Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Bark louder, little dog.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

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

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

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

After roe, women are no longer free.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

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Fuck The Middle-Class

Greeted as liberators all over again

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If you don’t think that Serious People want to dismantle the social safety net, you’re not paying attention. Here’s Bobo in a column that conflates the current budget problems with down-the-road entitlement issues:

This is not like fixing Social Security in the early 1980s. The current debt problem is of an entirely different scale. It requires a rewrite of the social contract, a new way to think about how the government pays for social insurance.

The current budget problems have nothing to do with Social Security. In fact, they are largely the product of supply side economic tax cuts and an economic collapse largely caused by belief in free market fairies. Moreover, the entitlements issue (and it is an issue) has very little to do with Social Security (which can be fixed again, if necessary, just as easily as it was in the 1980s) and everything to do with the strain on Medicare and Medicaid caused by rising medical costs (a strain that employers and workers are feeling just as badly in the private insurance market).

Tell me that this isn’t just like Iraq. We were a fed a mish-mash of Al Qaeda connections, nuclear programs, and the just plain evilness of Saddam Hussein, all of it part of one big “Islamofascist” stew. Now the “fiscal austerity” stew involves short-term budgetary issues, Social Security, and medical costs, none of which are related in any way. By conflating them, you create a single monster to fight against. Want to “fix Social Security”? Just cut earmarks. Want to stop Al Qaeda? Just attack a secular Muslim country.

Iraq was a disaster largely because there was no plan. Bobo and Sully and the rest have no plan for what we do after we’ve gotten rid of Social Security and Medicare and liquidated all the evil unions either. But we’ll all be greeted as liberators when we reach Galt’s Gulch.

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Middle-class young bucks fucking around on Facebook instead of building wealth

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David Brooks says the Chinese will destroy us because today’s “Jareds” screw around on Facebook all day instead of working long hours like their grandfather “Sam”:

Sam entered a world of iceboxes, horse-drawn buggies and, commonly, outhouses. He died in a world of air-conditioning, Chevy Camaros and Moon landings. His life was defined by dramatic material changes, and Sam worked feverishly hard to build a company that sold brake systems. Sam wasn’t the most refined person, but he understood that if he wanted to create a secure life for his family he had to create wealth.

[…..]

Jared lives a much more intellectually diverse life than Sam. He loves Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and his iPhone apps. But many of these things are produced outside the conventional monetized economy. Most of the products are produced by people working for free. They cost nothing to consume.

[….]

Jared is also providing much less opportunity for those down the income scale than his grandfather did. Sam was more hardhearted, yet his feverish materialism created more jobs.

Jared worries about that. He also worries that the Chinese and others have a material drive that he and his cohort lacks. But he’s not changing. For the past few decades, Americans have devoted more of their energies to postmaterial arenas and less and less, for better and worse, to the sheer production of wealth.

Of course it is unthinkable that any East Asian person would ever waste time on electronic gadgets and social media. Beyond that, though, do the middle-to-upper-middle-class “Jareds” of the world actually work less than their grandfathers? No, they seem to work a little more.

Nice try, though, Bobo.

Update. You all know why that top decile is working so much harder today than in 1980 right?

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That Used To Be an Outrage

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Adding to what DougJ said, I’m old enough that I remember it was an outrage when you called American workers lazy:

Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa`s remarks Monday that American workers lack drive and a strong work ethic not only elevated the war of words between the world`s two biggest economic rivals, they highlighted a growing gap in perception that afflicts U.S.-Japanese diplomatic relations.

Speaking during a parliamentary discussion of the declining American economy, Miyazawa said:

“I have long felt that (Americans) lack a work ethic . . . to live by the sweat of their brow.

“Because so many American university graduates were recruited into Wall Street, the number of engineers in charge of developing goods has declined.“ The Bush administration and several American politicians known for their tough stance against Japan responded quickly and forcefully.

“These kinds of comments are probably helpful in the sense of stirring the rages in all of us,“ said White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater.

“Beyond that, I would say that the American work force is second to none, that the American work ethic is legendary and has promoted the greatest prosperity in the world and throughout the world, including countries like Japan.“

House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) was more emphatic in his denunciation of the Japanese leader`s remarks, calling them an “ignorant expression of Japanese racism. . . . Americans work hard every day, and our productivity is higher than Japan`s.“

When the angry reaction began rolling in from Washington, Japan`s Foreign Ministry quickly issued a statement saying that Miyazawa “has no intention whatsoever of criticizing American workers“ and that the term “work ethic“ was used only to explain the “philosophy of work.“

Fitzwater said Washington regarded that as an “apology.“ President Bush said Miyazawa had “gone out of his way to make clear he is not denouncing all American workers.“

That was 1992, which in America is like ancient history. Interesting that what used to be called an insult is now the received view among our Galtian overlords.

Looks like Miyazawa wasn’t wrong about his Wall Street v. engineers remarks, either, was he?

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Strapping young bucks not looking for work

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Remember that if fiscal austerity helps keep the unemployment high, it will just be “structural unemployment” resulting from the laziness and ineptitude of the American working class (via):

It really makes you despair: we’ve been over and over the evidence, and there’s not a hint in the data that a mismatch between occupations and jobs can explain any important fraction of the jobless rate.

Sometimes I think there may not be enough strapping young bucks to account for all the ingrates soaking up gubmint unemployment benefits, that there could be some meth-addicted white trash on the job too, maybe some former union workers too.

The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter.

How about a big Charlie Rose round-table about how the American middle-class doesn’t deserve jobs or health care because they’re all a bunch of fat lazy fucks who couldn’t cut it in China?

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