Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!

A consequence of cucumbers

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

Bark louder, little dog.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Republicans would impeach Biden if he bit into a whole Kit Kat rather than breaking the sections apart.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

This blog will pay for itself.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

I was promised a recession.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

T R E 4 5 O N

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

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Alarmed by the seduction

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Over the next few weeks, we’re going to hear a lot about Herman Cain’s history of inappropriate and awkward sexual advances, and none of it is going to be pleasant. I suggest that, as much as possible, we ignore it. I know, however, that I will not be able to, not with Season 5 of “Mad Men” months away.

I have only one question: does this have real mythological staying power? Will Luke Nocera and Meghan Halperin some day agree that all the unpleasantness of 2036 politics dates back to ACORN’s and Rahm Emmanuel’s dastardly attempts to destroy Herman Cain?

I think it may have more staying power than people think because Cain’s polls numbers have not been affected much yet, so we could have as much as a few months of blaming the lamestream media for this story, etc. before Cain — who never had a chance anyway — completely implodes. That’s plenty of time to cook up myths about how Journolist was responsible for the whole thing.

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And I will be satisfied not to read in between the lines

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A friend of mine who studies Classics sent me a link to a Rush Limbaugh transcript wherein Limbaugh rants against Classical Studies for thousands of words. I was going to write about it, about how strange it is that the Straussians — who love the study of ancient Greece above all else — have cast their lot in with this culture-hating oxycontin addict, but when I read it more carefully, I was unable to figure out what Limbaugh was trying to say. He likes Victor David Hansen, who studies or purports to study Classics, and he applauded a caller for sending her kids to a Catholic school where they are forced to study Latin.

I was overthinking it, Limbaugh was making fun of the study of Classics because he saw a picture of an OWS supporter who was majoring in Classical Studies. But then he likes Victor David Hansen and Catholic schools, so it’s good when they study or teach the same things.

Likewise, Elias Isquith is right that I overthought my recent anti-Bobo screed about whether Red State non-college grads were Burkean patriots or mooching, looting, strapping young bucks:

Contra DougJ’s guess, I don’t think Brooks is trying to take a swing at slothful or stupid Real Americans. He’s just desperate — as it was always evident the GOP would be — to turn Occupy into humdrum representatives of the liberal elite, alighting the fireworks of culture war in a ham-fisted attempt to distract the nation from its ongoing class-based strife. The representatives of “Red Inequality,” then, are merely collateral damage, their struggles are cited by Brooks in a cynical attempt to claim the moral high ground and implicitly damn Occupiers and the like as petty, envious, and above all narcissistic.

Cleek’s definition of conservatism is the best yet written:

today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today: updated daily.

And a corollary is that today’s conservative rhetoric must oppose whatever liberals want today, updated daily. It’s as simple as that, and persons attempting to find a more complicated motive in the narrative will be prosecuted. I’ll try not to fall into this trap so much anymore.

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Taint necessarily so

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Bobo thinks the real villains in CainGate are the women he harassed:

If you are the victim of sexual harassment, and you agree to remain silent in exchange for a five-figure payoff, should any moral taint attach to you? In the old days, somebody who allowed a predator to continue his hunting in exchange for money would certainly be considered a sinner. I’m reluctant to judge people in these circumstances, but I’m inclined to agree. Am I missing something?

In the old days, the women would have been labeled sluts who were asking for it. They wouldn’t have even dared to make the complaint.

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Megan McArdle is Always Wrong™: Occupy Wall St./Income Inequality division

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I have neither the patience nor the time to wade through the divine Ms. MM’s effusion on the class snobbery at the heart of the Occupy Wall St. movement. (Via Edoroso)

It’s the usual McArdle — self regarding (I was a crappy student who went into the punditing racket because I loved it! And I’m better than you because of that!*); chock full of unsourced or supported claims that, as ever with this writer, are too-good-to-check;** and, frankly too wearisome a barge-load of flabby writing to want to wallow in long enough to do the full fisking that it probably deserves.

So to keep it short (as long as you ignore the footnotes)…let’s just look at one exemplary bit of McArdle drawing on her deep knowledge of the data making sh*t up:

Similarly, in the 1990s, when I worked with a lot of mostly blue-collar and first-generation college grads (with a fair sprinkling of Ivy Leaguers, to be sure), I didn’t hear nearly so much about the rich and how greedy they were–even though in the late 1990s, income inequality was almost certainly worse than it is right now.
That would be this income inequality.  Here is a handy chart:
My 53 year old eyes may not be all that acute, but from where I squint at the screen, it sure looks like the share of US income going to the top one percent is higher now than it was in the late nineties.
(Update: Commenter Downpuppy reminds me that McArdle has seized on data from the worst of the financial downturn to show that the unbelievably rich are getting slightly less so in relation to the rest of us.  Given the decades of data on this question showing just such jagged deviations from the upward slope of the plot, this is, as Downpuppy says, a leaf out of the climate denialist’s play book.  Grab just the right slice of a data set and you can prove, for example that Houston is actually habitable (see March and April).)
 If you want to see the data in tabular form, mouse on over here.
In other words — income inequality was piss poor in the 1990s, but it is in fact worse now.
Which means, as ever, recall the Levenson corollary to DeLong’s law:
1.  Megan McArdle is always wrong.
2.  If your analysis leads you to conclude Megan McArdle is right, refer to rule 1.
*Really.  In her own words:
“here’s the difference between me and the outraged lower-upper-middle-class: I chose it.  I decided to have terrible grades and major in English, and then job hop in New York before settling down as an IT consultant. “

**Here’s McCardle on the profile of the archetypal OWS supporter, and the thought process that led him/her to camp out in a manner calculated to offend his/her betters:

Probably they should not have sunk tens of thousands of dollars into acquiring a BFA.¹  But these mistakes didn’t usually used to be crippling.  They were a drag, as you paid off those huge student loans with your tiny little income…²
Unfortunately their choices became utterly, horrifyingly disastrous just at the moment when we had a terrible financial crisis that spiked our unemployment rate up to 10%.  We can argue about exactly who is at fault and to what extent, and how much longer our public sector spending would have been sustainable without the financial crisis.   But whether or not you think their reaction is empirically correct, it certainly isn’t surprising.  To them it looks like a bunch of greedy, stupid bankers stole the jobs that they were entitled to. [Italics added.]
Well, isn’t that special.

show full post on front page

Actually, it’s the usual McArdle switcheroo, a bit of clumsy rhetorical sleight of hand she hopes you won’t notice.  It’s not that the bankers — who are demonstrably greedy and stupid (as in, catastrophic failures at the core jobs of managing risk and allocating capital) — hold jobs that might go to others.  It is that their greed and incapacity destroyed the financial underpinnings of the rest of the economy, so that jobs the US used to create at fairly robust levels no longer appear.  IOW, the OWS critique of the finance crowd is that what they did screwed the rest of us — and that critique is correct, however much Mean Girl in Chief McArdle wants to distract us with the idea that the greedy old Social Security and Medicare receipients and the stimulus in response to the bankster-led crisis is actually the problem.  We’ll argue later about who to blame, she says, but for now let’s not fall prey to childish insults to the poor banking sectors.
Working this out is really not that hard — unless one is trying to make sure that no one actually pays attention to what happens and who is to blame when a handful of the most richly compensated members of a society f*ck up their one job, whilst looting the till.  But reality is a stubborn thing, and the greed and incompetence of the bankers is by now well documented, including,  for just one example, this pretty blunt piece from the archives of McArdle’s own employer.
          ¹Number of bachelors degrees awarded in the US in 2008-9: 1,601,368.  Number of such degrees in the fine arts: 89,140 (classified in these statistics as visual and performing arts, but matching the profile of the BFA degree).  Whatever else they are, (talented and monomaniacal, sez one married to a holder of an MFA), fine-arts graduates are unlikely to dominate the revolution, just on the numbers.
McArdle’s sneer at the arts is even sillier, in fact, when you actually look at the difference between a BFA and a BA.  The BFA curriculum, which typically demands studio and/or practice courses as well as more traditional classroom inquiry is classified as a professional rather than a liberal arts curriculum.  The folks who sign up for a painting BFA know they want to paint, and have some idea (usually a pretty good one) as to what that means — and they have an understanding of the working life they will enter.
McArdle might have been rhetorically better off dissing her own chosen undergraduate field of English literature — except that there are plenty of people who actually understand what a literature degree is supposed to do, which is not to guarantee an income, but to give you intellectual resources you can apply in the professional setting of your choice.  But imagining that people she disdains might actually have an autonomous inner life is beyond her vapid inability to grasp the fact that the world is not simply what she thinks it ought to be.
          ²The data here are a bit more complicated than they might at first appear — but a simplified picture is still a pretty good indicator of what’s going on.  And that would be that it’s not that students a generation ago made the same mistakes but were bailed out by the Bush casino economy.
In this study that looked at the period from 1993 to 2006, you see both an increase in the amount of debt and a shift in the mix of students graduating with high debt loads, with the debt burden in constant dollars rising sharply over those years for every quartile in the study.  All of which is to say that it isn’t that recent grads somehow made the same mistake their elders did and got burned; actual changes in the way the US invests in and builds human capital left them more vulnerable than their predecessors.

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Open Thread: Break Out the Barn Jacket, Scotty

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Per Glenn Johnson at the Boston Globe‘s Political Intelligence blog, Senator Brown (R-Masshole), a man not necessarily in danger of developing full-bore workaholism, is being forced to step up his schedule:

Senator Scott Brown is stepping up his campaign activity.
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The Massachusetts Republican today released a web video highlighting his recent visit to Gloucester, during which he called for the resignation of the country’s top fisheries official.
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Brown also wrote an op-ed column for the Lowell newspaper rebutting a television ad campaign being aired against him by the League of Conservation Voters…
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Brown publicly states that he won’t start campaigning until next year, when he will be seeking his first full, six-year term after winning a January 2010 special election to replace the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
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But the rise of Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, as well as early advertising by, first, the League of Women Voters and, now, the League of Conservation Voters, have prompted a change…

Shot of the fisherfolk-pleasing barn jacket in action at the link, although the news photog couldn’t shoehorn both the Glouchester Fishing Memorial and the Pickup Truck of Campaigning into the same frame, alas. There’s also a link to Brown’s video, which is a sackful of fail with a slight tang of flopsweat. Schadenfreude being a powerful drug, I am thoroughly enjoying Cosmo Boy’s disgruntled expression — he figured he could loaf through on Tea-Party talking points and blast-fax AFP boilerplate for another six months as long as his competition was split between the first-term mayor, that guy who won’t stop talking about City Year, an Episcopalian priest whose most significant political accomplishment was failing to be elected lieutenant guv, a lady pediatrician, a software engineer, and a state senator whose name is known only to his immediate family. Then Elizabeth Warren lost her dream job at the clammy hands of Scotty’s Rethug co-conspirators, and now he’s got an an actual race on his hands, poor fella. Sweat, Scott Brown, sweat!

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Rick Perry to OWS Protestors: “Money is highly overrated.”

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So then give me yours.

 Rick Perry is ridiculous:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry on Tuesday advised protesters in the Occupy movement to worry less about income inequality.

“You know, we have young people who are today occupying Wall Street, that there are some people out there that are making too much money,” the Texas governor said at an education forum in Des Moines, Iowa. “And if somebody were to ask me what the best advice that I could give them? It would be that money is probably the most highly overrated thing in the world.”

“It’s good to have some,” he admitted. “Because I’ve been without and I’ve had some, and it’s better to have some.”

Lay off the sauce, buddy.

[via Raw Story]

[cross-posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]

Rick Perry to OWS Protestors: “Money is highly overrated.”Post + Comments (84)