That plus twenty-six bits will get you a cup of coffee.
Ten years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book on the effects of Clintonian welfare reform on the working poor, working a series of entry-level jobs to demonstrate that it is impossible to support yourself in this country with that work. Over at BoingBoing, Charles Platt worked at Walmart for “a limited period” to prove Ehrenreich wrong. —Turns out she was silly to insist on supporting herself with an entry-level job, because no one who works at that level attempts to be self-sufficient! It’s an unrealistic expectation!
More, please.
So what we’ve done here is do an apples to apples comparison of current unemployment numbers to the stimulus spending number using the Thune Stacking Formula as a basis of comparison. Here we have dollars stacked on top of each other versus current number of unemployed Americans stacked on top of each other.
If they’re going to try to tear it all down with the same old bullshit arguments, counter with more and better and bedazzling bullshit. Point and laugh; point, and laugh, most balefully.
Without food speedily on a platter,
Without a cow’s milk whereon a calf thrives,
Without a man’s habitation after the staying of darkness,
Be that the luck of the Thune of Dakota.
Doughty theep.
Does the fact I’m driving around with my windows down in February give me a free pass to sneer and point and hoot and laugh at global warming denialists?
Everything old is new again.
Earthworm-ennabled pundit Doug TenNapel seems to think he’s got something with this whole “conservatives are the new punks” meme. At least he’s admitting that “lefty politics are no longer the fringe.” —D. Aristophanes sets him up with a Mondale joke; Dsquared pushes him down the stairs.
HENRY lemon CREAM.
Put it all together and at this rate, the government—that is, taxpayers—will own much of the housing, auto, and financial sectors of the economy, those sectors that are failing fastest.
Consider too that the government already finances much of the aerospace industry, which is still doing reasonably well but depends on a foreign policy that itself has been a dismal failure. And a large portion of the pharmaceutical industry and health care sector (through the Medicare and Medicaid, the Medicare drug benefit, and support of basic research). These are in bad shape as well, and it seems likely the Obama administration will try to reorganize much of them.
What’s left? Most of high-tech, entertainment, hospitality, retail, and commodities. So far, at least, we taxpayers are not propping them up. And when the economy turns up—perhaps as soon as next year, most likely later—these sectors have a good chance of rebounding.
But the others—the ones the government is coming to own or manage—are less likely to rebound as quickly, if ever. If anyone has a good argument for why the shareholders of these losers should not be cleaned out first, and their creditors and executives and directors second—before taxpayers get stuck with the astonishingly-large bill—I would like to hear it.
It’s called Lemon Socialism. Taxpayers support the lemons. Capitalism is reserved for the winners.
So one might say that we are seeing not the tender creep of socialist possibilities into the national discourse, but their further erasure. Every time that we agree that the word “socialism” might refer to something other than, at a minimum, worker ownership if not indeed the end of surplus value extraction; every time that we misrecognize state corporatism as something other than a moment in capital’s “equilibrium in motion,” we “turn the wheel of discursive normativity a click” away from socialism. We forget what that word promises. Perhaps the most optimistic memory, as Jasper reminded us, is that the corporatist regimes have arisen historically in the fact of popular socialist challenges—but that in no way guarantees the motion will summon forth such a movement via some blind mechanism of counterweights.
“My bonus is ‘shameful’ — but I worked hard to get it,” said John Konstantinidis, a wholesale insurance broker, lunching Friday at Harry’s at Hanover Square.
“I’m a HENRY,” Mr. Konstantinidis added. “High Earner but Not Rich Yet.”
Nonetheless, it was rather remarkable on Friday how many white shirts denied getting a bonus altogether when they were asked. Indeed, if the data obtained by reporters in the district was any measure, there is no telling where that $18 billion really went.
What can be told, however, is that President Obama is substantially less popular on Wall Street this week than he was last week. Words like “outrageous,” “shameful” and “the height of irresponsibility” — especially when applied to a man’s paycheck — tend not to make you many friends.
“I think President Obama painted everyone with a broad stroke,” said Brian McCaffrey, 55, a Wall Street lawyer who was on his way to see a client. “The way we pay our taxes is bonuses. The only way that we’ll get any of our bailout money back is from taxes on bonuses. I think bonuses should be looked at on a case by case basis, or you turn into a socialist.”
That, indeed, was a recurring equation: Broad strokes + bonuses = socialist.
—”It’s Theirs and They’re Not Apologizing”
And I want to take that acronym, HENRY, and set it on fire and wrap it around his neck, but it’s still too goddamn bland; it just doesn’t sneer yet, not like YUPPIE or BOBO or CREAM. High Earner but Not Rich Yet. Fuck you, you silver-spooned Masters of the Universe.
Say you’re a banker and you flushed $30 million down the toilet, which is the actual scenario we’re looking at. When can we expect you to pay a part of that back?
You know what, Henry? That guy walking ahead of us, down the street? Too out of it to spaynge like the ghettopunks and anyway if he ever stopped walking the cops would roust him in an instant under sit/lie? Travel-stained, in the euphemism of fantasy novels, hasn’t seen the inside of a shelter in months in spite of the cold? No coat on his back but that sleeping bag clutched around his shoulders to draggle down the sidewalk? Not to pull a cliché trump, Henry, but he ain’t rich yet, neither. —And you know what else? He’s too big to fail, Henry.
We’re all too big to fail.
Race fail 2009.
This past Monday, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, I discovered that the casting of the four leading characters for the upcoming live-action movie, The Last Airbender (based on the TV show, Avatar: The Last Airbender) had gone entirely to white actors. I want—no, need—to say something about this.
Following Jackson Rathbone’s footstep in addressing fans’ criticism over The Last Airbender casting, pop singer Jesse McCartney comes to MTV to share his response towards fans’ protest of the “all Caucasian” [sic] casting. The 21-year-old who is tapped for Prince Zuko part tries to assure hard core fans of the animated TV series that he will do his best to do justice for his character.
“I heard a lot about this online,” the singer who fills the voice of Theodore in Alvin and the Chipmunks explains. “There’s a lot of hard-core fans out there [who] probably know more about it… I’m still learning. This is M. Night’s vision and this is what he wants. To all the fans, I can tell you I’m putting my best foot forward.” He further adds, “I’ve been in kung-fu training for the last month and half-learning all the moves. I’m looking forward to it.”
The casting controversy came out after reports surfaced that karate-trained Texan Noah Ringer, Twilight actor Jackson Rathbone, Deck the Halls actress Nicola Peltz and singer Jesse McCartney have been offered the roles of Aang, Sokka, Katara and Zuko respectively. The casting of the four Caucasian actors brought out negative reaction from fans with accusations of racism.
Earlier, Rathbone has responded to the complaints, stating that it is his chance to show his range of acting. Speaking to MTV, he added on what he will need to do for Sokka’s transformation, “I think it’s one of those things where I pull my hair up, shave the sides, and I definitely need a tan. It’s one of those things where, hopefully, the audience will suspend disbelief a little bit.”
—“Jesse McCartney Answers The Last Airbender Casting Criticism,” ACESHOWBIZ.com
“And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.”
Since getting angry doesn’t help my daughter, though, I took a breath and tried to do damage control.
I told her that love makes a family, not size or gender or anything else. She wanted to know, then, why other families aren’t the same.
“There are some like ours, honey. Like Austin’s family—”
“Austin has a dad. He just lives somewhere else.”
I froze. I don’t want to say that the same is true of her. It’s not. She doesn’t have a dad, she has a biological father who doesn’t even take our phone calls anymore, who either doesn’t tell his girlfriends that she exists, or lies and tells them that I cheated on him and he doubts he’s really her father. (The Missouri and Pennsylvania courts would be surprised to hear that, considering they ran three paternity tests and garnish his wages every week, none of which he even contested.) I don’t want to lie and say he loves her and misses her and thinks of her all the time, that the only reason he doesn’t see her is because he lives so far away and doesn’t have enough money to travel. It would end this argument in a heartbeat, it would make her feel better, but it would still be a lie. And it’d be a lie I’d have to answer for ten years down the line, when she becomes a teenager and he starts building his replacement family without her.
I froze for too long. She started to cry.
“Sweetheart, there are other families like ours.”
“Then where are they?” she demanded. “Where are they?”
I dropped the ball on this one, you guys. I dropped it so hard it rolled away down the street and off a cliff.
Help 
darlas_mom pick it back up and more. She’s looking for photos “of you with your actual families. Straights with kids, gays and lesbians with kids, single parents (both moms and dads), blended families, families of different ethnicities or multiple ethnicities.” She wants ’em all. —Get yourselves into her book.
Cordwainer Bush.
Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair—
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
One less mouth to feed is one less mouth to feed.
Cal Thomas takes not so much the long as the hail-mary view of the necessary economic stimulus:
In an interview over the weekend with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the proposed “hundreds of millions of dollars” earmarked in the “stimulus” package for contraceptive services will help the economy. But wait. Won’t fewer people mean fewer taxpayers?
We have already reduced the number of taxpayers by an estimated 50 million since abortion became legal in 1973. If we had 50 million more people paying taxes, would we be in our current budget malaise? People mean taxes and since taxes are what Democrats are about, they are harming the economy by advocating fewer people through abortion and contraception.
In addition to being willfully stupid on the ostensible subject (a birth deferred is not a birth deleted; really, this is elementary), on the specific subject of the “hundreds of millions of dollars” earmarked in the “stimulus” package, Thomas—as you could probably tell from his overly judicious use of quotation marks—is lying through his shiny white teeth.
The essence thereof.
I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a difference feminist or a gender essentialist; there are differences, yes, of course there are, but they’re scattered in bell curves that overlap to an extraordinary degree, and even if one’s labeled Man and the other Woman, well, you never meet Man or Woman, do you? Just people. Who happen to be. And so.
I’m not a gender essentialist: for it to be at all meaningful (as essence, mind, essentially), you’d have to convince me that any conceivable woman has more in common with every other possible woman that she could with any conceivable man, and vice-versa. There are differences, of course there are, but we have so many different ways to be different together; why waste all your time looking for the Men who Always Do This or the Women who Never Do That and risk missing the people that are all around you?
Blanket statements like that, when the polarities are Male and Female, end up inevitably circling around one particular This ’n’ That which Men Always and Women Never (well, Hardly Ever): SEX. And while they can seem relatively harmless on the surface, leading to silly head-scratchers such as—
Men are simple creatures. Protoplasms. It is a strange irony that a woman can pretty much get whatever she wants from a guy with no arguments and no disagreements—nothing but “Absolutely, dear” and “Whatever you want, honey”—by doing just one thing (but doing it two or three or sometimes four times a week).
(And while I don’t doubt there’s some folks nodding along with the beat out there, there’s a whole lot of other folks going now hold on just a minute, what?) —But such seemingly harmless homilies can twist all of a sudden into duties and expectations the rest of us never knew were in the social contract—
What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.
What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can—indeed, ought to—refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?
—and what was a seemingly harmless stupidity has become a collectively punishing generality, getting uglier with every Men Do and Women Don’t twist until we end up clutching at Spider Robinson’s Screwfly:
We’re all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.
Now Tiptree wrote “Screwfly” for a reason, and people who said shit like that were definitely part of the unbearable wrong that fueled that particular pocket of outrage in her head. But the coldly horrible what-if of the story is precisely what if Men Always Did; what if there really is an US and a THEM and an unbridgeable gender war between. —It wouldn’t look like a John Gray sitcom, is what.
(Yes. I know: Black mollies. —I never said the idea doesn’t exist. I said it isn’t true.)
I’m not a gender essentialist, but—
(Ha ha.)
No, seriously. Or at least as serious as I want to be, whistling once more past this graveyard. —When I’m out and about with the Littlest Wookie (so named because of her fluting and hooting and not at all because of her furry back), I’ve noticed it’s always women who are smiling at me, nodding, saying hello and oh my and how cute. It’s always women who are suddenly stepping close to rub her head without asking. It’s always women, and never men.
(And before you tell me it’s because as a father strolling through downtown with a baby Björned I’m clearly good breedstock and willing to invest energy in my offspring which does something all unconscious-like to her uterus or maybe it’s her hormones which explains why, you should note the crucial grammatical difference between “women always” and “always women,” and start maybe questioning what you should have been questioning all along: my perceptions, and yours, and theirs. —I’m lying, for instance: the cashier who gave us a 20% discount on a hefty load of groceries because the Littlest Wookie was fussy was, after all, a man.)
Okay, babies, but how about salesmen? —In my job I see a lot of email ripped from a lot of corporate email accounts and let me tell you: salesmen? Hands down the worst for the nasty jokes and the porn and the shockjock photos. Saleswomen? Not at all.
So there’s that.
Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Althæaphage—
Go, relish the rest of the post that surrounds this glorious catalog of truth-eaters:
...the howling roil of right-wing authoritarians, of spite retailers, blowhards, closeted gay ministers, cranks, Bible lickers, of nerds-gone-bad, of flag humpers, pseudo-intellectuals, chair-based saucer investigators, of stern-bodiced rape fantasists, of millennarians, Know-Nothings, Free Silver enthusiasts, jingoes, Oreos, Foursquare McPhersonites, splinter Baptists, pseudo-Methodists, Pentecostal highway parishioners, of cynical purveyors of purpose-driven things and of AMWAY, of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, Graham’s miracle flour, Kellogg’s abstinence-promoting Corn Flake Cereal, or other products unevaluated by the FDA that are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease; of Goldwater idolators, ‘Scoop Jackson liberals,’ McCarthyites, Yankees fans, Likudniks, the mean of spirit, dupes, chumps, Dartmouth grads, shysters, four-flushers, dog-kickers, self-dealers, Professors of X at James Madison University, wingnut welfare skillet-lickers and beak-wetters; of wingnut welfare high-rollers, pimps, queens, bathroom-stall fellators, and generational dependents; of certain former or current WWF/WWE personalities and/or karate movie stars and/or minor Baldwin brothers, convicted Watergate felons, washed-up Red Sox pitchers, and/or 1970s Detroit-area rock musicians, as well as unnh and gaah, not to mention hunnh...
Form / Content,
or, The nail replaced.
Douglas Wolk incisively surveys the brand new and much-improved whitehouse.gov; Ben Orenstein tells you about the little, critical change you won’t see at first glance. (While we’re on about websites and such, would someone please give the New Republic whatever it takes to make theirs usable? The litany of “I’d link to this article I wrote for TNR but their website is as we all know borked” from the wonkosphere is beyond embarrassing at this point. —I ought to be able to click on a link from one of Douglas’s columns and bring up a directory of all of them; I ought to be able to search for his name and not have the first page of hits be nothing but front page teasers for the article I just read and a link to Marty Peretz’ columns. How else am I going to point y’all to the Critical Browser stuff?)
A cold day in hell.
I still haven’t heard the speech, or seen it. I did hear a bunch of attorneys and paralegals cheering from down the hall, and then I heard some historians talk about the speech on NPR (“I think it’s clear Obama decided to deliver one type of speech, and not another type of speech”). —I’m sorry, I’m just not much for this sort of thing, I guess, unless I am. And for whatever reason I’m not, today. But reading Spencer Ackerman gave me a taste of the thrill people are talking about, so hey. Thanks. (You are reading Ackerman, right?)
Brand new day.
(Also, there’s a new blog.)
Partisan hackery.
Shouldn’t the supposed crimes of the Bush administration be paid for by Barack Obama?
Yeah, I know. Maybe I’ll feel better about it all later today. But right now my back hurts and I’m grouchy and I have to load some data into a database downtown while he’s taking the oath of office and anyway his first words wouldn’t ever be arrest that sonofabitch. I guess I’m just a partisan hack. —I just wish I had a party, you know?
We’re gonna make it after all.
From Making Light, some photos by Scott Wyngarden:
I’ve never blogged under a Democratic administration. I wonder what it’s like.
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing
That side was made for you and me.
A whole lot of folks were thrilled beyond words when Pete Seeger stood up and sang the whole damn thing. They linked to uploaded videos of the historic public event to share with friends and family and country. HBO, who bought the rights to broadcast the inauguration concert, are busy yanking down every free copy they can find. —While you can apparently watch The Whole Damn Thing on hbo.com, there’s no linkable version of This Moment or That that I can find; what century are we in, again? (But apparently, neglecting to broadcast the invocation given by Bishop Gene Robinson—the sop tossed to Obama’s GLBTQ supporters, furious over the choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the actual inaugural? That wasn’t HBO. That’s all on Obama’s Presidential Inaugural Committee.)
Okay, so it isn’t as baldly bad as I’d thought. —Anyway, here’s a version from what looks to have been German television:
