Wonkette says what needs to be said.
Fat prick Chris Christie loves “mob humor,” which is why he suggested voters “take the bat” to 76-year-old New Jersey state Sen. Loretta Weinberg. Like so many previous N.J. governors, Christie apparently thinks the office is actually a supporting role on teevee’s The Sopranos, which actually ended its run several years ago.
David Brooks is known to some bloggers as ‘Bobo’. I don’t know if they use that name because they think he is a clown or not. He is mostly a moronic butthead. He wants President Obama and Rep. Ryan to heart each other. This puts the President, who ran a national campaign and answered the questions of a nation, on par with a Congressman from a safe Republican district from Wisconsin. That is buttheaded.
Paul Ryan believes five things Barack Obama does not. First, he believes that aging populations, expensive new health care technologies and the extravagant political promises have made the current welfare state model unsustainable. Fundamental reform is necessary or the whole thing will collapse, here and in Europe.
You can believe what you want, but absent data, it is groundless and buttheaded.
Second, he believes that seniors and the middle class cannot be excused from the benefit cuts that will have to be imposed to rebalance these systems.
Rep. Ryan wants to give seniors a voucher to buy insurance; who will sell insurance to seniors as a separate class? Buttheaded.
Third, he believes that health care costs will not be brought under control until consumers take responsibility for their decisions and providers have market-based incentives to reduce prices.
There is nothing in the Ryan plan that will gestate market-based incentives. Buttheaded.
Fourth, he believes that tax increases should not be part of these reforms because the economic costs outweigh the gains.
“Economic costs of tax increases” is the new name for “trickle down”, which has never worked. Buttheaded.
See this graph.
Fifth, he does not believe government can nurture growth and reduce wage stagnation with targeted investments.
The government has a good record of doing just that. Buttheaded.
Bobo is little more than a talking chip.
While having lunch with a male friend, we noticed a woman with a rather nice ass in yoga pants. She was around 40, and her companion was in his 20′s. On leaving, we walked past their table and out the door. I turned to my friend and said, “The only problem I have with this whole ‘cougar phenomena’ is that at my age, a cougar has to be around 70.”
The something new is that I have decided to record some of these mots, bon or not.
You would think that this is a technology that is superfluous. But maybe not.
NXP Semiconductors (NASDAQ: NXPI), the RFID leader for multi-applications, announced that ClearCount Medical Solutions has selected NXP RFID solutions to enable its SmartSponge® System. The SmartSponge System can easily and accurately detect and account for surgical sponges placed in a patient’s body when undergoing surgery, so that no items are “left behind,” thus improving patient safety.
I need a drink.
Sidney Lumet died last weekend. Looking through his credits, I saw that he had directed “Network“. I watched it last night for the first time in decades and loved the way it played. I don’t know if Sidney Lumet was a great director, but he was pretty good. He was a former actor and that informed his style of direction. He could speak the language of actors and his ability to communicate with them attracted a lot of talent over the years. His last feature was “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”. It wasn’t his best film. I have it on DVD and noted the number of money saving things that had been done to make that movie. It isn’t clear that the movie would have been better with a bigger budget, but Mr. Lumet was clearly having his style crippled by budget concerns.
I don’t know how it is that Mr. Lumet came to direct the script by Paddy Chayefsky, but the script is a gem of no-holds-barred, damn-the-audience writing. It is filled with the argot of television, but doesn’t give a damn if you understand it or not. Mr. Chayefsky foresaw the world of television in which we live, to our detriment. Just about the only thing that television has not put on the air in the form of reality television is a planned, live assassination. But that is available on YouTube.
Some people remember this scene as the most important.
Other people remember this scene.
I like those, but the one that had me rolling on the floor on first viewing was the one where the radicals and the lawyers are negotiating contracts. That clip is not available.
The movie starred Faye Dunaway. She won the Oscar and she should have. Robert Duvall inhabits his character in a way that only he can. I think that Mr. Lumet probably turned the camera on and let the actors work; the script seems clear enough, the characters well-formed, direction was not needed to find the beats in the scene. There are long speeches, which are normally death for a movie, but I liked them.
What Mr. Chayefsky doesn’t say is that the thing that draws our attention is spectacle. He was railing against spectacle and the use of it to delude and mislead people. But that is how it ever was. One step on that path was the gladiatorial games. Pure spectacle. Against the backdrop of spectacle, we then try to identify the elements of narrative that will inform our lives. Such is as it ever was. Sophocles wrote about a king who bedded his mother and fathered his own half-siblings. Think that wasn’t spectacle?
There are two kinds of spectacle: sex and violence. One is the embodiment of the greatest form of intimacy we humans possess, the other is the played as if it is. Our mores don’t allow us to explore sexual relations between consenting adults in a way that seeks to understand and communicate, so our storytellers turn to violence or violent sex.
I’m not a fan of reality television. I don’t watch that much television any more and I must confess to a certain element of pride of ignorance when references to reality television are made in the popular media. Mr. Chayefsky recognized the speed of communication and what it could do for mankind, and I think he also recognized that we would not use it well. The Everyman television, YouTube, can be used as a tool of democratization, but it can only act as a solvent, stripping away the chimera of respectability that repressive regimes use. It can not teach mutual respect for others nor direct us away from our inborn tendency toward clanism.
But here we are and it is our planet, or rather, the planet of our children. I hope they don’t damn us in our graves.
Tyler Cowen does a point-by-point take down of the Ryan budget proposal. I can’t say I agree with everything he says, but point 10 caught my eye.
10. There’s not nearly enough on reforming the dysfunctional supply-side of our health care institutions. Nor does science or basic research receive much discussion.
The problem with our health care system is that it is being driven by supply, not demand. The insurance companies being virtually guaranteed a return on their money have no incentive to reduce supply. They have many incentives to increase supply (within certain limits). The market for excess supply in the health care industry is being artificially created by the flow of money coming from the insurance industry. When one wants access to healthcare facilities, too much is just enough. But we can’t go on that way.
I predict that Bill Maher will have a field day with this. Bill Donahue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights gets on his high horse about sex abuse in the Catholic church.
The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let’s get it straight—they weren’t children and they weren’t raped. We know from the John Jay study that most of the victims have been adolescents, and that the most common abuse has been inappropriate touching (inexcusable though this is, it is not rape). The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that “more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.” In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.
So, in the view of Donahue (who seems to be channelling both Beavis and Butthead) these youngsters were hanging out at the Catholic church trying to get picked up. What? They wanted to do shots with the priest and then get down tonight? Donahue is a pig.
Krugman is in fine form this morning.
Maybe that terrible deal, in which Republicans ended up getting more than their opening bid, was the best he could achieve — although it looks from here as if the president’s idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making pre-emptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiation with the G.O.P., leading to further concessions.
And bear in mind that this was just the first of several chances for Republicans to hold the budget hostage and threaten a government shutdown; by caving in so completely on the first round, Mr. Obama set a baseline for even bigger concessions over the next few months.
But let’s give the president the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that $38 billion in spending cuts — and a much larger cut relative to his own budget proposals — was the best deal available. Even so, did Mr. Obama have to celebrate his defeat? Did he have to praise Congress for enacting “the largest annual spending cut in our history,” as if shortsighted budget cuts in the face of high unemployment — cuts that will slow growth and increase unemployment — are actually a good idea?
It is as if people are immune to the lessons of 1937, when FDR accepted measures of financial austerity pushed on him by the opposition and the country went into another recession. It is impossible to restart a sluggish economy with only spending cuts. And tax cuts are the opposite of what is needed. Revenue is needed to balance the books, not more spending cuts. There are two ways to get revenue: increase taxes on the wealthy and increase employment for the rest.
I’m watching David Gregory of “Meet The Press” make out with Rep. Ryan of Wisconsin and so far, it has been all lips and no tongue.
Rep. Ryan is flogging his proposed budget around. To be clear:
Jesus Christ. This twit is saying the same crap that the Republicans said about the Bush tax cuts, and those tax cuts blew up the deficit. They cut revenue and didn’t cut spending. What spending do they want to cut now? Spending on the poor and middle class. Who pays for it? The poor and middle class.
I support an alternative minimum tax (AMT) for corporations of around 15% of profits. General Electric made $14B in profits and then got a $3.5B tax refund. They have 1000 employees who prepare their tax filing. That is a great gig. I wonder what the bonus structure is for them? At a fully loaded salary of $200k, these employees cost around $20M per year. The net rate of return is $3.5B/$20M = pretty damned good.
An AMT for corporations would mean that corporations would have an incentive to make money on operations, not on tax filings. All that money that US based multinational corporations have in off-shore banks awaiting repatriation would be put to use in funding jobs here. Right now, they are waiting for a Republican led Senate that will give them another windfall tax break and allow them to repatriate the money tax free.
I also support a ruling that subchapter-S corporations have a limit of a few hundred employees. The chimera that multinational corporations with many tens of thousands of employees are “small businesses” needs to be put to rest.
I stumbled upon Conservapedia, a wikipedia dedicated to conservative political beliefs. If ever I need motivation to keep my shit together, this supplied it. If the people who work those pages had integrity, I would engage them. But here is the chain of links I followed from the main page. First Richard Dawkins.
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL, born March 26, 1941 (age 70), is a biologist, evolutionist,atheist, and leftist/liberal. Most of Richard Dawkins’ popular books have been on the topic ofevolutionary biology. Dawkins is also the former holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is an ardent opponent of religion, which he dismisses as mere superstition.[1] However, Dawkins has offered no effective rebuttal to studies which show that the irreligious are more likely to be superstitious than evangelical Christians.[2]
I thought the claim that the irreligious were more likely to be superstitious than evangelical Christians to be a bold one and followed it. The topic is superstition, not anything about the link which led there.
In September of 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported:
The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians….This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener,”skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.[2]
A comment by Martin Gardner becomes “studies”. Something printed in the Wall Street Journal (editorial?) becomes the gold standard for “studies”.
If Jesus edited Conservapedia, would this pass muster?