… because I would totally smack a bitch, and that would be most incorrect. ThinkProgress has a transcript from this week’s Sabbathday Gasbag* forum (ABC division):
CARLY FIORINA:I think it’s important to remember, when we talk about the economy, that a private sector job and a public sector job are not the same things. They’re not equivalent. I’m not saying public sector jobs aren’t important. But a private sector job pays for itself. A private sector job creates other jobs. A public sector job is paid for by taxpayers. […]
PAUL KRUGMAN: But when we say public sector jobs, it is not a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.
FIORINA: Oh, it is, actually.
KRUGMAN: When we talk about public sector jobs — when we look at the ones that have been lost in large numbers in this — it’s basically school teachers. Don’t think about bureaucrats. It’s school teachers. What we’ve laid off hundreds of thousands of school teachers. And when we talk about the cuts in public spending that have happened, they are not, you know, some god awful who knows what. It’s actually public investment. It’s largely fixing potholes and repairing bridges.
So, you know, you have this image of these wasteful bureaucrats doing god knows what. What we’ve seen is an incredible drought of basic infrastructure, and laying off hundreds of thousands of school teachers….
Video and further details at the link. Or you could always go admire Fiorina’s talent for failing upward, and maybe re-watch her notorious Demon Sheep TV ad. What passes for our late-stage American capitalist “civilization” is so bloody doomed…
*thank you, Calvin Trillin
some guy
fixing roads and bridges and tunnels has a massive ripple effect.
plus, more teachers means smarter, happier kids. why does Carly hate kids?
Yutsano
Do they still have her listed as the gubernatorial candidate? I could be mistaken but I though she tried to dislodge Boxer.
YoohooCthulhu
@Yutsano:
Yes, she ran against Barbara Boxer in a particularly nasty (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/06/10/carly-fiorina-open-mic-watch-her-diss-barbara-boxers-hair.html) campaign in 2010. She was such a great candidate…
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/04/local/la-me-1104-senate-20101104
Yutsano
@YoohooCthulhu: That’s right! She brought us DEMON SHEEP!!
YoohooCthulhu
@Yutsano:
Weirdly enough, that wasn’t an anti-Boxer ad, that was an anti-Tom Campbell ad (Republican primary). It was a web ad, and it was so inside baseball (it had the acronym FCINO in it), I’m not really sure to this day what was going on.
The Dangerman
Kinda like DoD jobs, isn’t that right, Carly?
Librarian
Nah, I wouldn’t smack her if I were him. I’d just say, “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, you stupid fucking bitch.”
PhoenixRising
How exactly does a private sector job”pay for itself” or “create other jobs”?
As a small employer in tech, I’m curious about what might cause these delusional statements to come out of Carly’s mouth. Suspect subsidies funneled to HP. Because on its face, that’s utter nonsense.
Spaghetti Lee
I never got the “paid for with taxpayer money”. Private sector jobs are paid for with consumer money. I buy stuff that helps them keep their jobs and they buy stuff that keeps someone else’s job. Public sector jobs have the exact same mechanism (you’re more likely buying services than goods, of course), just through a different conduit. There’s nothing inherently more wasteful about public sector jobs. These conservative analogy always seem to involve thinking of the economy like an assembly line. One end gives and the other end takes. It’s more like a big pool of water: everything mingles with everything else on a large enough scale.
Not only is this “government bureaucrats skree skree” crap hackish and mean-spirited, it’s not even remotely accurate.
Pooh
It’s a horseshit dichotomy, public employees pay rent buy cars, eat McDonald’s and everything else that makes the economy go.
NotMax
Ms. Fiorina. how exactly did the well over 10,000 you laid off from private sector jobs create jobs?
scav
Yeah, any multiplier effect in the local economy that a dollar spent has utterly vanishes if the dollar is earned the public sector. Public leaches are like that, they don’t eat in restaurants, buy groceries, coffees, beer, clothe their children, buy cars, blah blah blah. Those wages just vanish from the system. Little known fact.
TheMightyTrowel
Today I fought with an administrator, fought with my computer, fought with our university’s course webpage software and talked the department head into giving one of the post docs admin tasks that should have been mine. I feel like a real academic now.
The prophet Nostradumbass
I am absolutely SHOCKED to find out that Carly Fiorina doesn’t have the slightest idea what she’s talking about.
Hill Dweller
ThinkProgress also does a good job debunking Fiorina’s bullshit on the growth of government.
Also, too, Candy Crowley had on Mitch McConnell’s wife, but failed to inform her audience. Making matters worse, she just sat there while Chao claimed Republican senators were more “high-minded” than the President.
Bring on the meteor.
PeakVT
But a private sector job pays for itself. A private sector job creates other jobs.
Do police create other jobs? Firefighters? Teachers? Judges? Court clerks? Health inspectors? Yes, because they allow the rest of us to go off and specialize in other things. If we all had to be part-time firefighters, or master the knowledge needed to teach our children adequately, or inspect of all the food we eat for diseases, or spend hours finding a safe route to work because some area was lawless, we wouldn’t be able to put in a solid 9-5 day doing some other kind of work, usually in the private sector. That’s what idiots like iCarly don’t understand: good government (which we mostly have in this country, believe it or not) enables a robust private sector, rather than dragging it down.
And if it wasn’t for Republicans, our government would work even better, because then we would get more of the big policies right (no land wars in the Middle East, more renewable energy, etc.). So fuck Fiorina and the moronic talking points she rode in on.
Narcissus
I’m starting to think that neoliberalism or Friedmanism or whatever is just evil. Historically it’s going to be looked at like scientific racism or Stalinist five-year plans.
EconWatcher
K-thug shows up with specific points to make and facts to back them up, and they show up with ideological talking points, every time. It’s really like shooting fish in a barrel for him.
gene108
@Spaghetti Lee:
When your ideological basis is “government is the problem”, you cannot accept reality.
“Government is the problem” and therefore must be demonized, privatized and made grossly inefficient and ineffective to justify your thinking.
I really do hope we’re beginning to see a change in popular thinking, where people realize government isn’t inherently “the problem”.
Suzanne
The fact that these douchebags reflexively hate “government” but will straight-face-edgy say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” always makes me laugh. If guns are neutral, then certainly it would follow that government is neutral, and could be used for good or ill.
Suzanne
@Suzanne: STRAIGHT-FACE-EDLY.
God, I hate autocorrect SO FUCKING MUCH.
gene108
@scav:
To the right-wing mind, a tax dollar spent on a public sector employee is a dollar that could’ve been not taxed and an individual or business could keep the dollar and do more to create more wealth, jobs and just an overall state of awesome than allowing a government worker to be employed.
They really don’t see the correlation between adequate government services and a strong private sector.
They whole idea of makers and takers has somehow been hardwired into their thinking.
I guess it’s not surprising, as conservatives seem to have a very binary view of things. Things are either right or wrong, good or bad, one or the other and nuance and anything in between is lost on them.
scav
virtually every department in every organization in Washington, D.C. has seen its budget increase for the last 40 years.
There’s a shocking fact, because if they hadn’t, we would necessarily be providing fewer services (because of the increase in the cost of things )to a smaller proportion of the population (as the country has grown). Shocking Waste!
gene108
@PeakVT:
The show was one of my guilty pleasures, not sure what it has to do with Fiorina.
GregB
Hopefully Turdblossom will talk this odious shitheel into running again and blowing 5o million bucks on another lost campaign cause.
Go Carly, really, just go.
MattR
@PeakVT:
In wingnut world, you wouldn’t have to worry about doing any of those things because there will be numerous private entities offering those services in the free market.
The prophet Nostradumbass
When HP took over Compaq, they ended up with the rights to the corporate naming of the San Jose Arena. They should have dubbed it the “Carly FiArena”.
PeakVT
@gene108: People have been using iCarly for a while to imply that Fiorina is more of a media star than a competent CEO (that’s my take, at least).
@MattR: Yes, and in wingnut world, private entities would do those functions so efficiently that they’d be too cheap to meter. Or something. /rolls eyes.
Scotius
@GregB:
I hope he talks her into a national campaign. As a California resident I thoroughly enjoyed voting against her in 2010. The rest of the country deserves the same chance.
handsmile
I have a question or two: why was Carly Fiorina on television this morning? Having failed spectacularly as a Senate candidate in 2010 a mere five years after having been forced to resign for her mismanagement of HP, what the fuck standing does she have to be invited to appear on a nationally broadcast political affairs program? Other than what it must feel like to be such an abject failure in both business and politics, on what topic is her opinion of any value whatsoever? She holds no public office. She holds no prominent private position. She is hawking no product. Why is such a person given the corporate media microphone?
As for Paul Krugman, besides having to behave gracefully when confronted by the babblings of this figure of no consequence or reputation, he had this to say on the matter of gun safety:
“What strikes me is we’ve actually gotten a glimpse into the mindset, though, of the pro-gun people and we’ve seen certainly Wayne LaPierre and some of these others,” Krugman said, referring to the NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre. “It’s bizarre. They have this vision that we’re living in a ‘Mad Max’ movie and that nothing can be done about it, that America cannot manage unless everybody’s prepared to shoot intruders, that — the idea that we have a police forces that provides public safety is somehow totally impractical, despite the fact that, you know, that is, in fact, the way we live.”
“There are plenty of gun-owners who are fine,” Krugman said. “But the lobbying groups, the NRA is now revealed as an insane organization, and that matters quite a lot.”
(via TPM)
How very grateful I am for Paul Krugman.
pseudonymous in nc
@PhoenixRising:
Well, iCarly’s $40m golden parachute probably saved HP from losing several times that much.
max
Or you could always go admire Fiorina’s talent for failing upward
Any moron can run against Barb Boxer with some idiot commercials and get her ass kicked. It takes real talent to take a company with some not-profitable-enough divisions and decide to keep the ailing divisions and sell off the profitable ones. At least the thieves at Enron & Worldcom were good at stealing.
Only the Republican party would take the dumbest box of rocks female CEO in America and make her their pretend affirmative action pick.
max
[‘The sick part is they probably look up to her comparative smarts.’]
trollhattan
A friend who worked for HP in San Diego told me when they announced Fiorina’s
departuresacking the entire plant broke into spontaneous cheers.She is missed.
Sadly, Megs is taking up the slack.
We’re not stupid enough to elect them but HP is stupid enough to hire them. What’s the lesson, anyway?
PeakVT
@handsmile: Why is any right-wing pundit given any kind of media access? Fiorina is no different from Kraphammer or Bobo at this point.
gwangung
How shocking!
And every salary in almost employer in America has seen increases, too!
Scandalous!
Though, to be fair, this is definitely one of their smarter moves over the last six years.
Spaghetti Lee
@Suzanne:
You know, I would never notice 90% of auto-correct slip-ups if people didn’t do this.
@handsmile:
Why is such a person given the corporate media microphone?
The answer to your question is somewhere in this sentence.
danah gaz
Poor Dr. Krugman.
He’s going to have the words “I fvcking told you people.” etched on his tombstone.
handsmile
@PeakVT:
I think that’s always the right question to ask, but Kraphammer and Bobo are at least current employees of news organizations (which perhaps makes their opinions all the more egregious). Fiorina’s day job is chairman of the 52nd largest charity in the US, Good360.
Gex
Back home tonight.
Been reading some really good books on grieving a loss like this, seeing my therapist twice a week, and just rolling with the punches. Writing a lot.
Rented a cabin on the north shore of Lake Superior and went with a couple of friends to just decompress. I think relaxing allowed the cold I’d held at bay all month to settle in.
Mostly processing this physically. I’m sure being home again is going to make things more real and bring the emotional pain. So much awesome in this relationship and so many unresolved issues. I have had glimpses of that pain, though. When it really hits it is going to feel devastating.
Yuck. This really sucks.
Spaghetti Lee
I posted this on the last thread but it’s kinda dead, so I’ll ask. For the people who watched the SB, what did you think of the Paul Harvey commercial? It seems most people here hated it, but I kind of liked it. I mean, there are plenty of jingoist-cowboy truck ads out there, (“This is Our Country”, et al), which are the usual girls-and-beer type lifestyle ads just with cowboy hats. This seemed more like ‘being a farmer is tough as shit. You need help to get through it.’ And that’s, well, accurate, first of all, and it seems to me like more of a throwback to ads actually saying how their product would help you. As far as commercials go, I think that’s better than ‘This guy got hit in the nuts. Ha ha! Buy our beer.”
Everyone seemed to like the Eastwood Chevy ad last year. Is the urban/rural difference really that big a deal?
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Spaghetti Lee: Here’s a reaction from Brandon McCarthy, baseball player:
danah gaz
@The prophet Nostradumbass: So am I like, a bad person for finding that funny? Cuz I did.
FlipYrWhig
@Spaghetti Lee: I think it’s the God’s gift part that’s a touch problematic.
sb
@Gex: I loaned out my copy of “Who Dies?” by Stephen Levine; another copy is on my shelf. That one helped get me through it.
And then there is this letter by Ram Dass, written to a family whose child was murdered. Anytime one of my students suffers the loss of a loved one, I tend to fall back on the language of that letter.
A referred book, the letter and my deepest sympathies to you and yours, Gex. God, but what you must be going through. All the best.
Spaghetti Lee
@FlipYrWhig:
I guess. I’m not an atheist but I can see why they’d be annoyed by it.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@danah gaz: If you are, then so am I.
sb
@Spaghetti Lee: Beautifully read by Paul Harvey, a man whose political views could accurately be described as ‘odious’. I thought the photographs were quite good.
danah gaz
@EconWatcher: “K-thug shows up
with specific points to make and facts to back them upand tells people that smashing themselves in the hand with a hammer will hurt and leave them disabled, and they show upwith ideological talking points, every time. It’s really like shooting fish in a barrel for him.and smash themselves in the hand with a hammer over and over until only a mangled bloody mess remains, and then do it all over again, while telling him that they are not, in fact, smashing themselves in the hand with a hammer.”FTFY
And for the record, I don’t think Dr. Krugman enjoys it.
pseudonymous in nc
@Spaghetti Lee:
It did nothing for me, but I’m not the target audience by any stretch, and I know people who come from farm families in the big square-cornered states for whom it hit the mark. Less icky than the Jeep ad, but both smacked to me of Chrysler trying very hard to show that it’s not an Italian company, even if Fiat owns 60% of it.
The US is an urban nation that thinks it’s a rural nation. That’s been the case since the mid-1800s.
Villago Delenda Est
@Narcissus:
Yup, pretty much. It’s so blindingly stupid on its face. This shit was figured out over two centuries ago by some obscure Scotsman that no one has ever heard of and a book that is never, ever read…especially by dunderheads like Carly Fiorina.
freelancer
@Spaghetti Lee:
I wasn’t annoyed by the God’s gift to earth part. I’m from the Midwest and knew plenty of farmers and being raised by believers, I don’t shudder automatically when believers reference God.
I thought it was shit for multiple reasons. One is offering a single vector type of jingoism to sell a car. The other while there’s great dignity in work, I immediately thought of Monsanto and Tyson and other giant corporate entities that make up a huge part of farming as it exists today. The major and final reason is that farmers as a group are exactly like any group of humans: some stellar, a few that are abysmal, with a lot of average fuckers in the middle. A lot of them are fucking hicks though.
PeakVT
@handsmile: My guess is that the show’s producers think that including Fiorina in the guest mix will garner more rating. Ultimately, eyeballs are what any teevee show is intended to gather. The producers know they don’t have to provide news, just something that has some “newsiness” to it.
Spaghetti Lee
@freelancer:
One is offering a single vector type of jingoism to sell a car.
True. I’m probably reading too much into it, but if you’re going to try to push people’s buttons to sell something, it’s at least somewhat good to push the ‘life is hard but ennobling’ button over the ‘instant self-gratification rocks!’ button. The first one isn’t used as often, at least.
I immediately thought of Monsanto and Tyson and other giant corporate entities that make up a huge part of farming as it exists today.
Also true, but I guess if I’m analyzing commercials I’m already discounting the automatic positive gloss. And I also think there’s a difference between a message that’s well-intended but not accurate and a message that’s bad on the face of it. This one was more the former I’d say.
Alison
@Gex: I can’t even imagine. I haven’t lost anyone that close to me. I’m sure the pain is on something of a roller coaster, worse at times, lesser at others. I hope you have a lot of love and support around you when you need it. *hugs*
James E. Powell
@Spaghetti Lee:
My take on the farmer ad is similar to the “This is our country” ad. The biggest difference is that I like Mellencamp but cannot stand Paul Harvey and his mangled version of American mythology. But there’s something else that bothers me about those ads.
Who buys those trucks? How many sold to actual farmers or cowboys who repair fences or the other images from some other American century? How many Americans are farmers or people who work on farms?
No disrespect. It’s obviously hard work, has its virtues and rewards and all that. But what do we have more of, farmers or teachers? How many people are farmers compared with how many people are working for an ad agency?
Does a person living in the suburbs buy a truck like that because it makes them feel like one of the farmers described in Paul Harvey’s paean? Do those people wish they were farmers or cowboys?
There is just something about selling products & services with American mythology that bothers me. I’m supposed to buy some insurance because Our Brave Troops or something like that. Okay, I will stop now.
WaterGirl
@Gex: It seems really helpful that you can hold on to the awesome parts of the relationship you and Kate had and acknowledge the unresolved issues at the same time, at least some of the time. I suspect it’s a struggle at times not to live in one place or the other, and never the twain shall meet.
I cried my way through the letter linked by sb; it was hard, but I’m glad i read it.
I want to share a quote that brought me great comfort during a terrible loss. It’s my hope that you will find some comfort in these words, too.
Peace, Gex
James E. Powell
@pseudonymous in nc:
The US is an urban nation that thinks it’s a rural nation. That’s been the case since the mid-1800s.
I was looking at the census data last week and the first census where the urban population exceeded the rural was 1920.
Yutsano
@freelancer: I saw an ad celebrating the virtues and hard toil of Canadian farmers. If you don’t believe me watch it again. RedKitteh would be proud.
Spaghetti Lee
@James E. Powell:
You make a lot of good points. Maybe I’m feeling different than most because I’m judging mostly on aesthetics and not on sociology. Not that there’s anything wrong with your interpretation: the ad kind of invites it.
freelancer
quick, go look at comedian Joe Mande’s photoshop of the Budweiser Black Crown ad.
MikeJ
@James E. Powell: My uncle was amused the first time I visited his farm and I said, “holy shit, you’ve got a pickup with stuff in the back of it!” He’s also seemed far less concerned about the bed of the truck getting scratched than any urban pickuper I’ve even met.
Mike G
Unless it is Empress Carly’s job as CEO of HP, in which case it destroyed tens of thousands of jobs.
WaterGirl
@Gex: P.S.
Be grateful for the periods of numbness and the emotion distance, and for any moments when you can smile or feel happy, or experience peace. We humans just aren’t built to be able to comprehend the reality of a huge loss all at once.
I was just checking in on BJ before bed, gad I did because I saw your post. I’m headed to bed now, though, so I hope there are some night owls to keep you company tonight.
Yutsano
@Gex: No words. Just hugz. And otterz.
JustAnotherBob
@MikeJ:
First thing I do when I get a new pickup is to grab my hammer and make a big dent in the bed. Get it over with.
Tomorrow I’m going to haul a load of dirt for a garden bed. If I’ve got time, bring some firewood up the hill. Later in the week I need to haul a load of gravel for the road.
That’s how a pick-em-up should live….
The prophet Nostradumbass
@freelancer: Heh, yeah, that was awesome.
Joseph Nobles
The new CEO on House of Lies (Showtime) is so Carly Fiorina, I have to blink to make sure they haven’t actually cast her.
Gretchen
@Gex: I don’t have anything helpful to say. Just sending good thoughts your way and hoping you’ll get through.
Joel
Speaking of useless bureaucrats, I’m sure HP stockholders (and employees) were mighty relieved when Carly Fiorina’s private sector job was terminated.
karen marie
@handsmile:
I’m sure someone else already pointed this out but … she’s got a SHIT TON of money, that’s why she’s on your TV machine.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Where’s Heliopause? I’m sure he has something to say about the President’s new comments about whether he would allow his fictional son play football.
Darkrose
@Gex: /hugs I’m sorry. There’s no easy way through, which sucks.
karen marie
@pseudonymous in nc:
Well, of course. Everyone knows — and the commercial reminds us — that the only honest labor is that of the American farmer.
If you want to tell the world that you approve of and consider yourself an honest farmer, you’ll buy the truck.
cc freelancer:
Joel
@Spaghetti Lee: I didn’t watch the game today, but looking at the Youtube video, it looks an awful lot like those Errol Morris ads for Miller High Life.
Like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beF_gjnwU5E
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Spaghetti Lee:
I haven’t seen it, but an old friend was talking it up on Facebook, going on about how it reminded her of her grandfather…And I couldn’t reply, because, if you actually go back and read the Bible from the beginning, farmers aren’t necessarily seen as a blessing. Take the first farmer mentioned in Genesis- I believe his name was Cain…
gene108
@Spaghetti Lee:
It probably got the attention of its target audience: White conservative men. For that purpose, I think it was well done.
What I found funny – for lack of a better word – was with all the pictures of farmers, they showed one black guy and the rest were all white.
I mean, you’re going to talk about farmers in America and not show any Mexicans? WTF? They so missed out on a huge group of people, who work in agriculture.
Gex
I’m beginning to think the relationship was far worse than I realized. I feel like she left me years ago for comedy. I was just too stupid to realize it.
As I sift through things in the house and remember these last years, I just realize how little interest she showed in me. And how much interest she showed in so many others. All the people I had to listen to her gush about. All the people I had to listen to last week gush about how kind and generous and thoughtful she was as I wondered who the hell they were talking about.
I don’t know if I actually meant anything to her.
I’m noticing that there isn’t much of a different feel to sitting home alone without her than it was to sit at home alone with her.
I wish she hadn’t left things this way. Losing her would have been hard enough. But I will forever question the relationship, remembering that in all those months she put so much effort into everyone else, she could not find one night to reschedule our anniversary celebration.
No, I think she had someone who worked to bring the income in. Who did all the cleaning, yard work, driveway, laundry, shopping, pet care, pool work, and cared for her. And whom she gave so little to. She just got to quit her job and work on comedy without any struggle to make ends meet. Without even a drop in her standard of living. I think I’m just a chump.
anthrosciguy
@PhoenixRising: re private sector jobs creating other jobs: Carly F. created negative 18,000 jobs at HP, although she did create some jobs overseas by outsourcing.
greennotGreen
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): The story of Cain was probably the first crack in my former Judeo-Christian beliefs. My mother’s family were all farmers, and I saw how hard they worked. Why wasn’t God pleased with the product of Cain’s labors? He wants a blood sacrifice instead? Not a very nice God.
joel hanes
@Gex:
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
The depression stage will end.
Your assessment of your relationship will be different when it’s over.
bless you
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@greennotGreen:
I subscribe to Daniel Quinn’s explanation, that the story was created by the herding tribe known as the Semites to describe how early totalitarian agricultural(Quinn’s way of describing the dominant culture that exists in the world today, a culture that denies use of land to other cultures and species) peoples swept down the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and displaced the pastoral and hunter-gatherer tribes. When the Semites settled down with the Canaanites and they together became the Hebrews- who based their economy on totalitarian agricultural practices- it became convenient to forget the meaning of the story.
This theory folds in with Quinn’s theory that the story of the Fall of Man is the story of how the totalitarian agricultural people took life into their own hands, something which the Semites thought unwise because of the impact on the surrounding environment (human and non-human).
Some people think Quinn’s full of shit. I’m not one of ’em. It just makes too much sense to me.
Linda Featheringill
@Gex: #77
You have just been abandoned.
“She was terrible. How am I going to live without her?”
[hugs]
prufrock
@James E. Powell:
That was the first census where it happened, but 1912 was the last actual year the split was even 50/50. And remember, just because they were rural dwellers doesn’t automatically mean they were farmers too.
Btw, if the ratio of farmers to city-slickers is so low, why aren’t we starving? I mean, isn’t that the argument of the shysters trying to privatize social security?
Raven
@Gex: When one of my best friends died his wife, who is also very close to us, needed to tell us in great detail about his horrible behavior involving alcohol. That’s what killed him and we all knew it but it was important for her to tell us. It was important but, years down the line, she recalls him much more fondly. I hope that happens for you.
chopper
i know this isn’t the point (namely that there’s nothing wrong with a public job paid for by taxes) but my public sector job doesn’t take a dime from joe taxpayer.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@prufrock:
Better fertilization. Better pesticides. Better machinery used to till, plant and harvest. Better methods of soil conservation. Tougher, more disease resistant strains of crops that not only require less time to grow, but provide higher yields. GMOs. Transportation. Refrigeration.
All of this, and we’re still this close to facing mass starvation. If the lake under Greenland’s glaciers lets go and flows into the North Atlantic current, the major breadbaskets of the world freeze over- and there ain’t no growing crops in the deserts of, say, Arizona for a looong time.
Schlemizel
@Gex:
There are a couple of good responses in already but I’ll just add that you should focus on the good time you guys had. Anyone can be thoughtless at times and every relationship has its downside. You loved her & she loved you, remember the joy that brought & bury the rest with her. Because thats whats best for you and you deserve to be happy.
pluege
if American society ever survives the reagan era lunatic repug nation rule by the republican/conservative insane asylum, Krugman will deserve a bust up on Mount Rushmore for saving the nation.
Randy P
@pluege: B-but, I learned in the comments at Think Progress that Krugman has been proven wrong about everything in economics and has gotten in trouble for falsifying data. We couldn’t live in two factually-different universes could we? So the conservatives must be right about him.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Fiorina and her fellow private sector believers would make bupkus without the public sector. Would they build and maintain their own roads, bridges, and sewer systems? Would they educate future workers? Would GM, Nissan and Volkswagen have auto assembly plants in Tennessee if the TVA had never existed?
The private sector über alles types seem to be under the delusion that infrastructure and education just happen so the public sector is unnecessary. They’re the scorpions riding on the backs of the frogs.
Ribbit, ribbit.
IowaOldLady
I don’t understand this stupid meme about how public and private sector jobs are different. I’ve taught at two private colleges and one public university and the jobs felt the same to me. The wages I spent felt the same to the places I spent them.
The biggest difference is that the students I taught at the public university graduated with lower debts.
RSA
@Spaghetti Lee:
For me that wasn’t the main issue. In the abstract I like the sentiment; as you describe it, “Work is ennobling.” In the context of this commercial, though, there were other things…
Paul Harvey was buddies with J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy, and some of his stories were pretty judgmental about outsiders. This piece about farmers would have been fine, except that Republican messaging has used a lot of the same points for political gain. Farmers are the salt of the earth; farmers work hard; farmers are good family people; God looks kindly upon farmers; farmers are good for society; farmers are patriotic (though Harvey didn’t do this one). For the past few decades Republican politicians have added, “And none of this is true about you city people.” So they kind of ruined it in advance.
jayboat
Will more and better information flow finally rid us of Fiorina and her ilk? Probably not, but lag time to rear-view mirror will be quicker, that biatch is long past her sell date.
I’ve been a Paul Harvey hater since the mid-70’s, so the sound of his voice instantly put me in negative territory. The production was effective on the surface, which is enough. We are over-analyzing here, as tends to happen in this room.
Two occupations that would never see my face because of the real possibilities of Mother Nature doing a tap dance on your head on any given day- farmer and charter boat capt. Not for me, no sir, no way.
Lurking Canadian
@greennotGreen: The interpretation they always told us was that Cain picked out his least valuable crops for the sacrifice, whereas Abel gave his very best lamb.
The thing is, I’ve read the source material a half-dozen times. That information is simply not in the text. It’s just fanon.
Steeplejack
@Spaghetti Lee:
I had a negative reaction to the Paul Harvey ad. Maybe it’s just that our culture is so awash in snarkiness, but whenever someone trots out the homespun, salt-of-the-earth riff–especially a Super Bowl advertiser!–my deflector shields go up. Paul Harvey has a masterly radio voice, and he paints a great picture–if you’re listening to him while eating lunch at the Rexall counter in Lard Lake, Missouri, circa 1972–but I couldn’t help hearing: “God needed someone who could [blah, blah, blah] . . . so He outsourced it to Archer Daniels Midland.”
And the truck tie-in at the end was so short I couldn’t remember which brand it was.
And pseudonymous in nc made a good point about us living in “an urban nation that thinks it’s a rural nation.”
I thought this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads was generally underwhelming. The Go Daddy ad reached new depths of brain-bleach-itude, and the idea that people were drinking Budweiser at the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut was not one I had considered before.
Phylllis
@Gex: In the words of a great lady who still posts at YWBB, ‘be gentle with yourself’.
PS: I’ve found YWBB to be fairly LGBT-friendly, but, like any online discussion boards, has its issues. Take what you need and leave the rest.
aimai
@James E. Powell:
No, don’t stop. I like your point a lot. Wish they’d do spots about big city EMTs and teachers rushing to work in the mornings. I hate this hagiography of the horny handed sons of toil which exalt a largely mythical (or at any rate long gone) past of hard work by some to sell shit to others. Farms have either become highly mechanized, absorbed into larger agribusinesses, or the work is mostly done by migrant workers on a seasonal basis. But you will never see that acknowledged in advertising because it makes white people uncomfortable.
When I used to visit Atlanta, long ago, I noticed that all advertisements for jobs that you knew were performe by black people had white people to the fore to reassure the presumed consumer that black people wouldn’t be coming to their houses. Ditto the farmer thing–we know how much of the labor on all kinds of farms, especially fruit and nut and grapes and stoop labor is actually performed by migrant workers. Are they showing those guys in the back of trucks?
Steeplejack
@freelancer:
That picture is hilarious. I was relieved to see I wasn’t the only one who got the weird vibe from the Black Crown ad.
IowaOldLady
Is anyone besides me excited that they identified the bones of Richard III? DNA is amazing.
Chyron HR
@IowaOldLady:
Fixed that for you, you elitist hippie.
jibeaux
@gene108: I’ve used before an analogy I read that Molly Ivins made, that government is a tool, like a hammer. It might be the right tool for the job, or it might be the wrong tool. It can be destructive, and it can be constructive. But it isn’t INHERENTLY anything, any more than a hammer is.
Raven
How come people are talking abut Paul Harvey like he isn’t dead?
Pablo
@Spaghetti Lee:
I’m a sort of urban guy and I liked the ad.
jayjaybear
@Lurking Canadian: The more unflinchingly honest among them will bring in the fact that God wants BLOOD and veggies have no blood. I have a thumper cousin-in-law who cornered me at a family gathering once with that argument…
MomSense
@Gex:
I am so sorry that you are suffering. I don’t know what to say except that we will all just be with you, supporting you, no matter what. Try to be gentle with yourself. I think sometimes that when we are grieving, we are grieving for who we were as much as who we lost. You loved and cared for her well and that is beautiful.
Sending you a big hug.
cathyish
@Gex:
Loving someone is the gift we give ourselves. Love makes us stronger and freer and it allows us to grow into a complete person. If we are lucky, we get that love reflected back to us. When we love someone we are never chumps.
IowaOldLady
@Chyron HR:
I know! But seriously, who’s the elitist when the talk is of privatizing education? Because someone is still going to pay, and there are two choices.
1. The parents pay the private schools directly, so we go back to the days of only rich people being able to be educated, or
2. The government hires the private company to run the schools, so the taxpayers still pay, only there’s an added layer or two of people scraping off the money so less goes to the students.
rikyrah
MAYBE incorrect…
I’m not so sure.
Woodrowfan
Paul Harvey was the old radio equivalent of those bogus mass emails that your wingnut uncle keeps sending around.
Jamey
Carly Fiorina can go sit on a spiked iron-gate finial and rotate. Government bureaucrats (and taxpayers’ money) were partly what inflated her golden parachute.
She should learn to shut the fuck up and go home to count her money. Seriously.
chopper
so the number of federal jobs has gone up in the last 40 years? hm, something else has gone up over that time too. i wonder what it is. something about the number of people in the country, something like that.
or does iCarly expect the number of post office workers to stay the same when the population goes up by 50%?
Suffern ACE
@IowaOldLady: see (2). Guaranteed revenue. And the efficiency of our wonderful healthcare model. Eventually, we can pay three times as much per capita on education as other OECD countries, and no one will be able to explain why.
chopper
@Gex:
first off, you’re not a chump. but you are grieving and this sort of questioning is completely normal for someone in your situation.
listen, you put yourself on hold for a long time. and when you do that, the self-centered part of your personality gets put on the back burner. and you were taking care of a loved one with a terminal illness. of course it couldn’t ever be about you. you’d feel like an asshole if you made things about you during that time.
well, right now, that part of you is coming back. the part that wanted things for yourself but didn’t want to assert itself. and it’s all kind of flooding back now. and that makes you feel used.
i’m not saying you’re wrong, i have no idea what your relationship was really like. but you’re going to take a look at your history with a different set of eyes now and you’re going to see things differently for a bit. later on, you’ll probably shift gears and see things differently again.
i don’t know if you’ve done any grief counseling, but i recommend it. there are also groups for people who have dealt with loved ones with those sort of illnesses, caretakers etc, because that’s a group of people that have had very hard times themselves for those same reasons. if you can, i’d search one out, or find a grief counselor who can also find one for you.
it will make a world of difference. you deserve to feel better. it isn’t just that you’ve earned it.
tinare
@cathyish:
That was lovely.
chopper
@greennotGreen:
funny thing is, cain went on to sacrifice the thing that meant the most to him.
and god was all ‘no, that’s too much’.
you can understand cain’s confusion here. later on, abe was in the middle of sacrificing his own son for similar reasons, and god stopped him and said ‘ok, you’ll do’. and abraham went on to greatness.
cain kinda got the shaft here.
Gin & Tonic
@Woodrowfan: Just with better writing.
Chris
@Steeplejack:
I haven’t seen the commercial, but I second the feeling of many that the good-hardworking-country-folk cliche has been trotted out so many times, almost always to offer tribal contrast with “these people” rather than to praise the dignity of work, that my knee-jerk reaction as well is pretty much to groan.
Maybe when popular culture offers similar paeans to the nobility of the working man for urban workers as well instead of excoriating them as lazy, parasitic, un-American and devoid of good values, I won’t be as reflexive about it, but it doesn’t and I am.
chopper
@aimai:
i would have loved to see an ad instead (not selling trucks tho) about teachers. i.e. ‘god needed someone who would get up early and get home late, to deal with 30 worthless teenage slobs all day who couldn’t care less about anything, who would drive home in a 1970s orange hatchback with bald tires and a brown door just to spend three hours at home grading papers. someone who would paint houses over the summer because the paycheck sucks. who would get shit on by society just for having the job. and deal with all of it because education is important. so god created a teacher.’
Davis X. Machina
@chopper: As we used to say when I was working for the Jesuits, ‘It’s a good thing that teaching is one of the spiritual works of mercy, because as a job, it sucks.’
J R in W Va
@Gex:
I think you are to the anger stage of grief now. Surely it hurts so much because BAD! I’ve been there. It goes away, and you realize that you were central to their life, just as they were central to your life.
I’m sorry for your hurt, your loss of center, and your badly broken family.
But let this anger, too, pass. Then go on and rebuild your self.
johnny aquitard
@gene108: No accident. They spent a lot of money to reach that white conservative audience, they weren’t about to fuck it up by showing a bunch of messicans.
And the token, I noticed they had him sitting on the tailgate of the truck, like he was maybe bumming a ride. The ad makers had total control over the placement of the actors, it was interesting they didn’t put the black guy behind the wheel. You know, like he actually owned it.
Or maybe they focus-grouped that and found their target audience would think he’d stolen it.
Emma
@IowaOldLady: Me! I hope he gets a proper royal burial, not end up in a ridiculous research lab somewhere.
johnny aquitard
@gene108:No accident. They spent a lot of money to reach that white conservative audience, they weren’t about to fuck it up by showing a bunch of messicans.
And the token, I noticed they had him sitting on the tailgate of the truck, like he was maybe bumming a ride. The ad makers had total control over the placement of the actors, it was interesting they didn’t put the black guy behind the wheel. You know, like he actually owned it.
Or maybe they focus-grouped that and found their target audience would think he’d stolen it.
edit: trying to post this again since wp told me it wouldn’t the first time I tried. FYWP.
johnny aquitard
@aimai:
They showed a Black Guy in the back of the truck, who represented all minorities riding out to the fields in the backs of trucks everywhere.
sharl
@Gex: It looks like folks more knowledgeable than me offered counsel that sounds useful, so I’ll just offer my best thoughts and wishes, and a virtual {{{hug}}}.
One thing I had been wondering is what kind of friends you had to support you in all this, since you rarely brought it up in your past comments. So I’m real glad to see that mention of going up to Lake Superior with a couple friends; I was a little worried that you might be totally alone. You’ve said that online support is a big help, and I’m glad to hear that, but I’m sure that support IRL offers something that we can’t.
You take care.
Ruckus
@gene108:
You might say things are black or white.
SFAW
@handsmile:
She was, as her Facepalm page so eloquently states, “bringing her unique perspective and experience to bear on the challenging issues of our world.”
You know who ELSE had an “unique perspective and experience”?
Bruce S
Fiorina – who was a terrible CEO, a terrible vanity Senate candidate and still is a terrible person – also shamelessly lied in characterizing Krugman’s position on gun control. She doesn’t have the capacity to be honest.
I do have to say that most of the ABC This Week panel is at least one bit of evidence that inclines me to be viscerally sympathetic to the notion of large capacity magazines…
Howlin Wolfe
@gene108: Nuance is lost on them until they want to use it to justify some of their positions.
Helmut Monotreme
@SFAW:
Picasso?
stinger
@max: Just like they took the dumbest box of rocks female governor in America and made her their VP candidate.
Sad_Dem
@Scotius: Seconded. I hope that dumb multimillionaire offers more people a chance to vote against her.
stinger
@chopper: On the other hand, I hold a private sector position that is made possible entirely by public funds (govt contracts).
stinger
@cathyish: This. I’ve loved someone who was unworthy. It was no reflection on me. (Admittedly it took me a while to get this.)
SFAW
@Helmut Monotreme:
Well, Picasso was a painter, too, but I don’t think he did houses.
handsmile
@SFAW:
Very well-played, indeed!
(at least not intact houses): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PicassoGuernica.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Courtyard_of_the_Old_Residency_in_Munich_-_Adolf_Hitler.jpg
cosima
Because this is an open thread (and the latest open thread as far as I can tell)…
Anyone have suggestions/advice re: selling a used car? I’ve sent around an email to our (very small) group of friends/acquaintances asking them to pass on the info if they know of anyone in the market for a great used car. I’m wondering if Craigslist is a good option or if it’s too creepy/dangerous/scary. Or is there another online resource that is reputable? Is it advisable to put one of those plastic things in the window advertising that it’s for sale, or does that make it a target?
It’s not a cheap car (we’re hoping for $20k). We are moving overseas in a few weeks, so the car has to go. I’d never part with it otherwise. Denver area.
JustRuss
@cosima:
Went through that last year. It’s tough when you want that much for your car. Tried Craigslist, not much luck. Some outfit out of Las Vegas called and offered to market it for me for a few hundred bucks….stay away. We eventually sold it to an acquaintance, sounds like you’re already working that angle.
I hear Carmax is OK, might be your best bet if you’re in a hurry. Check on Edmunds.com and make sure you’re asking a realistic price.
I don’t see any reason not to put a sign in the car, why would that make someone more likely to steal it?
mclaren
When you rise to the level of gross incompetence and stupidity Carly Fiorina has attained, a major political position becomes inevitable. I’m thinking Vice President by 2020 at the latest…