Saturday, July 24, 2010

DANIEL Schoor was the last of the true and great national journalists. There are none these days.

AND here's an essay, in The Nation, that will certainly cheer you up.

Friday, July 23, 2010

REALLY enjoyed this comment in response to Paul Krugman's column in the Times this morning. It's so, well, Coulter-esque:

Karen Garcia
New Paltz, NY
July 22nd, 2010
11:43 pm

Those Bush tax cuts and their vibrancy sure made life a lot better for us hoi polloi, didn't they? Conspicuous consumption by the wealthy just fills me with vicarious joy. I get a thrill every time I see a Mercedes Benz commercial on TV, because I know that every purchase will be for the greater good. According to Mitch McConnell and his friends, we're just so darned ungrateful for being trickled down upon. I await those golden drops of Republican beneficence with baited breath.

The rich folks are getting nervous that their selfless gift of not paying taxes is about to run out — and (gasp!) they're actually starting to cut back on their spending. There was an article right here in the Times just a few days ago about sales of expensive toothpaste tube squeezers unexpectedly increasing. Before you know it, we'll see chauffeured limousines in Walmart parking lots.

It's getting so bad that a record number of millionaires are running for state and national office this year. Otherwise, things just won't get done. Good politician help is so hard to find.

But the most daunting event had to be when not one, but two Abercrombie and Fitch stores in New York became infested with bedbugs recently. The carriers apparently were frat boys who had been reduced to slumming in lower-end shops.

The resurgence of the ultimate frat boy, George Bush, cannot come soon enough. Just don't remind the GOP that it was Daddy who warned about voodoo economics. If you asked Mitch McConnell, he'd probably say Poppy Bush is just so yesterday. It's Junior we want, and Junior we must have.

Addendum II...

IT is always enjoyable to read Andrew Sullivan when he points out the remarkable ignorance and venality of the Palin-Gingrich reactionary right wing. Of course they don't respect — or want — religious freedom. They are as theocratic as the Taliban.

Addendum ...

IF you have an interest in the artistic qualities of urinals, click here.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

WHILE warming up on a bicycle at the gym Monday afternoon, I caught the text trailer on Fox News. Someone named Parker was saying that closed union shops were impeding job creation around the country. The TV's sound was off, so I don't know what people were actually saying, but the trailer keep saying that unions were preventing job creation.

So, with a quick Google later, I found this quotation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2009, the union membership rate — the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union — was 12.3 percent, essentially unchanged from 12.4 percent a year earlier, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions declined by 771,000 to 15.3 million, largely reflecting the overall drop in employment due to the recession. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.

The data on union membership were collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS is a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 households that obtains information on employment and unemployment among the nation's civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over.

So, 12.3 percent of the wage/salary workforce is unionized, and although the BLS doesn't say how many are in closed shops (not all unionized workers are in closed shops, so far as I know), this statistic means that 87.7 percent of the wage/salary workforce is NOT unionized.

Are we to believe that companies employing 12 percent of the workforce are keeping the companies employing the other 88 percent from creating more jobs? Gee, that 12 percent must be really intimidating. Or is this just another example of the fictions that constitute "news" at Fox?

SOME really sensible advice is offered by Lexington in The Economist.

Monday, July 19, 2010

DOES technology help make us dumber? An interesting question.

Untitled (beeswax, silk and watercolor) 9" x 12" 2010