Yet another reminder that a cynic knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing

Texas has taken another big step in its long campaign to become the galactic capital of Stoopid.

The Texas A&M University System has announced that it will be evaluating its professors (which is good) in this way (which is very, very bad): weighing the cost of their salaries against the size of the research grants  they bring in and how much money they generate from teaching.

A several-inches thick document in the possession of A&M System officials contains three key pieces of information for every single faculty member in the 11-university system: their salary, how much external research funding they received and how much money they generated from teaching.

The information will allow officials to add the funds generated by a faculty member for teaching and research and subtract that sum from the faculty member’s salary. When the document — essentially a profit-loss statement for faculty members — is complete, officials hope it will become an effective, lasting tool to help with informed decision-making.

“If you look at what people are saying out there — first of all, they want accountability,” [vice chancellor for academic affairs Frank] Ashley said. “It’s something that we’re really not used to in higher education: For someone questioning whether we’re working hard, whether our students are learning. That accountability is going to be with us from now on.”

Peter Hugill, the head of the local chapter of a national faculty group, calls the measure simplistic and crude, and views it as an idea spawned from a conservative think tank in Austin that has advocated faculty accountability and has the support of Gov. Rick Perry and the A&M System Board of Regents.

You can quantify any damn thing you want, but quantifying anything and everything is not necessarily going to improve your productivity or your accountability because some things are harder to quantify meaningfully than others.

In this case, you start with a question: What is it that you want college professors to do? If the answer is “bring in more money than they cost,” then you use an assessment like this one. But if the answer is “teach” or “impart knowledge” or something similar, then your assessment must be quite different. And that’s before you even get into the question of what you want them to teach: facts? Methods? What?

The article adds:

A rawer form of the idea was advocated by the conservative think tank the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a group whose board members are major financial contributors to Perry and whose ideas have been embraced by the A&M System Board of Regents.

One of the group’s seven “solutions” to higher education reform called for improving “the quality of teaching by providing legislators and governing boards with a simple tool to measure faculty teaching performance.” The reform called for dividing the teacher’s employment cost by the number of students taught, “and force rank from highest cost per student taught to lowest cost per student taught.”

If we pay the Texas Public Policy Foundation the common courtesy of presuming that it knew what it was doing, then we are forced to assume that it holds higher education in tremendous contempt. Why that might be is a matter of speculation. I speculate that research skills, logic and analytical ability honed in a quality program of higher education tend to undermine the tendentious, fact-averse world views and recommendations of groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which exist to advance the interests of a wealthy few at the expense of the rest of us. And you can rest assured that the children of such people won’t be going to college at Texas A&M unless their parents are confident that they’ll be leaving their offspring enough money that they need never have any inconvenient encounters with the real world.

These are the people who have supported Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has publicly flirted with the idea that Texas should once again secede from the U.S. My disgust at the repugnant idea of dissolving the Union and letting Texas go its own way is tempered, I must confess, by the possibility that the rest of us might well be better off without it.

PAYPAL IS THE WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD

John wants a Googlebomb. John deserves a Googlebomb. So John gets a Googlebomb.

(And honestly? I’m trying to decide whether I’ve ever had a worse consumer experience than the one he describes with Paypal, and I think I’ve got to say no. I’ve had consumer experiences that were worse initially — the great indoor waterfall of 2008 comes to mind — but nothing that ever turned out as badly as his experience has.)

UPDATE: Still.

Friday Random 10, Friday-afternoon-clearing-stuff-off-my-desk edition

Bernard Fanning – Watch Over Me
Horse Feathers – Belly of June
Iron and Wine – Half Moon
Pressure Boys – Radar Love
Susan Tedeschi – The Soul of a Man
Fear – Let’s Have a War
Stornoway – Zorbing
The Plugz – El Clavo y La Cruz
Fool’s Gold – Nadine
Mary Gautier – Mercy Now

lagniappe: Scarface: Money and the Power

The 2010 Panthers …

… are gonna suck eggs, if you believe the NFL’s stable of prognosticators. The best anyone predicts is 8-8 and 3rd in the conference, several say 6-10 and one says 5-11.

Me? I think a defense as good as the Panthers’ D has looked in the preseason will take you places. The big question mark was the D-line, and it has played well against the run and gotten a serious pass rush on. It sucks that MLB Jon Beason had to move outside to replace the injured Thomas Davis, but 1) Beason is gonna get tackles no matter what position he plays, and 2) Davis apparently may yet play this year.

Special teams appear solid, with John Kasay and Jason Baker quite reliable and the kick/punt coverage appearing to be significantly improved from last year. But kick/punt returns are still a big question mark.

The problem is that the offense, which the team didn’t do a lot to revamp in the off-season,  has serious problems: Not only can Matt Moore not find a receiver, but nobody, nobody has emerged as a viable alternative to Steve Smith. (For yet another year.) Worst of all, the O-line, which was thought to have enough spot-for-spot talent to match up with anyone in the league, appears to be having serious problems playing as a team.

Based on what I’ve seen this preseason, this team is not going to score many points. And the best defense in the league can’t help you all that much if it’s on the field too much. Against a dramatically improved division, that spells trouble.

So: If Steve Smith says healthy, I predict 8-8, which may not be good enough to keep the Panthers out of the NFC South cellar.

In which I begin to suspect that Hooper’s career as a speechwriter is off to an inauspicious start

Hooper: So, what do I say in the first paragraph?

Me: You could start by restating the question.

Hooper: OK. Then in the second paragraph I can give my answer. And in the third paragraph I can give a reason for my answer and in the fourth paragraph I can give another reason.

Me: Sounds good so far.

Hooper: But what do I do for an ending?

Me: Well, you could rephrase your answer in a slightly different way.

Hooper: Why in the world would I do that?

Me: Because sometimes, when writers are trying to get an idea across, they say the same thing more than once in different ways.

Hooper: Well, I don’t want to waste time on that. I think [teacher's name] is smart enough to get it the first time.

Me: Well, it’s not a question of whether he’s smart or not. Saying things more than once in slightly different ways helps people learn and remember things better.

Hooper: What? I”m not buying that. If you have to tell ‘em more than once, they’re stupid.

Mourning in America

(h/t: Valerie)

Oh, NOW you’re all worried about the commander-in-chief’s legality.

A Fox News military analyst, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, has come out as a Birther, having signed an affidavit in support of Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, who is resisting an order to deploy to Afghanistan because he doesn’t believe Obama is a natural-born citizen of the U.S. and therefore is constitutionally ineligible to serve as president and commander-in-chief.

McInerney’s affidavit says in part,

Our military MUST have confidence their Commander in Chief lawfully holds his office and absent which confidence grievous consequences may ensue.

That’s awfully precious, inasmuch as the commander-in-chief who actually launched that war did not lawfully hold the office at the time, but all the Very Serious People said we had to allow a judicial overthrow of the government or else the terrorists would win. I bet the countries with actual free presses are laughing their behinds off.

How can you tell when your lying is excessive?

Maybe when even people who advise banksters start calling you out on it:

Securities analyst Mike Mayo ramped up his increasingly bitter battle with the management of Citigroup (C: 3.82 ,+0.10 ,+2.55%) Monday morning issuing a note stating that the big bank can’t be trusted to provide investors with accurate disclosure about its financial condition or future plans to make money, and that the firm is setting the stage for future problems similar to those that nearly caused the bank to fail two years ago, prompting a massive government bailout.

Among the warning signs Mayo cites:

Citi’s 5% asset-growth target. In simpler times, 5% was unremarkable. Now, given the massive DEflation going on, 5% suggests one hell of a lot of risk, and Citi, after being artificially kept alive by taxpayers just two years ago, has no business taking on that level of risk.

Citi’s failure to write down certain assets called Deferred Tax Assets as quickly as it probably should to give investors an honest picture of its financial health. Those assets, “worth” around $50 billion, constitute 39% of the company’s tangible equity, the highest percentage of any large bank, but alone among those big banks, it has not taken any writedowns against those assets despite significant losses over the past couple of years. That’s because the longer the company can keep the assets on its books, the healthier the company appears.

Mayo:

“This position is further supported by news that the SEC has investigated these issues. In short, the company claims no DTA adjustment is warranted based on its projected earnings over the next couple of decades. More importantly, accounting precedents seem to us to warrant that a write-down is necessary. The stakes are raised since the lack of a write-down could lead to investor lawsuits later on.”

I wouldn’t spend a dime on Citi stock right now if you put a gun to my head.

The banksters have lobbied successfully to have accounting rules loosened so much that there are essentially no rules. No rules means no transparency: That is, it is difficult, if not impossible, for even sophisticated investors to get a grip on the true financial health of a corporation. Capital has been fleeing the stock market in droves recently, and this is one big reason. Investing in stocks in this atmosphere is like driving in a snowstorm and blackout, when you can’t see the lines on the road, the traffic signals don’t work and all the drivers are going way too fast to be able to stop if something appears in their path.

“… and taken care of him until he was able to be carried off which she is did herself on a little pony that she had …”

A fascinating database, of whose existence I was until today unaware, contains transcripts of applications from Revolutionary War pensioners from the South and their survivors, dating from the late 18th century until, it appears, just before the Civil War. Interesting stories. The database contains two John Alexanders, but neither is the one from whom I am descended.

Rough justice

Which Democrats are likeliest to pay a political price in November? Why, the ones who foolishly argued for cutting the deficit rather than creating jobs. Imagine that.

Now, will Republicans who actually created these conditions pay a price? Some won’t because they already did in 2008. But lots of others won’t because voters increasingly believe that the situation Obama inherited on Jan. 20, 2009, was actually his fault. (The fact that things have gotten worse is his fault, but not the situation itself.) And to take revenge on the Democrats they think are to blame, voters are re going to elect Republicans who would’ve done even worse things a few years ago given the chance and who will unquestionably do the kinds of things in the next couple of years that will make Smoot-Hawley look like the CCC.

The sad thing is, the right thing is and always has also been the politically popular thing, and yet the conservaDems choose neither:

15. Which ONE of the following do you think should have the higher priority for policy-makers in Washington RIGHT NOW… ?
37 %Reducing the federal budget deficit (or)
57 %Federal spending to create jobs (or)
6 %  Don’t know

16. Do you think Congress should allow the Bush tax cuts for persons in the top two percent income category to EXPIRE in 2011, or should Congress pass legislation to EXTEND the Bush tax cuts for the top two percent?
52 % Allow Bush tax cuts to expire
38 % Extend Bush tax cuts
10 % Don’t know

Unrelated side question: Can someone explain to me the business case for NYT Co.’s having acquired FiveThirtyEight.com?

Dead banks walking

I’ve had some things to say in the past about zombie banks and how bad they are for the economy. But, hey, what do I know? I’m just the guy who called Howard Coble out for failing to vote for the LaFalce Amendment, as a result of which the S&L bailout of the early 1990s ended up costing about four times what it would have if Coble and others had supported his fellow Republican’s put-the-S&Ls-out-of-their-misery measure and Coble himself admitted he’d screwed up.

But you know who’s saying bad things about zombie banks now? Those silly liberals at American Banker:

… no stage of the [foreclosure] process has returned to pre-September 2008 levels. That is when the Treasury unveiled the Troubled Asset Relief Program and promised to help financial institutions avoid liquidating assets at panic-driven prices. The Financial Accounting Standards Board and other authorities followed suit with fair-value dispensations.

These changes made it easier to avoid fire-sale marks — and less attractive to foreclose on bad assets and unload them at market clearing prices. In California, ForeclosureRadar data shows, the volume of foreclosure filings has never returned to the levels they had reached before government intervention gave servicers breathing room.

Some servicing executives acknowledged that stalling on foreclosures will cause worse pain in the future — and that the reckoning may be almost here.

“The industry as a whole got into a panic mode and was worried about all these loans going into foreclosure and driving prices down, so they got all these programs, started Hamp and internal mods and short sales,” said John Marecki, vice president of East Coast foreclosure operations for Prommis Solutions, an Atlanta company that provides foreclosure processing services. Until recently, he was senior vice president of default administration at Flagstar Bank in Troy, Mich. “Now they’re looking at this, how they held off and they’re getting to the point where maybe they made a mistake in that realm.”

Duh. Ya think?

And, honestly, if it were just banksters getting hurt, that would be one thing. But you know who’s going to pay for this: homeowners, and you and I whether we own homes or not.

Delayed foreclosures might be good news for delinquent borrowers, but it comes at a high price.

Stagnant foreclosures likely contributed to the abysmal July home sales, since banks are putting fewer homes for sale at market-clearing prices.

Moreover, Freddie says a good 14% of homes that are seriously delinquent are vacant. In such circumstances, eventual recovery values rapidly deteriorate.

Ayep.

Priorities; or, Banana Republics R U.S.

Remember, kids, it is more important to bail out rich banksters  — and keep their taxes low — than to keep fires suppressed.

Why does Obama hate small business?

Personally, I think it’s because he’s a Muslim:

But we have to do more.  And there’s currently a jobs bill before Congress that would do two big things for small business owners:  cut more taxes and make available more loans.  It would help them get the credit they need, and eliminate capital gains taxes on key investments so they have more incentive to invest right now.  And it would accelerate $55 billion of tax relief to encourage American businesses, small and large, to expand their investments over the next 14 months.

Unfortunately, this bill has been languishing in the Senate for months, held up by a partisan minority that won’t even allow it to go to a vote.  That makes no sense.  This bill is fully paid for.  It will not add to the deficit.  And there is no reason to block it besides pure partisan politics

Things that make you go “Hmmm …”, cont.

So, Republicans are claiming that the “Tea Party” slate in Michigan was actually a ruse set up by Democrats to split the Republican vote. And unlikely as it seems, there might even be some there there.

If it exists, this operation bears a strong resemblance to the kind of trick that has been a GOP tradition (and, in particular, a Young Republicans) tradition since the era of Nixon. (There’s actually a specific term for it, one that I won’t repeat here but involves rodents and coitus.) And I’m torn. On the one hand, it’s a shame that Democrats feel like they have to stoop to that level. On the other, it’s encouraging that the gang that always brings a knife to a gun fight is finally packing heat.

When hypocrisy turns deadly

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother taking note of the fact that someone who isn’t an elected official has come out of the closet. But Ken Mehlman, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, is a special case.

Mehlman spent decades in powerful positions in the GOP as its anti-gay platform literally took lives. Choire at The Awl connects the dots:

But also let’s not forget the plans that began in 1992 to funnel public health money solely into religious institutions, so HIV prevention money could be spent almost entirely in systems that advocate “marital fidelity, abstinence, and a drug-free lifestyle,” as that year’s Republican platform put it. (This scheme had as a nice backdrop and semi-foil Pat Buchanan’s still-unbelievable convention speech.) This resonated for years around the world, undermining HIV prevention in Africa. (Ahem: “A full two-thirds of the money for the prevention of the sexual spread of HIV goes to abstinence.” And: “HIV prevention funding turned into a patronage system for the religious right.”)

Anyhow! How about that Ken Mehlman? Is it completely biased of me that I can’t take his personal struggle that seriously? Given that he was the fund-raising architect of a system that advocated and literally built anti-gay initiatives? I guess, to extend the empathy that he never once exhibited, it’s sad that he has spent 40+ years blinded by ambition, in love with power, literally unable to think properly about causes and effects. And that he’ll spend the rest of his life trying (one assumes) to compensate for his self-betrayal.

But really, I find it next to impossible to keep any empathy going, given that his self-betrayal has a bodycount.

Yup. Thousands of people are dead who might not be if Ken Mehlman had been more honest with himself, sooner, about who and what he was.

… and no sense, either.

Fox News’ Chris Wallace urged Fox talk-show host Glenn Beck this morning to run for president.

I think that tells you almost everything you need to know about Chris Wallace, Fox News and Glenn Beck. As for the rest, Steve Benen sums up why it’s hard to take Beck’s movement seriously: It is ideologically incoherent, the intellectual/political equivalent of the guy in shabby clothes on the street corner mumbling to himself and urinating in his pants.

No shame

Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition who, as a lobbyist involved in the Jack Abramoff scandal, just missed going to prison, is holding some sort of event in Washington soon, and five Republican congresscritters, five Republican congressional candidates and Karl Rove will be speaking at the thing.

Notice how neither the media nor the Democrats are making a big deal about this. Why? Because It’s OK If You’re a Republican.

Finally, some honest services

Former lottery commissioner Kevin Geddings goes free:

Ending what former N.C. lottery commissioner Kevin Geddings called a five-year nightmare, the same federal judge who sent him to prison more than three years ago has officially exonerated him. …

The order came two months after the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the scope of the fraud statute under which Geddings was convicted. In essence, it said the statute no longer applied to what Geddings did. …

His legal troubles began in 2005 when then-Democratic House Speaker Jim Black appointed him to the fledgling state lottery commission.

He resigned five weeks later after reports that a lottery company had paid him thousands in the years leading up to his appointment. Prosecutors said Geddings denied the public of “honest services” by failing to disclose his conflict on a state ethics form. …

“I should have been more fulsome in the disclosures I made on that ethics form,” he said, “but I never committed a felony.”

fulsome (adj):

1. offensive to good taste, esp. as being excessive; overdone or gross: fulsome praise that embarrassed her deeply; fulsome décor.

2. disgusting; sickening; repulsive: a table heaped with fulsome mounds of greasy foods.

3. excessively or insincerely lavish: fulsome admiration.

4. encompassing all aspects; comprehensive: a fulsome survey of the political situation in Central America.

5. abundant or copious.

No longer an inmate, but still a douchebag.

(h/t: Mom)

Friday Random 10, Sunday Chores Edition

Death Cult — With Love
Mekons — Country
Mary-Chapin Carpenter — He Thinks He’ll Keep Her
Caesar’s Rebuilders — Every One Would Listen
Interpol — Lights
M.I.A. — Paper Planes
The National — Blood Buzz Ohio
Juicy Bananas — Bad Man
Brains — Heart in the Street
Big Pink — Love Song

lagniappe 10:

The Rescues — Break Me Out
Dave Matthews Band — Rhyme & Reason
AC/DC — Brain Shock
Warren Zevon — Sacrificial Lambs
Steely Dan — Babylon Sisters
Jeremy Fisher — Cigarette
Rolling Stones — Turd on the Run
Sweet — Fox on the Run
Aerosmith — Back in the Saddle
Killing Joke — Total Invasion

Headed home

Sunset on the tidal creek off Wadmalaw Island near Charleston, S.C., March 2010. Shot at a Hay family reunion.

Forget, hell

The rotating corpse of Thomas Jefferson is lighting a small New England town

For crying out loud. What part of “warrant” do you people not understand?

Law enforcement officers may secretly place a GPS device on a person’s car without seeking a warrant from a judge, according to a recent federal appeals court ruling in California.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Oregon in 2007 surreptitiously attached a GPS to the silver Jeep owned by Juan Pineda-Moreno, whom they suspected of growing marijuana, according to court papers.

When Pineda-Moreno was arrested and charged, one piece of evidence was the GPS data, including the longitude and latitude of where the Jeep was driven, and how long it stayed. Prosecutors asserted the Jeep had been driven several times to remote rural locations where agents discovered marijuana being grown, court documents show.

Pineda-Moreno eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy to grow marijuana, and is serving a 51-month sentence, according to his lawyer. …

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the appeal twice — in January of this year by a three-judge panel, and then again by the full court earlier this month. The judges who affirmed Pineda-Moreno’s conviction did so without comment. …

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., arrived at a different conclusion in similar case, saying officers who attached a GPS to the car of a suspected drug dealer should have sought a warrant. Experts say the issue could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Relatedly, you know those full-body scanners for use in airports? Law-enforcement agencies are buying them to use on the street … again, without warrants.

Let’s see if this subject comes up at the Glenn Beck rally …

Politics 101 …

… offered free of charge to the many Democrats who apparently skipped the course:

With the economy rapidly weakening, some senior Democrats are having second thoughts about raising taxes on the nation’s wealthiest families and are pressing party leaders to consider extending the full array of Bush administration tax cuts, at least through next year.

This rethinking comes barely a month after Democrats trumpeted plans to stage a high-stakes battle over taxes in the final weeks before the November congressional elections.

The Bush tax cuts are set to expire in December. Republicans are pushing to extend them all, while President Obama has forcefully argued that the country cannot afford to keep tax breaks on income over $250,000 a year for families and $200,000 a year for individuals.

But a growing cadre of Democrats – alarmed by evidence that the recovery is losing steam and fearful of wounding conservative Democrats in a tough election year – are advocating a plan that would permanently extend tax cuts benefiting the middle class while renewing breaks for the wealthy through 2011, senior Democratic aides said.

That idea has long appealed to some conservative Democrats in both chambers, who argue that Congress should not raise anyone’s taxes until the economy is more stable. But Democrats said it has gained momentum since economist Mark Zandi, a key adviser to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), adopted that view during a presentation at a Democratic issues conference in California in mid-August.

Zandi, an adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), later played an important role in designing Obama’s economic stimulus package, enacted by Congress last year.

These tax cuts never should have been enacted in the first place. The president has the right idea here. So if you’re a Democrat running this year, here’s what you do:

1. call the GOP plan “a bailout for the same people who benefited from the bank bailouts.” This description, by the way, is basically true.
2. hang it around your opponent’s neck like a dead, stinking sea bird.
3. run against it.

In addition to being winning politics in all but a few of the nation’s 435 House districts, this approach has the added benefit of being the right thing to do from a policy standpoint.

If you’re a Democratic congresscritter and you’re paying any money at all to a political consultant whose advice to you on this issue differs in any significant way from my advice to you on this issue, fire him/her and hire me. You won’t regret it.

Alan Simpson, the Cat Food Commission and Social Security

Former Sen. Alan Simpson, co-chair of the presidential commission looking at deficit reduction — and, by “looking at deficit reduction,” I mean, “looking for ways to cut Social Security unnecessarily so as to benefit wealthy taxpayers” — said some condescending things to to the head of the Older Women’s League and some economically ignorant things to the head of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, apparently not understanding that he was saying sexist things to a woman and economically ignorant things to an actual economist and that both of them were not inclined to sit on their respective butts and nod at stupid things.

The Older Women’s League, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), and North Carolina’s Democratic Senate nominee, Elaine Marshall, have all called for Simpson to be fired. Won’t happen; as long as you don’t insult AIPAC or rich white conservatives, you’re safe. But the main problem is, they’re wrong.

President Obama needs to fire the whole damn commission.

As currently structured, the commission is a fraud, a single, particular solution in search of a nonexistent problem. You want to fix the U.S. deficit? Then you fix health care, because health-care costs are the biggest part of the deficit (closely followed by a bloated defense budget and two wars, one of which should have ended long ago and the other of which never should have been fought in the first place).

Social Security benefits do NOT need to be cut, retirement ages do NOT need to be raised, and Alan Simpson calls Social Security “a cow with 310 million tits” like that’s a BAD thing, apparently because he doesn’t understand that we’re all feeding the cow, too. Moron.

What we talk about when we talk about “free markets”

John Cole at Balloon Juice thinks out loud and raises some interesting questions about whether we’re all on the same page:

Something I’ve been tossing around the last couple of days … is that it has occurred to me there are differing conceptions of the free market. To me, when I say the free market, I think of people being able to freely and openly share their wares, to purchase what they want and need, and with some degree of happiness on both the buyer and seller’s end.

It seems to me, though, that the folks who most discuss the free market and are the biggest free market advocates just don’t see things that way. They sort of view things much like the “pain caucus,” who seem to be [incapable] of thinking a policy is acceptable unless a majority of the nation [suffers] in the name of patriotism and fiscal responsibility. Instead of viewing the “free market” as I have described it, their vision of the free market is an economy in which those with power are able to freely [screw] over everyone else. The free market needs energy, so those of you living in towns with your water polluted by mine runoff can [just deal with it], because any government intervention messes up the “free market.” The market demands oil, so Allah forbid we get in the way of oil spills that might ruin the Gulf forever — witness the freakout over a mild cessation in deep sea drilling by “free market” advocates. The free market advocates that there be Randian geniuses who vacation at the Hamptons after fleecing people who tried to do the right thing investing.

In short, it has become obvious to me (belatedly), that when a lot of free market advocates talk about the free market, what they mean is the right to [cheat] people with no recourse. Hey — you should have invested better! Hey — you should have known those Iowa eggs were [contaminated]! It seems as if in their minds (and I’m thinking of total [jerks] like Welch, Gillespie, and McMegan), there simply can not be a free market unless someone is getting screwed, which is completely contrary to my understanding of the “free market.” In my understanding of the free market, things are a win/win scenario, not a tilted table with a win/lose situation where the winner is predetermined by influence and power and connections and societal standing.

The explanation, of course, is that we don’t have free markets. We have crony capitalism, and we have unprosecuted theft of money, goods and services, but we don’t have free markets. Everyone in a position to do anything about this knows it and refuses to do anything about it, either because they’re getting a piece of the action or they hope to someday.

Death by drowning

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist is perhaps most famous outside Washington for saying he wanted to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Well, apparently we’ve gone him one better and are now drowning it in the toilet:

It has come to this: Parents are now being asked to send their children to school with their own toilet paper. And not just toilet paper, but all sorts of basic items that schools themselves used to provide for kids. It’s all part of a disturbing trend, highlighted by the New York Times last week, of cash-strapped public schools — their budgets eviscerated by state cutbacks — shifting more and more financial responsibility onto parents.

Privatization meant transferring responsibility for entire programs or functions to the private sector. But with the drastic budget cuts that states have been forced to make, responsibility for public services and programs is literally being forced into private hands one roll of toilet paper at a time. We’ve entered the era of backdoor privatization.

This isn’t public policy, it’s sociopathy and IGMFY, and it’s wrong.

I don’t spend much money on clothes …

… but I may have to spring for one of these:

The last word on “Doctor” Laura Schlessinger …

… from Nancy Nall, for the win:

Now she can sliiiiide into full retirement and comfortable obscurity, there to await the death of her much-older (ha ha!) husband, and god-knows-what from her horrible son, and then, finally, the rancid breath of the Reaper himself. “It’s time, Laura,” he’ll whisper, as he will to us all. What will she say in reply?

“Daddy? Is that you?”

Quote of the Day

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly: “I imagine that if the RNC [Republican National Committee] hired a science advisor, she’d be the single most bored person in American politics.”

Welcome to post-Enlightenment America

Neal Gabler at Politico (which, to be contextually accurate, has contributed significantly, via poor reporting and fabrication of/adherence to distorted and even just flat wrong narratives, to the very problem Gabler describes):

Daniel Moynihan famously said that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. Well, Moynihan spoke too soon. From the political shoutfests on TV and radio to the endless drone of sports radio callers to the millions of vanity blogs, opinion has rapidly become fact. …

Indeed, of the multitude of ways that President George W. Bush changed America, this may have been the most important. He helped legitimize the idea of individual truth. In doing so, he became the first president to challenge the old Enlightenment foundation on which this country was established. …

So when you read that the preponderance of Americans doesn’t know what religion our president practices, it is not that they are ignoramuses. It is that they have come to feel that whatever they think is fine because — in post-Enlightenment America — facts really don’t matter.

The immortal but anonymous Bush White House aide who dismissed journalist Ron Suskind as a member of the “reality-based community” wasn’t just being snarky; he and a lot of people like him really believed that they had the power to alter reality — that facts are malleable:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The problem is, 2 and 2 are always going to equal 4, it doesn’t matter how close to the Oval Office you work. As somebody said on some blog somewhere, you can ignore reality, but reality is not going to ignore you.