FIRST DRAFT

A Poor Neighborhood is Not For You

Via Jeff on Facebook, sweet baby Jesus: 

Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard.

“Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?” she teased a couple from Paris.

As the bus idled across from historic St. Ann’s Episcopalian Church, Battaglia launched into a description of the crime, poverty and violence that plagued the South Bronx during the 1970s recession.

As she spoke, a line of two dozen poor people — including one man visibly agitated by the onlookers — waited for handouts from the church pantry.

“I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it,” Battaglia told the tourists. “We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.”

The bus stopped in front of St. Mary’s Park, where she credited Mayor Rudy Giuliani for curbing crime.

“If it were 1980 and you said to me, ‘Lynn, I want to die.’ My answer would be, ‘You’re in the right neighborhood,’ ” she said.

Chicago does some of these types of things too, true-crime tours and mob-themed tours and things, and it's always gross, but not quite as gross as making people's poverty your fucking theme park. Do all your proceeds, and not profits, I mean proceeds, go to helping this neighborhood? No? Then how dare you use it as your set piece? Even then, how dare you? THEY LIVE THERE. This is their HOME. If it seems so horrible to you, if it seems so unsafe and scandalous and you're being so very daring, think about how it must be to be there, all the time. 

("They should move then." I can hear it now from Smuggy McPublican. Bitchass, not everybody sees problems where you do, and also, abandoning your parents' and grandparents' homes is hard, even if you do have the means. All things being equal, moving is fucking expensive. Even if you and a few friends and a case of Bud Light do it, moving is expensive. Do YOU have the equivalent of first and last month's market-rate yuppie-ville rent plus security deposit on you at all times, and a job from which you can take time off to look for a new place without losing more money? If not, STFU.)  

This goes back to the whole "I can't go there without a sidearm" kind of thing I was talking about before, where you assume people who don't live in your neighborhood aren't real. They don't, say, get up and go to work or come home and sit on their porch reading or listening to the game. They don't love their children or drive through the hamburger place or check books out of the library or get their hair cut or drink coffee. They think violence is normal and gang affiliation is awesome and everybody be slingin' tonight. Their ways are strange to us all. I mean, God Almighty: 

“I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it,” Battaglia told the tourists. “We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.”

GO ASK JESUS HOW HARD IS THIS SHIT. Go over to the strange "natives" and ask what's up. Nine times out of 10, someone will tell you, gladly. This is America, almost everybody speaks enough English to satisfy your curiosity about almost anything at all, and even those that don't will find you somebody who does or get by with hand gestures, because 90 percent of people are basically decent and want to help your clueless ass so long as it doesn't unduly interfere with their days. 

I am all for visiting everywhere in a place when you visit it. And I know that sometimes that can be a knife-edge of difference between looking and gawking, and I'm absolutely sure I've come down on the wrong side of it in my life. But there are about a hundred miles between going to see a place you are curious about, and making a buck alienating human beings from one another. This company is gross. 

A. 

You get six carrots, a bag of celery and a potato because we said so

For a party that has always said that they didn’t want the government sticking its nose into people’s lives, Republicans in this state have no problem sticking their noses in people’s refrigerators

But only if those people are on the government teat.

Rep. Dean Kaufert of Neenah has proposed a bill that would create a “tiered buying” system for food. In his bill, which passed out of committee earlier this week, only one-third of the money could be spent on what he deems to be “junk food.” The rest of the money should be spent on good, wholesome food like milk and bread.

Kaufert’s rationale behind the bill is as follows:

Kaufert told members of the State Affairs Committee he often heard complaints that food stamp users were buying large volumes of chips and soda. He said he simply wants people to use their benefits to eat healthier.

“I don’t want to ban Nachos or Doritos from anyone’s grandson because my grandson eats it,” Kaufert said. “But the fact is, reasonable limitation is not asking for too much.” 

 

In other words, “I didn’t bother to check with anyone at the WIC office, any state agency that monitors this, any health officials who assess the health quality of these allegedly unhealthy foods or anything else. However, I have ‘often heard complaints,’ which means at least one and it probably was someone was also anecdotally pissing and moaning about this person owning a cell phone while being on WIC as well.”

Kaufert’s argument is the same argument we’ve been having for years. We had the whole “welfare queen” argument for years, in which people were appalled at how these damned poor people were using their government assistance to buy extravagant foods like steak and lobster. Now, we’re having the same outrage at them buying cheap shit.

The reason? You’re poor and I’m not. I’m paying for your fucking Doritos so I get some sort of say.

Notice that Kaufert made some lame attempt to throw himself into the whole processed foods argument by doing the, “Hey, I have a grandkid. He likes Doritos. We’re on the same page.” However, Kaufert didn’t say, “What I really need is a government agency making sure that he’s not subsisting on Doritos.”

The “reasonable limitations” are only there because a) we’re fucking paying for your Doritos and b) there’s an underlying assumption that if you’re poor enough to be on food stamps you’re too stupid to buy anything but Doritos. Kaufert, being gainfully employed by the state and able to wear a suit and tie to work, obviously doesn’t need oversight when it comes to the health of his children and grandchildren. (Hey, wait! My tax dollars are paying for you DEAN! I should get some say in what you eat!)

As for you poor bastards, you’re lucky he’s not assigning a special-needs aide to walk you to the store as well so you don’t hurt yourself on the way.

Before he gets all happy about this whole “I’m just like Michelle Obama because I want you to eat better,” Kaufert also might want to take a look at the food industry he’s touting. Pulitzer-prize winner Michael Moss took a peek at what really makes it on to our dinner table in his book “Salt, Sugar, Fat” and if Kaufert had read it, he’d know every “natural” food is not created equal:

“Take milk, for instance. Through the 1960s, sales of milk plunged as it bore the brunt of public concerns about fat, both in terms of its calories and its links to heart disease. At the same time, the dairy industry figured out a way to soften this blow to their business by putting the phrases “low-fat” and “2 percent” on milk… The popularity of this defatted milk grew so fast that it now outsells all other types of milk, including skim, which has no fat at all. But there is a marketing scheme at work in this: The “2 percent” labeling may lead you to believe that 98 percent of the fat is removed, but in truth, the fat content of whole milk is only a tad higher at 3 percent.”

In looking at bread, Moss wrote that it contains not-so-good levels of salt, sugar and fat in order to improve “mouthfeel” and taste. In various experiments, Moss was allowed to taste bread that lacked one or more of these key elements. At best, he reported that the bread tasted like tin and felt like it rotted away in his mouth. Meat? Don’t even get me started on the issues pertaining to “pink slime” and Moss’ look at the way in which meat will kill you.

So much for those great “food staples of healthy eating.”

Look, I understand that we should all eat better. I’m just as bad at this as anyone else. The difference is that the state trusts me to make my own stupid decisions as to how much Diet Coke I mainline or when I can or can’t buy a piece of veal. If the only reason I’m able to make these choices is because I’m lucky enough to not have to take government assistance, that says a lot as to how we view our fellow citizens.

Well, First They Should Sell Some Bling

I mean, really, quit cashing those government checks: 

“I think it would be a good idea if perhaps we had the kids work for their lunches: trash to be taken out, hallways to be swept, lawns to be mowed, make them earn it,” Del. Ray Canterbury (R-Greenbrier) said during floor debate. “If they miss a lunch or they miss a meal they might not, in that class that afternoon, learn to add, they may not learn to diagram a sentence, but they’ll learn a more important lesson.”

Which will be that their government and their community think they are scum, and should be exempted from child labor laws, and are to blame for their parents' misfortunes. I can't think of a more appropriate lesson for children than that. 

I swear whenever these Republican knobs start yobbing off about how poor people just need to learn to work hard, I think YOU FIRST ASSHOLE. I doubt any of them have ever hauled anything heavier than a double scotch, but boy are they eager to stand watch with a whip while the little children pick in the fields and scrub in the hallways.

Make them earn it. In your life, man, what have you ever earned? 

A. 

Winter comes for us all

George Carlin was fond of saying that the poor are there to scare the shit out of the middle class in this country. It was something that made them keep showing up at those jobs of theirs.

However, I don’t think that’s the truth anymore.

We’re already scared. We just don’t want to admit it.

I caught the movie “American Winter” last night, a story of eight families living on the razor’s edge of poverty every day. The issues that landed them on that edge ranged from the death of a spouse to the loss of a job. Regardless of how they got there or why they were there, they found themselves afraid to open the mail, fearful of turning on a light switch and crying when they faced the fact they couldn’t care for themselves or their families.

They moved back in with their parents.

They scavenged for scrap metal.

They saved rainwater for their sanitation needs.

The people captured in this film weren’t the drug users or the lazy bastards we’ve been told they are. It wasn’t a blinding flash of the obvious to me, as I’ve known more than a few friends who found themselves on government assistance or heading home to Mom and Dad’s house.

However, it appeared to be a stunning moment for all of them. The easy answers they heard for years had been deflated by hard reality.

“Well, get a job!” people tell them.

I’m trying. No one is hiring.

“You’ll have to settle for less than you’re used to,” people retort.

I’ll do anything, one man said. I’ll scrub toilets for minimum wage, which is far less than the $22 an hour he once earned at Volkswagen.

“You’ll have to tough it out,” people say.

We are, but tough doesn’t pay the bills.

I even heard a sliver of my father’s voice in my head as I looked at these people:

“If they’re so goddamned broke, how can they afford all those tattoos,” he would occasionally remark when something like this came on TV.

Or, “They’ve got a goddamned cell phone/video game/whatever… How bad can they be?”

Worse than they’d ever imagined, I would imagine.

In each case, the families were doing something they’d never done before and never thought they’d ever do. They took food from a food bank. They slept at a shelter. They lived without power. They moved back home. They sought financial assistance.

A 50-year-old man cried as he considered himself pathetic for asking his father for help in paying the light bill.

A 30-something couple fought the fear of losing their children in order to admit the lack of electricity in their home had created a detrimental living condition for the family. They did this because they were told that doing so would force the power company to turn the power back on, only to find out later that this wasn’t true.

A 40-year-old man quietly responded, “I’m an American” when a co-worker accused him of “having some nigger in you.” He was worried he would be fired if he started a problem. He was later fired anyway, being told by the boss he shouldn’t have hired “your kind.”

I thought about that last person a lot and how “your kind” can be an easy answer to every problem.

Many of the kids I grew up with looked at life the way a lot of these kids in this film did: Find a spouse, get married, raise a family and provide a good life for themselves. Somewhere along the way, a lot of folks were felled by something or other.

A good friend of mine was put on a one-week-on, one-week-off schedule to ease his company’s “financial burden.” He got sick, his kid had something wrong with her throat and suddenly, the doctor bills were everywhere. He is getting divorced and has moved back in with his parents.

Another friend was a single parent who had a good job that suddenly meant he would have to travel more than parenting would allow. He lost the job, lost another job and moved into his mom’s basement. He would tend bar and save money to send his kid to a private school, pouring everything he had into hoping his child would have a better shot at life than he did. He turns 40 this year and hasn’t had steady full-time work in years, despite his best efforts.

What always struck me most about these two men was how conservative they were about almost everything. Guns, politics, social programs, whatever. They held firm in the belief that they government assistance was for welfare queens, lazy pricks and people who just didn’t give a shit. Those things aren’t for “my kind,” I could imagine them saying.

They were afraid that by taking part in the system, they had become what they once despised. They couldn’t see that they already were “those people,” people who had hit a rough spot, people who had come up a little short but were willing to do anything to get back to where they were, people who once were protected from these circumstances by rules and laws and unions.

They just couldn’t admit it. Admitting it would make it real.

So instead, they did what most of us do. They built up a wall that somehow separated “us” from “them.” They drew false distinctions between who they are and who those “other people” are, so they could find safety and security in their illusions.

As I get older, I tend to find that the faster I come to grips with reality, the less painful it is to fix the problem. Whether it’s my bad back (“It’s just a twinge, really…”) or my car (“I can change the oil next week…”), the quicker I pony up (“Fuck this, I’m seeing the chiropractor…” or “Piss on it. I’m paying someone to change the oil now.”), the less problematic it becomes later.

If we can only get more people to see that they are but one wrong turn from becoming “those people,” maybe we’ll all be able to help “our kind” before that happens.

Louisiana Notes: PBJ's Devious Game

It's time to batten down the hatches and get ready for some bad policy making. That's right, the Louisiana Lege is in session. Last week, Governor Jindal ostensibly gave up on his so-called "tax swap" proposal. It's an exquisitely bad policy that would have eliminated the state's rather negligible income tax in favor of a state sales tax of 6.25%. In Orleans Parish, that would have left us with a 11.25% sales tax. Everybody hated the idea so PBJ "parked" the proposal.

I'll let my old pal Mark (Oyster) Moseley extend the automotive analogy. He knows from cars, y'all:

On April 8 Gov. Bobby Jindal parked his tax-swap vehicle. He exited from the driver’s side and admitted he had been speeding.

It was a big deal.

Bystanders were so surprised, they didn’t notice when Jindal hopped into the backseat of a getaway car, tossed the keys to the Legislature, and told them to floor it. Take us to the promised land of untaxed income, he insisted.

That’s how it sounded to me, anyway.

Most of Jindal’s numerous critics have spent the past three months firing at the governor’s vehicle instead of his destination. “His plan doesn’t add up. It hurts the poor… etc.” (In my meandering, too-subtle way, I tried to rebut those easy criticisms.) They shot up the plan until it wouldn’t run.

Do we understand yet that Jindal’s so-called tax-swap plan was only a “sleeper,” to borrow a term from hotrodding’s golden age. The revenue offsets in his initial plan were always completely negotiable as long as they yielded an income tax repeal. The higher sales taxes, the closed loopholes, the appeals to simplicity … all that crap was political window-dressing. That’s why it kept changing.

Jindal’s overriding mission, though, has always remained the same: to end the state income tax. As long as that is within reach, Jindal’s “parking job” is only a tactical retreat.

As usual, PBJ is more interested in his delusions of 2016 grandeur than in what is best for the state. He's tossed the ball to the lege with a wink, and encouraged them to eliminate the income tax. The Tea Party types among them would be thrilled to do so without any offsetting revenues. They call it "conservative reform," I call it a disaster. They've been itching to cut spending and their callow, ambitious, and megalomaniacal daddy has given them the keys to the car.

Jindal is looking for an idea that will endear himself to the Koch brothers and all the right wing taxophobes in his party. "Parking" the proposal is apt to make it an even shinier bauble for them. If it goes down, he'll blame the lege, if it passes, he'll take the credit. The rest of us will be left to pick up the pieces when he hotfoots it out of state and spends even more time in Iowa and New Hampshire than he already does.

Much was made in the national political press about PBJ's tanking popularity ratings at home. He no longer cares about those numbers. He has an eerie confidence that his confidence game will play well nationally. I think it's misplaced but the mere thought of taking the GOP's pulse increases my blood pressure to dangerous levels so I won't try.

I remain convinced that PBJ will not be his party's nominee for President BUT he has a pretty darn good chance of being the next losing Vice Presidential candidate who will never be President. The Gopers are desperate to look diverse without changing their views and PBJ is right up their alley. He's as conservative as they come and will do or say anything to get elected. He may even embrace his own ethnic identity. Nah, that's a bridge too far for "Bobby."

I'll keep you updated on PBJ's shell game. Stay tuned. In the meantime, a brief musical interlude:

 

UPDATE: The income tax repeal appears to have died in committee.

Childless Women Lack Essential Humanity

Boy, do I ever love it when they just come right out and say it. Oh, and fuck your sympathy, you condescending bitchmonster: 

I mean, seriously, what is this paragraph even trying to say beyond “please don’t fire me Mr. ‘Femail is a Great Name for a ‘Lifestyles’ section’, I can pimp breeding for white women harder if you want!”

But, more than all the things we want, we actually need our children; they complete us as women, they are our light and our love and our legacy.

Because without that ability to spawn actual human beings with their uteruses (well, about 49 or so % of the time anyways), women would be the useless malfunctioning fleshlights Patriarchal society treats them as, amirite?

We feel desperately sorry for those who yearn for children they cannot have; the unwilling barren, if you will.

Translation: The last time I tried to argue that childless women were soulless abominations, I got my ass deep-roasted in flames from barren conservative women, so this time I’m trying to throw this belated shield up in the hopes of making it more clear that “childless” is just an attempted dog whistle for “those young feministy types that actually want to be treated like full people in the workplace and society” that makes “curtain-twitching patriarchy defender” sound like something halfway appealing in contrast.

How the CHRIST would this nosy skank know if someone is "unwillingly barren" or not? She'd have to ask, I suppose, and in that wheedling busybody tone you get to know so well when you run into one of these members of the mommy cult bent on ferreting out exactly what kind of horrible tragedy you're having so she can cluck over it with her friends at the next fucking meeting of the Club of Maternal Superiority. I swear to God, I try not to be bitter at people who have children but BITCHES LIKE THIS DO NOT MAKE IT EASY.  

The entire thing is just an excuse to hate on young women, using "childless" as a synonym for young. All the disparaging comments about how young women go out and party and come in to work hungover (and let's not get started on how her only concept of work is Intertrode or something), and are shallow, and don't value their co-workers or their jobs the way TRUE WOMEN who have given birth do ... it's not even so much hateful from a childless perspective as it is hateful from the perspective of someone who still identifies with a generation that is constantly getting told it is shallow and trivial and fuck you, basically, you don't know anybody's life. 

Because anybody who doesn't have children just wants to party all day and all night. Anybody without children has no responsibilities at all, and certainly no family of her own. She has no cares at all and can be as selfish as she pleases! For as much as this woman seems to value the workplace, she might try meeting some people in it. She might discover that the young woman who has no children volunteers for two charities and takes care of an aging parent, instead of partying all night. God forbid anybody younger than 40 lay any claim to being a grown-up, after all. You're not REALLY an adult until you've given birth. 

Look. I get you've got to come up with reasons why you and only you are superior to all other ladies in the office. Otherwise you're just living on merit like everybody else, fighting your way through the fucking minefield that is modern work life with men and women, trying to succeed. If you're not inherently more worthy, how on earth are you expected to survive? 

But my understanding of your psychological coping mechanisms ends when you declare that I lack the essential humanity of the virtuous Madonna. Fuck that shit and the diaper bag it carried in with it. 

A. 

I Wonder What This Could Mean

The suburbs don't want to "subsidize" the city: 

Service consolidation has been a popular topic for local government, but the notion of a metropolitan form of government has sparked controversy.

"Metropolitan government is tough," Glendale Mayor Jerome Tepper said. "We have 20 municipalities including the county. People identify with their community" and some don't want to give that up, he said.

Rob Henken, president of the nonpartisan Public Policy Forum, said the controversial part about metro government in Milwaukee would be concerns from suburban communities that they would be subsidizing "much more intense levels of service in the city."

Right. Much more intense levels of service. 

For fuck's sake. You know why the city would need more services? MORE PEOPLE LIVE THERE. And the city's been starved of services forever, creating more problems to solve, as businesses and anybody with money fled to the 'burbs and city government could and did ignore things like building inspections and public works upkeep in neighborhoods where nobody had time or inclination to complain. 

I'm not saying metropolitan government makes perfect sense here or anywhere, really, but the glib dismissal in that comment is ... something. 

A. 

 

Job Creation! Walker Style

He's doing it so well: 

Gov. Scott Walker’s decision not to accept federal funding to expand the state’s health-care system could contribute to some state employers being collectively penalized by paying millions more in taxes, according to a report released Tuesday.

The report, released by Jackson Hewitt Inc., looked into tax provisions state employers could be required to pay under the Affordable Care Act.

The “shared responsibility” provision of the ACA would require employers to pay a tax penalty if employees seek aid from tax credits that help low-income individuals pay for their health-care coverage.

And yet I'm sure this is all Obama's fault somehow. Because of reasons. 

A. 

 

Working Girls

A bunch of links that will make sense when you get to the end of them: 

My fabulous friend Jennifer's fabulous new book, Sexy Feminism, is out, and you should buy it and give it to all the young men and women in your life (and get an extra copy for yourself).

My favorite part of that book is a chapter about "The Working-Woman Problem," about the way our culture encourages women to view one another as competition for jobs and favors in the office. 

I thought of that chapter when looking at this (click to embiggen): 

Because we need to address this: 

One audience member asked the group if women were doing enough to support other women. "I sort of push back a little bit on the 'women don't help other women' thing," Sklar responded. "Why isn't there fretting about why men don't help men in the workplace? Because I personally know a lot of dudes who have knifed a lot of dudes in the back without thinking twice about it."

The Working Woman Problem chapter in Jennifer's book made me think about my own feminist actions more than anything else (because I've been involved with Sexy Feminist for years now, I was familiar with most of the topics). I don't have a lot of female mentors. I've worked in male-dominated industries and thus almost always had more male friends than female ones, but lately (having met some kickass chicks I'd like to network with) I've found myself wondering why I don't have more women I go to when I don't know what to do about something work-related.

Part of it's my personality, part of it's what I like and what I'm like, of course. But I think part of it, too, is that I've often fallen into the same trap the book cautions against, and that's thinking about careers, especially white-collar office careers, as a game with only one winner -- if another woman's getting a promotion then there's one less for me. I want to win, of course, but the rules need to change. If the game's about who's the boss's favorite girl, the boss is still a fella, and that's not okay if I want to be the boss. 

It's not even okay FOR the boss, really, because he's missing out on a hell of a lot of talent if we're all being taught to fight it out so that only one of us advances. The best experience I had working with a bunch of chicks was on a mostly female investigative news team a few years back. If just one of us had been hired instead of all four of us, the list of projects that wouldn't have gotten done would be as long as my arm. Instead we had a great time kicking ass together, and while I'm sure there were jealousies on occasion (you don't throw a bunch of Type A's in a room together without some friction) we mostly managed to do our jobs without being hemmed in by fear of helping each other too much. 

That's where last quote and the graphic up there come in. Women have been in the working world since there WAS a working world, and yet conditions for women who are working are still not remotely friendly. Conditions for ANYBODY who is working are getting noticeably worse, as companies compete to see who can suck more and governments compete to see who can punch unions hardest in the neck. Things SUCK right now, and we can't get around to fixing how they suck if we're fighting the fucking mommy wars between stay-at-home and work-outside-the-home moms and then in the office arguing over how there's a new pretty girl at the dance. 

A. 

Someday I Wanna Be Above The Law

Skeery, skeery banks: 

“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult to prosecute them,” Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “When we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps world economy, that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large. It has an inhibiting impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate. That is something that you all need to consider.”

Holder added that he felt the department had been “appropriately aggressive,” in pursuing and bringing cases where it could prove companies or individuals had broken the law. “These are not easy cases to make,” he said. “Things were done wrong, but the question is whether they’re illegal.”

As far as "not easy cases to make," well, Holder, we don't pay you the big bucks to nab people who shoplifted makeup on CCTV and then confessed to it the minute the clerk heard the alarm go off. Christ. It's the same old nonsense, what if you go after them and lose? Well, what if you do? They'll still be sons of bitches who are going to hell, and you'll still be on the side of the angels. Assholes beat the rap every day, and yet we still make arrests. You fight the fights need fighting, and at least then you've fingerprinted the bastards so the next time they steal it's quicker to book them. 

And as for "even if we win, they're too big, it's too much, it'll collapse everything," THEY ALREADY DID THAT. There's already a giant flaming hellmouth in the fucking earth. In case you hadn't noticed. And if you throw the guys who fucked the economy up in jail, I have news for you: Someone else will take their jobs, even if those jobs will now have to be done within the bounds of the law. Someone else will want to be head of a giant squillion-dollar bank. It is not going to be a position that is vacant for very long. Someone else wants a swimming pool full of money to Scrooge McDuck around in. This is not hard sell in America. 

The other thing that might happen is that people who look at the entire American economy as one giant "you just won a free timeshare" scam might start thinking about investing again. Spending again. Hiring people again. Feeling, again, like maybe they're not gonna get screwed no matter what they do.

Imagine what that would look like. 

A. 

Have These People Ever Met a Teenager?

My teen years are fully two decades behind me, and I can tell you with absolute certainty what nonsense like this would have made me want to do. Here's a hint: It wouldn't be shutting up: 

The students, some wearing duct tape over their mouths and carrying signs, were protesting an announcement at the beginning of the day, in which Strongsville High School Principal William Steffen asked the children to refrain from posting on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Steffen said he's been trying to tell students since yesterday- when several videos, Tweets and Facebook posts depicted disorganization and unruliness at the start of school March 4 -  that, when they post things online, they're there forever and that has the potential to be seen by the entire nation.

"I've told them that some of the rumors that they're putting out there are putting our students and our school in a bad light," he said. "We had a student tell the students on announcements to keep it classy."

If you want the young'uns to refrain from doing something, the best way to get them to do that is to shout orders at them from a great height, right guys? Franklin Delano Roosevelt Christ. And what a passive-aggressive bullshit way to go about it, too, all "we're not telling you not to say anything, just to be VERY CAREFUL about what you say." 

Not for nothing, but I would suggest to Mr. Steffen that what is "putting the school in a bad light" is having a teacher strike in the first place, not students talking about it. The description of a thing is not the thing itself, and outrage over what's being said should never exceed outrage over what's been done. 

Via dan_ps. 

A. 

Real Estate

Bad enough there are LEGAL foreclosures on military personnel serving overseas (Really, we can't wait a few weeks until they come home to kick them to the curb?), but this:

When regulators forced them to take a close look at their loans, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, the largest loan servicers, each discovered about 200 military members whose homes were wrongfully foreclosed on in 2009 and 2010, according to the people with direct knowledge of the findings. Citigroup had at least 100 such foreclosures. The foreclosures violate the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, a federal law requiring banks to obtain court orders before foreclosing on active-duty members.

“It’s absolutely devastating to be 7,000 miles from your home fighting for this country and get a message that your family is being evicted,” said Col. John S. Odom Jr., a retired Air Force lawyer in Shreveport, La., who represents military members in foreclosure cases. “We have been sounding the alarms that the banks are illegally evicting the very men and women who are out there fighting for this country. This is a devastating confirmation of that.”

The banks note that the wrongful evictions make up a fraction of the foreclosures under review. Bank of America analyzed more than 1.2 million loans, and JPMorgan assessed roughly 900,000.

I am sure that is an incredible comfort to those kicked out of their homes, that you only fucked up THEIR cases. Their credit. Their lives. I'm sure they feel really good about that. Especially a squillion miles away, having to burn up phone calls with freaked-out spouses or relatives trying to figure out where they're going to live now that they've been foreclosed on. Like I'm sorry the banks are having a bad day with this but it's not their kids who have to grab all their shit and stuff it into trash bags quick so they can get out ahead of the guys with the padlocks.

Jesus tits and God America, who is advising these people on how to speak in public? PR is not that hard, even with something that sucks this much. Leave the justifications and the WELL IT WAS ONLY A COUPLE OF AMERICAN HEROES WE KICKED OUT OF THEIR HOUSES REALLY for someone who cares. The minute you start blithering and explaining and trying to make yourself look better, it is OVER.

We feel terrible, even one case is too many, etc. We're very sorry. Full fucking stop.

Instead they just keep digging:

The banks also found a handful of foreclosures related to botched loan modifications. In those cases, the people with direct knowledge said, customers had successfully negotiated a permanently lower mortgage payment, but the banks failed to honor those agreements.

Ms. Adams, the Wells Fargo spokeswoman, said the bank identified only five cases of foreclosure on borrowers “technically not in default.” She noted, though, that the customers were “seriously delinquent” and the problems may have been caused by mortgage payments made “close to the scheduled foreclosure action.” Ms. Adams said in all but one case, “we identified the issues ourselves in a timely manner and reversed them immediately, so that the customers did not lose their homes.”

You know, if somebody at the coffee shop forgets my coffee order they at least say man, I'm sorry, here's one on the house. Not "we were really busy and here's all the orders we DIDN'T forget, see, and by the way you always speak your order too fast and we need more staff up here and it's raining and maybe all this is your fault anyway for taking a penny from the dish last week even though the sign says take a penny and you put a nickel in."

Schmucks.

A.

Damn Right I've Sold Out

For these prices, I'd have said Walmart was not in any way sticky, George W. Bush was the best president we ever had, and ferrets are filthy animals who should be banned from all homes and crack vans. 

Sure, sure, those are opinions I hold anyway, and the money would just be a nice bonus to support my work. If somebody showed up with a huge check, I'd never question it. 

A. 

Quote of the day: Sequestration edition

 Today's quote comes from the great Charlie Pierce:

 I found an empty airport terminal under my Sequester tree, and Sequester Santa ate all the cookies I put out for him and left me some tainted meat in return. 

All I've got to add is this: don't sit under the Sequester tree with anyone else but me...

Here's my favorite song with tree in the title:

 

Guess I fibbed about that I've got nothing more to add thing. Hey, at least I didn't go alll Joyce Kilmer on your asses...

Wisconsin is Broke!

So very broke. Take pay cuts, everybody: 

Madison - Gov. Scott Walker is setting aside $25 million in his two-year budget bill to boost venture capital investment in the state but isn't putting forward a plan for doing that.

The Republican governor got praise for the financial commitment from Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council and a member of the Wisconsin Growth Capital Coalition, which has been pushing for such an investment proposal.

WHY WOULD THAT EVER BE A BAD IDEA? 

Venture capital legislation failed to pass the Legislature last session because Republicans in the Senate and Assembly could not agree on a proposal. The measure was especially controversial because of debate over certified capital companies, or CAPCOs.

CAPCOs are for-profit entities that sell tax credits to raise money to invest in businesses. The governmental entity offering the credits determines what type of businesses the CAPCO can invest in. Critics point to CAPCO programs such as the one that operated in Wisconsin in which the private entities profit but promised jobs and economic development fail to materialize.

A program in the late 1990s that awarded $50 million in state tax credits to CAPCOs found that while two of the three funds generated nearly 1,000 jobs, the third fund “appears to have performed poorly and at significant cost to taxpayers,” according to a report from the Wisconsin Capital Growth Coalition.

So, $50 million for 1,000 jobs? So $50,000 per job. Why not just spend the $50,000 per job directly? Hell, why not spend $1,000 per job and quit gouging people for health care and salary concessions?

Walker made it clear in an interview CAPCOs are not part of his proposal.

Oh good.

But wait: 

Walker said the $25 million would be in addition to other proposed economic development measures he announced in early February, which included millions of dollars in tax credits for startup companies.

The governor said the money initially would be housed in the state Department of Administration as a “placeholder” until the program can be established. Critics in the Legislature have been hesitant to give more money to WEDC, the public-private entity that has suffered from mismanagement during its brief existence, including failing to follow federal regulations and its own policies in making loans, failing to track repayment of millions in taxpayer-financed business loans and high staff turnover.

This kind of thing drives me nuts. We're shuffling money around, subsidizing businesses to bring jobs while killing jobs that actually exist. And every single company can blackmail the public by saying they'll go somewhere else. In the end, we're spending more than is necessary because there's no money to spend on what we need.

And then we plead poverty and demand another round of cuts.  

A. 

The Greatest Country In The World

"It's even hard to get in a shelter nowadays."

A.

Judge My Purchases In The Past Week, Please

In the past week, I have eaten at Taco Bell.

I have purchased a pair of shoes I did not strictly need. And a bar of fancy soap I didn't need at all.

I went to see a movie (Silver Linings Playbook, stop whatever you're doing and go). 

I paid $31 to park in a parking garage from hell downtown. Screw that place at Jackson and LaSalle, don't ever park there. 

I kicked in $15 for a magazine subscription, and $3 to have some bagels around the house. 

I'm sure there have been other things, but I don't think so. I've been busy, and skipping lunch. 

Now, go.

I mean it, go. This is our national Olympics right now, judging what other people spend their money on. Our entire social structure is based on the idea that Those People Can't Have Nice Things.

Exhibit A. 

I'll do this for you: In the case of Taco Bell, I should have made myself a peanut butter sandwich at home and taken it to work. I have plenty of shoes. The fancy soap smelled like coffee and cinnamon and cream, but I have lots of soap like that, because I hoard soap that smells like that. 

Could have lived without the movie. There are a thousand movies I haven't watched that are online for free and also some books in my house I haven't read if I needed to kill a couple of hours. 

The parking garage was just me being lazy and vain. It was a block away from a meeting I was late to, and I should have left earlier and double-checked the address, and left myself time to drive around until I found a free/cheap space. I also could have taken the train, but it was pissing it down outside and when you're trying to impress people you don't want to show up looking like a wet cat dragging a ginormous dripping umbrella. Even a cab would have been cheaper. 

The magazine subscription and the bagels were even dumber. We have piles of magazines thanks to friends' children selling subscriptions for school, and I can bake my own bread if I have a carb craving, even my own cheese bread. 

Even the big purchases I make on a regular basis, you could take issue with. Mortgage payment? Why the hell don't I rent somewhere, and cheaper? Car payment? Realistically, the Saturn of Love maybe could have limped through another winter, or we could have bought a cheaper car. Groceries? Do I really need a bottle of wine, that frozen pizza, this week?

The ferrets are a huge expense and serve no useful purpose whatsoever, beyond companionship and therapy and reasons to get up in the morning. Get right down to it, I'm pretty sure Mr. A and I could live cheaper separately. Maybe we should split up. Get our own places. I'll take Riot, he can take Bucky and we'll have joint custody of Claire. 

Do you see where I'm going with this? 

I am not, thank whatever gods there be, presently on TANF or other assistance. People like me, who are not on assistance, we spend money at fast-food restaurants and movie theaters and clothing stores and all kinds of other places. And then we act all shocked and appalled when other people do the same because HURR DURR OUR TAX DOLLARS. As if people suddenly stop wanting a cheeseburger or something after they lose their jobs or get thwacked with medical bills or any of the thousands of other ways you wind up needing TANF. As if they stop being people like us, and should wait in line patiently for their bread and beets. 

And let's get past the morality of this somewhat: The only way to ensure that somebody WON'T ever spend OUR TAX DOLLARS on something we consider stupid even once is to create some kind of Virtuous Expense Agency that delivers each family a box of what we consider them to need each week and then monitors that family's usage of the same.

Need would be decided, I imagine, by editorial boards of the greatest newspapers in America or some other group of smuggy scolds in no danger of missing a meal, so as to provide maximum punishment to make the rest of us feel good. And then we would need to make sure nobody was trading things on some kind of black market, or selling unwanted things for cash to get a cheeseburger anyway, so an enforcement angle would have to be designed, along with appropriate punishments.

Because that wouldn't be wildly expensive, intrusive, creepy and pointless at all, or an example of the kind of government overreach that conservatives pretend to hate. 

Easier to just hold in our minds that people want cheeseburgers and movies and clothing, no matter how poor they are, and go about trying to make a world in which nobody needs to be on public assistance, so that we can go back to worrying about our own stupid spending habits instead of everybody else's. Thirty-one dollars to park, seriously? That meeting was like an hour long. 

A. 

Triple Dip

Triple dip may sound like a tower of yummy ice cream but it refers to what's what with the British economy. They're facing a triple dip recession because of the austerity policies of the Tory/Lib Dem Coalition government. The formerly center-left Lib Dems were supposed to restrain the Tory's Thatcherite impulses but they joined hands and jumped off the cliff with them.

Why am I banging on about this? Our conservative are big on cutting and austerity and it's not gonna work viz Dean Baker in the Guardian:

The news that the UK, with negative growth in the fourth quarter of 2012, faces the prospect of a triple-dip recession, should be the final blow to the intellectual credibility of deficit hawks. You just can't get more wrong than this flat-earth bunch of economic policy-makers.

They're pretty much batting zero. They failed to foresee the collapse of housing bubbles in the US and Europe and its consequent downturn. They grossly underestimated its severity after it hit. And their policy prescription of austerity has been shown to be wrong everywhere that applied it: in the US, the eurozone and, especially, the UK.

By all rights, these folks should be laughed out of town. They should be retrained for a job more suited to their skill set – preferably, something that doesn't involve numbers, or people.

Of course, the Guardian is a left of center publication and has <drum roll> Socialists <shudder> on its staff so the GOP won't listen to them but the UK is a cautionary tale for any sane folks out there. I cannot believe that I used GOP and sane in the same sentence.

Thus far we've avoided a double dip recession thanks to President Obama and Senate Democrats but if it comes it will be topped with nuts. Wingnuts.

Here's Another Way To Fix Everything

Goody, another "fuck the poor" act: 

North Carolina lawmakers have drafted legislation that would ban welfare recipients and people in bankruptcy from buying lottery tickets in the state, according to several news reports.

The bill draft would punish vendors for selling lottery tickets to someone who they know is on welfare or in bankruptcy, according to ABC 11 in Raleigh. The lawmakers behind it believe it's counterproductive for the government to accept money from welfare recipients who are struggling to get by.

"We're giving them welfare to help them live, and yet by selling them a ticket, we're taking away their money that is there to provide them the barest of necessities," state House Majority Leader Rep. Paul "Skip" Stam (R), who is helping draft the bill, told ABC 11. Stam added that the lottery "is essentially a scam," the news outlet reported. Stam also said that some of the North Carolina lottery advertising is "just fraudulent,"according to the Raleigh News & Observer.

THEN DON'T SELL LOTTERY TICKETS TO ANYONE. Get your state out of the goddamn lottery business. Don't single out poor people and shame them for buying into a scam when you're the one running the goddamn scam. 

A. 

Let Me See if I've Got This, Guys

We had a solution to a problem. It's a somewhat silly-sounding solution, but it was a solution. It made the problem go away. It made the problem disappear. It accomplished what needs to be done which is to ix-nay on the oblem-pray. 

The people who would propose and then carry out said silly-sounding solution would face exactly zero consequences, since this would be all on Barack Me Amadeus, and last I checked he wasn't up for an election in any way in the near future*. We all learned from Bush II that, despite everybody hating you, you still get to hang in the White House for a second term. It's not like your polls drop into the 40s and they boot Air Force One. You get to wear the windbreaker no matter how many people think you suck, which is kind of the point of second terms these days. 

So that's the sitch. And we're not going to do it. 

Because. 

I mean it, has anyone proposed a better reason at this point for this epic shrug at a potential solution to our most pressing national problem than "because?"

Because it's silly? Because it's bad precedent (okay, but so was going to war based on bullshit and WHOOPS LOTS OF DEAD PEOPLE)? Because the Sunday shows and columnists would howl? Because talk radio would make jokes? Because EVERYBODY would make jokes? 

(Everybody except all the poor old people who would not be starving and dead of preventable diseases due to budget cuts, that is. Maybe even them too.)

SO WHAT THOUGH? A platinum coin is stupid. It kills exactly nobody, though, and you can't say the same about the kind of punitive budget cuts that are going to ensue if Republicans get to hold the economy hostage again. So what's the most important thing? The process? It's LEGAL. Jesus, we've done more horrible things that weren't, in the name of more disgusting goals. 

I talk about this kind of thing in my day job(s) all the time, the prizing of a process over a solution, and almost everyone looks at me like I've suggested shooting kittens to get ahead. "WE HAVE TO SOLVE THIS HORRIBLE PROBLEM!!11!" Well, here is a solution. "THAT SOLUTION IS STUPID OMG THE SKY IS FALLING!!11!" Look, you didn't say the solution had to be pretty, you said it had to exist. Here it is. You have other criteria, give them to me, but don't tell me the thing I came up with that does what you want isn't the right thing because according to your own parameters, it is. We have to pay our bills. This coin would do that. 

It's not that the ends justify the means. It's that the means aren't the objective, and when things are bad enough, as they are right the fuck now for huge swaths of the country, that's a critical distinction and it's one we've now decided not to make, because. 

A. 

*As an aside, I would like some Democrat to propose rescinding the 2-term limit just for Barack, simply because of the head-explody-ness that would ensue. For fun. This is the kind of fun I have in the winter when the beaches are closed. 

Corporate Welfare

We should be drug-testing these freeloaders.

The soon-to-be-released study, "Nothing but Net Profit: Jerry Reinsdorf, Property Tax Relief, and Corporate School Reform on Chicago's Near West Side," says tax breaks the United Center received from the state have saved the owners tens of millions of dollars, in exchange for Reinsdorf and Bill Wirtz, then owner of the Blackhawks, agreeing to build it on their own without public financing.

According to data CTU obtained from the Cook County Board of Review through the Freedom of Information Act, the United Center paid $8.5 million in property taxes for the six years from 2002 through 2007.

That's because the General Assembly had previously approved legislation setting the UC's assessment at 20 percent of market value — well below the 38 percent maximum rate for commercial properties at the time — and gave the UC a sweetheart deal to deduct income taxes, maintenance costs and mortgage interest from income.

Every time somebody says public education has failed because we've already thrown so much money at it I bring up stuff like this. 

A. 

What's The Worst Thing Ever, Tom Friedman?

Why, it's giving poor people health care and taking care of them when their homes are flattened by nature, of course: 

What world are we living in? It’s a world in which we face three major challenges: responding to the merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, which is changing every job and workplace; dealing with our mounting debt and entitlement burdens, driven by steadily rising health care costs and unsustainable defined benefits; and, finally, developing energy sources that can grow the world economy without tipping it into disruptive climate change. (At one point last week, the Senate approved a $60.4 billion aid package to help New York and New Jersey recover from Hurricane Sandy. If fully implemented, that would mean we’d spend on one storm all the new tax revenue for next year that the House and Senate just agreed to in the fiscal-cliff negotiations.)

Emphasis mine, because is there anything worse than spending on such things? And "debt" by itself is defined as just terrible, regardless of what it's for. In fact, the MOST HORRIFYING EXAMPLE OF SPENDING EVER is aid to New York and New Jersey, which is just SO MUCH MONEY. So much. It's almost a WHOLE QUARTER of two wars we aren't winning, the costs of which Tom Friedman could not give two shits about, because suck on this. 

And why can't we solve this horrible problem? Because Obama isn't bold enough to boldly propose boldly slashing Social Security and Medicare, boldly: 

When I heard Obama say, after the election, that this time he was going to take his plan to the country, and not make the mistake again of just negotiating with Congress, I thought, “Great, I can’t wait to hear what he says.” But all he took to the country was a plan for increasing taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” There was nothing comprehensive, nothing bold, no great journey for America and no risks for him. 

If there's one thing that carries no risk in America, it's attacking rich people. I mean, it's not like they then turn around and spend squillions on trying to get somebody else elected in his place, amirite? 

He took to the country a plan to curb rising health care costs by trying to get everybody some health insurance and for the first time regulate an entirely unregulated industry, but that didn't have the words BOLD AND COMPREHENSIVE in glitter puffy stickers on the cover, so Friedman just assumed it didn't count. 

Maybe Obama has a strategy: First raise taxes on the wealthy, which gives him the credibility with his base to then make big spending cuts in the next round of negotiations. Could be. But raising taxes on the wealthy is easy. Now we’re at the hard part: comprehensive tax reform, entitlement cuts, radical cost-saving approaches to health care and new investments in our growth engines. 

Yeah. It was so easy the Republicans almost detonated the whole country over it. 

And now Obama has to do something really hard. He has to grit his teeth and kick old poor people. That takes major courage. Not like confronting powerful people with rooms full of gold in which they dive like Scrooge McDuck. A kindergartener could fuck those people up. Radical "cost-saving" takes real balls. 

I swear I don't know what Friedman's freebasing these days but I'd like some of it. 

A. 

Time for a Cantor Coup?

I am an agnostic when it comes to the fiscal cliff/slope/curb/grassy knoll deal. I'm not sure that I like it BUT I am also sick and tired of the teahadists in the House taking the economy hostage as if it were an Embassy or something. I'm waiting to see what happens when the next round starts before shooting from the lip, hip or any other orifice. No instant analysis from me this time around, unless Nancy Smash starts fretting publicly about what comes next.

I am, however, fascinated by the maneuvering and intercine strife on the GOP side. Majority Malaka Cantor seems to be erasing the entries marked Boner on his dance card. I'm not sure if he's coup plotting but he's keeping his distance from the weakest Speaker in recent memory. Speakers such as Carl Albert, John McCormack, and Denny Hastert were not exactly dynamic and charismatic but they had helpful chairmen, majority leaders, and whips. Speaker Boner has the weaselly Cantor instead.

Cantor may not be ready to plunge the dagger all the way up to the hilt BUT he *has* inflicted a series of cuts this week that, at the very least, have Boehner bleeding and as pale as a guy who uses too much spray tan can be. We all know that Cantor wouldn't carry the Speaker's tune of the cliff/slope/curb bill but he's also pointing a boney finger of blame at Boner for the Hurricane Sandy aid bill fiasco:

 At a press conference in New York, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters Wednesday that he’s “distraught” and “angry” over the House’s failure to hold a vote, blaming it on a House GOP “leadership squabble.” He said Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has been “truly helpful” in piecing together the package and blamed Boehner.

“Cantor has been very much for us, but Speaker Boehner … pulled the rug out from under us,” Schumer said. “It’s a Boehner betrayal.”

A Cantor aide affirmed that the majority leader has been pushing for the package.

“Majority Leader Cantor is committed to ensuring the urgent needs of New York and New Jersey residents are met, and he has been working tirelessly toward that goal,” the aide told TPM.

So, will the Boehner betrayal lead to a Cantor coup? I think the odds are 50-50 but if Cantor is as snakily shrewd as he seems, he'll let Boner bleed slowly to death instead of moving immediately. Who the hell would want to be in charge of the fractious and ideologically idiotic House GOP caucus, after all?

Since I've used a lot of bloody imagery, I'll let the Rolling Stones have the last word, since we all need someone we can bleed on:

 

 

 

Malaka Of The Week: John Boehner

I don't have to recite chapter and verse on this one, you know why he's won the malakatude crown of thorns. Speakers-even strong ones-all eventually lose control of their caucus. Boner, however, *never* had control over his, and it turns out he has no influence with them either. He also doesn't know how to count votes. I have never in a lifetime of following politics seen an important vote, announced, scheduled, and withdrawn in a 24 hour period. Never.

It's hard to see how John of Orange can survive this public humiliation at the hand of the teawads in the GOP caucus. Unfortunately, that weasel Eric Cantor is just as bad and is unlikely to unite the fractious House Republicans so that the nation's business can get done.

The message to Democrats in all this is a simple one: get out and vote in off-year elections so that 1994 and 2010 will not be repeated. Unfortunately, losing so many ledges in 2010 has given the GOP an advantage in the House via the dark magic of Gerrymandering.

I saw Louisiana Congressman Bill Cassidy on WWL-TV this morning. He's the man from Red Stick so I was surprised that they didn't interview our local wingnut Congressman, Steve Scalise. Cassidy seems to be planning a run against the eternally vulnerable Senator Mary Landrieu in 2014. Cassidy blamed-surprise, surprise-Obama for Boner's defeat at the hands of his own caucus, which is crazy but typical.

Boehner's Plan B tuned out to be as artistically successful as Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space as well as equally mockworthy. That's why the lame duck (?) Speaker of the House is malaka of the week.

It's Always Time to Talk About Shit That Doesn't Matter

I keep going back to this, from the brilliant Cleolinda: 

(Here's my thought on that in a nutshell: Violent movies and videogames do not make people violent. Violent people are attracted to violent media. Of course, so are many of the rest of us, just for different reasons. I ended up watching The Matrix about 46,000 times--at one point on a three-day loop--for the book, and I shot nobody. If you want to talk about warning signs, don't look at the kid's taste in movies or his literary output--look at those two things in the context of his real-life behavior, which was already disturbing his teachers and classmates. Stephen King? A folksy, personable guy in real life. Quentin Tarantino? Full of energy and enthusiasm. Consequently, no one expects them to go on shooting rampages. The bitter, stalkative kid who won't even speak when spoken to, who also writes about bloody murder sprees? For God's sake, keep an eye on him.) 

I would never say we don't need to have a less nihilistic, brutal, violent culture. But we can start working on that by refraining from blowing up so many fucking kids in the world and starving them of food and care here at home. Once we are done with that I will listen to you about shooting hookers in GTA or whatever the hell we think is the problem right now. Once we are done making sure everyone can EAT, we can get on to what disaffected suburban brats are reading these days. 

Once we're done with this: 

The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes as I filled out the paperwork—“Were there any difficulties with....at what age did your child....were there any problems with...has your child ever experienced...does your child have....”  

At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.

No individual insurance plan, and until the laughably toothless health care reform passed last year which has been called a staggering overreach of government power, few insurance plans AT ALL. The kinds of intensive therapies children need, even with Cadillac insurance, can bankrupt middle class families. Can bankrupt relatively wealthy families. Can, even if there is money to pay for them and doctors to provide them, can quite simply drag a family under with the grinding, every day process of staying level enough with the horizon to buy groceries and go to school. 

It is one of the grand ironies of what little mental health assistance exists that when you need it most, that is when you are usually so far beyond the beyond that accessing it seems like going to the moon. 

But getting back to Cleolinda's wise words up there, what we're not doing very well right now is creating a nonviolent world for any of us. (I almost wrote "our kids," as if adults have no need of peace and decency.) That violence is not, primarily, on screens or in "the media" or anywhere imaginary, but imaginary violence is all we can seem to bring ourselves to talk about when things like this happen. 

It's all we can bring ourselves to try to address, because real violence, real agents of violence, are political, and controversial, and emotional and upsetting and they're going to make dinner conversation awkward and difficult. Everybody agrees that shooting fictional aliens is probably not the most productive use of anyone's time. Almost nobody agrees on the correct number of children that have to be killed in drone strikes so as to properly elevate our national dick, or how much money we spend turning schools into prisons instead of the other way fucking round. 

It's like there's a list somewhere, of Things We Can Address, and it's all stuff like why so many kids have ADHD, and how parents aren't hugging their children enough, and where precisely in the schoolyard we should stick the plaque proclaiming GOD IS LOVE because that'll fix everything. It's how many teachers need to be armed, and how many cops need to be at every entrance, and the opinion that perhaps we need fewer cops in schools and OH SHIT RIGHT FEWER HOLES IN THE SCHOOLS' ROOFS WHILE WE'RE AT IT never quite makes it through the World of Warcraft soundtrack blaring on every goddamned Sunday show.

(See, already there you go, asking why I have to put it just that way. Can't I use nicer language?)

We have limited ourselves to addressing matters that don't need addressing, so as to drown out the screaming of the things that do. 

A. 

Oh You Have GOT to be Kidding Me: Medicare Edition

What the fuck did you win an election for, you assholes? 

Recall the core fight on taxes: Republicans say they’re open to more revenue, but they want to find it by closing deductions and loopholes. Democrats say that any deal needs to include more revenue, and they want to find it by letting the George W. Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy, which would mean the top tax rate snaps back up to 39.6 percent.

But what if you do a bit of both? … Talk to smart folks in Washington, and here’s what they think will happen: The final tax deal will raise rates a bit, giving Democrats a win, but not all the way back to 39.6 percent, giving Republicans a win.

Yes, by all means let's give them a win, given how many Americans wanted them to get what they want. Let's give them a win because obviously if everybody loses that means everybody's equally fucked and we're pretty well solidly used to that by now. 

I talk all the time about how there's tremendous bias in media, and in politics as well, and it's bias towards the status quo. This is the cause of most misery in the world, I am coming to think, the tremendous effort we expend on compensating for problems so as not to move, rather than saying it actually hurts to be stabbed with this pitchfork cut it the fuck OUT. 

And in exchange for this win, what are Republicans getting? 

[T]he headline Democratic concession is likely to be that the Medicare eligibility age rises from 65 to 67.

ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR GODDAMN FUCKING MINDS? That's not a concession. That's a danger-close nuclear fucking bomb. QUIT LISTENING TO THE FUCKING PUNDITS ON THIS. Just because David Broder could continue writing columns until almost dead does not mean somebody can stay on the factory line or in the shipyard or working the checkout counter or otherwise on foot all damn day until almost age 70.

Not everyone is a stupid, privileged bitch like you Washington columnist fucks. Have these fucking garden implements even seen what a 64-year-old who's spent his life on his feet looks like these days? It ain't ideal, and even those in the best of health would rather not be killing themselves for minimum wage in order to eke out those last couple of years before stumbling into Medicare. And once upon a fucking time before this country got so goddamn fucking mean we used to think they wouldn't have to BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T. 

Let's review the current state of the middle class: Smash unions so that nobody has pensions anymore and can't retire in safety to continue upholding the standards of decent society by staying in their homes and buying groceries. Then, since nobody has pensions anymore, make it so that they can't even retire on Medicare until they're practically past caring, driving them into poverty and despair. All so that there can be a fucking compromise.

I swear to fuck, you fucking pundit jackasses. Did nobody in your fucking family tree ever ride a goddamn tractor for a living or come home with grease under his nails? Who do you think RAISES generations of elite pussy columnists who get hard-ons from punishing grandparents, anyway? We have a middle class at all because of those presently about to retire, but fuck them, because we don't understand life exepcectancy statistics and think everybody's in good health until 90. 

LIGHT YOUR DEM SENATORS THE FUCK UP.  Krugman's goddamn right there'll be hell to pay. Hell to pay will be the best they can hope for. 

A. 

Gobsmacked

I was watching MSNBC last evening and Laurence O'Donnell ran a clip that nearly made me fall out of my chair in disbelief. It was an exchange between Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity about taxes:

 

That's right: Ann Coulter, of all people, urges a pragmatic approach to the non-existent fiscal cliff, which is really more of a slope or a curb. Dim bulb Hannity states that conservatives must "stand firm" on principle in dealing with the Dems whereas the artist formerly known as Coultergeist quite correctly asks, "What principle?"

I'm not sure if hell froze over, pigs flew or <insert your own phrase> but I was gobsmacked. It took crazy Ann Coulter to note that Hannity's "principle" involved raising taxes on 98% of the people. Ninety-fucking-eight percent. That's a lot, y'all.

I'm not sure how long this deathbed conversion will last but it does reflect that the times they are indeed a changin':

 

Yeah, I know Bryan Ferry is an arch-Tory but he's a helluva interpreter of Dylan's oeuvre.

Our Fate is Your Fate

Michigan edition.

A. 

Austerity

Yes, let's continue to screw over places that are already screwed: 

The White House is assembling a spending request to send to Capitol Hill as early as this week, and while the final sum is still in flux, it should fall between $45 billion and $55 billion. That represents an enormous sum at a time when Mr. Obama is locked in a titanic struggle with Republicans over the federal deficit, but is significantly less than the states sought.

Unless an austerity-minded Congress adds to the president’s plan, state leaders would have to figure out other ways to finance tens of billions of dollars of storm-related expenses or do without them. 

Can we start using the word cheapskate instead of meaningless village-phrases like "austerity-minded?" Because that's all this is, pointless cheap-ass-ism. This is managing one's vast wealth through controlling the thermostat and buying off-brand cheese and refusing to tip the diner waitress. 

I swear to God, I don't know what kind of economy we're building here, if every third business in the Rockaways is going to be left to rot. If you're not nearby, follow Occupy Sandy for a few days on Twitter and it will give you an idea of the enormity of the need and the ways people are scraping pennies out of their couch cushions in order to pay for respirators and, you know, cleaning supplies. And just because 'twas ever thus doesn't make it okay. 

A. 

What We Can Afford

We never question the price tag on this type of stuff, do we: 

The US Army Corps of Engineers plans to supervise construction of a five-story underground facility for an Israel Defense Forces complex, oddly named "Site 911," at an Israeli Air Force base near Tel Aviv.

Expected to take more than two years to build, at a cost of up to $100 million, the facility is to have classrooms on Level 1, an auditorium on Level 3, a laboratory, shock-resistant doors, protection from nonionizing radiation and very tight security. Clearances will be required for all construction workers, guards will be at the fence and barriers will separate it from the rest of the base.

Only U.S. construction firms are being allowed to bid on the contract, and proposals are due Dec. 3, according to the latest Corps of Engineers notice.

Time and treasure are always available. US resources -- public and private -- are always available. The "no we can't" spirit so prevalent in government and private industry these days only seems to apply when we feel like it. This isn't me making a value judgment on Israel paying some private company to build whatever this is, by the way. It's me pointing out that we tend to talk about choices as if they're inevitabilities and not things we've decided to do on purpose. If we can choose to do this, we can choose to do something else, too: 

Now, please take the time to watch this meeting of theLouisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authoritythat took place immediately following Hurricane Isaac where Col. Edward R. Fleming explains to the board that COE simply doesn't have the money or resources to address the levee system that flooded Braithwaite, East Plaquemines Parish and Laplace. 

We choose to do and not do things, and this isn't semantics. How we talk about our spending priorities is how we understand them, and we seem to understand that protecting ourselves is impossible, and blowing shit up elsewhere in the world is inevitable, and anybody pointing out that neither of those is true is crazy. 

A. 

Race to the Bottom: College Edition

I have somewhere between three and six degrees, depending on how the universities I attended are attempting to count them.

And, no matter how you slice it, none of those degrees make me smarter, better, more intelligent or anything else when compared to people who don’t have them.

If I am better or smarter or anything else, it comes from what I actually LEARNED in doing the degrees.

This is why the recent moves by governors Larry, Moe and Curly to create “McYugo” degrees has me wondering if I’ll eventually just wear a paper hat to class and ask, “Welcome to the university! How may I help you today?”

Florida’s Rick Scott announced earlier this week his plan to create four-year degrees at institutions of higher learning that could be had for $10,000. By the end of his call to action, seven institutions, including educational powerhouses like Valencia College, Daytona State College and Broward College all said they were up for the challenge.

If this attempt to create a cheap alternative to actual learning sounds familiar, it’s because Texas braintrust Rick Perry thought of it first. During a statewide address, Perry called for colleges and universities to keep the costs down, even pitching the idea of a $10,000 degree. Other awesome ideas these two Ricks agree on include collecting data on faculty to see how many students they are teaching and how much grant money they are raising, limiting state appropriation increases and providing funding-based incentives based on how many kids a college can graduate.

Nothing says quality education quite like the “charge ‘em cheap, stack ‘em like cordwood and shove ‘em out the door quick” model.

If it’s a bad idea about higher education that is being poorly executed by Republican idiots, it’s a safe bet that my governor, “Scotty Doesn’t Know” Walker, will be quickly following suit in a more disconcerting and less compelling fashion.

Instead of pitching a “We’ll paint your car for $99” degree, Walker helped push out the “Flexible Option” degree this week. This will allow people who think they already have a pretty good handle on book learnin’ to show those skills to other people who will be incentivized to make this program work so they can get a jumpstart toward an “almost bachelor’s” degree at various institutions.

The bonus? Although the people involved don’t know how much this will cost, it will be cheaper than going to school for a traditional four-year degree.

At some point, we, as a society, must start to figure out what it is we are valuing here: Is it the degree or is it the knowledge?

It used to be theorized that one begat the other and the other reflected positively upon the one. Now, it’s a “Git Er Dun!” approach that makes educators become “providers” and students become “customers.” People want degrees faster, cheaper and easier.

As the proud holder of more degrees than most, I can tell you with absolute certainty that degrees don’t matter worth a crap.

The doctorate was cool for about five minutes. I passed my defense, called a restaurant and ordered reservations for “Doctor” me. After that, it really didn’t do much. However, that stats class I killed myself in to learn how the hell to do research mattered. The assistantship I took that forced me to teach really smart kids how to be smarter and encourage really weak kids to apply themselves and learn something mattered.

If you want to dial it back even more to my master’s and bachelor’s degrees, I can’t say I learned a whole hell of a lot from the tests and quizzes, but rather the experiences.

Being “forced” at the time to take courses in ethnic studies, sociology and other areas helped me figure out who I was and how I fit into a puzzle of many other pieces.

Taking speech, even though I’d been speaking competitively for four or five years, helped me see what other bad speakers did that I needed to avoid and what other good speakers did to help me want to better myself.

Being on campus didn’t hurt either, as I got to meet people from other races, ethnicities and sexual orientations and realize they ran the gamut of “full of shit” to “really fucking awesome” just like everyone else. I got to ask questions and give answers regarding who we all were and why people could or couldn’t get along.

(Speaking of questions and college, here’s my best one ever:

I’m in a room at age 19 with my journalism TA and four other guys who were also gay and we were all drunk as shit on margaritas.

One guy asks, “So you’re straight?”

Me: “Yeah.”

Him: “I gotta know. What’s a woman’s … y’know… like?”

Before I can answer, Stereotype Gay Guy chimes in with “Honey, I’ve been there. It’s like a wet, loose handshake.”)

Not one of those things (not even the “handshake” discussion) led to a degree. As the years went on, I realized that the degree was pretty much a by-product of the learning.

My father would probably lose his damned mind if he heard me talking about this, and not just because he’d figure out that his 19-year-old son was shithammered on tequila in some guy’s apartment watching “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” on VHS.

Dad was a big believer in the power of the degree. He spent his whole life in one factory and he was often passed over for improved positions due to his lack of a sheepskin. He was a foot smarter than anyone around, but that four-year degree held an almost mythical power over those who doled out promotions.

If he said it once, he said it a million times: “Your mother and I have done pretty well for ourselves, but let me tell you…” he’d pause and a wistful look would creep across his face. “If I only had that damned degree, we would be a lot better off.”

On more than one occasion, he referred to my degree as “your generation’s union card.” When he found out that I kept the actual diploma in a box of crap under my bed, he looked at me like I’d used it for toilet paper.

The sheepskin didn’t matter. The stuff in my head did.

I try my best to pass that along to my students each day I teach. If you’re here for a grade, I explain, you’re cheating yourself. Some nod, others don’t, but I think a lot of them figure it out. It’s my hope that they figure this out a lot faster than I did and that they vote for people who understand it as well.

Still, every semester, including this one, I have a painful email conversation with at least one kid that usually starts like this:

“I’m supposed to graduate next week and I just noticed I’m failing your class. Can I get some extra credit or something? My mom and dad are coming out for graduation and we’ve got a party planned, so I need those points.”

A deeper look at Herald-free Fridays

I spent the better part of the week digesting this item: One of the student newspapers at my alma mater is dropping its Friday edition for a “digital-first” approach. I obviously have some bias toward the dead-tree edition of publications but I also obviously have a bias toward the Internet. Both have been good to me for different reasons: I love advising the kids in our newsroom as they gather on deadline to pump out the paper. Conversely, without the Web, I’d just be a crank writing missives in a “Avengers” notebook.

The Badger Herald isn’t the first to do this and it won’t be the last. The Minnesota Daily dropped its Friday edition a few years back and hasn’t looked back since. The Shorthorn at Texas-Arlington has moved to a digital platform and TCU has launched TCU360 in place of a daily pile of pulp.

Perhaps the biggest gambler was the Daily Emerald in Oregon, which took a profitable print publication and blew it up. The Emerald now publishes as a primarily Web-based medium, despite making money in the print world (a rare feat these days to say the least). In that case, the publishers saw changing shifts in their readership and despite remaining relatively healthy, they took a chance that if they wanted to survive long term, they would need to get while the getting was good. At the time, it seemed akin to a healthy woman in her early 30s getting a double mastectomy because she had the breast cancer gene: a radical choice but one that was theirs to make. As is the case with most of these things, the jury is still out.

However, in the case of the Herald, deconstructing their approach and their argumentation gave me the sense that this was more about triage than it was about trailblazing. Consider the following:

 

• In an interview with College Media Matters, Herald EIC Ryan Rainey noted that the paper was going to create a “voluntary sandbox” where digital first ideas would come about and potentially be implemented as a substitute for the print edition. When considering how to move to a digital-first model, whether you’re doing it one day or every day, you need to have some semblance of a structure. If this move were for the purpose of doing SOMETHING, Rainey would have likely been more specific as to what that something would be. Instead, it felt very free-form. Don’t get me wrong: Good things can come of that free-form approach, but more often than not, it’s like having a task to do that lacks a concrete deadline. It rarely gets done.
  
  
• Rainey noted a lack of revenue and concerns with the drop in advertising over the past few years at multiple points in his interview with CMM’s Dan Reimold. He explained that the move isn’t indicative of any major problems at the paper from a financial standpoint. That said, the Herald’s most recent 990 form shows the paper lost about $33,000 over the previous year (Download it here). For the past several years, the paper has shown a downward trend in its financial health. That said, the “voluntary sandbox” wasn’t in any way linked to a revenue-making process, which is a concern. In other words, it’s not enough to cut spending. You have to increase revenue. It’s unclear how this move does both.
  
  
• When the other papers moved to a digital model, the proposals had been in the works for months. This included heavy revamping of the workflow to better accommodate the 24/7 aspect of digital-first, the reconfiguring (or redesign) of the website to show new and exciting things and an overall set of financial and editorial projections to outline some good markers to assess the success or failure of the venture. Although I am in no way privy to the inner workings of the Herald, the nebulous nature of this project would concern me. The interview was one thing: Reimold appeared to catch Rainey before he was ready to do a full roll out of this idea. However, Rainey’s own words, published three days later in the Herald, do nothing to disabuse me of this concern. He relies on some serious buzzword bingo and that’s about it.
  
  
• When you say you value something and you want others to believe you value it, you actually have to value it. In most cases, what you are willing to pay for will demonstrate that value. I’m not say it’s always that way (I love FD the most and I do it for free), but when you set up a paid/unpaid tier system, you run the risk of telling people, “Put more time here and less time there.”
  To wit:
  
  He said salary levels for the paper’s roughly 55 paid staffers are being adjusted, simply due to the fact that “there’s going to be one less print edition, which means one less day of revenue.”
  
  Essentially, the staffers are taking a pay cut, the new enterprise is going to be revenue-free and no one is being forced/paid to work in the “voluntary sandbox.” What that indicates at a basic level is a) the paper remains the most important enterprise, b) we value the “sandbox” less both in terms of resources we are putting into it and the revenue we expect to receive from it and c) we have no cudgel to hold over you in order to get work out of you to help make this enterprise a success.
• Why now? Today is the first “Herald-free Friday,” which means that with Thanksgiving break and upcoming finals, the Herald is essentially killing (at most) five issues. The financial savings isn’t enough to make that a rational choice. In addition, this is the most stressful part of any college semester. The Thanksgiving break usually means a boatload of stress, travel and catching up on the homework students have been blowing off all term. Then, it’s upcoming final projects, final exams and packing up for the holiday break. It’s not exactly a time period most conducive to thoughtful discourse, innovation and radical change. Students are lucky if they can get laundry done. One of the best advantages student news outlets have over their professional counterparts is the presence of extended school-year breaks. Summer, Christmas, Spring Break and more give student media operations a chance to stop the daily grind and regroup. Why not push this off to the middle of December and use that dedicated group of staffers that will be responsible for launching this thing to figure out what exactly will be happening.

Other problems are always around the corner, but these appear to be the biggest question marks in an industry filled with them. The one thing that remains the elephant in the room is that for the most part student newspapers (the dead-tree editions) are still popular with students. Reimold did some earlier analysis on this topic and found that, yes, people still pick these up, they still read them and they still like them as a free, quick way to catch up on the news of the campus. By being ever-present on the campus, the papers lack competition in many ways (although the Herald does have a competing daily on its campus, it is the only paper in the country with this concern). However, when you flip the switch to digital, you find yourself fighting for air against millions of other sites, ranging from daily newspapers to Facebook and Twitter. If I’m online, I’m not going to look for my student paper, unless I have REALLY developed an online reading habit associated with that site. The days of “If you build it, they will come” are over and have been for many years.  

What will happen next to the Herald and their Friday experiment? That’s just one more question in a long line of them.

Proud to Promote

Soon Allen West will be out of office, and we will not have to listen to his stupid comments anymore: 

In an e-mail to supporters on Monday, Representative Allen B. West, a Florida Republican, called the increase in food stamp use a “highly disturbing trend.” He said that he had noticed a sign outside a gas station in his district over the weekend alerting customers that food stamps were accepted.

“This is not something we should be proud to promote,” he said.

Yes. What we ought to do is keep secret all the locations where poor people can get food, forcing them to go up to each cashier at each potential source of nutrition for their children and ask loudly, "IS THIS WHERE THE LAZY SHIFTLESS WELFARE TYPES CAN PURCHASE T-BONE STEAKS PLEASE?" Because that, as we all know, will make people less poor. It will also make them full. Humiliation is magic in the way that it improves people. 

A. 

Staten Island Still Suffering

The poor and vulnerable are always the most at risk: 

The residents of Staten Island are pleading for help from elected officials, begging for gasoline, food and clothing three days after Sandy slammed the New York City borough.

“We’re going to die! We’re going to freeze! We got 90-year-old people!” Donna Solli told visiting officials. “You don’t understand. You gotta get your trucks down here on the corner now. It’s been three days!”

Staten Island was one of the hardest-hit communities in New York City. More than 80,000 residents are still without power. Many are homeless, and at least 19 people died on Staten Island because of the storm.

One of the devastated neighborhoods was overwhelmed by a violent surge of water. Residents described a super-sized wave as high as 20 feet, with water rushing into the streets like rapids.

Staten Island resident Mike Abuzzio’s home is completely gone, with only his floor boards remaining. He, his wife and their two young daughters have been staying with relatives.

“My youngest daughter yesterday said, ‘Daddy, I want to go,’” Abuzzio told ABC News. “I told her, ‘It’s going to be awhile, hon.’ She doesn’t understand. She’s 6.”

Hopefully the past few days have put paid to the idea that government is evil and must be shrunk down to nothing so that "we" can afford ... I don't know, other stuff? Non-government things? Drones? A fucking marathon (are you kidding me with this)? Another party for rich people? When people call for aid, who do you think responds? The national fucking guard, the city and state and national agencies, so you starve them, and the cries for help go unanswered. 

It keeps happening, and we keep doing every fucking thing we can do to avoid learning. 

A. 

And as Long as We're on the Assclown Topic

Once again, history's greatest monster is some poor woman who needs help feeding her children: 

Despite the fact that low-income women who give birth to children would logically need increased assistance to care for their larger family, Pennsylvania lawmakers — State Reps. RoseMarie Swanger (R), Tom Caltagirone (D), Mark Gillen (R), Keith Gillespie (R), Adam Harris (R), and Mike Tobash (R) — don’t want their state’s food stamp program to provide additional benefits for that newborn. If a woman gives birth to a child who was conceived from rape, she may seek an exception to this rule so that her food stamp benefits aren’t slashed, but only if she can provide proof that she reported her sexual assault and her abuser’s identity to the police.

The primary sponsor of this bill, oddly, doesn't list it among her many accomplishments (including but not limited to promoting "American Law for American Courts"). Even more disheartening, a Democrat is co-sponsoring the thing, though he at least has the stones to put it out there.

Nowhere in the bill is it mentioned that perhaps the men who can't govern their own dicks should have benefits reduced to them, because women are the ones tasked with providing for their children, and women bear those children, and women raise those children, and women are shamed for getting pregnant and shamed for not getting pregnant and shamed for being raped and shamed for reporting their rapes and shamed for not reporting their rapes and shamed for giving birth and shamed for getting abortions because stupid bitches and that's why. 

As to the actual dollar amount that will be saved by the state through eliminating the horrible scourge of poor fake-rape babies, the bill is silent. There were eight entire cases of fraud proven overall, according to this, in the past month.  

So clearly this is a crisis we all need to get working on. Fuck this. If you added up all the fraud and waste and horror that poor people supposedly cause, I doubt it would total a month's worth of time blowing shit up in Afghanistan, but hey, people on public assistance are already down, so that makes them much easier to kick. 

I do not understand what we get out of this, as a society. I really, really don't. If I thought making poor people feel like shit about themselves would actually end poverty maybe I'd be a little more in favor of doing it, but you know, it's not about the objects of our charity. It's about us, and what we deserve to do. To send outward into the world. To show others.

And all of the testing, the probing, the constant suspicion that somebody somewhere is getting away with something, that doesn't do shit to make people any less poor. All it does is make those of us who are not poor a little less rich. 

A. 

Shakedown Street

The plutocracy is determined to shove their boy, Willard, down our throats:

The CEO of a Florida-based software firm has repeatedly solicited his more than 1,300 employees not only to support Mitt Romney, but to donate up to the maximum $2,500 to Romney’s presidential campaign, suggesting that their jobs may be at stake if Romney doesn’t win, according to emails obtained exclusively by Up w/ Chris Hayes.

Arthur Allen, the CEO of ASG Software Solutions — a $375 million company, according to Forbes magazine — sent an email to his employees on August 27th, the day before the scheduled start of the Republican National Convention, asking them to give up to the maximum individual donation to the Romney campaign in order to help the company stave off financial ruin and save employees’ jobs.

Mr. Allen is not the only CEO pressuring his employees into supporting Romney but he's one of the most overt. Hmm, I wonder if their software is part of the Mittbot's programming? Romney, of course, thinks CEO arm twisting, threats and employee coercion is jolly good.

Nothing is new in politics. Employers threatened their workers with firing if they voted for FDR in 1936. The economy was recovering too slowly for most tastes that year too, after having been driven into a ditch by the so-called Great Engineer, Herbert Hoover. Btw, the next time a GOPer complains to you about the Dems talking about Dubya, remind them that we ran against Hoover for 30-odd years, and that they're still running against Carter 32 years after "whipping his ass," a term used by the Deacon to describe how he'd beat Kennedy for the nomination. Reagan was the one who really had the whip hand that year. Guess he borrowed it from Nancy who always struck me as the dominatrix behind the Gipper's throne...

Here's hoping that these employees remember that it's a SECRET FUCKING BALLOT and ignore their CEO's pressuring them to vote for one of their own. It looks as if Mitt and his fellow CEOs have moved from easy street to Shakedown Street:

 

Please Just Go Galt & Leave Us The Fuck Alone

I know it's been said before like a thousand times but the overwhelming butthurt coming from our multimillionaire class has gotten way old. I'm tired of it, I really am. I would like you people to take a steaming cup of STFU and please, go Galt or go to your island in the Caribbean or the south of France or whatever better place you think exists for people like you and just leave the rest of us alone. We'll clean up your mess, just like we always do. We're used to it by now. 

Today we learn that timeshare kingpin David Siegel, whose crashing empire was chronicled in the documentary "Queen of Versailles," has sent a letter to his "valued employees" in which he tells them they will all be fired if President Obama gets reelected. Because of taxes and stuff. And fairness. And class war. And on and on.

So, y'know, no pressure or anything, just something to keep in mind as you head into the voting booth in a few weeks.

He writes:

Just think about this – most of you arrive at work in the morning and leave that afternoon and the rest of your time is yours to do as you please. But not me- there is no "off" button for me. When you leave the office, you are done and you have a weekend all to yourself. I unfortunately do not have that freedom. I eat, live, and breathe this company every minute of the day, every day of the week. There is no rest. There is no weekend. There is no happy hour. I know many of you work hard and do a great job, but I'm the one who has to sign every check, pay every expense, and make sure that this company continues to succeed. Unfortunately, what most people see is the nice house and the lavish lifestyle. What the press certainly does not want you to see, is the true story of the hard work and sacrifices I've made.

Now, the economy is falling apart and people like me who made all the right decisions and invested in themselves are being forced to bail out all the people who didn't.

Now the economy is falling apart? Now? Where were you in October 2008, buddy? Remember who was president then? Your good buddy George W. Bush, the man whom you claim to have single-handedly re-elected in 2004 through "probably illegal" means (and I'm quoting you from Queen Of Versailles here). You support  people who treat the global economy like their personal gambling casino and when it all falls apart you want to blame us? Don't think so, buddy. You created this mess, now you've got to live with it, just like the rest of the hoi polloi. You think you're special? You're not.

He closes with this:

You see, I can no longer support a system that penalizes the productive and gives to the unproductive. My motivation to work and to provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it, so will your opportunities. If that happens, you can find me in the Caribbean sitting on the beach, under a palm tree, retired, and with no employees to worry about.

Yes, please go. Go now. Don't wait until November. You are a bloated leech on the hard work of the middle class, the real engine of our economy, and the very people whom you deride as living a worry-free existence thanks to your sacrifice. This country would be better off without you. Ta-ta. Buh-bye. 

I suppose I should be a little more gracious to these poor dears. I should find that last shred of Christian charity that still lurks somewhere deep in my soul. But right now I'm so over this shit, I can't even be bothered to muster the energy to look for it.

Early Readers

Freddie: 

I think this sort of thing demonstrates the inadequacy of our educational discourse. First, it really should give pause to anyone who is among the “blame teachers first” crowd; how can a teacher be blamed for the results of processes that begin, at the latest, during the toddler stage? But more to the point, it demonstrates that our educational outputs are conditioned by a host of factors that are really beyond society’s control. We don’t take children from their parents, and of course we shouldn’t. But a growing body of evidence suggests that parental input at the earliest stage of life have a huge impact on the success of children. How do we square that with our egalitarian aspirations, when we know that not all parents are made equal? I don’t have an answer, except for this: to protect all of our people from disadvantage through a robust and generous social safety net.

I can't tell you how important it is to be able to write. Not from an artistic perspective, but from a practical one when searching for jobs or doing those jobs. If your e-mail is entirely AOL kiddiespeak, or misuses words, you don't get to the next stage of the interview. If you can't fill out a form in plain language, or read a paragraph to understand insurance benefits or a doctor's instructions, or write a request letter, it stymies you in ways that go far beyond just the inconvenience of not expressing your thoughts clearly. 

Part of solving this is equalizing the opportunity for exposure: better funding for libraries and musuems, especially in economically disadvantaged communities. Part of this is also making sure we close the digital divide; there are whole libraries online and I know the joke is that today's technologically connected kids don't read but reading on a screen is still reading. 

And part of this is making sure there is time in which to read. It's easy to bag on parents who don't read to their kids, but if you're working two jobs and aren't home for bedtimes, if you're so exhausted when you get home that you've got nothing left to give to your family, if you're miles from a university or school of any quality or ambition and don't get paid holidays to take trips, if your every thought is about the rent and the phone and electric bills, where exactly are you supposed to find the reserves to pick up Dickens, or even Judy Blume? 

I joke all the time that as the oldest of three I was the starter kid, and my dad, though working full-time, did stuff like taking me to see Star Wars when I was two and reading me The Hobbit when I was five and generally treating me like an equal when it came to culture from the time that I could talk. He just sort of popped me into a backpack and went on about his day, and as a result I got exposed to a lot of things we now consider luxuries, or think of as adult pleasures. We would take annual trips down to Chicago and spend the day wandering around the Art Institute looking at paintings. One night we stayed over in a hotel (exciting!) and after dinner happened upon a play that was just starting in a cramped theater upstairs in a college. It was To Kill a Mockingbird, and it blew my tiny little mind.

We could do things like that not just because we had (relative) money -- museums have free days and there's all kinds of low-cost theater options available even in small towns, and libraries too -- but because we had the time. Vibrant literature is evidence of free minds, and a great society is one that can support the freedom to expose oneself to great writing, the mental and physical space in the day to take it in. Quality child care, sensible family leave policies, living wages, all of those have as much to do with creating generations of readers and writers as anything that happens in a classroom. 

A. 

'Born with Boots'

Go read Megan and then come back.

Certainly, if we give out lump sums of cash, there will be people who just blow it on drugs, gambling or alcohol. But the current social safety net isn't immune from fraud either. The research in the story is compelling, showing that most people who are given cash transfers use it to educate themselves and take care of their children.

Word. I'm just about done worrying about what could possibly happen if we give someone who's poor a truly pathetic amount of money so that he doesn't STARVE TO DEATH, when shit like this is going on: 

Ed Burke's Juicy Fruit
"Ten years ago, Chicago's most powerful alderman, Edward M. Burke, and the rest of the City Council signed off on a deal that promised $16 million in taxpayer subsidies to the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. to help it build a new corporate campus on Goose Island rather than move to the suburbs," the Sun-Times reports.

"Three years later, Burke's law firm, retained by Wrigley, persuaded Cook County officials to lower the property assessments for two buildings the chewing gum giant had bought down the street from the new campus. Burke's legal work helped Wrigley cut its property taxes by more than $412,000 between 2006 and 2008, records show.

"For that, the company says, it paid the alderman about $90,000 in legal fees."

So Wrigley still came out more than $15 million ahead.

Obviously we can't trust these schmucks with lump sums of cash, so why not put them on some kind of punitive voucher system and drug test them frequently while mocking them in campaign speeches and on Facebook with stupid memes? I mean, give them lump sums of cash, and every banker schmoe in sight is going to be blowing it on ill-advised IPOs and badly designed vacation homes, or they're going to lose it altogether. Parasites. 

In all seriousness, OF COURSE we should just give people a wad of bills every month (or every week, or whatever) so they can make the same life-or-death decisions about which bill gets paid when that everybody who isn't Mitt Romney is making these days. Then they could put off buying spaghetti sauce in order to get diapers. Then they could duct-tape the hole in their shoes, so they can go to the pharmacy and get a flu shot. Then their lives would be up to them, the way yours is when you're not beholden to the crabbiest busybody on the Fox News block. 

The only downside to giving away a lump of money is that it would interfere with our need to create a situation where we can be sure they won't be spending "our" taxpayer dollars on booze, or organic vegetables, or sugary soda, and if there is one thing we absolutely love in this godforsaken country it is getting our national back up over $2.50 worth of fucking groceries. We love that more than football and chocolate cake and handjobs. Telling stories about shitty poor people we know is like our national Olympics and it never ends.  

We love it because it gives us a pass not to give a shit about the enduring nature of poverty in America. If we can pull up an anecdote about JUST ONE SINGLE POOR PERSON being an asshole then that means we don't have to feel bad about the next poor person we see. Because people who aren't Us are all the same anyway, and love is a bowl of sugar and there's only so much so don't waste it on the unworthy. Instead, just sit around on your damn couch and wait for a really worthy cause to come along. I'm sure it'll be here any second. 

Number two, by making it about "our taxpayer dollars" and which side of the line we're on, we're giving ourselves the righteously indignant self-esteem boost of thinking we're on the upside. In truth, welfare of any kind isn't me paying for your groceries. It's goddamn INSURANCE that if I need groceries that bad someday and am broke, I can get some. Put it just that selfishly, if you want. It's not assistance to someone else. It's making a deposit at the bank of karma and if you don't ever have to visit that ATM, be fucking glad about it instead of complaining. 

We absolutely should have a lot more trust in the inherent decency of the overwhelming number of people who need help in this country, and spend a shitload of a lot less time crabbing at them about the exact brand of pickle relish they buy and whether we think they deserve to splurge on the brand-name stuff this month. 

A. 

'You're Not Supposed to Support the Strike'

Look, I see where Miller's going with this: 

My friend, a widely known pundit, wanted to tell me that he didn’t believe the poll, which was conducted by We Ask America.

After some back and forth about what the pollster could’ve or should’ve asked, I finally told him that as an older, white person with no kids in the public school system, he’s not supposed to support the strike.

The poll, taken after three full days of no school, found that a 52 percent majority of whites disapprove of the strike. Whites were the only ethnic group that expressed a majority disapproval of the strike.

African Americans approved 63-32 and Latino support was even higher at 65-32.

A majority of parents with kids in private schools opposed the strike, 52 percent to 43 percent, while parents with public school kids approved of the strike 66-31.

In other words, I don't have kids in the system, so what difference does it make to me? 

I realize not everything has to be about complete selflessness, so let's make the argument from self-interest here. If my neighbors are poor and desperate and uneducated, I'm not safe, because poor and desperate and uneducated people do stupid shit and eventually that stupid shit lands on my doorstep.

Yes, no matter how far out of the city I move. Yes, no matter how many alarm systems I install. Yes, no matter which private school I send my kids to. Yes, no matter how disgustedly I harrumph at the nightly newscast and how much I mutter under my breath and those people and what you can expect. Eventually it lands on my doorstep and I'd better not dare say if only we could have prevented. 

We live in a society. We live in a community, no matter how small or great the distance between our homes. What happens to you can happen to me. What I can do to you, you can do to me. And it is imperative upon us all to recognize that we are not making ourselves better when we give ourselves a pass to not give a shit about education if we don't have kids, or poverty if we're not poor, or health care if we're not sick, or work if we're retired, or retirement if we're young. We can't lop off parts of ourselves and then wonder why we're not whole. 

That's not charity. It's not even morality. It's how we survive. We do better when we all do better, because we're going to be every age sometime, and have every problem eventually, and our only hope is that we take care of each other, and quit deciding we don't have to be responsible for what no longer matches our reflection in the mirror. 

A. 

Solidarity

The CTU strike spreads: 

Teachers in Lake Forest High School District 115 went on strike today after failing to reach an agreement over salaries during negotiations that ended just before midnight.

Assholes are assholes: 

"You make three times more than the average citizen in Chicagoland," a woman yelled. "What is the lesson for all the students today?"

A man joined the picket line but carried a sign telling the teachers to get back to work.

Given that the average citizen includes the dude panhandling on the highway overpass with the sign that says GIVE SOME CHANGE SO I CAN BUY MYSELF A PLASTIC LOVER, possibly that's not the best argument to make.

I touched on this in Monday's post, but this concept that you need to be really, truly, deeply poor for me to want you to be less poor is becoming a THING to me. What magical sympathy line do these rich yelly fucksockets seem to think is crossed, after which you're entitled to ask (quietly, and oh-so-civilly) for a raise or a benefits increase? 

Have they seen the way we treat poor people in this country? Do they log onto Facebook and see one asshole cousin after another posting shit about drug testing for "welfare" and offering anecdotes about giving SIXTY WHOLE CENTS to somebody who then went and bought a can of beer with it? Do they realize how our definition of "not poor" now includes having an air conditioner and a microwave? Have they ever sent their kids to school wearing off-brand donated clothing and ill-fitting hand-me-down shoes? 

What do they think people would be saying to the teachers if they did indeed make less than the "average" citizen? Probably YOU'RE STILL BETTER PAID THAN THE PLASTIC LOVER OVERPASS GUY SO SHUT UP. 

A. 

Anybody Sensing a Trend Here?

Chicago teachers go on strike, for being sick of Rahm's bullshit generally, and also for being screwed out of limits on class sizes and length of the school day and promised wage increases: 

Key disputed issues in the talks were teacher cost of living raises, additional pay for experience, job security in the face of annual school closures and staff shakeups, and a new teacher evaluation process that ties teacher ratings in part to student test score growth.

“Evaluate us on what we do, not on the lives of our children we do not control,” Lewis said Sunday, denouncing the online process by which teacher evaluators were being trained.

CTU officials contend that CPS’ offer of raises over the next four years does not fairly compensate them for the 4 percent raise they lost this past school year and the longer and “harder” school year they will face this school year, with the introduction of a tougher new curriculum.

The union also has pushed for improved working conditions, such as smaller class sizes, more libraries, air-conditioned schools, and more social workers and counselors to address the increasing needs of students surrounded by violence — all big-ticket items. CPS officials contend they are seeking a “fair” contract, with raises for teachers, but are limited by funding and the threat of a $1 billion deficit at the end of this school year.

THOSE MONSTERS. 

The local press just cannot believe the effrontery: 

They are mainly stuck on two issues: teacher recall and teacher evaluations. Emanuel said teachers cannot strike over either issue by law. They’re also still fixated on issues that cannot be resolved at the bargaining table, such as financial resources for schools and wraparound social service supports for students.

They are right to fight for these issues — but they are not ones that warrant keeping 350,000 students out of the classroom.

Well, how the hell else is anybody going to pay any attention? For as long as I have been alive these have been issues in public schools, especially those in poor/city districts, and for as long as I have been alive the only response of those in power has been to basically shrug, continue making cuts, and whine about overpaid teachers on TV. 

I'm sorry, I can't find it in my heart to have much sympathy for people whose entire argument is "other people's lives suck, so you should stop resisting the suck in your own life and just lean into it:"

 Average teacher pay in Chicago is already at $71,000 without benefits, while the average Chicagoan makes only $30,203 and the unemployment rate in the city is nearly 11 percent.

Liberals are the communists here? Somehow it always seems to be the wingnuts who are arguing that everybody's pay needs to be dragged down to the same level, which is usually Charles-Dickens-poor, before anybody can ask please sir may I have some more. 

If somebody else has it worse off, the answer isn't to shut up until things get precisely that bad for you, too. The answer is to pull that other person up as well, by doing things like teaching them well, and fairly, in a school with air conditioning for 106-degree days, and textbooks that no longer mention the looming threat of war with the Soviet Union.

A. 

Offer Only Good For Today! 10 Percent Off! Mention This Post!

President Obama, on Paul Ryan's Medicare "plan:" 

“My plan reduces the cost of Medicare by cracking down on fraud and waste and subsidies to insurance companies,” Obama said. “Their plan makes seniors pay more so they can give another tax cut to millionaires and billionaires.”

Obama directed his attacks at Ryan’s original Medicare plan, not the more vague plan now espoused by the Romney-Ryan ticket that would keep some traditional Medicare options. Ryan’s plan would eliminate Medicare’s current structure in favor of vouchers for private insurance.

“Because the voucher would not keep up with costs, the plan offered by Gov. Romney’s running mate would force seniors to pay an extra $6,400 per year — and I assume they don’t have it,” Obama said.

But it's the mark of seriousness that their plan would cause seniors (not seniors like the ones on TV, just seniors living regular lives with their regular Social Security incomes, who are not pensioned by some dildo at Regnery sucking off their every unhinged op-ed) to suffer! 

Their plan is to give you just enough to make you think maybe you'll be okay. It's actually worse than just outright stripping Medicare by executive order and/or orbital nuke. It's worse because being able to kind of sort of solve your problem is the worst thing in the world. To be able to do just enough to die slowly, in debt and in pain, while nobody listens to anything you have to say anymore. 

If there's one thing that gives me hope in this campaign, it's that Obama can deliver a message that government can and should be about coming together to provide for the welfare of all. Whereas Mitt and Paul are going to have to snarl and growl and rage about everything that's being taken away from you. I hope we're tired of the latter by now. I hope we're ready to hear the former again. 

A. 

Stop Subsidizing Shit That Already Makes Money

For serious: 

4. "Over the last 22 years, during which 125 of the 140 teams in the five largest U.S. professional sports leagues have built or refurbished home stadiums - most using public subsidies - evidence shows the facilities rarely, if ever, live up to their 'measurable economic boost' billing," Danny Ecker writes for Crain's.

That's what the data shows. Study after study after study. But what's a few hundred million dollars of taxpayer money between friends?

*

"The Wrigley Field rehab is a case that Chicago-based SportsCorp Ltd. President Marc Ganis calls 'unlike any other situation in the nation' because of Wrigley's status as a privately held asset that has a measurable effect on tourism . . .

"'No other facility is as important an economic engine,' Mr. Ganis says of the 98-year-old stadium's role in the North Side neighborhood. According to the Cubs, about 30 percent of ticket sales come from outside Chicago."

Doesn't that really cut against public subsidies? The privately held asset is doing good for all of us just the way things are - and the Ricketts are already investing a sliver of their fortune to wring even more revenue out of the ballpark and the neighborhood. Aren't they the last people who need a public subsidy?

It's one of the dumbest things about our current reward-the-wealthy culture (and there are plenty of examples of dumbitude to choose from): We have this thing that makes money, so we need to give it public funding, so that it will make money. WTF. Covering the suburbs 10 years ago, nearly every meeting was about how much of a tax break to give a Jewel or a CVS to set its fat ass down on a corner, when, erm, the guy selling baseball cards out of a storefront last renovated in the Eisenhower administration might need those bucks, too. 

Anybody currently gearing up the "but Jewel will bring in much more money than that guy" argument, EXACTLY. So what are we giving them a break for? 

If we are going to just arbitrarily give money to whatever certain people want, then I am starting a petition for a bagel shop because Dunkin Donuts bagels taste like ballsacks and the only other breakfast place nearby doubles as a drug deal waiting room (not inefficient, mind, but ill suited to my present needs). Or a good used bookstore/vintage shop/ferret hangout. I guess all I need to get that retail multiplex off the ground is a squillion dollars of my own and thus no need for the subsidies the city will rain down upon me. 

A. 

Privatization Fixes Everything!

Just ask the London Olympics! 

G4S had been expected to recruit a staff of about 10,400 as part of a total security force of 23,700 for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The contractor said this week that while 4,000 are already at work across 100 venues, more than 9,000 are still going through the training and vetting process.

In a statement Saturday, the company said it had "encountered significant difficulties in processing applicants in sufficient numbers through the necessary training, vetting and accreditation procedures. As a result, we will be unable to deliver all of the necessary workforce numbers."

Okay. It's not like you didn't know the Olympics were coming. I mean, they plan these things rather well in advance. And it's not like people aren't looking for work in the UK just about as frantically as they are here.

G4S signed the contract with Locog in 2010 to supply 2,000 security staff to work at Olympic venues.

In December 2011, the Games organisers asked the company to provide some 8,000 more, bringing the total to approximately 10,000 staff.

At which point the company could have looked at those numbers and said, "um, no fucking way," and everybody would have lived their lives just fine, but instead they promised what they couldn't deliver, and only figured out 10 days ago that they couldn't deliver it. 

I swear, the more I get to know about private industry the more confidence I have in the efficiency of the public sector. 

A. 

Meritocracy Has Made Us Suck

Take it away, David Brooks: 

Over the past half–century, a more diverse and meritocratic elite has replaced the Protestant Establishment. People are more likely to rise on the basis of grades, test scores, effort and performance.

Yet, as this meritocratic elite has taken over institutions, trust in them has plummeted. It’s not even clear that the brainy elite is doing a better job of running them than the old boys’ network. 

Bring back the glory days of keeping the Jews out of the country club! 

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

You see, things were just better when you inherited your privilege instead of working for it. When you work for it, you tend to be less confident in it, and less willing to piss all over the servants just to show that you can. You do desperate things like implode the economy and take steroids in order to play baseball. Because baseball up until now has been a hereditary business? The tits? 

Baseball players get to the major leagues through merit, but then some take enhancement drugs to preserve their status. Financiers work hard to get jobs at the big banks, but then some rig the game for their own mutual benefit.

Lord knows there were no corrupt financiers until recently. In fact the real change that's happened is we didn't once upon a time let those guys run entirely everything on the basis of I'M THE JOB CREATING JUGGERNAUT BITCH and call anyone asking for regulation of the banking industry a screaming Commie. But hey, if we make it all about the characters of the people involved, then we can opine ponderously about the need for Better Humans and not for a system that isn't rigged to fail. 

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

KIDS TODAY IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT. Or it absolutely is not, if you're living in reality.

The difference between the Hayes view and mine is a bit like the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. He wants to upend the social order. I want to keep the current social order, but I want to give it a different ethos and institutions that are more consistent with its existing ideals.

I want to keep white men on top, but I want them to talk sweetly when they're boning the economy, instead of cat-o-nine-tail-ing it while calling its mother a whore. If only our elites were nicer, you guys, it wouldn't be so gross when they did what they did. 

A. 

Packing the Parachutes

For serious, who didn't think this would happen at some point? 

The Duke board voted for Johnson’s resignation, and since Johnson was eligible for severance if he quit for “good reason,” he is able to collect his $44 million. Grist calculates that Johnson’s pay package comes out to $5.5 million per hour, if he actually put in a full 8-hour day.

I'm asking. Because if you told me I would get a squillion dollars for fucking up my job and/or just walking away, like you would have to pay me in order to fire me, I would get fired so fast my head would spin. I hear all the arguments about how we have to pay CEOs these insane salaries and provide these packages to give them this sense of security so that they'll work hard, and all I can think of is that they should maybe learn about what it is to work hard for the same reason most people do: To keep from starving and living in a box. 

I mean it. I love my work, love it, but if you assured me my present income with reasonable increases for the rest of my life there would be pretty even money I'd spend a lot of time on my back porch, pleasantly drunk and playing with the neighbor's dog. I'm sure I'd get bored eventually, but the motivation to get my ass out of bed every day would be significantly lessened. 

(Also I would like to print this story out, roll it up and shove it up the ass of the next person who jaws on at a party about how government benefits remove the incentive to look for work. What the fuck does stuff like THIS do, then?)

There is actually a way to design incentive packages for CEOs that are still nice enough to attract decent people (I will run your company, which is basically about taking people to dinner, for a mere $8 million, for example) but don't have built-in Douchebag Trap Doors that drop the boss down into a giant pile of money. Trouble is, we've gotten into this thing where nothing's too good for the masters of the universe, and nothing's too outrageous for us to swallow. 

A. 

How Protesting Is Done

Nice. 

A. 

Fox News, Kids: In Honor of Freedom, Fat People Should Die

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY, BITCHES! 

Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel appeared on Fox Business Tuesday afternoon and expressed strong resentment for having to provide more health care coverage to sicker Americans in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare.

[snip]

SIEGEL: Tom, that the untold story. There has been no consideration to the fact that many physicians do not take insurance. Many surgeons don’t take insurance…The more Obamacare floods the gate, the less they will take insurance. If they’re not getting paid and an insurance company says, I have to cut somewhere.

They are forcing me to cover all pre-existing conditions, which sounds great. Let’s take care of everybody’s pre-existing condition. You lie on the couch for 30 years, you never exercise, you gain weight, you eat all the wrong foods, you get diabetes and now you have Obamacare. But the fact is, doctors don’t have to play ball with it. If they are not paid enough they won’t play ball with it.

Right. So people who gained weight for other reasons will be accepted by this great humanitarian, because his phone questionnaire prior to granting an appointment will be something along the lines of what is your favorite snack food, and how many hours of MASH re-runs do you watch per day (WHY IS IT ON ALL THE TIME DON'T THEY KNOW IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO DO ANYTHING ELSE WHILE IT'S ON?) and do you do yoga while you watch it or something? 

There is this horror story that has been going around since the health care debate started, about undeserving shitty people who will get health care that, I dunno, rightly belongs to Olympic athletes or something, as if people would deliberately make themselves fat and sick because that's like winning the lottery around here. I don't know if anybody's noticed but fat people seem to be treated kind of shittily by everyone regardless of how or why they are fat, so it's not like it's an automatic boon for them or something. And nobody wants to be sick, for any reason, anytime, at all. 

I think we keep missing that, in this high-minded conversation we keep having about fat pieces of shit who should have known that very first pork rind was their mortal enemy. Nobody wants to be sick. Nobody tries to get sick. The reasons they end up sick are, generally, not obvious at first, and a lot of them have to do with the bad luck of being born into a family in which eating a single piece of string cheese leads to Administrative Ass. 

And that there is no way around this is the real reason the entire insurance system and the way we decide who is worthy of health care needs to die in a fire. Because nobody's a great risk. Nobody is not about to die. Nobody is safe. That's the thing we're all so determined not to think about. You can run every single day and wind up with a tumor. I know a guy who had a heart attack while taking a fucking nap. I don't know how many of you have had serious health problems but once you start learning about how your body actually works, about all the things that can go wrong inside you, you start looking at it with horrified fascination and asking who the fuck designed this thing? It is so perilously easy for these machines to fail. You'd go nuts if you concentrated on it too long. 

Much less if you started concentrating on all the things that can go wrong with everybody else. So it has to be something they did, to make thesmelves unworthy. 

A. 

Not Trying Hard Enough

I'll say: 

Mr Cameron said the existing benefits system was "sending out strange signals on working, housing and families".

He went on: "A couple will say, 'We are engaged, we are both living with our parents, we are trying to save before we get married and have children and be good parents.

"'But how does it make us feel, Mr Cameron, when we see someone who goes ahead, has the child, gets the council home, gets the help that isn't available to us?'

"One is trapped in a welfare system that discourages them from working, the other is doing the right thing and getting no help."

But your fictional couple is getting help. They're getting help from their parents, which makes them lazy and entitled, last I checked in with the world's foremost authorities on self-determination, right-wing politicians of the world. "My dad could afford to give me a start in life, therefore I am completely independent and deserve sole credit for all of my achievements" is a construction I will never understand. 

Then again I suppose we should all have the grace to be born white in a Western country, because I totally remember that choice in the womb and boy am I awesome for having made it. 

A. 

ps. I'm just about done with the state telling people how many children they can have. Either put birth control in the water supply and make people have to apply for a breeding license, or shut the fuck up, because shaming people for having children is like the least effective way to do this.