Ohboy. Looks like ol' Hermanator is now Hermanover!
Monday, November 07, 2011
Myth America
Things you didn't know about our country, but thought you did.
I got 13 of 14. I'll let you guess which one I missed.
A Primer On
Mormonism.
Honestly, any "religion" that has at its heart an angel named Moron is giving a wink-and-a-nod.
Why Occupy Wall Street Will Ultimately Win
It's not just income inequality between rich and poor.
It's also income inequality between young and old.
Skeptically Mournful
Cold fusion has been a topic of conversation for decades, ever since the disgraced Fleischmann/Pons experiments.
Italian researchers seem to have duplicated the experiment, but...
There is still no peer-review that duplicates the results, because the basic protocols behind the process have been deliberately hidden, as the scientists plan to go straight to the market with a device based on their work.
Long gone are the days iof Jonas Salk and free polio vaccines, I guess.
Cutting Off Your Nose To Spite Your Face
When Teabaggers talk about the high price of public employees, I wonder if this is who they mean?
Ginny Townsend, 41, took a job in January as a nursing assistant in the state-run home for veterans here. Technically, she works for a private company that supplies some employees to the veterans home under a [Michigan] state contract. She makes $10 an hour, about half the wage of the public employees working at the facility.
“I love my job, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here,” Ms. Townsend, a former home health care aide, said on a recent afternoon as she cheerfully delivered fruit and a newspaper to an 85-year-old resident in a sun-drenched solarium.
With the national unemployment rate at roughly 9 percent, Ms. Townsend says she feels lucky just to have a job. But on her low wages, she is barely scraping by. She said she was raising four grandchildren under 11 with her unemployed sister and could not support them without the $300 in food stamps she collects every month.
Do a little math here: $10 an hour works out to less than $23,000 a year, so $20 an hour works out to a little over $45,000 a year. Undoubtedly, with benefits and insurance costs, and of course profit, her employer is being paid about $20 an hour for each full-time equivalent (not all employees would work a full time shift). The average private care worker in Michigan is paid $12.25 per hour.
On top of this, she takes down $300 in food assistance each month or $3,600.
In other words, the state pays $55,000 or so for a $50,000 employee. OK, the state incurs other expenditures like pension contributions and other benefits mandated by collective bargaining, but the differential is clearly not as grand as Teabaggers would have you believe. call it $55,000 for a private contractor's employee versus $60,000 for a public worker.
But Townsend's case highlights the real danger in offsourcing jobs to contractors: Contractors are going to hire the cheapest, underpaid workers, which means they will hire less qualified workers, since even average workers will earn $12.25 per hour, which means that the quality of care will diminish while also draining state resources in other ways (unemployment benefits, food assistance, and so on.)
The savings, in other words, is minimal at best and likely a real waste of state resources.
This is not to say that the state should never outsource work. There are some jobs the private sector will do better than the public sector, and if the area is non-critical, it seems to be those are areas where outsourcing might commence. But no one wants to see the public security and health risked for a false profit.
Thursday, November 03, 2011
So I'm Guessing The Entire Nineties, Limbaugh Was A Leftist
Sexual harassment: A tool of liberals.
(jeez, I can't believe I just linked to Little Green Footballs...)
That Depends On What The Meaning Of "Is" Is
I sort of see Herman Cain "Canegate" going down the twists and turns of legalese in short order.
I mean, really, when FOX's best defenses of the candidate are to point out that two of the accusers work for the government-- like tens of millions Americans nationwide and around the world do-- and also what words were exchanged, things are pained in Cain's campaign.
This, ahead of new allegations, admittedly even more unsubstantiated and hearsay than the original two, that Cain's straining cane plain changed the game for him in this campaign.
And amid countercharges, further unsubstantiated, that Rick Perry and Mitt Romney may have each independently (or worse, in collusion) planted these stories. Ironic that Cain's initial attempts to smooth the ruffles down amounted to "these tales are unsubstantiated," yet he had no problem flinging poo.
It really does come down to "he said, she said." Which is bad news for Cain, since he's running for an actual office, no matter how fictitious his campaign may be. He will really need to make some decisions here: run or quit, reveal or cover-up, confront or deflect.
If history is any guide, and in these matters, it should be, Cain's best move is to either quit, or reveal. The truth will out, even if that truth looks nothing like the original question made public. As an example, Bill Clinton was originally investigated for an affair with Gennifer Flowers, confronted that, and still ended up in court over Paula Jones, who ended up the person most exploited in her own law suit.
In politics, the cover-up is almost always worse than the crime. Had Clinton fessed up to serial affairs, gotten them out of the way, he probably would have gotten a pass in office on any future affairs, and the whole Lewinski matter probably doesn't come up (pardon the pun.)
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
In a good faith effort to help male shoppers who buy lingerie for their wives and girlfriends, a shop in Sweden had its employees wear tags which stated cup and bra size.
You Know Who Else Named His Son "Adolf Hitler"?
Should that be cause enough to take a child away from his parents?
On The One Hand...
...I can understand why Greece President George Papandreou put the EU bailout of his country up for a popular referendum: you might as well make sure the people understand the terms of the arrangement, and whether they want to accept it or drop out of the EU. Too, you disable your opposition from calling the deal unpopular or rushed through without the support of the people.
On the other, the timing seems a little off to me. He's already survived a confidence vote this year, so this measure merely opens up that can of worms again.
However, he has a couple of things going for him. His party holds a slim two-seat majority in the Greek legislature.A vote of no confidence means a general election would be forced, which would likely see his party lose seats and therefore, power. Likely, the votes would go along party lines, and Papandreou would live on to fight another day.
Also, the call for a referendum has been coyly raised so nebulously that it almost forces the EU, particularly the Germans, to take another look at the deal with an eye towards sweetening the pot a little. After all, a Greek collapse and pull-out of the EU would trigger a cascade effect of defaults and write-downs that would impact the fragile recovery the west is enduring.
Doubling Down On The Silly
Well, Rick Perry said he "felt great" when he gave the already infamous Cornerstone Action speech over the weekend.
Psychoactive drugs can do that.
Errrr, so I've heard.
Seriously, if your excuse for putting on that kind of performance is simply that you "feel great," this raises all kinds of questions about your emotional and mental state.
It seems more likely that he ingested something that took him off his feed, in which case, the easier solution is simply to fess up and move on. Hell, President Obama admitted to doing cocaine, so it's not like prescription meds or even marijuana is going to put people off by now.
My guess is he smoked a doob, probably for the first time since high school (maybe college in his case. Or with his last hooker. Or last week.)
Hell, I half expected to see him demand Twinkies, a bag of Cheetos and some Gatorade.
So now we get down to the nitty gritty about this candidate: is he a stoner or a psycho? Either way, he and his staff have opened a door they may wanted to keep shut. Whichever of his handlers let him get out on stage like that, who couldn't come up with a "I'm sorry, the governor is under the weather," deserves to be fired.
Look at this from a realist perspective: here's a man who stood a snowball's chance in New Hampshire. He might have placed third (could still do that, by the way,) but fourth is a more likely finish for him. He didn't need to give this speech, particularly in light of his inability to come up with a coherent sentence at the past debates he has participated in.
Indeed, he's now set a standard where he pretty much has to recreate this behavior each and every time he appears in front of an audience or camera, else how will he explain to those voters why he's not in such a "feel great" state of mind.
People notice these things. Cornerstone is a family values organization, you see, so if you felt comfortable cutting it up in front of those bluenoses, why won't you poke some fun at yourself at, say, the Manchester Guardian or on the stump? Rick Perry hasn't exactly established his comedic or even his sardonic credentials. It's not like this is Robin Williams doing twenty at a steamfitters' convention.
Herman Cain Is My Name, And I Rode On The Scandal Train
Uh oh. Looks like ol' Hermie's wormie was busy wizzy
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Fighting Fire With Fire
I was watching a re-run of Stephen Colbert last night, the one where he consults with Republican strategist Frank Luntz regarding the message that Colbert Super-Pac wants to sell to the American people: Corporations are people, too.
Luntz is a master of the summing up complex concepts into sound bites.
Let me rephrase that: he's the master of summing up noxious concepts into palatable sound bites and vice versa (for example, he came up with "death taxes" for estate taxes.)
His phrasing evokes emotional responses. He's very good at that.
We have to get better. And here's where this ties in to the current situation in this country.
Occupy Wall Street terrifies the people in charge. After all, there are tens of thousands of people nationwide who are camping, day in and day out, to protest the inherent inequality of income and the inherent unfairness of the US tax code.
I've been straining to recall when a Teabagger rally on similar topics lasted for more than a few hours, and that was in clement weather in the spring and summer. These kids have made it through a freak snowstorm and are still hanging in there.
How could the powers that be not be afraid?
Think about that imagery: the right, via their useful idiots and tools, has tried to cast OWS as a bunch of spoiled white lefty brats who's mommies and daddies cut them out of the will because they were dope-addled and sexually promiscuous (itself, a pretty powerful trope: the scary hippy.)
That imagery, which had some legs at first because of the way the news reported the story (up until the pepper-spray incident,) as a bunch of disgruntled interns and low-level clerical workers with English degrees getting fired and thrown out of their apartments, sort of falls apart after the first week of camp-outs, much less the subsequent brute force by the police, the cooling temperatures, the world-wide solidarity, and the general genial mien taken by the protestors.
The right couldn't just mash this into the dirt and cover it over, is what I'm saying.
The imagery the OWS folks have out there is now too powerful, and although the colder weather will likely lessen in its impact, it can always be picked up again in the spring. It's an emotional, gut protest, and people have responded to it.
This is the kind of imagery and argument we need to raise elsewhere. Right now, the craftsmen of the right, like Luntz, have co-opted the dialogue. We need to get it back. But how?
We need to look to marry language to logic, but also to emotions. We need arguments that are so simple and so powerful that they defy rebuttal.
Let's take the abortion argument for a moment. The single biggest protest in America is the annual March For Life. March for Life attracts upwards of a quarter-million people consistently.
Abortion is an emotional matter for them. We can cite statistics until we're blue in the face, like how the US birth rate has not declined one bit despite all these "millions of dead babies" (their term,) or we can talk about the improvement in the quality of living the babies which are eventually born not to teenage mothers but to women with jobs and careers and long-term partners will have. Not one second of these arguments will sway a single mind on the right.
And those are perfectly logical arguments. But why not tie those to the alternative: women who spend twenty years in servitude (slavery even) because they've made a mistake.
Why not provide imagery, in the form of a counter-protest: get five thousand women to march in torn dirty muslin smocks, chained at the neck and feet with dolls dangling from the other end of those chains?
After all, if the scare tactic of showing photos of an aborted fetus is within bounds for the religious right, then equally alarming and disturbing imagery ought to be utilized in response.
We need to make an emotional case to the American people about the progressive agenda. We don't have much time and there is much to be done. The nation is heading down a bleak path, even if we can all pull together and we must all pull together or things will get dire, indeed.
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