Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Petty moves from a petty man.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

The revolution will be supervised.

“Alexa, change the president.”

Too little, too late, ftfnyt. fuck all the way off.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

This fight is for everything.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

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Get ready to sacrifice, proles

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There’s nothing Villagers enjoy more than telling people in flyover country that they need to sacrifice. I’m not sure why people who live in Georgetown and eat at Charlie Palmer Steakhouse should be telling people in Macomb County that they need to take fewer trips to the Applebee’s salad bar, but I’m sure if I read Big Russ or the The Greatest Generation, it would all become clear to me.

Look for the “sacrifice” meme to become even stronger now that we’re in a recession (after all, everyone knows that if consumers would just stop buying stuff, the economy would be fine). Digby catches Andrea Mitchell telling people that they need to give up health care and Social Security:

And certainly, if he is serious about what he told the Washington Post last week, that he wants to take on entitlement reform, there will be greater sacrifice required from a nation already suffering from economic crisis — to ask people to take a look at their health care and their other entitlements and realize that for the long term health and vitality of the country we’re going to have to give up something that we already enjoy.

David Brooks has a more pompous, capital-letter-laden take on all of this: we need to get over the Great Disruption that began in the 1960s, strike a new Grand Bargain, and start living the kind of Purpose Driven Lives everyone led before the hippies fucked everything up. Needless, to say the Grand Bargain will “require joint sacrifice — like reducing deficits, fixing Medicare and Social Security and reforming health care.”

Let’s go back to 1960 and see what might have been different then. Here’s a little chart I’ve culled from various sources. A lot of the data begins a little later than 1960 and ends earlier than 2008 but it should be a pretty good approximation:

Increase in median salary, 1970-1999: 10%
Increase in salary of top tenth of one percent, 1970-1999: 395%
(link, all figures in constant 1998 dollars)

Top marginal tax rate, 1960: 91%
Top marginal tax rate today: 35%
(link)

“The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.”
(link — David Cay Johnston)

Graph of annual income (link):

(Note: the scale is slightly off on this graph — the vertical axis should start at 0, not at 100K (h/t Kirk).)

Damn those hippies and damn the middle class for refusing to sacrifice enough.

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Grading on the Curve

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It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile. – John Hinderaker, 28 July 2005
***

With the end of the Bush Presidency come the end of term assessments, and who better to provide a critique of the Bush administration than the folks from the bias free zone at the Powerline? Let’s get right to it:

Bush took office just as a recession was beginning, a recession that could have been made much worse by the September 11 attacks and the subsequent stock market collapse and business contraction. Instead, Bush’s tax cuts gave needed relief to taxpayers and fueled an expansion that lasted almost throughout his terms in office. This is one of several instances where Bush, despite a number of small errors, got the biggest things right.

With his usual ill luck, Bush saw the Fannie/Freddy/house price bubble burst at the tail end of his administration, with the results that we have all seen over the last few months. But Bush deserves little if any blame for the collapse, just as Bill Clinton deserves little if any blame for the stock price bubble, and inevitable collapse, that scarred the last year of his administration. Bush tried to rein in Fannie and Freddy but was blocked by Congressional Democrats. One can argue that, notwithstanding those efforts, he failed to foresee the full impact of the financial tsunami that has now exploded. But so did pretty much everyone else. Except insofar as we view the President as a good luck charm, it makes no sense to blame Bush for those events.

So for the folks at the Powerline, it makes no sense to blame Bush for the addition to the national debt of trillions, trillion dollar deficits, the worst unemployment in decades, and a whole host of other things. It just happened. Mistakes were made. In fact, if you read what he has said again, it makes no sense to blame Bush for the bad things, but he deserves full credit for getting the “big things” right. You just know the foreign policy portion is going to be rich:

In foreign policy, the terrorist attacks dominated, perhaps too much. Few would have predicted on September 12, 2001, that there would be no more successful attacks on American soil or even against American interests abroad, yet that is what happened. As we noted here, President Bush’s strong anti-terrorist policies stopped a long string of successful terrorist attacks that stretched back to the late 1970s. His record in this respect is truly extraordinary, and he deserves an enormous amount of credit for it.

It is too soon to say that President Bush destroyed al Qaeda to the extent that it will not threaten us in the future, but that may well prove to be the case. If so, succeeding Presidents will garner the credit that was sadly denied Bush.

Got it? According to the Powerline, our foreign policy has been so successful under Bush that the main problem is that FUTURE Presidents may unfairly get credit. Delusional does not begin to describe these guys, and this is something to keep in mind the next couple of months when they are screaming that Al Franken is trying to steal an election.

Bush is not, however, without his failings, and even the Powerline concedes that he has some. His biggest flaw? Being too nice to Democrats:

Bush’s great failing was that his focus was almost exclusively on policy, and he was unwilling to pay adequate attention to politics. This failing manifested itself repeatedly throughout his term in office. With hindsight, the beginning of the end for Bush was his unwillingness to defend himself when he was attacked for the “sixteen words” in his State of the Union address–words that were indisputably true. The same thing happened after Hurricane Katrina, the event that got his second term off on the wrong foot. In truth, the federal response to Katrina was both the largest and the fastest response to any natural disaster in world history. Yet Bush was never willing to stand up to his critics and make the case in his own defense.

That tendency to turn the other cheek was, in the end, fatal. Bush never cared much about politics. He was almost contemptuous of political leadership, willing to engage in politics on a sustained basis only in his two successful election campaigns. But he was a politician, and the job of a politician, as President, is to use political skills to lead the American people. Bush’s unwillingness or inability to do what it would take to be an effective political leader, in the end undid his administration.

No one can seriously question President Bush’s character. He did, at all times, what he thought was right for his country. For that he deserves our undying respect. But his political failures, his myopia on some issues and the fact that he was not much of a conservative seriously marred his administration.

Everything considered, I give the Bush administration a B-.

I’m speechless.

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Catching Flies With Honey

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About a month ago Dr. Mrs. Dr. F and I developed fruit fly problem in the kitchen. Working as I do in a mixed research university it seemed natural to walk down the hall and ask some of those overfunded fruit fly experts how they deal with escapees. As it turns out the old saw is actually pretty useful – flies love honey, and vinegar doesn’t help. The solution endorsed by nine out of ten fruit fly geneticists worked well enough that I’ll recommend it here.

You need some tape, a small square of stout paper (try a business card), honey and a small flask-type container with a narrow mouth. Researchers use erlenmeyer flasks, I used one a one-serving cognac bottle.

Roll the stout paper into a cone, leaving a hole in the bottom just big enough for two fruit flies to crawl through back-to-back (if you don’t know how big that is, you don’t need a honey trap). Cover the bottom of the bottle/flask with honey, then add an equal measure of red wine and mix. Push the paper cone into the flask pointy end first and tape it in place. That’s it! You’re done. Flies will chase the honey/wine smell like guys after football and beer, but the geometry of the inverted cone makes it nearly impossible to find a way out.

Another tip from my geneticist friends: if your can’t figure out whether related mutations act through the same pathway, try epistasis! No need to thank me.

***Critical Update***

Per the comments, it appears that you can catch about the same number of flies with vinegar. Add that to my earlier look at the boiling frog parable and this blog has become something of a graveyard for folk biology.

Use the thread to list any other scientifically bogus folk sayings that come to mind.

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Obamapalooza

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I agree with John and JMM that selling the rights to yesterday’s Obamapalooza to HBO was a mistake. The smart move would have been to reach out to conservatives by selling the rights to Fox. We still are a right-center nation, after all.

But my biggest problem with the festivities was the presence of people like James Taylor. That’s the kind of thing that makes us look weak to our enemies.

Making this the official version of the national anthem — the one they play at the Olympics and everything — would make us look strong again. I remember seeing it live as a kid and thinking “I’ve never heard people clap along with the national anthem before.”

Consider this an open thread, but, please, no reprisals.

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Glossy deathwatch fun

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Howie Kurtz has one of those thousand violins playing just for the media type articles in the Washington Post today, chronicling the travails of Time and Newsweek and their “savvy” managing editors Rick Stengel and Jon Meacham. A couple things struck me. First:

The rival editors are turning out weeklies that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal. They are pursuing a more elite audience, in print and on the Web, abandoning the old Henry Luce notion of catering to the masses. It is nothing less than a survival strategy.

Now, the idea that Newsweek or Time will ever be the kind of product that appeals to a truly well-informed (that may be what they mean by “elite”) audience is laughable. I’ve never, ever heard anyone with half a brain tell me about a “great article they just read” in Time or Newsweek whereas I’ve heard that countless times about Mother Jones, The New Yorker, The Economist, The New York Review of Books, and The American Prospect. It’s worth noting that all the publications I just mentioned — with the exception of The Economist — are seen as liberal (though I’m not sure I agree). There is no way to produce quality journalism anymore without being seen as liberal. It’s time to just admit that.

The trouble, of course, is that Time and Newsweek spent so long catering to the Fox crowd — hiring Bill Kristol as a columnist, writing hagiographies of Bush, mocking attempts to investigate Alberto Gonzales — that it’s too late. For me, Time and Newsweek will never be anything more than Murdoch lite and I would never subscribe to either magazine, no matter how “liberal” they become.

But this got me too:

cut-to-the-bone corporate culture.

[….]

Meacham, wearing a dark sweater in his office overlooking Central Park

….

Stengel, wearing a dark sweater in his office with a view of the Hudson River….

Now, if they’re really so broke, why do they have offices with such great views? Do companies ever think about economizing by cutting back on bigwig perks rather than by screwing everyday workers? To me, this is particularly galling when it’s a media company that acts like it was serving some higher cultural purpose.

I’ll be glad when both of those magazines go out of business (and I say that as someone who dreads the day when the NYT and WaPo are gone). They’ve never done anything but repeat conventional wisdom and suck up to power. Good riddance.

Update: Interestingly, in this same article, Howie quotes MM saying “Pomp and circumstance have been replaced with pimp and self-aggrandizement” without comment.

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