I'd like to know why Patriot Boy (aka Jesus' General) was banned from your website. The General, who is an 11 on a manly scale of absolute gender, has been nothing but a throbbing pillar of support for Pastor Steven Anderson and during the most trying times of both their lives. I'm speaking, of course, of the time the Border police beat the shit out of him when he stood up for his somewhat vague rights and then when he openly wished for the President to die and then when he sent a man named Chris Broughton to an Obama gun rally with an AR 15 (Oh sorry. It wasn't a gun rally. It was a Town Hall on health care reform. My bad).
The point I'm making is that I think you have banned him for the wrong reasons. Just because he oils up like a Spartan of old and wrestles other manly men and his fist occasionally (and purely by accident, of course) winds up in the tight rectum of another hard-bodied, glistening male it does not make him a homosexual.
Therefore. I must issue an ultimatum: Either you reinstate the General immediately or I will be forced to abandon Mr. Anderson's glorified cult, as good as the butter cookies are (the ones made by his wife whose vagina doubles as a clown car). And in that case I will join Michael Parks' somewhat more even-keeled religion as that seen in the Kevin Smith movie, Red State.
I have always hated meetings. One of the reasons I wanted to be a programmer was so that I could sit in a corner, do my work, and be left alone. But something happened along the way. For one thing, after I hit the age of 40 I started realizing that I had inherited my father's garrulousness. (My mother calls it "compulsive talking" and insists I've always had it. You decide.) And iin recent years, the supreme irony of my life is that I have found myself in a late-career career in which up to half of my time is spent in meetings. And I've found that not all meetings are a waste of time after all.
My department head has an expressed hierarchy of communication: Personal contact is best, followed by telephone, followed by e-mail. Our upcoming IT upgrade will make it so that those 7 AM teleconferences taken at home will warrant full dress and makeup, lest we be seen on webcam in fuzzy pink bathrobe with bedhead, bags under our eyes, and cat playing with the mouse pointer on our screen. But here's the thing that I've found: He's actually right.
What I do involves a lot of meetings with teams. Some of those teams are overseas, which makes face-to-face impossible, at least until we start teleconferencing. But what I've found is that especially when there are language and cultural issues, in-person and even voice contact really IS far more effective than e-mail, not to mention that when an elaborate discussion takes place via e-mail, it's often impossible to evaluate which of the e-mails you hsould keep and which can be trashed -- because someone might be responding to only one response embedded deeply in the thread, thus creating a satellite e-mail thread of its own. The result is that you can end up with dozens of e-mail messages, none of which can be trashed because each contains something not in the others.
Sometimes it's easier to just have a meeting or teleconference and write the damn minutes.
So along with all the other compromises I've had to make over the years with my Adamant Adolescent Principles, my loathing for meetings has fallen by the wayside -- provided they are effective ones.
I've found through experience is that the key to an effective meeting is to know what you want to accomplish, have a defined agenda, have a tactful way of breaking up filibusters, and remind people that if you can't get it done today, you'll have to call another meeting -- a fate worse than death. I have pretty good communication skills, largely attained while in grad school and doing the millions of presentations required as part of that lovely experience, but I would say to anyone who has to give presentations and run meetings is that the only way to learn to do it effectively without nervousness is to just do it.
They way NOT to encourage staff to have more meetings and fewer endless e-mail threads is this:
You’ve got mail–not. Employees of tech company Atos will be banned from sending emails under the company’s new “zero email” policy.
CEO Thierry Breton of the French information technology company said only 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful and 18 percent is spam. That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface.
Caroline Crouch, a spokeswoman for the company, told ABC News the goal is focused on internal emails rather than external emails with clients and partners. Atos has already reduced the number of internal emails by 20 percent in six months.
[snip]
Crouch said Atos is evaluating a number of new tools to replace internal email including collaborative and social media tools. Those include the Atos Wiki, which allows all employees to communicate by contributing or modifying online content, and Office Communicator, the company’s online chat system which allows video conferencing, and file and application sharing.
Collaborative tools are great, but I'm always skeptical when anything called a "tool" is presented as something that will solve all of the problems related to that task. While I'm hoping to look into ways to establish a permanent knowledge base next year that doesn't involve word searches through meeting minutes for the things we do that occur over and over again, and while I am an avid devotée of forums and wikis and collaborative tools and social media-type interfaces, I don't think you'll ever eliminate internal e-mail, and banning it as a top-down diktat from Mount Olympus is not the way to go about it.
Managers should not delude themselves that chat capabilities are preferable. Not a day goes by that I have an interactive chat that doesn't result in someone either saying "Let's talk by phone" or "I'll stop by", nor should they make blanket statements that internal e-mail is useless. Internal e-mail is one of the best cover-your-ass tools available. In a heavily team-oriented environment, where agreements made today may be denied tomorrow, a written, dated record is useful evidence to have; more useful even than meeting minutes, which can be dismissed later on as the interpretation of their author, unless you add even more layers of good-luck-getting-it by requiring all attendees to sign off on the minutes.
This kind of sledgehammer tactics always smack of "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." E-mail doesn't have the glamour of wikis and Facebook emulators and bad video images of your bleary-eyed colleagues in another time zone clutching cups of coffee while you're getting ready to head home for the day. But all-or-nothing ways of thinking are hardly the way to go about fostering teamwork.
It's easy to dismiss Nepali food as being 'kinda like Indian' but there are just as many differences as similarities. Although both cuisines feature plenty of curries, Nepalese dishes tend to be less spicy, and based around tomatoes, not yoghurt or coconut milk or cream.
Keen to find out more, I headed to Everest Kitchen in Marrickville for this month's Eat This column in Time Out Sydney.
(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)
It almost seems like a betrayal that, in a festering cesspool of corruption and stupidity, a man like Barney Frank would lay down his arms and walk off the field of battle. When political correctness was draped over the Beltway during the Reagan era like a wet Christo, Frank either didn't get the memo or balled it up and threw it in the circular file. However abrasive he was toward his detractors, whether it be a student full of himself, right wing pundits or misinformed Tea Bagger constituents, it can't be said that Congressman Frank suffered fools gladly.
Frank, the ranking Democrat and former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, announced yesterday that he would not be seeking reelection. His reason was that his CD had been redrawn. Frank found himself in the ironic and absurd position of fighting a wave of anti-incumbency from new constituents who've never been represented by Frank. What was once arguably the safest seat in Congress, MA-4, is now conceivably vulnerable to a Republican challenger in an ominous environment of gerrymandering that almost always seems to favor Republicans (Frank lost the entire town of New Bedford, losing in the process many reliably Democratic-voting Luso-Americans and the bedrock of his support on the South Shore).
And, most inescapably, he's 71 and understandably wants to put up his feet in his golden years.
So let me add to the growing pile of premature political elegies by saying that the beginning of Frank's farewell is almost like eulogizing intelligence itself. As any real liberal knows, it is the moral and intellectual imperative of every one of us to lampoon and pillory stupidity, ignorance and bigotry whereever we find it. It's a long established if unwritten code on the Beltway and beyond and the 16 termer took full license of that invisible rule and then some.
The Frank anecdotes are as plentiful as those of the late Molly Ivins. After being called "Barney Fag" during a Dick Armey interview, which Armey then tried to worm out of by stating it was a slip of the tongue, Frank replied, "I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag."
To a Tea Bagger who likened ObamaCare to Nazism in Dartmouth two years ago: "Madam, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table."
To ignoramuses who'd blame Frank for not being able to understand him, he'd once famously said, "I can read it for you. I cannot understand it for you."
No, Frank did not suffer fools gladly any more than did Anthony Weiner or Alan Grayson. Hopefully in '13, former Congressman Grayson will be occupying his old chair with the stubbornness of an Occupy Wall Street protester in Zuccotti Park. Congressman Frank's quick and incisive wit desperately needs to be succeeded.
As well as his quite impressive record, one that almost rivals that of Ted Kennedy, on issues ranging from financial reform, gay rights and human rights in general and the economy and how it impacted on the working class people in MA-4, the most valuable lesson that Frank has taught us is that it's OK to call a spade a spade or a moron a moron. It's that kind of Bulworth-class straight-talking that used to be part and parcel to American political discourse until Ronald "Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of a Fellow Republican" Reagan decided it was far better to hide our lights under a bushel if they threatened to torch any dessicated political egos. Barney Frank at low ebb could still make a mockery of John McCain's straight talking.
Frank shattered the longstanding tradition of politicians seriously entertaining college students. Once, on national TV, a right wing Harvard law student dutifully parroted right wing talking points by saying, "You're a public representative, I'm a student..." and Frank immediately shot back, "Which allows you to say stuff you don't back up?"
When Republicans shied away from all but soundstages owned by Rupert Murdoch, Frank was almost a regular fixture in the lion's den of Fox, always girded for battle. To a theatrically "out of control" Bill O'Reilly, an exasperated Frank finally said, "Your stupidity gets in the way of rational discussion."
Nobody was sacred to Frank whether you were a college student at a prestigious Ivy League University or a fellow member of Congress: If you were stupid, ignorant, impertinent or disrespectful, you were fair game. Barney would shoot you, bag you, hollow you out, stuff you and mount you over his mantle before it was shown to all on the 5 o'clock news. And he'd get away with it with comebacks zooming in on the weak point of a fallacious argument, ripostes mercilessly delivered with stunning dispatch and accuracy.
Sadly, Frank will never be emulated as a role model for straight talking that gleefully skewers the willfully ignorant and stupid. Parliamentary protocol, political correctness and an ever-vigilant eye on demographics and a fear on the cellular level of pissing off thin-skinned Republicans means we won't see another Barney Frank again any time soon.
But it ought to be remembered that Frank did it often enough with relative impunity that it should serve as an object lesson to all of us, both private citizens and elected officials alike, of the importance of all of us being Frank.
This is OccupyTrenton and that is the State House. As you can see, there's plenty of room for you to hold up a sign where the oligarchs can read every word.
Les islamistes modérés du Parti justice et développement (PJD) ( Alaadala wa tanmia) ont remporté les législatives du 25 novembre au Maroc avec 107 sièges sur 395, a annoncé dimanche le ministère de l'intérieur marocain. Cette victoire va permettre au roi Mohamed VI de désigner au sein de ce parti, qui comptait 47 députés dans la précédente chambre, le chef de gouvernement qui sera chargé de former un cabinet de coalition.
Si l'on se réfère aux résultats partiels complets publiés samedi, le PJD devance nettement le deuxième parti arrivé en tête, l'Istiqlal, le rassemblement national des indépendants (RNI) de l'actuel ministre ministre de l'économie, le PAM (parti de l'authenticité et de la modernité), dernier né de la classe politique, créé par un proche du roi Mohammed VI, et enfin l'union socialiste des forces populaires (USFP).
Le taux de participation s'élève à 45,4 % sur 13,5 millions d'électeurs marocains inscrits sur les listes électorales.
If Annie had discovered the divine pleasures of bone marrow, surely she would have sung a different tune.
Marrow is the only thing on our minds when we head to BLACK by ezard, the latest venture by Melbourne chef Teage Ezard, opening at The Star casino. Ezard is the creative force behind two hat restaurant ezard and Asian street food diner
At The Political Carnival, there's a cool list of referrals for gifts for EVERYONE on your list. (Here at Casa la Brilliant, we succumbed to the Siren Song of Cupertino by taking the bait so we can tentatively dip our toes the Cult of Mac via a Mac Mini. Discounted Apple products? Steve Jobs is already spinning.)
These gals just don't post enough. Margaret and Helen put forth their Thanksgiving Rules.
And finally...go visit Monkeyfister for a video that tells it like it is about turkey. (A bit late for Thanksgiving, but if you're one of those people that thinks a turkey dinner should be re-run at Christmas during the Lockup:Raw marathon on MSNBC, it might be useful. As for me, I already have the traditional Christmas ham. Because nothing honors the birth of a Jewish baby like pork products.)
President Obama did not include any reference to God during his weekly address titled, “On Thanksgiving, Grateful for the Men and Women Who Defend Our Country.”
His remarks were void of any religious references although Thanksgiving is a holiday traditionally steeped in giving thanks and praise to God.
The president said his family was “reflecting on how truly lucky we truly are.”
For many Americans, though, Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on how blessed and thankful they are.
The president said the “most American of blessings” is the “chance to determine our own destiny.”
He called the very first Thanksgiving a “celebration of community”
“We’re also grateful for the Americans who are taking time out of their holiday to serve in soup kitchens and shelters, making sure their neighbors have a hot meal and a place to stay,” he said. “This sense of mutual responsibility – the idea that I am my brother’s keeper; that I am my sister’s keeper – has always been a part of what makes our country special.”
The president said that belief is “one of the reasons the Thanksgiving tradition has endured.”
But nowhere in the 11-paragraph address does he mention the Almighty.
Because after all, unless you invoke the Baby Jesus 5,498,632 times a day, God only knows what might happen. Hell, you might start to think....and thinking means asking questions. And we mustn't have that. It would be unseemly.
I'm not in favor of those laws that well-meaning legislators are trying to pass that would make it illegal for employers to say "Must be currently employed" in their ads. Just making it illegal to say they won't hire the unemployed doesn't do anything to make them actually consider the unemployed; it just wastes the candidate's time (and transportation costs).
Similarly, I can't get all that outraged about this:
A west Georgia business owner has been deluged with calls and emails after posting signs on his company's trucks that say he's not hiring anyone until President Barack Obama leaves office.
Waco-based U.S. Cranes LLC owner Bill Looman tells WXIA-TV (http://on.11alive.com/u8jDri) that reaction has been so intense he's had to disconnect his phones and temporarily shut down the company's website.
He posted the signs on his company's trucks for other motorists to see on roads and interstates across the South. The signs proclaim "New Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone."
Looman says he's not refusing to hire employees to make a political point. He told WXIA he can't afford to hire anyone because of the economy, and he blames the people in power.
It seems that every major corporation and every small company run by people who listen to Rush Limbaugh feel the same way, except that they call it "uncertainty". So let's know where they stand. And where they stand is that these people would rather see the economy tank than see Barack Obama re-elected.
Every year, the usual suspects come out and claim that the Godless heathen homosexual jewish Muslim Kenyan socialist fascist great unwashed have declared war on Christmas, what with their "Happy Holidays" and their menorahs on the town hall lawn right there alongside of the Baby Jesus.
Well, you know what? Maybe there SHOULD be a War on Christmas.
Yesterday I received my copy of the local newspaper. It was the size of the Sunday New York Times, and almost all of it was ads for "doorbuster specials." It was one thing when the doorbuster specials started at 8 AM, or even at 7 AM. But when people are camped out at Best Buy for days on end, something has gone very, very awry with this holiday. It seems that Black Friday has become National I Got Mine And Fuck You Day for that portion of the 99% which doesn't realize it's camping out at Target to get $200 off a flat screen TV BECAUSE the oligarchs have taken away all but the last few bucks in their pockets.
A woman shot pepper spray to keep shoppers from merchandise she wanted during a Black Friday sale, and 20 people suffered minor injuries, authorities said.
The incident occurred shortly after 10:20 p.m. Thursday in a crowded Los Angeles-area Walmart as shoppers hungry for deals were let inside the store.
Police said the suspect shot the pepper spray when the coverings over the items she wanted were removed.
“Somehow she was trying to use it to gain an upper hand,” police Lt. Abel Parga told The Associated Press early Friday.
He said she was apparently after some electronics and used the pepper spray to keep other shoppers at bay.
You can almost write the post-apocalyptic Philip K. Dick story for yourself; about a consumer-driven society driven mad by having everything it believed to be true proven wrong, scrambling for the marked-down accoutrements of their former life while those who run the companies that provide these opportunities watch on TV screens and laugh.
Oh. Right. That's already happened:
If this is Christmas, then I want no part of it. So I am hereby declaring a War on Christmas. Oh, I'll still make chili for the company potluck, because it's what you have to do. But other than that, I want no part of it. And if everyone just simply stayed away from the stores, or shopped exclusively locally (not just on Small Business Saturday), we just might get the message across that WE are the "job creators".
Here at Casa la Brilliant, we have very, very hard water. This fact, combined with the unfortunate reality that our downstairs bathtub is American Standard Ming Green and our upstairs is avocado green, means that our tubs tend to look like crap, because who wants to scrub something that hideous?
That's not to say I haven't tried, because I have. I tried every product known to man -- I tried CLR. I tried steam. I tried lemon juice-soaked paper towels. I tried vinegar-soaked paper towels. I tried baking soda paste. I tried Kaboom and Bam Lime-Away and all kinds of other highly nasty cleaners -- all to no avail.
I read on a messageboard a few weeks ago that some people people have had success with Bon Ami Cleanser, and others with Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. So since I had a few days off, and walking past the upstairs bathroom in broad daylight made me realize just what a horrorshow it was, I decided to try both. First I put the Bon Ami on one of those scrubby sponges and scrubbed, then rinsed. Then I went over it with the Magic Eraser. And damn if that old ugly olive green tub didn't start to shine! I'm not going to say it looks new, but it looks like a clean bathrub is supposed to.
So then today I decided to try it on the Ming Green tub downstairs -- the one with the curved bottom that's going to kill me if I have to keep it into my old age. Now Old Ming hasn't looked quite as bad as Groovy 70's Show upstairs, but that's only because it's a lighter color. So I went to work. And damn it if Old Ming didn't start to shine too. Well, all except the giant rusting chip that I have to sand, then paint rust stopper on, then apply Porc-a-Filler and then many layers of Porc-a-Fix (which the nice man at World of Tile told me had to be done in multiple thin layers, and the fact that I didn't do that last time is why it rusted from underneath). But when Old Ming is smiling like he is today, it makes me much more inclined to fix that old war wound from probably an incident with a glass shampoo bottle in the early 1960's.
I don't know if it was the Bon Ami or the Magic Eraser (though I scrubbed both sinks with nothing but the Magic Eraser and they started to shine too), but this Product Skeptic is sold. If you have an old tub that you hate that is rotten with lime stains, try these products. You may yet rekindle the magic of your old romance with your own Mamie Pink tub.
No, it won't be quite like this. It'll be just Mrs. JP, the cat and me and an outside chance of seeing my son Adam and his fiancee later on. It won't be KFC but a pork loin. With my luck, that means, somewhere in America, there's a three-legged pig on a crutch that's looking for me.
So before we clear the table and put up the laptops, let me take this opportunity to tell ya'll what I'm grateful for this Thanksgiving.
I'm grateful for having the few loyal readers I do. You guys prove that quality is always better than quantity. In these brutal times, we have a roof over our heads, a working car on the road and no creditors (yet) knocking on our door.
One of those readers is Mrs. JP, who thought enough of me to walk away from her family to drive 1355 miles alone two and a half years ago in a rickety 15 year-old Chrysler LeBaron on its last legs in the name of love.
I'm grateful that I have strong, healthy sons. It's a shame the mother of two of them didn't live long enough to even begin watching them grow up.
I'm grateful that I didn't succumb to the racist wingnuttery into which my father fell later in life and that I remained independent and strong-minded enough to reject the diktats of all organized religion. I've always been a big believer in Altruism whether I was the giver or recipient. As the poet Percy Shelley once bemoaned to a friend, if only we had a religion founded on charity rather than faith.
I'm grateful for Occupy Wall Street and its countless incarnations and all the hell they're enduring for us to remind us that, yes, the First Amendment does indeed exist and to we who wring our hands at the festering cesspool of corruption this country has become, OWS gives us vibrant, indelible proof that we are not alone.
So as we sit at the dinner table this Thanksgiving, let's offer a vocal or silent thank you to Occupy Wall Street and all those who were swept up in the movement. They, especially those in Occupy Boston and the other colder states, are undergoing tortures and persecution that the rest of us can only imagine. And they'll be right out there again tomorrow decrying corporate greed while the rest of us camp out (without being beaten or pepper-sprayed) outside Wal-Mart, Target or Best Buy.
...followed by an orgy of consumerism. Is there anything more American than that?
Because Mr. Brilliant has no family and I have none living close by, Thanksgiving is a quiet affair here at Casa la Brilliant. When Mr. B's father was alive, I once did a big Thanksgiving dinner for the three of us, with fresh fruit, handmade ravioli with vodka sauce (neither of them handmade by me), turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, and something for dessert that I don't remember. Then we started just going out to eat on Thanksgiving.
I grew up with the doctrine that eating out on Thanksgiving is depressing, so my mother made a turkey every year, or else we went to the home of one of her friends. But in recent years, I've discovered the pleasure of letting someone you don't know do the cooking. The last few years we've gone to the Thanksgiving Brunch at the Short Hills Hilton. This is pricey, but they do a lovely buffet spread (which Mr. B. likes for its variety) with unlimited champagne or mimosas. If you're a big eater, you can start at the omelet station for eggs, bacon, and sausage and then move on to trips for appetizers and hot food. If you're more like me and always find today to be a minefield, you case the joint first looking for what's OK to eat and then take a little of the things that looks good and also look like they won't have you in the cardiac ward of St. Barnabas on the way home. They do some lovely salads, and have great smoked whitefish, and then I tend to lean towards things like ale-braised shortribs and orichiette with broccoli rabe and sausage and maple-glazed carrots. After 56 Thanksgivings and the advent of Trader Joe's sliced turkey and frozen mashed potato discs making it possible for even non-cooks like Mr. B. to prepare a turkey dinner any night of the week, the whole "traditional" Thanksgiving dinner seems kind of ho-hum.
For me, the worst part of Thanksgiving is the pitying looks that colleagues give you when you say that it's just going to be dinner for two on Thanksgiving. It makes me understand in a far lesser degree what my colleague who recently underwent treatmet for breast cancer described as "That Look". If I had family close by, I'd be there for Thanksgiving. But I don't, and Mr. B. doesn't, and sucking down unlimited champagne and eating pears poached in port wine with goat cheese is a pretty damn pleasant alternative. It's my one concession to consumerism over the Thanksgiving weekend, since I have zero intention of going anywhere near a store this weekend, unless it's to Trader Joe's to buy that big tray of sliced turkey breast and stuffing just so we can say we have turkey leftovers to eat while we watch the increasingly bad New York football teams play.
This year in Blogtopia (™ Skippy), we are highly amused at Pat Robertson's bafflement about whether mac and cheese is "a black thing":
I realize that Thanksgiving is supposed to be about the Potatoes Mashed and Sweet, but for my money, if you're going to eat a high-fat, high-glycemic index food on Thanksgiving, which is all about comfort food, why NOT macaroni and cheese?
I realize that to admit a fondness for macaroni and cheese at my advanced age is akin to confessing to still liking Smarties (which I do) when you are above the age of ten, but we all have guilty pleasures, and that one is mine. And I'm not alone.
You can pretend you aren't making comfort food by coming up with recipes like Rustic Fried Sage and Chicken Apple Sausage Mac n Cheese with Autumn Chutney, and Wild Mushroom and Grana Padano Macaroni and Cheese, but we know the truth.
I mean seriously. Grana Padano mac 'n' cheese? "Autumn chutney"?
I've made passable mac 'n' cheese using cheddar, but it can be difficult to get the sauce consistency just right. Cheddar mac can be a bit grainy. Ken Johnson of Amarillo Grilling says his secret is French butter, though I suspect that the four kinds of cheese he uses for his amazing rendition of this dish has something to do with it, because his macaroni and cheese leaves no pools of separated grease on your plate, but is just forkfuls of rich, creamy, cheesy, crunchy heaven.
Here are some other recipes that look worth trying if you're inclined towards an early death because there won't be any Social Security by the time you hit age 66:
Soul Food Macaroni and Chees uses the entire cheese counter at Fairway, but it does have Velveeta in it, so i'll forgive that something called Soul Food Macaroni and Cheese is on a web site called Epicurious.
If you like a little heat with your mac, try this recipe from Lynne's Country Kitchen (even if "Lynne's Country Kitchen" sounds like it should be featured in the next Blues Brothers movie: Blues Brothers 2012: Whatever DID Happen To Jonny Lang Anyway?).
Admit it. You now want macaroni and cheese today.
Have a great day, everyone. And go the fuck to sleep tonight. The tchotchkes will still be in the stores tomorrow.
In a city that feels increasingly over-run with food and drink franchises, Project 8 is a breath of fresh [caffeinated] air. It's a hip but slouchy kind of cafe - a mix of good coffee, cool music and an affordable snacks menu making it a popular hangout for local university students.
Free range eggs with avocado and tomato on toasted sourdough, for example, will only set you back $7.50. It
The Benton Harbor, Michigan based Whirlpool corporation, which recently received a $19 million dollar stimulus grant from the Dept. of Energy to develop smart grid capable appliances, moved forward with plans to close it’s Evansville, Indiana refrigerator plant and build a new plant in Mexico.
Whirlpool closed the plant in June, eliminating 1,100 full-time jobs. They did this all the while the company is collecting public subsidies while eliminating jobs.
After buying the Maytag brand in 2006 Whirlpool shut down the manufacturing headquarters which at its peak Maytag had 4,000 workers in Newton, Iowa a town of 16,000 people 30 miles east of Des Moines. Newton is a great case study on what happens when the company town packs up and leaves. The devastating effects are quickly dominoed throughout the town and surrounding towns. Those 4,000 plus workers were supporting the other local businesses. When Maytag left, people had to leave to find work. When people left we have ghost towns that are popping up all over the United States. Towns that used to thrive, towns that people used to be proud to call home now sit mostly vacant. Is this the ‘new modern economy’ America will build it’s future around?
Taxes? That’s for poor people…
Whirpool, the world’s largest appliance maker, has been a major tax dodger. The company had negative income tax rates over the past three years, and reported a $64 million income tax benefit last year. It expects similar results this year:
Meanwhile sales at the appliance maker rose 7 percent to $18.4 billion last year after dropping during the housing slump of the previous two years. In the year-earlier quarter, the company attributed a rise in revenue to increased productivity.
Whirlpool had negative effective income tax rates in 2010, 2009 and 2008. Last year, the company reported an income tax benefit of $64 million and an effective tax rate of negative 10.9 percent, according to company filings. The company expects a similar tax benefit in 2011.
We keep hearing about how corporate taxes have to be cut in order for companies to "create jobs." When companies pay no taxes and still get refunds, how much more government largesse do they need?
If you look at the records of "successful businessmen' who run for President on the GOP side, you'll find that all of them involve active participation in the systematic gutting of this country's middle class.
I'd like to see big-talking Fox News-bot Megyn Kelly volunteer to be pepper-sprayed, to back up her claim that "it's just a food product":
Last night Rachel Maddow explained how pepper spray resembles a food about as much as botulism does:
Now, I realize that actual science has no place in Republican and its associated media doctrine, but here's the science on pepper spray:
The reason pepper-spray ends up on the Scoville chart is that – you probably guessed this - it’s literally derived from pepper chemistry, the compounds that make habaneros so much more formidable than the comparatively wimpy bells. Those compounds are called capsaicins and – in fact – pepper spray is more formally called Oleoresin Capsicum or OC Spray.
But we’ve taken to calling it pepper spray, I think, because that makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, like something just a grade or so above what we might mix up in a home kitchen. The description hints maybe at that eye-stinging effect that the cook occasionally experiences when making something like a jalapeno-based salsa, a little burn, nothing too serious.
Until you look it up on the Scoville scale and remember, as toxicologists love to point out, that the dose makes the poison. That we’re not talking about cookery but a potent blast of chemistry. So that if OC spray is the U.S. police response of choice – and certainly, it’s been used with dismaying enthusiasm during the Occupy protests nationwide, as documented in this excellent Atlantic roundup - it may be time to demand a more serious look at the risks involved.
My own purpose here is to focus on the dangers of a high level of capsaicin exposure. But as pointed out in the 2004 paper, Health Hazards of Pepper Spray, written by health researchers at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, the sprays contain other risky materials:
Depending on brand, an OC spray may contain water, alcohols, or organic solvents as liquid carriers; and nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or halogenated hydrocarbons (such as Freon, tetrachloroethylene, and methylene chloride) as propellants to discharge the canister contents.(3) Inhalation of high doses of some of these chemicals can produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death.
Their paper focuses mostly, though, on the dangerous associated with pepper-based compounds. In 1997, for instance, researchers at the University of California-San Francisco discovered that the “hot” sensation of habaneros and their ilk was caused by capsaicin binding directly to proteins in the membranes of pain and heat sensing neurons. Capsaicins can activate these neurons at below body temperature, leading to a startling sensation of heat. Repeated exposure can wear the system down, depleting neurotransmitters, reducing the sensation of the pain. This knowledge has led to a number of medical treatments using capsaicins to manage pain.
Its very mechanism, though, should remind us to be wary. As the North Carolina researchers point out, any compound that can influence nerve function is, by definition, risky. Research tells us that pepper spray acts as a potent inflammatory agent. It amplifies allergic sensitivities, it irritates and damages eyes, membranes, bronchial airways, the stomach lining – basically what it touches. It works by causing pain – and, as we know, pain is the body warning us of an injury.
In general, these are short term effects. Pepper spray, for instance, induces a burning sensation in the eyes in part by damaging cells in the outer layer of the cornea. Usually, the body repairs this kind of injury fairly neatly. But with repeated exposures, studies find, there can be permanent damage to the cornea.
The more worrisome effects have to do with inhalation – and by some reports, California university police officers deliberately put OC spray down protestors throats. Capsaicins inflame the airways, causing swelling and restriction. And this means that pepper sprays pose a genuine risk to people with asthma and other respiratory conditions.
And by genuine risk, I mean a known risk, a no-surprise any police department should know this risk, easy enough to find in the scientific literature.
Except that police departments are clearly not interested in scientific literature. Look, this is about hippie-punching, clearly and simply. It's been going on for forty years, and it's going to continue to go on every time large numbers of people dare to threaten the status quo. The Occupy movement has learned its lesson from Chicago 1968, and its discipline has created a startling underscore to the disproportionate response from police. It's just a hideous irony of our times that major city police departments are so staunchly defending the very people who regard them as suckers at the public teat whose pensions and pay should be cut in the very service of those they persist in defending.
As for Megyn Kelly, well, I think it's just a trial balloon to have pepper spray classified as a vegetable for the school lunch program. As a pizza topping.
This is what companies do when they have large cash reserves (NYT link):
at a time when the nation is looking for ways to battle unemployment, big companies are creating fewer jobs, and critics say they are neglecting to lay the foundation for future growth by expanding into new businesses or building new plants.
What is more, share buybacks have not fulfilled their stated purpose of rewarding investors over the last decade, experts say. “It’s a symptom of a deeper problem, which is a lack of investment in the long term,” said William W. George, a Harvard Business School professor and former chief executive of Medtronic, a medical technology company. “If we’re not investing in research, innovation and entrepreneurship, we’re going to be a slow-growth country for a decade.”
Liberal critics insist the trend is another example of top corporate executives raking in an inordinate share of the nation’s wealth, even as their employees suffer.
“It’s an extraordinarily unimaginative way to use money,” said Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor under President Clinton who now teaches public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. After diving in the wake of the financial crisis, buybacks have made a remarkable comeback in recent years, with $445 billion authorized this year, the most since 2007, when repurchases peaked at $914 billion.
But spending on capital investments like new plants and infrastructure has stagnated more broadly in corporate America, confounding efforts by the Obama administration to spur economic growth. Capital expenditures by companies on the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index are expected to total $546 billion in 2011, down from $560 billion in 2008, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters Eikon.
The principle behind buybacks is simple. With fewer shares in circulation, earnings per share can rise smartly even if the company’s underlying growth is lackluster. In many cases, like that of the medical device maker Zimmer Holdings, executives are able to meet goals for profit growth and earn bigger bonuses despite poor stock performance.
“It’s clear there’s a conflict of interest,” said Charles M. Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “Unless earnings per share are adjusted to reflect the buyback, then to base a bonus on raw earnings per share is problematic. It doesn’t purely reflect performance.”
In addition, executives, who are often large shareholders, stand to benefit from even a small, short-term jump in stock prices.
When everything is about the stock price, and keeping the insatiable maw of Wall Street analysts happy, there's zero incentive to create actual growth by investing in products and services and plant, let alone investing in people.
The whole "public" ownership model has become a sham. The concept is that issuing stock allows companies access to more capital than they might be able to tap otherwise. But "public" (and I use the quotation marks deliberately) ownership isn't about returning actual value to shareholders, it's about keeping Wall Street happy.
Case in point: Apple.
On a recent flight back form Florida, I counted no fewer than ten iPads befre I had to get on the plane and stop counting. At least three others of them besides me were reading Steve Jobs on it. I would say that at least twenty percent of the people on that flight were listening to iPods. Another sizable number had iPhones. There are other tablets and music players and smartphones, but these names are becoming almost generic terms for all brands of their concepts, much the way "Kleenex" now means facial tissue, no matter who makes it.
On October 18, Apple announced its third-quarter results, which included sales of 17.07 million iPhones. Got that? OVER SEVENTEEN MILLION iPhones sold in three months. That's over five million a month or over a million a week. But the stock immediately lost five percent of its value, because the "Wall Street analysts" predicted sales of 20 million -- and it's been swooning ever since, closing yesterday at $369.01.
Has anything really fundamentally changed at Apple since the stock surged to over $400/share in early November -- almost a month after Steve Jobs' death? The day after he died, 96% of Wall Street analysts gave the stock a "Buy" rating with a MEDIAN target price of $500/share. And now the price is $369, because some idiot in a suit pulled a number -- twenty million -- out of his ass, and because only a million and a half iPhones sold per week, the stock has been slammed.
And this is the system we're protecting? No wonder executives are buying back stock to artificially prop up the price rather than actually invest in something that might help their companies actually grow. Taking chances is punished by Wall Street.
We keep hearing about how we have to lower corporate taxes to eliminate "uncertainty". Is this what business has come to? Guaranteed results, every time? Business is all about uncertainty. Innovation is what generates growth in a business, and innovation THRIVES on uncertainty. A new car model may not go over well with buyers. A new drug compound may turn out to be ineffective and have to be scrapped. Buyers may be wary of a hi-def webcam because they don't want to have to dress up and put on makeup to talk to relatives. 3-D television may prove not to be perceived as having sufficient additional value to warrant the cost. The very nature of business is a crapshoot. It's full of uncertainty, and it always has been. But today business is governed by Wall Street, and Wall Street goes into a panic at the slightest bit of bad news. Today we hear news that Greece may default? The Dow will drop by almost 400 points. Tomorrow there are signs that an agreement may be reached? A 300-point surge. Day after tomorrow we'll hear bad news about Italy and it'll be another swoon.
Is this any way to run an economy? What happened to rewarding the risk-takers; those who take a chance that they may lose, but that they also may win? In an environment in which a risk that doesn't reward is punished out of all proportion to the supposed "offense", why take the chance?
There's a nice little company called Angie's List. The concept is simple: People who have used contractors and other professoinals rate them, so that if you need someone to, say, install insulation in your attic, you can read other people's unsolicited experiences with insulation contractors, rather on just relying on the references the contractor provides. It started with construction-related services, but has branched out into medical, veterinary, and other services. No anonymous reviews are allowed, only members are allowed to review companies, and while your name and contact information isn't published, Angie's List knows who you are. This also keeps contractors themselves from spamming their pages with bogus reviews. I'm a member, and I don't hire anyone without checking their reviews on Angie's List. The membership is about fifty bucks a year.
Angie's List is about to be ruined, because it's going public, with an initial IPO price of $13/share. Three venture capital companies are going to own 43% of he company. and as you can see, the analysts are already freaking out. My guess is that within three years, Angie's List will cease to exist and you'll be back to waiting until one of your neighbors has work done on his house to find a good contractor. All because Wall Street hates "uncertainty."
It's no wonder our economy is in the crapper. It's run by a bunch of people who, like five-year-olds, want iron-clad guarantees of success before they'll take any chances at all -- like on hiring people, one of whom could very well have the Next Great Idea.
I don't answer my land line phone at home. I screen all calls, and return calls I want to return. I do this because despite being on the "do not call" list, my phone often rings off the hook with nonprofits and political groups wanting money and robocalls from groups and politicians. I have a policy: I only give to individual candidates as I see fit, and I only give to local nonprofits -- mostly animal shelters and food pantries --where I know the money they raise isn't going for bloated administrative salaries and the mailing of free crap in fundraising letters. So it's a waste of time for telemarketers to contact me.
I use my cell phone a lot more than I used to. It isn't that I talk more on the phone for fun, because I actually hate talking on the phone. But I spend at least a third to half of my work time on teleconferences, and when I'm at home, I use my cell phone to access them. So in some months, I might use my entire 500 shared monthly minutes allowance in a single week.
The Mobile Information Call Act is a proposal by Nebraska congressman Lee Terry. Yes, he is a Republican. The Republicans have time for this, and they have time to reaffirm "In God We Trust" as he national motto. That pesky jobs business? That's for pussies.
I don't know why anyone thought that locking six Republicans in a room with ANYONE who doesn't march in lockstep with them would result in anything other than Nothing Accomplished (NYT link). This is a party that has now definitively identified itself as the Party Of I Got Mine So Fuck Off And Die, so what gave anyone the idea that these people would ever emerge with a plan for the top 1% to kick in even one tiny copper penny more?
I often wonder exactly what Grover Norquist has on these guys, that their oath of fealty to him supersedes any sense of responsibility they might have to their oath of office. And why does it bother no one that this country is run by Grover Norquist, with House and Senate Republicans (and the clown car that is the 2012 GOP field) as his public face?
The Republicans on the committee are claiming Democratic intransigence, but just who's refusing to compromise here?
Republicans have forgotten that they and their wealthy buddies were paying the pre-Bush tax cut rates all through the 1990s, and the economy was humming along just fine. Tax rates seem to have little effect on economic activity, which has many influences. But Republicans live in a world in which only their interests count -- and the interests of those who have made them quite wealthy themselves as they sit in Congress receiving a government check and paid health insurance without contributing even as much to this country as my local DPW guys do -- and God knows the DPW in my town leaves a lot to be desired. Because of their obeisance to Grover Norquist, Republicans would rather see my COPD-afflicted mother suffocate to death rather than have the nebulizer that helps her breathe, and my chemotherapy-undergoing father fade away rather than have treatment that has an 85% effectiveness rate. They'd rather see low birth weight babies among the poor and deaths in childbirth rather than have Medicaid. They'd rather see the disabled dying of exposure on the streets than have such a thing as Supplemental Security Income. Got two kids and your husband dies? Too bad, lady -- get a job, because there are no more Social Security survivors' benefits. That Paul Ryan benefitted from that program is immaterial -- he got his so fuck off and die.
The Republicans have always been like this, but at least they used to be honest about it. Now they dress up in populist clothing and benefit from corporate-funded groups with names like Americans for Prosperity to dupe the uninformed into thinking that no sacrifice is too great for the poor and the middle class to make in the service of allowing the plutocrats to amass more and more and more and more of this country's wealth just so that they can have a vain hope of maybe landing a job someday.
Not one day goes by that I don't have George Carlin's voice in my head reminding me, "It's a big club -- and you ain't in it." Because he knew in 2005 what too many people still refuse to believe in 2011.
And so the so-called supercommittee, which everyone knew was just a ruse to kick the can down the road a little further, has failed. This is a microcosm of the failure of our entire system of government. So perhaps it's time to give up this bullshit about American exceptionalism and admit that we are just another failing empire, just another plutocracy. It's time to stop deluding ourselves and just try to get through as best we can.
...that Michael Bloomberg's thugs are forcing the #OWS protesters to wheel around their library and pet supplies in shopping carts like homeless people? It's not coincidence and it's not even ironic: It's by design. And Wall Street and city officials are probably making their fat asses jiggle with amusement that they've reduced the protesters to pushing their belongings around like bag ladies.
But when you stop and think about it, this manufactured irony just underscores what Wall Street's been doing to the 99% for decades. And what better way to convey a message and protest of world-consuming greed and arrogance than to look the part?
And Zuccotti Park and, at night, Foley Sq. are becoming a cross between war zones and protest sites in Third World countries. How much is Wall Street beginning to resemble downtown Tehran during the riots of June 2009, with unarmed people getting attacked by ebony-garbed basij thugs? How much does it look like a war zone when medics with red crosses taped to their bicycle helmets have to tend to the wounded?
And how much more like a Third World country does the richest area in the developed world have to look when people have been deprived of their only shelter, deprived of their safety and deprived of their dignity in a microcosm of what Wall Street's been doing to the bottom 99% all these years and decades?
And like Ahmadinejad's thugs after Iran's "elections" 2 1/2 years ago, the NYPD and Bloomberg's office and police departments literally from coast to coast are nakedly making up the rules as they go along. Now in NYC, you can be arrested for driving without your headlights and wipers on, especially if you're caught driving a wikileaks truck rumored to be carrying blankets. No search warrant? No problem! We'll just confiscate the whole fucking truck!
They want to deprive OWS of shelter, of literature, they want to reduces us all to the level of transients just blocks away from their offices? Fine. We'll be glad to play the part. And let the entire world take notice.
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If there's one dish you must order at Izakaya Fujiyama, it's the tuna jaw. This behemoth of bones, fin, gills and cartilage is one of life's pleasures - a testament that good eating can be found in the most unlikeliest of places, and that foraging for your own food provides endless fun.
Sushi bar counter at Izakaya Fujiyama
I'm dining with thefoodpornographer and Juji Chews tonight, both
That's the message we've been hearing from Wall Street, many Republicans on Capitol Hill and self-styled right wing pundits like Andrew Breitbart, Bill O'Reilly (who this year had replaced Christine O'Donnell as the Typhoid Mary of the publishing racket) and others who channel and filter their partisan passions directly through their rectums and bile ducts.
Basically the same propagandistic bullshit we heard about the hippies in the 60's from the right wing hard hat crowd when they were righteously protesting the war in Vietnam. Yawn. Each and every one of these charges had been shot down faster than John McCain over Hanoi.
Earlier today, Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC's eponymous Up w/Chris Hayes, revealed a corporate conspiracy involving a high-powered lobbying firm that employs two former John Boehner staffers and the American banking Association. The memo makes for some pretty eye-opening revelations (.pdf file), not the least of which is the fear that Occupy Wall Street is inspiring fear on not only Wall Street itself but also Capitol Hill.
While it would be very easy to envision an impotent and unpopular Democratic Party cynically "embracing" (read: exploiting) OWS in order to manufacture ground on Republicans who are hardly more popular than the GOP that'd exploited the Tea Party, this admission is extremely important in that it betrays OWS is getting under the thin skin of Wall Street.
To that end in their "opposition research" (read: propaganda), Wall St. is all but too prepared to throw one of their own under the wheels of progress: The right wing's billionaire boogey man, George Soros. The memo's proposed tactics, which the American Banking Association told MSNBC is it "did not solicit" and "chose not to act on it in any way (which sounds laughably disingenuous considering last month's revelation)", are tried and untrue right wing tactics right out of Richard "Defund the Left!" Viguerie's dog-eared playbook.
What the Republican Party fears more than anything, besides OWS pissing off Wall Street more than they already have with the completely discredited GOP hardly in a PR position to do anything about it, is that the Occupy movement may actually do something the flash mobs of the Tea Party never came close to doing: Physically closing the gaps and linking until it becomes an honest-to-God daisy chain of humanity stretching from coast to coast.
The memo to the ABA, quite justifiably, fears that OWS could become as potent, if not a more potent, political movement than the Tea Baggers ever were. And, with nearly a year before Election Day, it's only inevitable that the Occupy movement starts drafting, supporting and even funding their own candidates for 2012.
While it's screamingly obvious that since late this summer, with hardly any fanfare (of course) from the corporate MSM, there was actually a bill in Congress that almost gave civil and criminal immunity for Wall Street for crimes that haven't even been seriously investigated. But what may be even more troubling to these ex Boehner staffers is that the right wing may be capitalizing on #OWS and the populist fervor they're slowly but surely generating.
Without specifically mentioning Occupy Wall Street, Tom Coburn shocked the political blogosphere when his office issued a report claiming that the 1% should pay more in taxes. Rush Limbaugh proved that a stopped clock is right twice a day by hitting the bullseye on the absurdity of Chelsea Clinton getting a job as a top correspondent with NBC. Limbaugh tied this in to the frustration felt by the 99% when he said to a caller,
Let’s go down to Occupy Wall Street or wherever else that there’s an Occupy, or go wherever there is a collection of liberals. What are they mad about? They’re mad about the 1 percent, and what are they mad about about the 1 percent? The 1 percent’s got it all. The 1 percent has everything and they’re not sharing it with anybody, and they didn’t work for it. There aren’t any jobs for anybody else because the 1 percent are making sure they’ve got all the jobs and they’ve got all the money.
So here we come with Mr. Democrat Party, the highest ranking, biggest star, most respected member of the Democrat Party, and with pure nepotism and nothing else his daughter, who is unqualified for this job, gets pushed ahead of everybody that works at NBC and gets this job. This is the quintessential thing the 99 percent are fed up with, that they don’t have a chance, that the game’s rules are rigged, that everything’s stacked against them…
And most recently, Sarah Palin's ghost writer put out on the pages of the WSJ what actually amounts to policy proposals with some heft, a screed that actually seems to "get" what #OWS is all about. (Just to reassure you all that I'm not falling in love with Sarah Barracuda, I will point out that her ghost writer's approved script did ask this ironic series of questions that could've just as easily been turned on her: "How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians' stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers'? I answered the question in that speech." Obviously, if asked in Iowa how she herself could've left midway through her gubernatorial term as Alaska's governor only to see her own finances and stock portfolios dramatically improve, she would've had a considerably tougher time answering that.)
One can hardly stifle laughter at Palin's usual and disingenuous claims about fighting the "good ol' boy political class in Juneau" and how she'd "been fighting this type of corruption and cronyism my entire political career." But it's a huge step when a partisan pit bull like Palin can dredge up enough honesty to say that both parties have been occupying Wall Street long before the 99%.
The Republican Party, obviously, has no answers and are as a whole stubbornly resistant toward the idea of even looking for them. Asking the Republican Party to help rebuild this country is like offering a building contract to the same thugs that had trashed your house. And while Michael Bloomberg was engaging in gimmicks involving fictional heroes exactly a year ago to "combat" unemployment, Occupy Wall Street's 99% was gearing up to do the real thing.
The eminently quotable science fiction author CJ Cherryh once drew the invaluable distinction between the self-interested warrior and the (in an ideal world) soldier:
The warrior may fight for gold or for an immediate gain, or for something to take home for the winter to feed the family. The soldier is part of a more complex society. He's fighting for a group ethic of some sort.
Occupy Wall Street is a long-festering sore on the long-neglected hind end of America with the scab torn off, running with blood, pus and lymphatic fluid for all the world to see. Wall Street doesn't want you to know about that long-festering sore because it and the politicians they employ like doing what they do in secret. Bloomberg's NYPD may have physically exposed the OWS soldiers by depriving them of shelter. But Occupy Wall Street has more than returned the favor.
If Bill Maher ever has Andrew Breitbart on his show again, I'm going to stop watching him for good. Why should we give air time to someone who hires people like this.
Yesterday on the shuttle to Newark Airport, I was talking with a woman who is a realtor in New Jersey. She was talking about how ill-prepared her young grandhcildren are to face an austere world. She had raised her children alone in a three-room apartment before finally being able to buy a house. I know she gets Medicare, so she is at least sixty-five. That makes her a baby boomer parent. Her children always worked -- at household chores, paper routes, lawn-mowing. They grew up and had children, and her grandchildren have always received anything they wanted, because their parents -- those children of a baby boomer mother -- wanted their children to have everything they didn't have. Her teenaged grandson has a brand new car, its lease paid for by his parents.
It's not unusual these days to see things like this. I used to work with a guy around my age (baby boom generation) who drove a Ford Taurus with a cracked winshield across the Tappan Zee Bridge every day while his high school age daughter drove a brand new car given to her by her World War II-generation grandparents. Another person I know drives her high school age daughter two blocks to school every day and was horrified when the local Dunkin' Donuts closed because "Where are the kids going to get their coffee?"
We are now seeing representatives of the McMansion generation -- kids who grew up in 4000-square-foot houses, each with his/her own bathroom. As much as I adore little Rachel Crow on X Factor, no, a girl does NOT need her own bathroom. But that's what parents, not all of them baby boomers, have done to their children in the name of "giving them what we didn't have."
Young people are seeing the current budget wars as a war on them -- their own future Social Security benefits at risk because of what they see as a generation that grew up in plenty and privilege. But just as there are kids today who DIDN'T grow up in McMansions and have strong work ethic (one that I know heads up a household of two sisters, a brother, and a nephew), not everyone born between 1946 and 1964 spends their days navel-gazing and collecting Social Security checks that they now want to deny others. Because I'll tell you this much: The teabaggers in their hoverounds were not out there in the streets in Chicago in 1968; they were the YAF crowd in plaid pants and Izod shirts with "Nixon's the One" stickers on their notebooks.
The navel-gazing stereotype is an image perpetuated by the media, and by all too many early baby boomers themselves, who look back with nostalgia at their own youth. But what younger people don't understand is that we did this ourselves, with our parents as they looked back on their youth. My late father-in-law felt that his days in the Army were the best time of his life. And this was someone who fought at the Battle of the Bulge. He believed that Glenn Miller was the greatest musician that ever lived and that every piece of music put out since the Big Band era was crap. Every generation does this, and today's young people will too when it's their turn.
Digby wrote about this the other day, citing an exchange that Rick Perlstein had in a live chat not all that long ago. It's worth clicking over and reading, if only for Rick Perlsteins statistics on just how LITTLE the pop culture and media images of the baby boom generation reflect reality. Generations are as heterogenous as any other group, and it's interesting to watch supposedly progressive people being willing to stereotype an entire group -- the generation born in 1946 and 1964 -- as being all exactly the same, and being so blind to reality:
But the fact is that "generations" don't do things and it's facile to look at the world in those terms. Indeed, in the case of the "millenial" vs the "boomers" it's downright self-defeating. The "boomers" who are failing to "make the hard choices" are actually saving their grandkids from the twisted logic of Pete Peterson who is using generational warfare to agitate for the "millenials" to defy their parents by ... cutting their own retirement benefits. After all, Peterson's not talking about cutting off grandma. He's talking about cutting off grandma's favorite grandson. And grandma is the one fighting to stop it.
Look, there's no denying that there are a lot of us. Some provisions were made in the early 1980s to recognize and deal with it. But of course governments of both parties found that piggybank to be very tempting, and now Republicans see the Social Security as the only creditor that the US can tell to fuck off, we're not paying.
When we fight to keep Social Security, we're not just doing it for us. We're doing it because we haven't really changed all that much after all. We still see ourselves as part of a larger community (ZOMG, socialism!!) and we recognize that part of that community is the many generations that will follow us.
After reading about House Minority Whip Steny Hoyers' outburst over my "Overhauling Washington" plan, I wonder if his obstructionism reflects your own opposition a
nd that of the Democratic Caucus to urgent reforms the American public so vehemently demand. After increasing the debt by $4 trillion in less than three years, no one can truly believe that Americans are satisfied with business as usual, and that a permanent political class in Washington can get us out of the mess you and your colleagues have created.
A part-time Congress with half the pay would still make $38,000 a year more than the average American Family. Do you truly oppose lawmakers spending more time in their districts? Is it so important for the Washington power brokers to build their fiefdoms of influence, including providing bailouts to Wall Street while businesses on Main Street are being boarded up every day?
[snip]
Let me conclude with an invitation: I am in Washington Monday and would love to engage you in a public debate about my Overhaul Washington plan versus the congressional status quo.
I think it would be a tremendous service to the American public to see a public airing of those differences. Let the people decide.
If Monday doesn't work, perhaps we could find a time in Iowa over the course of the next month to discuss these issues in front of the people of America's heartland.
Should you choose not to respond or engage in such a healthy discussion, I will take it to mean you will continue your obstructionist ways in the face of much needed Washington reform.
Sincerely,
Rick Perry Governor of Texas
Does Rick Perry even know that Nancy Pelois is not running for the presidency? For that matter, has anyone told Rick Perry that Nancy Pelosi is now the MINORITY leader in the house? Perhaps Mr. Perry should be giving John Boehner a call and ask HIM for a public debate? After all, Boehner has been in charge of the House almost a year now, and is one of those "insiders" to which Perry is referring. And for that matter, has anyone ever told Rick Perry that a president can't just wave a wand and make sweeping changes to the structure of Congress by executive order? Or does he confuse a president with a king? With Rick Perry, it's difficult to tell, because his appalling level of stupidity indicates that he clearly slept through civics class.
