Since I don’t have cable, I always find out about the Really Good Rants a few days late. Gotta love Mr. Maher’s “the rich are like pinatas” riff starting at 3:27… although no doubt it has already been decried as uncivil.
__
What other Significant News and/or Excellent Snark have we missed recently?
C.R.E.A.M.
Wednesday Night Open Thread
Not completely surprising that an Esquire blogger came up with the best title so far for Gingrich’s self-justifying speech at Ralph Reed’s self-justifying ‘Christian Broadcasting Network’:
How Newt Gingrich Misplaced His Member
Now we get it! Apparently Newt Gingrich was working so hard, loved his country so much, and felt so passionately about Bill Clinton’s intern that he couldn’t find his penis anymore. Again, that’s:
There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate…
No Union, No Strength
Harold Meyerson at the Washington Post has another excellent, and thoroughly depressing, column on the ‘jobless recovery‘:
… Our current recovery, alas, is different from all previous recoveries that America has experienced since the end of World War II. The earlier ones were marked by wage increases. As the economy picked up and more revenue started flowing to business, those businesses shared the revenue with their employees. Mark Whitehouse of the Wall Street Journal looked at how businesses were dividing up the pie 18 months into every previous recovery since 1947 and found that 58 percent of their increases in productivity trickled down to their workers in increased wages.
__
This time around, the numbers are starkly different. Productivity increased 5.2 percent from the recovery’s start in mid-2009 to the end of 2010, he found, but wages rose by a minuscule 0.3 percent. That means just 6 percent of productivity gains have gone to our newly more-productive workers.
__
Where is the other 94 percent going? To profits, which have been increasing at a record clip for the past three quarters. To funds on the corporations’ balance sheets, which the Federal Reserve calculates at nearly $2 trillion. To shareholders. To the companies’ stock buybacks…
__
Why the difference between this recovery and its predecessors? For one thing, it’s happening at a time when almost the entire private-sector workforce is nonunion – 93.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest level of nonunion employment since some time in the 19th century, before such record-keeping began. Absent unions, workers are dependent entirely on management’s willingness to share their increased revenue with their employees. And absent unions, apparently, no such willingness exists.
(Cartoon, Joel Pett via Gocomics.com)
Tuesday Evening Open Thread
For a little schadenfreude, here’s Jack Shafer attacking the NYTime’s coverage of “the White House’s new stuffed animals“:
Do you remember Rahm Emanuel? Former Washington colossus. Feared and respected by everybody. The guy the president depended on to get things done. Highly functional Tourette syndrome case. Now the mayor of some Midwestern city. Well, the acidic Emanuel has been replaced by a team of Care Bears, whose pH runs a corrective basic. There’s Good Luck Bear (William M. Daley), who is of Irish descent and who brings luck to everyone as he twirls through the revolving door between government and business. Smart Heart Bear (David Plouffe) is just the brightest bunch of batting ever stuffed into a fake-fur body. Obama carried Smart Heart Bear from hotel to hotel during the 2008 presidential campaign, and it’s believed that he whispered brainy things to Obama that Obama repeated on the stump to make people think he’s smart. And then there’s Baby Tugs Bear (Jay Carney), the sweet little tyke in the family. Baby Tugs Bear is still in diapers and just now learning to talk, so they’ve made him the press secretary…
If you prefer something slightly more substantive, Tom Scocca will explain why the “Pharmaceutical Industry [Is] Near Collapse Because It Is Stupid and Incredibly Bad at Its Business“.
What’s everybody up to this evening?
Open Thread: Happy Possibilities
It’s probably too much to hope for, but at least the conventional wisdom has shifted enough that the NYTimes Media Villagers are willing to suggest that “Fox and Glenn Beck Stare Into A Dark Future“:
… Mr. Beck, a conservative Jeremiah and talk-radio phenomenon, burst into television prominence in 2009 by taking the forsaken 5 p.m. slot on Fox News and turning it into a juggernaut. A conjurer of conspiracies who spotted sedition everywhere he looked, Mr. Beck struck a big chord and ended up on the cover of Time magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and held rallies all over the country that were mobbed with acolytes. He achieved unheard-of ratings, swamped the competition and at times seemed to threaten the dominion of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity at Fox.
__
But a funny thing happened on the way from the revolution. Since last August, when he summoned more than 100,000 followers to the Washington mall for the “Restoring Honor” rally, Mr. Beck has lost over a third of his audience on Fox — a greater percentage drop than other hosts at Fox. True, he fell from the great heights of the health care debate in January 2010, but there has been worrisome erosion — more than one million viewers — especially in the younger demographic.
__
He still has numbers that just about any cable news host would envy and, with about two million viewers a night, outdraws all his competition combined. But the erosion is significant enough that Fox News officials are willing to say — anonymously, of course; they don’t want to be identified as criticizing the talent — that they are looking at the end of his contract in December and contemplating life without Mr. Beck….
Open Thread: Wisconsin Chedda
Dave Weigel at Slate on Walker’s latest burst of grandious entitlement:
The two week sleep-in at the Wisconsin state capitol is over; protesters will no longer crash in the building. The decision comes after a court battle (a polite, short one) over whether it was legal for the state to limit access to the building, and the state’s case was that protesters were doing damage.
__
[S]tate officials said that damage from the demonstration to the marble inside and outside the Capitol would cost an estimated $7.5 million: $6 million for damage inside, $1 million for damage outside and $500,000 for additional expenses.…
__
I’ve got my own call in on this. There’s no precedent for the occupation of the Capitol, nothing to compare this number to, but protesters were very conscious to limit damage to the building…
__
The only times I looked at the Capitol and said “wow, this is going to need cleaning” were when I saw carpet in the rooms being used for strategy and protest-staging, like the third floor room occupied by teaching assistants. There wasn’t filth; there was just some of the liquid spatter and food crumbs you’d expect after two weeks of people living in these rooms. But will it cost $6 million to scrub the building’s carpets and floors? It’s worth checking back in a few months to see if this $7.5 million estimate actually panned out; also worth checking how much it usually costs to clean the building.
Maybe the Koch brothers had Blackwater Xe put in a no-bid contract for hand-scrubbing the floors with Fiji water…
A few rebuttals
I just read a few very good rebuttals to Chris Hayes’ claim that DC elites in both parties are so ensconced in their comfortable world of low local unemployment and newly opened sushi bars that they don’t care about jobs for the middle-class. Booman:
[T]he reason that Washington DC doesn’t care about jobs is that the Republicans have too much power.The Democrats aren’t blameless, but they don’t like to waste time. After a few days, it gets really boring trying to reason with Republicans. Then you just figure out what you can muscle through and you go for that. The Democrats know that they can’t close the unemployment rate because anything expensive enough to work is just going to get voted down in the House or filibustered in the Senate. So, they move on. They focus on other things that they can make progress on rather than sitting around moping and feeling impotent.
That’s it. That’s the whole explanation. The unemployment rate could by 90% in Northern Virginia and it wouldn’t change the basic dynamics.
The difference now is simply that one party has gotten so tied up in its own rhetoric and ideology that it’s managed to convince just enough people that government is the sole problem, and any major attempt it makes to create jobs or improve conditions will fail. This wasn’t the case in the early ‘80s recession. Washington, despite being better off than the rest of the country then too, was scared shitless about 10% unemployment every waking morning and its electoral repercussions for both parties.
[….]It’s a shame. I felt so sorry for the lifetime health care policy researchers, those who moved here to work on this as a career, who finally got their chance after decades to implement their life’s work, but watched as meaningful provision after meaningful provision was stripped out over a retarded Sarah Palin facebook shart about “death panels.” I met the person who wrote that language for end-of-life counseling reimbursements in the bill, and it’s hard to explain how frustrating it was for her, and the experts who worked with her staff for years, to see it taken out over this kind of temporal cable news bullshit.
I think there are unquestionably certain ways in which DC Democrats have failed to stand up for the middle-class. But I sometimes also wonder if “both sides screw the middle-class” (and I write this as someone who says that a lot) is just Broderism for hippies.