Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Let’s finish the job.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

The words do not have to be perfect.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

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120Comments

  4. 4.

    rikyrah

    Jeb! Hasn’t Shuffled Off This Mortal Coil, Yet
    by BooMan
    Sat Oct 17th, 2015 at 09:40:46 AM EST

    I understand the impulse that led Gary Legum to compare Jeb Bush’s campaign to a dead parrot that has “shuffled off this mortal coil.” I understand it because I suffer from the same impulse. I keep having to exercise self-restraint to avoid writing precisely the kind of pre-autopsy that Legum has just penned.

    It really couldn’t be easier to mock Jeb Bush and his political aspirations. They are the lowest of low-hanging fruits.

    But his campaign isn’t dead, yet.

    And his campaign isn’t dead for the same reason that John McCain’s campaign wasn’t dead when he completely ran out of money and had to start over from scratch. It’s the same reason that Mitt Romney could simultaneously be the very last choice of the Republican base (after they had chewed over “serious” candidates like Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Herman Cain) and the Republican nominee.

    I’m not talking about Republican voters having a come-to-Jesus moment when they realize that they have to nominate someone with an iota of general election plausibility. I’m talking about the sheer impossibility of nominating Tom Tancredo or Fred Thompson or Rick Perry.

    And, frankly, Tancredo, Thompson and Perry were considerably better prepared to handle the nuclear football than Donald Trump, Ben Carson, or Carly Fiorina.

    Say what you want about Jeb Bush’s warmed-over policy proposals, he wouldn’t spend his first 90 days in office trying to work the light switches in the Residence or asking random Marines how to find the Situation Room.

    Legum also compared the Jeb campaign to a zombie that doesn’t know it’s dead, but it could be that the more apt zombie comparison is that Jeb’s campaign is hard to kill and has a remarkable and frightening ability to come back to life.

    I’ve said myself that Jeb has no juice. I’ve said that he doesn’t have what it takes. I’ve said that I see no real sign that he can fix his problems. That’s all true.

    But I can’t count him out for a simple reason. Until I see the Republicans nominate a candidate as weak and ridiculous as their frontrunners, I won’t believe it will actually happen.

    http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2015/10/17/94046/478

  5. 5.

    dedc79

    A lot of bands/musicians bring them in for specific tracks (Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush is an example), but struggling to think of a band that employed one full time.

    ETA: The band Beirut had a french horn for at least some of their albums.

  10. 10.

    Gin & Tonic

    At the moment there is one sunny spot on the carpet in the front hall. That sunny spot is almost exactly the dimensions of an average housecat. Therefore…

  12. 12.

    MattF

    I knew a french horn player when I was in grad school– she was in the music school. Other musicans showed up once in a while to commiserate and to register shock and awe at the notion of playing the horn professionally.

  13. 13.

    pete mack

    Devotchka basist mostly plays tuba. She only occasionally picks up the double bass. Not quite French horn, but still.

  14. 14.

    BobS

    @benw: Shouldn’t be – John Entwistle played a variety of brass instruments. His horn playing is heard on a number of Who albums (The Who Sell Out, Who’s Next, Quadrophenia) as well as his solo gem from the early 70’s Smash Your Head Against the Wall.

  15. 15.

    Schlemazel

    @rikyrah:
    I’m OK with that. JEB? was a weakling to start with and has taken a lot of damage since he started so he should be softened up well for the general. AS crazy as Dump is he has publicly said things that needed to catapult the media (to misquote W) so they are now in play to be brought up again.

    JEB? would kill any enthusiasm the base and be a much weaker campaigner than even the Mittster, bring him on. I don’t think from a policy/performance standpoint he would be any different from the current top 3 who each has a constituency excited about them.

  16. 16.

    Karmus

    Electric Light Orchestra, especially in their early Roy Wood-led incarnation, included French horn.

  17. 17.

    Anoniminous

    @rikyrah:

    I think JEB! will win enough Winner-Take-All primaries that his Establishment and Party Insiders delegates will get him the nomination.

  18. 18.

    Redshift

    @rikyrah:

    Say what you want about Jeb Bush’s warmed-over policy proposals, he wouldn’t spend his first 90 days in office trying to work the light switches in the Residence or asking random Marines how to find the Situation Room.

    Facts not in evidence!

    Okay, the statement is probably true, but the fact that he’d win the Jeopardy category of “the floor plan of the White House” doesn’t even qualify as a low bar.

  24. 24.

    Chris

    Random: a client just paid me with a one dollar coin. Looking at the back, I see that the guy on it is… James Buchanan.

    That would be Buchanan, the last president before the Civil War, right? How did he end up with his face on a coin? I thought he was one of the few president that really is universally panned for having done nothing to prevent the Civil War (whether or not that’s fair, I thought it was the consensus). Was he viewed better at the time these coins were made, and if so why?

  25. 25.

    Jewish Steel

    But what about english horn? I can think of only two off the top of my head. Jennifer Juniper by Donovan and Life In A Northern Town by, uh, Dream Academy? I think?

  29. 29.

    Redshift

    @Chris: Apparently they started making dollar coins with presidents on them in 2007. My wife got some Andrew Jackson ones recently. According to Wikipedia, they stopped making them for general circulation in 2010 because no one wanted them, and now only make them for collectors.

  31. 31.

    Schlemazel

    @Chris:
    believe they are minting them with all the Presidents, one at a time but I’d have to check to be sure.

    HS Truman called the line just before 1860 the “little five” Jimmy B was a lilliputian even among little people.

  33. 33.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Redshift:

    According to Wikipedia, they stopped making them for general circulation in 2010 because no one wanted them, and now only make them for collectors.

    They would make them for circs but the Congress won’t let them stop making $1 bills which are a really bad deal from the Mint’s POV because they cost them so much fucking money during their life cycle. Canada uses dollar coins, the Euro doesn’t have a one Euro bill. But, you know, “business interests”.

    The Chamber needs to sit down and shut up. First, they oppose all taxes (unless they’re regressive ones on poor people to be controlled by corrupt local governments so the local gov can pay for shit the businesses should have bought themselves like storefronts and traffic signals for new developments), so they should be the last ones telling the US Mint to waste money. Second, there’s no fucking reason cash registers can’t take the dollar coins, or any other device, which are all calibrated to take the same fucking dollar coins in circulation since 1978? ish. Get real.

    Inconvenient? So many Americans use cash cards at this point, would anybody fucking notice?

    In conclusion, send the dollar bill to perdition where it belongs, along with the fucking penny, and, hell, the nickel too.

  35. 35.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Schlemazel: Buchanan was the only president whose niece served as first lady. His long term companion was a slave owner who evidently influenced his politics but who died before he became POTUS.

  40. 40.

    Schlemazel

    @Another Holocene Human:
    the “best” excuse I have heard is that there is no slot for them in a cash drawer. Seems to me one would come open as soon as the $1 bill went away, but it is just as likely that new drawers would become available pretty quickly if needed or inserts for coins.

    switching to $1 coin is something that should have happened years ago.

  42. 42.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Schlemazel: I went out to breakfast recently. The tab was $12.50. I gave the server a $20, and she came back with a $5 bill, a $2 bill and a 50c coin. Wonder what their cash drawer looks like.

  45. 45.

    Jewish Steel

    @Gin & Tonic: Here Comes Something Pompous And Baroque. That’s what all of these instruments generally announce. But I’m receptive to that message.

  48. 48.

    Doug!

    Does Neil Diamond count as a band? I think Solitary Man has French Horn on it.

    Good call on After the Gold Rush, very prominent french horn.

  49. 49.

    Mom Says I'm Handsome

    John Entwistle credited his incredible plucking speed to the three-finger key playing technique he learned on the French horn.

  50. 50.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Jewish Steel: They occur for more natural purposes in a jazz context, with which I am more familiar. Mingus had oboe and english horn in at least one of his bands. Yusef Lateef played both oboe and bassoon.

  51. 51.

    Roger Moore

    @MattF:

    Other musicans showed up once in a while to commiserate and to register shock and awe at the notion of playing the horn professionally.

    See, that’s exactly backward. It’s the hardest instruments to play that are easiest to get gigs playing. You can’t walk down the street without tripping over good guitar and violin players, so the competition for their gigs is fierce. In contrast, good french horn and double reed players are scarce as hens’ teeth, so the ones who are out there are in constant demand.

  52. 52.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Schlemazel: Precisely. Furthermore, most cash drawers have a 50c coin slot that right now has rolls of pennies and suchlike in it. Put the rolls in the dollar coin slot, put the dollars in the freed up coin space.

  53. 53.

    Amir Khalid

    @RandomMonster:
    If you put the coins for James Buchanan, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and George Walker Bush in a set, what would you call the set?

  54. 54.

    dubo

    As others have mentioned, The Who was the first to come to mind. Entwistle’s horn is incredibly prominent all throughout Tommy, and it’s most excellent

  56. 56.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Gin & Tonic: Were there a bunch of superannuated personages about?

    I was working on a job a decade ago when this old coot forced a 50c coin into my machine and it accepted it, but when the next customer put in their quarters the whole fucking thing jammed.

  58. 58.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Anoniminous: I must confess I don’t know of one that is easily comprehended by the layman without a few subacute head injuries, vodka, and judicious use of electro-shocks.

    :(

    If somebody else can mention one I would be interested as well.

  60. 60.

    Roger Moore

    @Chris:

    That would be Buchanan, the last president before the Civil War, right? How did he end up with his face on a coin?

    They’re doing a series with all the dead presidents: good, bad, and indifferent. It’s the only way Buchanan and Harding are ever going to wind up on currency.

  61. 61.

    Another Holocene Human

    Herbert Hoover was a good man wedded to a bad ideology. He turned a deaf ear to Maynard Keynes. As even W said, “We are all Keynesians now.”

  62. 62.

    BobS

    @Gin & Tonic: Ornette Coleman used oboe and bassoon on The Complete Science Fiction Sessions. They appeared regularly in Sun Ra’s music (no surprise there). Also Roland Kirk (to the best of my knowledge, never simultaneously, but who knows with Roland Kirk) and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

  63. 63.

    dr. luba

    Get rid of pennies, and there will be plenty of room for dollar coins. Canada and Australia did away with them years ago, painlessly.

  64. 64.

    Roger Moore

    @Anoniminous:

    Do you know of a good linguistic explication of English?

    My impression is that English is very strange because it involved at least two rounds of creolization, first between Anglo Saxon and Norse languages, and then between that creole and Norman French. Creoles generally wind up with compromise, stripped-down grammar and expanded vocabulary, both of which are obvious features of English. I think the process also generally gave English a tendency to absorb new words very easily and a tendency to keep their original spelling. English also became divided between Old and New World variants before its spelling became standardized, which has tended to prevent it from the kind of orthographic reform that other languages have undergone.

  67. 67.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Roger Moore: I don’t think there was extensive creolization between Old English and your unnamed Norse languages (you mean Danish, right? and I’m going to leave Scottish over there as its own thing) and I’m interested to learn why you think so.

    eta: if anything, Norman French is the creole going into 1066

  69. 69.

    Anoniminous

    @Another Holocene Human:

    I’m not a layman but by no means a linguist, tho’ I’ve read my Chomsky on Minimalism, the Biology of Language, etc.

    As comprehensive as I’m sure it is, the Cambridge Grammar is outside my ability to pay.

    I’ve found: Introducing English Linguistics and Introducing English Linguistics but have no way to judge ’em.

    I downloaded a copy of “English Syntax and Argumentation” by Bas Aarts (Palgrave/MacMillian). A high school text using English to introduce Linguistics, fine in its way but not what I need.

    Going to be in Las Cruces next week. I’ll run into the University library and see if I can track something down. Will report if I find anything.

  70. 70.

    MattF

    @Roger Moore: There was also a big influx of invented classical Greek/Latinate words in the 1500’s which you can see by comparing Chaucer with Shakespeare.

  72. 72.

    Steeplejack

    @MattF:

    The daughter of an old friend is a professional French horn player. I had dinner with her a couple of weeks ago, and she was good-naturedly complaining that she has to practice a lot more than her bandmates or her embouchure goes to hell. They’re just starting up their touring season. (WindSync does Valerie Coleman’s “Umoja.”)

    She and her boyfriend have an impromptu rock band on the side with some friends. I don’t know whether the French horn figures in there.

    And this thread has knocked loose this memory: French horn (maybe English horn?) meets “A Taste of Honey,” courtesy of David McCallum (Ducky on NCIS!). Lord, I bought this album almost 50 years ago.

    ETA: As you and Roger Moore mention, French horn players are in great demand. Anni was getting film score gigs even as an undergraduate at USC.

  75. 75.

    Anoniminous

    @Roger Moore:

    English was bog-standard West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) until the Conquest came in and overlaid Norman French. Germanic specialists and Comparative Linguistics use Frisian as what English probably would be if the Normans had been fought off.

    One good thing was the development of an all-purpose “the” instead of all those damn noun case endings and a major simplification of grammar from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) to Middle English (Chaucer) time period. One bad thing was an explosion of vocabulary such as, e.g., we raise cows but eat beef.

  76. 76.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @Another Holocene Human: Canada has $2 coins circulating too. They were very handy for vending machines when I was there for a conference about 10 years ago.

    I assume there will be very little paper and metal money circulating in the US 20-30 years, except for collectors, but until then it’s a bit annoying. While some vending machines take plastic, lots want over $1 in coins. Making $1 and $2 coins would help for those situations, and for things like parking meters and tolls, also too.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  77. 77.

    BobS

    @Gin & Tonic: I forgot about Oregon, but yes, I do catalog them in the Jazz section of my hard drive. And I appreciate the reminder — it’s been too long since I’ve listened to Music of Another Present Era, a classic from the early 70’s. By the way, they also recorded an album with Elvin Jones (Together), who I’m sure you know is a jazz musician of some distinction.

  79. 79.

    p.a.

    Where’s Right to Ruse to call it a Freedom Horn? Although most instruments are pretty surely foreign/unamurrcan except maybe the banjo, am amurrcan instrument with its roots in…ah…oh dear. Never mind.

  80. 80.

    maya

    @Amir Khalid:

    If you put the coins for James Buchanan, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and George Walker Bush in a set, what would you call the set?

    $5

  81. 81.

    Amir Khalid

    @Anoniminous:

    One good thing was the development of an all-purpose “the” instead of all those damn noun case endings

    Not sure I follow this. As far as I know, being self-taught in German, how you determine which “the” to use is quite separate from how nouns vary by case.

  82. 82.

    Another Holocene Human

    @MattF: Yes, but borrowing words is different from two populations colliding and the ensuing change in grammatical structure, which is what Roger was talking about.

  83. 83.

    honus

    @Gin & Tonic: they do them in groups of four each year. The Buchannan group (2010) was Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and … Abraham Lincoln. Three utter failures followed by someone competent that had to clean up their mess.
    The next most similar group of four was 2014: Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and FDR.

  84. 84.

    Yatsuno

    @MattF: I just noticed that the other day. I have a George and a Franklin Pierce. I should check the ones I have at work now. One of the vending machines pops them out for change.

  85. 85.

    Plantsmantx

    It’s not rock and roll, but the French horn was part of producer Thom Bell’s (Delfonics, Stylistics, Blue Magic, etc.) signature sound.

  87. 87.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Roger Moore: The Brythonic influence is really fashionable right now. What I find very amusing is that everyone is ignoring that there are some weird old English live off the landscape kind of words that you suppose must be Old English–and they are, but they are Old English derived from Latin.

    And this is when you realize that Latin was not just a school language and an administrative language as is commonly supposed when the Romans leave. No, after 350 years of Roman rule there are places where common Gaiuses out on the fields are speaking this language.

    Imo with Old Norse, the Anglo-Saxons themselves came from modern day Schleswig-Holstein and southern Denmark. A dialect is a language with an army. The Danish king of England, Canute (Knut) could not have been speaking a language that radically different from Old English.

  88. 88.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Amir Khalid: In German, and also in French, a lot of noun gender just has to do with how the word sounds. I’m sure there’s a word for that but I’ve forgotten it. However, there are dozens of words whose gender you just have to memorize, and gender impacts all of those case endings. I find masculine versus neuter particularly frustrating in German.

  90. 90.

    Anoniminous

    @Amir Khalid:

    Noun case endings are suffixes indicating a word’s grammatical case, number, and gender. So, “the bridge” and “the bridges” in Old English would be, depending:

    brycg Singular Plural

    Nominative (the/that séo) brycg (the/those þá) brycga
    Accusative (the/that þá) brycge (the/those þá) brycga
    Genitive (the/that þære) brycge (the/those þára) brycga
    Dative (the/that þære) brycge (the/those þæm) brycgum

    ETA: which is Strong Feminine

  91. 91.

    BobS

    @Plantsmantx: I was scrolling through the channels a few nights ago and landed on the end of Jackie Brown (one of a few movies — The Big Lebowski, Goodfellas, etc — that I can start watching at any point in the film and have a hard time turning off) just when Max and Ordell where driving to Max’s office with the Delfonics playing.

  92. 92.

    Robert Sneddon

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Britain has a £2 coin (a little over three bucks US). There’s also a £5 coin which is legal tender but not commonly circulated. They’re struck for special occasions and usually kept as souvenirs rather than being spent.

    http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/coin-design-and-specifications/five-pound-coin

    Japan has a 500 yen coin, worth a little under five bucks. They also have a 10,000 yen note (worth about 85 bucks ATM) which is in common usage for buying things in shops. I suspect offering a $100 note in a shop in the US for five bucks worth of groceries would get you some scrutiny by the till staff, not so in Japan.

    There are 500 Euro notes in circulation in Europe, they appear to be more trouble than they’re worth.

  93. 93.

    Anoniminous

    @Anoniminous:

    And note German “Die Brucke” keeps the feminine gender of a bridge while Swedish “Bron” not only drops gender it also dispenses with an article.

    Yet the Grimm truth is: it’s all Germanic.

  94. 94.

    catclub

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: That makes me think of a good idea. A creidt card for small purchases – so your credit card with large balance/maximum amount does not get compromised.

    For short time I think it was bankamerica that would generate you new numbers based on your main card, for internet purchases. I thought that was a great idea. No one copied it because it was patented.

    Setting a time or dollar limit on a temporary credit card number seems like such a good idea.

  95. 95.

    Origuy

    @Another Holocene Human: From what I’ve read, the current thinking is that Old English lost its case endings in contact with the Danish. The languages were very close in vocabulary, but the grammar was different enough that the creole that formed dropped a lot of inflections. It’s difficult to know for sure because written English mostly disappeared with the Conquest and doesn’t really reappear until Chaucer.

  97. 97.

    Roger Moore

    @catclub:
    Before they can get people to use credit cards regularly for small purchases, they’re going to have to get transaction costs down to the point it makes sense to the merchants. There are a lot of places that place a minimum on card purchases because it isn’t worth it to them after the transaction costs are factored in. That’s a big reason for stored value cards at places like Starbucks; it gives the convenience of a credit card without the big overhead.

  98. 98.

    gelfling545

    @Redshift:

    the fact that he’d win the Jeopardy category of “the floor plan of the White House”

    So would the people who clean the place, electricians, plumbers, caterers, etc. and at this point I’d rather see one of them in office than Jeb.

  100. 100.

    FridayNext

    @FridayNext:

    I’m wrong. That’s Mark Volman who never played the French Horn. Apparently he pretended to play a different instrument on every show they played in a satirical comment on the fact they were lip syncing and fake playing. When The Turtles broke up they found out they were not only contractually forbidden from using the name Turtles by their record label, they were also forbidden from using their actual names, so he went by Flo, as in Flo and Eddie, and teamed up with Frank Zappa and became a Mother of Invention.

    There you go. A whole bunch of answers to a whole bunch of trivia questions no one asked. (Yet)

  101. 101.

    Gin & Tonic

    @FridayNext: Flo was short for The Flourescent Leech.

    Funny thing is they may have been prohibited from using their names, but not from singing their material, so on the Mothers’ “Live at the Fillmore East,” the climax is a pitch-perfect rendition of “Happy Together.”

  103. 103.

    RandomMonster

    @Amir Khalid:

    If you put the coins for James Buchanan, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and George Walker Bush in a set, what would you call the set?

    At the very least I’d call that collection “not suitable for framing”.

  104. 104.

    John Revolta

    Bill Wyman pretended to play the French Horn in the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. I wondered if he was taking the piss out of Entwistle, who was also on the program.

  105. 105.

    Spike

    My favourite “obscure wind instruments in pop music” moment in recent years was the night Vampire Weekend brought a bass saxophone to 30 Rock for their SNL performance of “Diane Young”:

    Link

  107. 107.

    Matt McIrvin

    My wife is a French horn player (I am pretty sure efgoldman has introduced her band at Faneuil Hall), but 19th-20th century wind ensemble music is more her specialty.

    They Might Be Giants sometimes does concerts with a brass section, but I don’t know if there is a French horn player involved. One of John Linnell’s primary instruments is the bass clarinet, and it shows up frequently especially in their post-2000 albums.

  109. 109.

    Barney

    @Karmus: Roy Wood being the important person – when he split from ELO, he took the horn-playing keyboardist Bill Hunt with him to Wizzard. Though Wood himself carries the horn in this Top of the Pops mime for ‘See My Baby Jive’, he doesn’t bother trying to make it look as though he’s playing it:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynsxk9WAuEc
    But here’s the pre-split ELO, with french horn in ‘10538 Overture’:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBMjN17K2o4
    I’m not sure if there’s any post-Wood use of a horn by ELO.

  110. 110.

    rikyrah

    Taking on TFA

    Disillusioned Teach for America alumni are striking back at the organization’s neoliberal narratives.

    by T. Jameson Brewer & Sarah Matsui

    For the first two decades of its existence, Teach For America (TFA) could expect fawning media coverage and unremitting praise. With founder Wendy Kopp and her band of Ivy Leaguer grads, article after article glowed, education inequity in the US had met its match. But over the last several years, the near-universal adulation has begun to wane.

    Several school districts have kicked out the organization. Some professors refuse to write student recommendation letters for TFA applicants. And TFA’s high-powered PR department now seems to spend much of its time churning out statements defending itself.

    Not surprisingly, the uptick in public criticism of TFA — one of corporate education reform’s totemic institutions — has tracked with increasing opposition to neoliberal education reform. Teacher organizing has been key. Taking its cues from the Chicago Teachers Union, reform caucuses have sprung up in teachers unions across the country. Bill Gates and company, if still powerful, no longer seem indomitable.

    Two new books by former TFA corps members seek to heighten that growing skepticism. Unlike previous works, Sarah Matsui (Learning From Counternarratives in Teach For America) and T. Jameson Brewer (Teach for America Counter-Narratives: Alumni Speak Up and Speak Out, coedited with Kathleen deMarrais) both focus on the experiences of TFA alums themselves. The picture that emerges — of overworked, disillusioned corps members — is distinctly at odds with the way TFA presents itself internally and externally.

    https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/tfa-wendy-kopp-corporate-education-reform-new-orleans/

  111. 111.

    rikyrah

    uh huh

    uh huh

    ……………

    The Privatization of Childhood

    Childhood has become a period of high-stakes preparation for life in a stratified economy.

    by Megan Erickson

    Today, nearly half of American children born to parents with low incomes grow into adults with low incomes, and 40 percent of children born to wealthy parents become high-income adults. In the United States, which has based much of its social safety net on educational mobility, the ability to do better than one’s parents by completing more years of schooling did indeed rise between 1947 and 1977, but it has decreased sharply since.

    Correlation of educational attainment between parents and children is now higher in the United States than in European countries, particularly Nordic countries, where a tiny fraction of low-income children becomes low-income adults. As Richard Wilkinson, coauthor of The Spirit Level, has said, “If Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark.”

    Upward mobility has always been the exception to the rule — children born to families in the bottom income quintile have about a 6 percent chance of making it to the top income quintile in their lifetimes — but unfortunately it is a fantasy on which United States welfare programs are now based. Never has pulling oneself up by one ’s bootstraps been more plainly a cruel action than when prescribed as a policy regime for large swaths of the population.

    Under Clinton, who delivered on his promise to “end welfare as we know it,” direct aid — itself hardly redistributive — has been replaced with punitive welfare-to-work programs emphasizing personal responsibility.

    In 1996, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) become temporary (TANF), and continuous access to government transfers became contingent on filing a tax return (Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC).

    Using data from tax records, economist Thomas Piketty shows that both capital income and earned income have grown for the richest families to the extent that in the America of 2010, like the Gilded Age Europe of 1910, the top 1 percent owns the same share of income as the bottom 50 percent, and the top 10 percent own the same share as the bottom 90 percent.

    https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/children-testing-schools-education-reform-inequality/

  112. 112.

    PurpleGirl

    @Another Holocene Human: I like dollar coins to use on buses. NYC’s bus fare is now $2.75, which is 11 quarters and they are heavy. Much easier to carry dollar coins and quarters. The bank doesn’t often have dollar coins which is annoying.

    ETA: Just notices you are against pennies. Please poor people still count them and need them for those damned fractional prices. Get rid of pennies and nickles and prices go up. I know, I count them. They are still important to poor people. (Yes, I’m poor, I’m living on savings and have no new money coming in.)

  115. 115.

    Zinsky

    I can’t believe no one mentioned this song – “There’s A Place In the World for A Gambler” by Dan Fogelberg. Score!

  116. 116.

    russell

    Simon Dupree and the Big Sound,“Day Time Night Time”.

    unlike some examples, the french horn player was one of the regular band members. they would occasionally bring out a set of vibes, too.

    they eventually turned into Gentle Giant.

  117. 117.

    Sphouch

    Polyphonic Spree featured a French Horn on the one single of their with which I’m familiar, which is like antidepressant in musical form (look up Light and Day).

  118. 118.

    Zinsky

    @russell: Gentle Giant! I hadn’t thought about them in years, although Peel the Paint is on my iPod and I love it when it shuffles into play. Thanks for the back story….

  119. 119.

    Adrian Lesher

    I’m surprised more people didn’t remember the very prominent French horn at the beginning of the Stone’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Here’s a geriatric Stones concert appearance with the horn player prominently featured on stage.

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