rule; the Constitution, like science, is faith-based; and war is the first, not the last, resort in foreign policy.”
Frankly, I don’t much disagree. My own Democratic voting record is born as much of “consider the alternative” as of anything else. The Democratic Party hasn’t had much of an identifiable program since LBJ. They haven’t gotten much right, but they sure as hell get a lot less wrong.
And, honest to Pete, do think of the alternative.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Stand in line to pick up your prescription with courtesy.
From my local rag (the survivor disputes the police account and claims the other guy drew first; anecdotes cited in the article, q. v., indicate that the deceased tended to be confrontational):
Gun Nut Paradise approacheth apace. Every city, Dodge City; every hill, Boot Hill.
Wo-Wo-Wo-Wo-Wildwood Days 3
When we used to go to Wildwood, the Big Johnson tee-shirts were about as risque as it got.
They seem to be on the tame side these days.
No-no-no-no-nobody does tacky like Wildwood.
Makes me want to go back.
The (Job) Creationism Myth 0
At McClatchy, Scott Klinger takes a look at some of those who have benefited most from Bush’s tax cuts. A nugget.
Then there’s Dave Cote, Honeywell’s CEO. The Bush tax cuts saved him about $2.5 million that he would otherwise have had to pay on his $55 million income last year. Cote is a high-profile crusader for low taxes on corporations and the wealthy. As a member of the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission, he supported cuts to Social Security and Medicare while pushing for reductions to his own taxes.
Cote’s insistence that U.S. corporate taxes are too high is ironic, given his own firm’s ability to dodge them. Over the last three years, Honeywell reported $2.5 billion in U.S. pre-tax income and yet got net tax benefits back from the government worth $377 million. It’s also notable that Honeywell is no U.S. “job creator.” The corporation shrunk its U.S. workforce from 58,000 to 53,000 over the last three years, while offshoring 4,000 jobs.
It’s welfare for the rich.
The Galt and the Lamers 0
Ed Kilgore explores the appeal of Ayn Rand to teenage boys.
I suspect he is over-thinking this.
The appeal is simpler: glorifying selfishness as the ultimate value is quite enough to attract this demographic.
Fortunately, most teenage boys grow up and grow out of glorifying selfishness. Unfortunately, too many of the ones that don’t grow out of it do make it onto Republican tickets.
Speaking of objectification, I recall hearing a biographer of Ayn Rand intervideo on the talking box (no, I can’t remember who–it was two years ago). She said that, when she was in college, she learned early that boys who were wrapped up in Ayn Rand’s theories were not good dates.