Decision Points. :::nuff sed:::
most astounding fibs
“Sarah Palin says she wants limited government. Does that mean politicians quit midterm?”
“Former President George W. Bush reveals in his book that he considered dropping Dick Cheney. But Cheney nixed the idea.”
Dismantling discretionary spending, extending retirement, pooling health services, aggregating oversight, stripping incentives, buggering education, abandoning infrastructure, ignoring corruption, bailing the wealthy, and they call that a pledge, nay, a vision. Phooey.
Our Banana Republic – NYTimes.com:
“You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24% of all income, up from almost 9% pre-Reagan Republican.
As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
CEOs before Reagan earned 42 times the average worker but 531 times more after Republican laissez-faire supply-side no tax bankster free markets.
Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
revenue punditry
The facts are painfully apparent.
Though hundreds — if not thousands — of people in D.C. are professionally paid to pretend these facts require debate and analysis and parsing and speculation and press releases and pithy Tweets and Sunday Show roundtables and C-SPAN symposia and to-camera cable-TV rants and lengthy thousand-page books, they don’t require any of that. The facts are simple.
The facts are obvious.
The facts are undeniable to anyone not paid fistfulls of sweaty money to lie or sensationalize…
Clarity is always relief.
So much better hotly written:
We’ve got lives to lead, we’ve got struggles to struggle through, we’ve got bills to pay – in short, we’ve got to get through the shit you’ve created and continue to create.
And as you now incessantly bitch about the alleged scourge of those evil election-losing liberals, as you whine and wail and cry from the cocktail and hors d’oeuvre paradise of TV studios and green rooms and congressional offices and party fundraising events, you’ve made quite clear you don’t give a shit about the harsh reality we all face – the harsh reality we all face thanks to you.
Knowing all of that, I’ll end just to reiterate my one succinct request: All I ask is that as you continue your hard work to prop up the kleptocracy, as you continue to clog our last remaining democratic conduits with your viscous rhetorical shit bombs, please, do us all a favor and for the love of whatever god you worship – please just stop wasting our damn time and go fuck yourself.
how long we waited
What’s important here?
A new right angle plug that lets cords lie flush with the wall. Something never seen before.
I’ll never shake the surprise the obvious isn’t already invented.
packratnomics
Paul Davidson writes:
I am not surprised by the failure of the Obama Administration to win over the American people to a progressive economic program.
After all, we all hate Franklin Roosevelt. Right? Wasn’t he related to the Czars?
Paul Davidson argues that the Obama Administration and its allies in Congress have not actually followed the prescriptions laid out by the British economist Lord Keynes in making economic policy – and that this is a principal reason for their failure to deliver.
Who’s Lord Keynes? Oh, I remember. He’s bro’ of Karl Marx and begat the loather Hunter Thompson. Wingnuts know so much Adam Smith, just enough to keep evolution true, because it sells. No government. No tax. We’re free boat hands after all, last on deck, last on deck, but juicing stagnation. Yes, as Republicans say, you’re better off with that ol’ Reagan revelry.
oh dat odac
Doesn’t every town have this?
• link to ODAC. • Background on its Oxford trustee. • Or audio interview.
polarized
From Jo at Majority of Two, composed vignette of purpose.
At one time, folks all lived in small communities and everyone knew each other. Even in large cities, people lived in specific areas and everyone worked, lived, and socialized within their own community. Everyone knew everyone else, people visited back and forth in each other’s homes and there was a real sense of belonging.
h/t Pauline.
deeply told
We know so little. Regard is essential. That’s humility and with it awe.
Here’s 4 minutes of our ocean, best clips of Howard Hall, to show beauty abounds, poise in wonder, life among our tiny container.
Take care. Be care, my friends.
Be care, the frenzy we’ve forgotten and the future we’re able.
illiteracy, immappancy
Look carefully now. The Earth won’t change but your brain will.
shrink & shrub
problem perception
I was reading about the paradox of complexity and certainty. To plan is Soviet. To distribute is Socialist. To regulate is Democrat. To defer is Republican. And for the Tea Party, it’s dismantle.
‘As If By An Invisible Hand The Wealth Of The Nation Will Grow’
Is there room on a bumper for this slogan of the times?
Yes, invisible hands took the wealth of this nation. What do we say about national pilfering and the concentration of finance?
much done
• “Today, Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) has clear responsibility for examining emerging threats to our financial system.”
• “No more bailouts. Instead, the Dodd-Frank reforms provide the government with the authority to wind down any firm.”
• “Today, there is one agency for one marketplace with one mission – protecting consumers.”
• “Before Dodd-Frank, consumer protection was fragmented over 7 fed regulators … [with] higher priorities than protecting consumers.”
• “Today, the OTC derivative market is comprehensively regulated for the first time.”
• “Before Dodd-Frank, the OTC derivatives markets- $700 trillion at its peak–grew up in the shadows, with little oversight.”
• “Today, ‘too big to fail’ is gone. We no longer have to make the untenable choice between taxpayer bailouts and market chaos.”
• “And the regulators have clear authority to restrict excessively risky activity, including proprietary trading, by banking firms.”
• “Today there is authority for clear, strong & consolidated supervision of every financial firm-regardless of legal form.”
Assistant Secretary Michael S. Barr Remarks at the American Bar Association. http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/tg947.htm
political boss
Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson:
But amid the wreckage of Tuesday’s GOP rampage, there’s one person for whom I feel awful: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She’s losing her job not because she does it poorly but because she does it so well.
Pelosi would never ask for, or even accept, my sympathy – that’s not her style. Her place in history was secure the moment she became the first woman to take possession of the speaker’s gavel. Still, she squeezed every drop out of her four-year tenure.
To string together a couple of sports cliches, she came to play and she left it all on the field. I regret that the nation has never come to know the actual Nancy Pelosi.
cattle branding
Good ol’ Urban Cartography:
margins and markup
A very large percentage of our healthcare line items are ruthless extraction. If it mattered to mood-driven America, Chris Corrigan’s summary of health care would be premier campaign material.
In Seattle yesterday I was listening to a keynote by Dr. Jack Shonkoff who is a brain researcher at Harvard with an interest in early childhood development. He said an interesting thing about American health care which kind of answers the question for me about what the US is good at.
Many Americans who are opposed to public health care use the argument that people from other countries come to the United States for the world’s best treatment, surgery and acute care. No question that if you can afford it, the USA has the best.
BUT – and this was a revelation to me, to hear from a leading doctor –no one moves to the USA permanently for their health. In the case of almost every industrialized country, and several developing countries as well , the USA trails in health promotion. So while people do come for treatment, they go back home to countries that support better overall health.
An insurance-based system is to blame for this. Pouring money into insurance means that treatments including surgery and drugs are developed and widely available because there is an incentive for private companies and public institutions to develop excellent treatment, activities and products that you can charge for.
Health promotion is not a profit making venture, so if you choose to put public resources in private insurance, you get private, price-based solutions.
Building a system that prioritizes prevention, healthy communities, health promotion and safety is the way to reduce the need for acute treatments later in life, but no one can make a profit at it, so it requires a public, social response to build that infrastructure.
voter unpsychology
Harpers, since 1859:
The corruption of our institutions manifests itself in a variety of ways, but in none so dramatic as the imbalance of national wealth, which in recent decades has shattered records formerly set in the late 1920s.
Although it is often claimed that the gap between rich and poor began decisively to widen in the late 1970s, as if to absolve Ronald Reagan for what his followers no doubt count as his primary accomplishment, the total share of income of the wealthiest 10 percent of American families was well within the postwar norm until 1982, when Reagan’s policies began a massive, decades-long transfer of national wealth to the rich.
…
Such a distortion of the nation’s balance of wealth did not come about by accident; it was the result of a long series of policy decisions—about industry and trade, taxation and military spending, by flesh-and-blood humans sitting in concrete-and-steel buildings—that were bought and paid for by the less than 1 percent of Americans…
Nemo says:
So my choice of parties is between
a) owned by Wall Street and
b) totally owned by Wall Street.
Just pick a side, and start sniping!
tender up
If adults were merciful and resolute, we would all see that stress derails:
Babies brains build a basic architecture by forming synapses and then a more complex architecture develops on top of that. For the first three year of life, babies’ brains form 700 synapses a second.
Genes provide the template for this work, but experiences turn the genes on and off. So early life experiences are built into our bodies, encoded in our brains – for better or for worse.
moodocracy
But hey, when Americans are angry and nervous, they do stupid things. Like vote Republican. It happens. Just did.
http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com
“The Tea Party has been a great schtick for the GOP — a bunch of rallies, some don’t-tread-on-me talk, and suddenly the people who screwed the economy are elected as its saviors!”
a rigged deal
Well, the pirates succeeded, pointing scorn to government.
This is one of the areas that are very easy to demagogue.
By accusing government of being the enemy and promising people that if we simply shrink government they will be better, some politicians and ideologues are attempting to improve their own positions of power. They are misleading the voters.
We know that when the private sector is unwilling or unable to spend and when consumers are under a huge debt load, government is the last remaining spender, at least in the short term. Long term deficits do have to be reduced, but unless we get the economy growing in the short term through government spending, we’re all going to be experiencing a much longer and more painful so called recovery.
And stop blaming China. The USA is a greater threat to the world.
improvoteurs wanted
Everything you want to know about budgets, er, oil. Really folks. An astounding march each day:
voting is free
Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress turnout of the opponent’s supporters.
If the TV ads can turn you off enough not to vote (“they’re all bums”) then their strategy has succeeded.
The astonishing thing is that voters haven’t figured this out.