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Rappers, Deficits

This is a hilarious headline, but I think it, and the accompanying photo, should go with the story below. Insert witty segue along the lines of ‘Lesbians, Dwarves Clash over New Tax Laws’.

Because along those very lines, we have this new Deficit Commission, charged with, seemingly, suggesting the most craven ideas coming out of Talk Radio available. For  a good overview of the leaked fail work of the new DefCom, Kevin Drum, via TPM:

To put this more succinctly: any serious long-term deficit plan will spend about 1% of its time on the discretionary budget, 1% on Social Security, and 98% on healthcare. Any proposal that doesn’t maintain approximately that ratio shouldn’t be considered serious. The Simpson-Bowles plan, conversely, goes into loving detail about cuts to the discretionary budget and Social Security but turns suddenly vague and cramped when it gets to Medicare. That’s not serious.

There are other reasons the Simpson-Bowles plan isn’t serious. Capping revenue at 21% of GDP, for example. The plain fact is that over the next few decades Social Security will need a little more money and healthcare will need a lot more. That will be true even if we implement the greatest healthcare cost containment plan in the world. Pretending that we can nonetheless cap revenues at 2000 levels isn’t serious.

Check the rest, plus the nice chart, and share with your friends, because remember: Thanksgiving’s just around the corner.

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Is Luck a Skill?

This is a crucial point – also crucial, too, is that it does not undermine capitalism but does expose its chief weakness, which itself eerily resembles it’s great strength. Funny that.

Green does not equal smarts or vast expertise, and probably should denote rougher trade qualities like foolhardy gumption. The minute we get too sensible about things is the minute we turn toward convention. The rich we have now are bold mostly in the outlandish links they’re willing to go to protect their winnings, in common parlance. Of course our new billionaire overlords, who believe in nothing so much as their own genius, know nothing but to go into a crouch, expand their fortunes and spend millions to save their billions from the gov’mint. Acute failure of imagination. Symptomatically nouveaux riche – the only question is will they be able to hang onto their green cushions long enough to learn to doubt the perfection of its comfort?

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Talking about the Whether

It’s funny to talk about journalists giving money.

First, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann was indefinitely suspended when the Web site Politico revealed that Olbermann had donated to three Democratic candidates.

Politico’s post included this statement from MSNBC President Phil Griffith: “I became aware of Keith’s political contributions late last night. Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay.” 

Now, the Web site The Wrap is reporting that Fox News Channel host   Sean Hannity and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough have also donated to candidates.

As the site reports: “This year, Hannity gave $5,000 to Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-Minn.) political PAC and $4,800 to New York Republican John Gomez’s unsuccessful congressional race.”

I found the idea of Murdoch giving the republicans a $1 million donation kind of silly – and a lot redundant. I mean, the in-kind contribution of a single-minded, 24-hour cable puke-funnel would appear to be the balance, if not tip it. Tacking on a measly Mil for them to buy new forks after you’ve already cooked the food and set the table seems a little… crass and patronizing, not that the party much cares if they’re seen as lackeys. Just wanna be seen. Thanks for playing.

So, per the above report, Olbermann’s problem wasn’t a matter of whether he gave, but the “to three democratic candidates” part.

Right now, and over the past thirty years, it has been corporations that have loosened most of the conventional, if increasingly Orwellian, memes into society. Most prevailing ideas about health, wealth management, insurance, risk, taste and comfort have originated as some flavor of perception-shaping effort on behalf of a product or service. And we’ve greatly accepted them into our nostalgias, tagging the years and decades of our lives with brand names and theme park visits like blog posts. This has, of course, been extended into, some might argue it has in essence become, the political arena. I recommend a halt to these proceedings. Olbermann could’ve really made news with hearty contributions to O’Donnell, Angle and Rand Paul. Then the corporate ideologues wouldn’t know what to think – hippies and CEOs would both be scratching their heads, wondering who the sucker is at the table, who’s mark of the double-play wacko. That’s the kind of confusion that needs to be sewn.

Damn – I thought I had a semi-free weekend. Now I’ve got to White-paper my new de-consulting firm: Tricks of the Tirade.


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When We Ask Not What

Reminiscent of this,

Is this darling little site.

Really, I’m fine with Boehner becoming speaker; it will be infuriating for a while, but he certainly should be able to spout his nonsense from the highest tree, as should Cantor and Pence. They’re complete fools and should be allowed to advertise their ignorance as loudly as possible so they and the pseudo-ideology they represent can more properly be sent packing. If given the opportunity – they’ll do most of the work themselves to convince a supermajority that,

Republican leadership has no future – except for the coming spike in bullet-resistant shoes of all styles.

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Happy Halloween

I always think it’s cool that election day so closely follows All Hallow’s. Some kind of convergence that appeals, that I don’t want explained.

In an unrelated development, was recently enjoying this site.

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For-profit Hate

How does one set of people loathe another whole set? Individuals, sure – it happens all the time, and some many deserve it. But it’s usually sincere, in that it doesn’t pay. You actually loathe them. But entire groups? Is something else at work? Can green mean stirring up resentments?

Steven Emerson has 3,390,000 reasons to fear Muslims.

That’s how many dollars Emerson’s for-profit company — Washington-based SAE Productions — collected in 2008 for researching alleged ties between American Muslims and overseas terrorism. The payment came from the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, a nonprofit charity Emerson also founded, which solicits money by telling donors they’re in imminent danger from Muslims.

Emerson is a leading member of a multimillion-dollar industry of self-proclaimed experts who spread hate toward Muslims in books and movies, on websites and through speaking appearances.

Leaders of the so-called “anti-jihad” movement portray themselves as patriots, defending America against radical Islam. And they’ve found an eager audience in ultra-conservative Christians and mosque opponents in Middle Tennessee. One national consultant testified in an ongoing lawsuit aimed at stopping a new Murfreesboro mosque.

But beyond the rhetoric, Emerson’s organization’s tax-exempt status is facing questions at the same time he’s accusing Muslim groups of tax improprieties.

“Basically, you have a nonprofit acting as a front organization, and all that money going to a for-profit,” said Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog group. “It’s wrong. This is off the charts.”

But a spokesman for Emerson’s company said the actions were legal and designed to protect workers there from death threats.

“It’s all done for security reasons,” said Ray Locker, a spokesman for SAE Productions.

Emerson made his name in the mid-1990s with his documentary film Jihad in America, which aired on PBS. Produced after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the film uncovered terrorists raising money in the United States.

Via Juan Cole. Hate to share this on a nice Friday. No groups or individuals, beyond the for-profit co-nationalists mentioned herein, were loathed in the writing of this post. And certainly not you.

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Windy names for fun

Why can’t the pharmaceutical companies

The United States is on the verge of a solar boom that could provide 4.3 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2020, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

There’s just a 12-figure catch: Investors need to put $100 billion into the solar industry to keep the generation of solar electricity growing by 42 percent a year for the next decade to expand capacity from the current 1.4 gigawatts to 44 gigawatts

directly fund sponsor desert wind farms?

Federal prosecutors in Boston yesterday said British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC agreed to pay $750 million to settle civil and criminal charges that it made and sold adulterated drugs, including the antidepressant Paxil, to Medicaid and other government payers

The settlement, one of the largest ever in a health care fraud case, burnished the reputation of the US attorney’s office in Boston as the premier federal office for investigating health care fraud. It has been responsible for recovering about $6 billion in health care fines and claims in the past decade, about 25 percent of all recoveries nationally.

If you think I’ve got it backwards, GlaxosmithKline’s share price only went down .14 (fourteen cents!) on news of the settlement.

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Greens and the Next-Bubble

I was passing around this video, via Grist, about ‘what french school kids eat’ to some friends of Mrs. Green this weekend and so I should share it here. Note the child-like presentation from CBS News, which says a lot about what they think of their audience. But also note that this was on CBS News. One of the most poignant philosophical lines in the report is when the chef says, “just because they can’t vote doesn’t mean we should shove crap in their face.” Touche’, mon frere.

Then there’s this article in the Washington Monthly on the Next Real Estate Boom. Guess where it’s going to be, and why:

The baby boom generation, defined as those born between 1946 and 1964, remains the largest demographic bloc in the United States. At approximately 77 million Americans, they are fully one-quarter of the population. With the leading edge of the boomers now approaching sixty-five years old, the group is finding that their suburban houses are too big. Their child-rearing days are ending, and all those empty rooms have to be heated, cooled, and cleaned, and the unused backyard maintained. Suburban houses can be socially isolating, especially as aging eyes and slower reflexes make driving everywhere less comfortable. Freedom for many in this generation means living in walkable, accessible communities with convenient transit linkages and good public services like libraries, cultural activities, and health care. Some boomers are drawn to cities. Others prefer to stay in the suburbs but want to trade in their large-lot single-family detached homes on cul-de-sacs for smaller-lot single-family homes, townhouses, and condos in or near burgeoning suburban town centers.

Generation Y has a different story. The second-largest generation in the country, born between 1977 and 1994 and numbering 76 million, millennials are leaving the nest. They may sometimes fall back into the nest, but eventually they find a place of their own for the first time. Following the lead of their older cousins, the much smaller generation X (those born between 1965 and 1976), a high proportion of millennials have a taste for vibrant, compact, and walkable communities full of economic, social, and recreational opportunities. Their aspirations have been informed by Friends and Sex in the City, shows set in walkable urban places, as opposed to their parents’ mid-century imagery of Leave It to Beaver and Brady Bunch, set in the drivable suburbs. Not surprisingly, fully 77 percent of millennials plan to live in America’s urban cores. The largest group of millennials began graduating from college in 2009, and if this group rents for the typical three years, from 2013 to 2018 there will be more aspiring first-time homebuyers in the American marketplace than ever before—and only half say they will be looking for drivable suburban homes. Reinforcing that trend, housing industry experts, like Todd Zimmerman of Zimmerman/Volk Associates, believe that this generation is more likely to plant roots in walkable urban areas and force local government to fix urban school districts rather than flee to the burbs for their schools.

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Early Times Gentrification

All this applesauce about gentrification sent me back to thinking a little about the original movers-in-ers, you know the ones:

While Spanish conquistadors and adventurers were moving the colonial frontier to the mainlands of South and Central America in the early sixteenth century, they also began to explore the southeastern coasts of North America. Slavers preying on the Lucayan Indians in the Bahamas were probably the first to sail the shores of Florida, searching for harbors in which they could anchor to capture Indians who could be taken back to the Caribbean and sold. In 1512 Juan Ponce de Leon contracted with the Spanish crown to explore the region north of the Bahamas and the next year he explored the coasts of the southern portion of the Florida peninsula. In only a few short years other Spanish sailors and slavers would determine what Juan Ponce had thought was an island was a peninsula attached to the mainland of a huge landmass, one connected to New Spain (Mexico) around the Gulf of Mexico.

Over the next forty years the Spanish crown contracted with several conquistadors to conquer and colonize La Florida, establishing a presence on the northern border of Spain’s growing American empire. But all would fail. The expeditions of Juan Ponce de Leon in 1521 (to southwest Florida), Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón (to the Georgia and South Carolina coasts in 1526), Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528 (Tampa Bay to the eastern Florida panhandle), Hernando de Soto (Tampa Bay through, Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas in 1539-1543), and Tristán de Luna y Arellano (the Pensacola, Florida region and parts of Alabama in 1559-1561) could not conquer the land and its people.

Spain’s failure to secure La Florida would not escape the attention of France and England. In 1562 France sent an expedition under Jean Ribault that explored the coasts of northeast Florida and Georgia before establishing a short-lived fort on the South Carolina coast. Two years later a second French expedition established the settlement of Fort Caroline near the mouth of the St. Johns River.

Learning the French were usurping lands he claimed, Philip II of Spain sent Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to oust the Fort Caroline settlement. In 1565 Menéndez accomplished his mission and founded his own town, St. Augustine. In short order he established a second Spanish town, Santa Elena, on the South Carolina coast where the Frenchman Ribault had been. La Florida would remain in Spanish hands for two centuries, though the land it controlled would shrink as English interests, following the ill-fated Roanoke colony in 1585, successfully colonized Virginia and then the Carolinas between 1607 and 1670.

Well aware of the slaughter and enslavement of the Indians of the Caribbean, the Catholic monarchy of Spain had begun to require better treatment of indigenous peoples as early as 1516. In reality, however, such legal admonitions were rarely followed; in Florida, Narváez and de Soto, for example, both displayed extreme cruelty toward the native peoples. But by the time of the successful La Florida colony and the founding of St. Augustine, Spanish attitudes had shifted somewhat. Native people were recognized as having souls and capable of becoming loyal, Christian subjects of the crown, members of Spain’s American empire who could work in support of the crown’s colonies. From his headquarters in St. Augustine, Menéndez set about to make Christian allies of the Indians of La Florida. He also wished to establish an overland route from the Atlantic coast at Santa Elena south and west to northern New Spain and to find the fabled northwest passage, the sea route from the Atlantic into the Pacific that would provide a shortcut to the riches of the Orient.

See also Diaz, Bernal.