Paul Krugman linked to his and Robin Wells’ review of a handful of books for a famous publication. It’s not so much a book review as an analysis of the Great Recession, the whys of political and economic paralysis and the bleak future.
The government — and as a consequence, the country, has become unworkable, they conclude. It’s an analysis that leads one to believe the US is a new, but bad, thing — essentially the largest and most powerful failed state in the world.
The immediate effect of this bitter [two party] confrontation has been to paralyze economic policy in the crisis. Obama might have had a window of opportunity in his first few months in office, but as Scheiber shows, that window was lost—and there has been little chance of effective action since. So the slump drags on. But as Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein say in the title of their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.* They argue that Congress—and indeed the whole American political system—is close to complete institutional collapse … ultimately the deep problem isn’t about personalities or individual leadership, it’s about the nation as a whole. Something has gone very wrong with America, not just its economy, but its ability to function as a democratic nation. And it’s hard to see when or how that wrongness will get fixed.
The essay also gets at why the Democratic Party has been so ineffective at combating the radicalism of the GOP, a topic I’ve whined a lot about.
Basically, they’re losers because they didn’t grasp any moral narrative when the economy failed because of Wall Street. Someone needed to be blamed. The public craved it. The Democrats went absent. The Republicans, and the Tea Party, provided a message of blame — big government which forced American financial businesses to give loans to people who didn’t deserve it.
Wrong as it was, because there was no moral story from the other side (Obama certainly didn’t furnish one), it stuck.
Not coincidentally, various arms of the DNC and the Obama campaign have filled e-mail in boxes with increasingly hysterical solicitations for money. All of these are wrapped around the truth that the Citizens United decision have given the GOP an unlimited supply of crazy billionaire sugar daddies. So the first time in history, the incumbent will be outspent by the oligarch, Mitt Romney, a man who would be a world calamity as president. But whom I increasingly suspect will be who we get because he’s the president the country deserves, in the sense of a fable with a moral that punishes those nations that fiddle while everything burns.
The Obama campaign used to ask for 5 dollar micro-payments. Perhaps because of donation fatigue in the mailing list, it has been ratcheted down to 4 dollars. But they still apparently believe crowd-sourced serial micro-collection is an answer to oligarchs.
It is another instance in which they are now proven wrong. (Along with the Meet Barack for dinner with GeorgeClooneySarahParkerBillClinton lotteries for jackasses.)
Until Citizens United is nullified, they need to find their own oligarch douchebags. There are probably none for them, though, compelling the party to take a united stand as fanatical as that of the opponent, purge the hacks or risk losing what should have been a more easy election against a character with no quality at all.
By the way, if you want to make a minor donation to the blog, you can get ol’ DD a book to review, either this (cheap) — or this (not quite as cheap). Just one will do, thank you.
I’d go with the first. If anyone wants to take the plunge, e-mail me for an address.
Today the Grenades feature salutes American equating of merciless finger dexterity with quality. YouTube makes the giant weenie roast of the vanities easy, furnishing thousands of home videos of young people playing guitar along to their favorite heavy metal wanking tunes, proof of triumph in the culture of lickspittle.
Great minds work here. Everyone picks the same tunes to wank off on. Why not? With the music playing in the background as one wanks few care if you’re just another robot in a herd of at least one hundred thousand. If you’re strong enough to tolerate more than a minute of the samples of “the best” you’ll find the YouTube virtuosos often skip parts and flub notes when they think the record is covering them. And virtually none of them have the personality to even look at the camera, if they put their head in the video at all. But, boy, take note they shot themselves in HD!
Modern technology, like the iPhone in the kickoff video, abets. It is specifically made so you can play along with your favorite wanking tune, dub into it, and instantly upload to YouTube.
All in five minutes or less. You can easily see why iJunk, much like Facebook, makes the lame to see and the blind to talk.
A couple decades ago many ninnies said all the tech infrastructure would power democracy of expression. A DD Blog No-Prize for you if you can explain without smirking how the amplification and greasing of witless imitation until it drowns everything else out fits into it. Because make no mistake, YouTube’s Google-powered search specifically rewards slavish rote copying. Video-makers depend on it.
So here we go! (You can rate the excellence of the grenades by the amount of time they take you to wish to poke the player in the eye with a blunt stick. The shorter, the better.)
More bootlicking for iJunk.
This, a very special composite video, showing girls are just as pitiless and rote as guys. That’s progress of some kind. Hang around, if you can, to 3:34, where one of the lasses puts the pick in her mouth during the drum solo.
It’s in HD!
Totally ear-splitting and tinny but over half a million views. I couldn’t get that in ten years.
The same tune, just less ear-splitting. About now you’re wishing Eric Johnson had been run over by a car when he was ten.
A dog barks in this one. How long did it take for you to wish it had savagely attacked him?
Mitt Romney has been able to turn being an unprincipled liar into an asset. He’s done it because the mainstream media finds the sheer volume of his mendacity too complicated to explain. It’s just easier to publish it without comment than come to an editorial decision that would sever the Gordian knot — the equivalent of a tag-line stating “Readers and viewers are warned that everything Mitt Romney says is untrue including the words ‘a,’ ‘and’ and ‘the.'”
And Mitt Romney is not a stupid man. He’s surely noticed which is why he’s not deterred. He has total of control of a tactic that can put him in the White House.
What is the proper response when, even after it’s pointed out that the candidate is not telling the truth, he keeps doing it? Romney actually has a telling rejoinder for this. When a reporter challenged his oft-stated assertion that President Obama had made the economy worse (factually, not correct), he denied ever saying it in the first place. It’s a lie on top of a lie.
Now, it’s certainly true that on the campaign trail, facts can be stretched in many different directions – and both parties, including President Obama, frequently make arguments that are misleading, lacking in context or simply false. But it is virtually unheard of for a politician to lie with such reckless abandon and appear completely unconcerned about getting caught …
Romney has figured out a loophole – one can lie over and over, and those lies quickly become part of the political narrative, practically immune to “fact-checking”. Ironically, the more Romney lies, the harder it then becomes to correct the record.
It’s also true that one can repost such Guardian comment columns ten thousand times in social media and it won’t make a bit of difference.
Mitt Romney could be president because we deserve him.
iJunk, ensconced as the pricey consumer electronics equivalent of PowerPoint, selling the idea that just be jerking off for five minutes and uploading to YouTube, you can rule the world. Think I’m exaggerating? This, in my e-mail, today — how to make yourself sound like a totally lame imitation of Kraftwerk in 1977.
If Apple thought it could get away with having people on television suck on a piece of iKit shaped like a penis it would probably have FoxConn make some. See, one of the most annoying things about iJunk is the fetishism. One of the fetishes, and a major selling point, is the illusion created that one can rule the world from the palm of your hand. Just whip your fingers over a couple apps, easier than the five finger exercise.
You see this in the Beeb’s Sherlock, a show I like very much IN SPITE of its pandering commercial Apple tie ins.
For the show, there are only two infallibles. The star, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. And the iPhone.
The iPhone is the aim point for all texting between good and evil — the detective, his colleagues and adversaries. Whenever another computer shows up, it’s an iPad.
And one can do anything on those, too, so why does Apple even makes more than one device, since they’re all the same kind of magic wand?
In the climax of season two — The Reichenbach Fall — the start is given over to Holmes nemesis Jim Moriarty who invades the Tower of England during peak tourism hours, engineers a break in at the Bank of England and a prison break at Pentonville — all by swiping his iPhone apps — while he’s listening to his iTunes and chewing gum.
Straight off I wanted Holmes to kill the guy out of hand.
It can bring Britain to its knees because scandalous photos and careless talk are on its disk. It’s a very special piece of iKit, booby-trapped with multiple explosives charges. The finest computer, forensic and safe-cracking technicians in the world cannot penetrate it. Only the intellect of Sherlock Holmes can manage it, deductively reasoning that Adler has made the first four letters of her new boyfriend’s name, his, the password.
There is now something called the gTar, a prototype semi-guitar that serves as a docking station for an iPhone.
Do you hear any rock and roll? Do you hear anything at all that sounds like what Leo Fender made? Or Les Paul? Are there anyone but nerds in the video?
The gTar, an instrument with the feature that it comes with no acoustic capabilities at all, not even requiring the strings to be tuned, which I can tell you is important — psycho-acoustically and feel-wise — in playing an instrument with virtually zero native tone, is not even cheap by the standards of guitars for beginners. Yet iJunk groupies are all over it judging by the project’s funding success.
Indeed, one cannot turn around without seeing iPhones as the Swiss Army knife of life.
This — in today’s mail — on using your iJunk as a digital guitar amp, studio and hit producing machine all in one. Everything sounds perfect but sterile, like fragments of tunes you’ve heard on all the best-selling records, ever, but not quite identical because of digital copyright issues.
There is something missing from the frictionless lowest common averaging technology with pretty imagery of iOS app — humanity. This lack optimizes it for instant gratification, HD video commercials and soundtracks made spasmodically in minutes, uploaded by the tens of thousands to YouTube.
The player’s face is never seen, only the gear, the iJunk and GarageBand icons and trademarks. His blue sneakers are the only personality in the damn thing. I’ve become so averse to iJunk and its culture of lickspittle, just the idea of using GarageBand or Logic Pro for anything gives me a mild headache.
Nearly an hour after his “Every Town Counts” bus tour was scheduled to make a pit stop Saturday at a Quakertown-area Wawa — where dozens of protesters and prominent Democrats had set up camp — Mitt Romney finally pulled up and bought a sandwich.
At a different Wawa.
That left hundreds of people and dozens of protesters — including former Gov. Ed Rendell and former Democratic U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy — standing in vain at a Wawa off the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s Quakertown exit, waiting for a bus that was actually four miles away …
After ordering a meatball “sub” — whoops, make that a meatball “hoagie,” he corrected himself — Romney shook hands with the dozen or so customers who happened to be inside the store and had his picture taken with a group of boys from a local baseball team …
The crowd in the coal town was largely older, polite and sparing in ovations. Phil Jeffries, a funeral director from Weatherly, brought a camera and a concern for small businesses to the rally. A Republican who has voted Democratic before, he thinks Romney could clear the red tape that trips up entrepreneurs.
[It’s worth interjecting that funeral directors are not entrepreneurs in the sense of the discussion. They run depression and recession-proof “businesses.”]
Still two hours before Mitt Romney stood in front of a lone microphone atop a grassy mound just outside the entrance to historic Cornwall Iron Furnace on Saturday, the Burtko family of North Cornwall Township was bubbling over with excitement to see the Republican likely to face Barack Obama for the presidency in the fall.
“It’s not every day something like this happens,” Kelly Burtko said as her children, Emily, 9, and Zachary, 7, watched her mother answer questions.
Kelly’s husband, Barry, said he had heard George W. Bush speak near Wilkes-Barre in front of 20,000 people as he campaigned for a second term in 2004 …
Lebanon businessman Ed Kercher said he was “very impressed.” Romney was a more impressive speaker in person than the candidate he had watched on TV, he said.
“This is the most important election we’ve ever had coming up,” Kercher said.
The stories show what the expected — supporters, older, white and non-college educated Republicans who say they have voted Democratic, in the past. Such assertions are “likely stories,” not at all uncommon for interviews of this nature. It’s only human.
However, the next video — tipped to me at Pine View Farm — illustrates a Dem problem. Pale old white loser hacks, in this case ex-Ohio governor Ted Strickland, are the best to be found?
Young people wouldn’t listen to this guy. Older white people certainly didn’t. Strickland lost to Fox News celebrity and Bill O’Reilly stand-in John Kasich. And there’s no reason anyone else would, either.
The video is a grenade and the DNC never gets these slowly desiccating dog turds off the stage.
It’s painful to watch Strickland, who nobody knows — anyway, stutter his way through a poorly framed message, talking about saving the “auto industry in Ohio,” when everyone naturally thinks, “Detroit, Michigan.” You just have to ask yourself, “What’s wrong with the guy? Can he not even write and deliver one vigorous 90-second rebuttal?”
The answer is no, he can’t.
The party won’t field good people. The only inspirational man is the President and after that the talent goes shallow fast.
It’s one of the reasons, along with the reactionary vote that will hit him due to the disastrous economy in the last four years, I believe the president can easily lose to the unprincipled liar, the astonishingly unlikeable and impossible to admire (unless you’re just like him) person that is Mitt Romney.
Stimulus works. It creates jobs. One of the best examples is the explosion in hiring for homeland security, at the local level, for the last twelve years.
Coincidentally, following upon the weekend post which discussed parts of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, this new hire in Odessa, TX:
Ector County Commissioners approved the hiring of a bioterrorism technician at their meeting Monday, but the position covers more than just the threat of terrorist attacks.
Ector County Health Department Director Gino Solla said the position, part of the public health preparedness system, is part-time and assist with duties that involve dealing with disasters that range from manmade attacks to natural incidents.
“It could be radiological or even … a tornado,??? Solla said. “Any time people are hurt or killed, public health gets involved.???
Hired at a step five, or $13.36 an hour, Dillon Harris will be coming from Dwight, Ill., and is a student at Monmouth College. Studying to get into medical school while in college, Harris said he will be taking time off from his studies to get hands-on training before entering his field …
Bioterrorism technician. For this part of Texas. It’s an eye-rolling proposition.
There will never be a bioterror or any other kind of terror incident in this place. Still it is a job for someone who does not have one, which means money spent on the local economy. And — ultimately — all these jobs come from the federal government and grants from agencies like the Dept. of Homeland Security.
They are the equivalent of stimulus. Or, if you prefer, Keynsian jobs programs.
The funding, reads the newspaper, came from “the Bioterrorism Response Program after it was formed in 2003 in response to the Anthrax scares … a large part of the Public Health Emergency Preparedness budget has been issued through grants.”
The grants for the hire are scheduled through 2012 and 2013, it adds.
Readers know I’m a bioterrorism expert. They can easily understand the outrage that results when all domestic jobs which could theoretically be sustained or created by stimulus or thought of as bad.
Except in the cases of creating homeland security positions where there will never even be a theoretical need.
Having said that, creation of a new job in the Odessa area, whatever it may be, is a good thing.
“Rock Of Ages” and Cruise failed to hit the high box office notes, taking in an estimated $15 million from 3,470 locations for the No. 3 spot.
The young males that were seen as the key to broader success for the film didn’t turn out. The audience, which gave the film a B CinemaScore, was 62 percent female, and 74 percent over 25 years of age.
Adam Shankman directed the film based on the Broadway musical, but it couldn’t match his earlier success with another film musical, 2007’s “Hairspray” … The film’s production budget was around $70 million.
“We’re not gonna take it/No we ain’t gonna take it!” — the kids vote with their feet.
Wait for the appropriate scene at 4:22. Or just skip to it. Big Balls & the Great White Idiot, one of the greatest band names of all time.
Takes his campaign tour to where everyone was fired, my old homeland, southeastern rural Pennsy:
WEST HAZELTON, Penn.—Mitt Romney takes his bus tour to Pennsylvania Saturday, hoping to turn the focus back to the economy after a day in which his message was largely overshadowed by President Obama’s immigration decision.
The Republican nominee will begin his day by touring a casting and machine company in Weatherly, located in a rural eastern part of the state. He’ll then make his way west, stopping at a WaWa convenience store in Quakertown and an old iron furnace in Cornwall that is a national historic landmark.
Mitt Romney has nothing in common with the people of the area. The idea of this man at a WaWa in Quakertown, also home of the Q-Mart bazaar, is almost enough to induce tetany. (Follow the link)
Do you think candidate Romney would look good in this? You used to be able to buy them where he’s campaigning.
Romney’s campaign stop is slightly reminiscent of part of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, about football-obsessed Odessa, TX and the Permian High football team. Staunchly conservative in values, the area was destroyed economically by the mid-Eighties and Bissinger tells the story, since watered down and over-simplified in a movie and television series, of how elevation of high school football to a level dwarfing many collegiate programs held the place and people together.
Through Friday Night Lights Bissinger infrequently cites Pennsylvania, Ohio and a couple other states where high school football holds places together, too, just as in Texas.
The American Dream, Bissinger writes, is destroyed but in these places there is Firiday night football.
Through it the people can still have the very special — an event, a shared experience of tremendous emotion, athletic achievement, and vicarious thrills, anodyne from September to near Christmas, if the team made the playoffs, to a shriveled, diminished life of no future and no opportunities the rest of the year.
Friday Night Lights takes place during the elder Bush’s run for President against Democrat Michael Dukakis.
Nothing has changed between then and now except for the fact that the American economy is much much worse for all except those at the very top.
Unsurprisingly, Odessa was no place for the Democratic Party.
In Odessa, Michael Dukakis was the candidate for “homos,” a “minority of sexual perverts.” He was a socialist who ignited “fear that he would take away the rights of people to protect themselves against violent intruders, fear that he would ruin the economy, fear that the only people who would beneift from his administration would be the poor, while they, the hardworking guts of the country got sold down the river.”
Familiar?
In the book the elder Bush makes a brief campaign appearance in the Odessa area. George H. W. Bush, like Mitt Romney in West Hazelton today, was no more like the people than the all-destroying Martians were like the narrator in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. (To be fair, Bush had lived in Odessa for a short period after WWII when he was in the independent oil business.)
“Their belief in [George H. W. Bush] seemed ironic, even crazy,” writes Bissinger in Friday Night Lights.
“[The economy] of Midlands-Odessa had fallen apart during the Reagan-Bush administration, and it was hard to think of any other single area of the country that had suffered as much … The statistics were numbing. in 1986 the unemployment shot up to 20 percent. The number of bankruptcies filed with the federal court in Midland shot up 65 percent.”
In the book, the arrival of the elder Bush is met with near hysteria, virtually, but not quite, the same support inspired by the Permian High football team.
“[Bush] created the image of a country that was still as good, as fundamentally sound as it had been in the fifties, when [he] and thousands of others had watched the American Dream blossom before their eyes …” writes the author.
That place no longer existed, Bissinger dryly observed. The GOP candidate created an “amazing illusion.” The people of Odessa wanted and needed it, anything to lift the spirit and assuage the desperation.
And that’s what Mitt Romney, an unprincipled liar and brazenly unlikeable oligarch from the upper atmosphere of the ruling class, works in eastern PA.
Size of check recently written to Romney campaign by kook right wing billionaire — $10 million.
That would buy most of what’s left north of Philly between Quakertown and West Hazelton.
“Some Romney advisers sound especially bullish, with one positing that a big win by their side is now more likely than a narrow Obama victory …” — TIME
Coincidentally, Paul Krugman has a blog post on Texas and the state recession caused by a collapse in oil prices and the S&L banking scandal in the late Eighties, the period in Friday Night Lights.
Bissinger devotes nearly a chapter to discussing the people and the economy of Odessa in relation to it.
