The vultures are circling
While all the attention is being paid to the suicidal skylarking of the Republicans as regards the Affordable Care Act, Richard Eskow points out that, in the mix right now, and trading on the preposterous notion that both sides are somehow at fault over this, the deficit fetishists are back. Even Messrs. Simpson and Bowles have rolled away the stone. They have their commission’s recommendations to wave around. The Fix The Debt frauds are wandering the Green Rooms. While all this scrambling about defunding the ACA is going on, it is very likely that the various cultists in Congress, at the instigation of the White House, might decide to start feeding Vaal again.
There’s nothing that leads me to believe that the president has abandoned his desire for a Grand Bargain, even if the political context within which one might be reached, has catapulted itself beyond the izonkosphere. It is the secondary deals that could be cut in this particular crisis — the GB, or our old pal, the Keystone XL pipeline — that are going to be worth watching. The side deals are where the real damage could get done and, once those side deals are cut, the damage is likely to be buried under a blizzard of Beltway platitudes about “compromise,” “bipartisanship,” and “shared sacrifice.” The fact that it is beyond indecent for the Democrats to join in the notion that cutting social spending at a time of grinding unemployment doesn’t seem to stop a lot of them from considering it. And, as always, it’s important to keep in mind the blog’s First Law Of Economics: Fk The Deficit. People got no jobs. People got no money.
Restoration
I have electricity again. Hallelujah!
Shut it down
I haven’t been writing about the impending government shutdown because it’s so depressing. For one thing, since they’ve been playing games with funding for so long, it literally does shut down everything. It’s much worse than when it happened under Clinton — back then, a lot of funding bills were already signed so it wasn’t a total shutdown. This is.
And they’re going to use it as cover for the Grand Bargain. (As Digby says: It doesn’t hurt to be paranoid.) It’s almost inevitable, and Obama handed them the gun to shoot us with. He set up the whole showdown. And this isn’t conjecture — WH economic advisor Gene Sperling admitted as much in a letter to Bob Woodward.
I don’t know how we can fight back. The Congress critters are terrified of extending the shutdown, they’ll grab at the first deal they can live with. And Wall Street will live happily ever after while old people die.
God bless America.
Happy birthday, Bruce
He’s 64 today! (P.S. One week until my birthday!)
http://youtu.be/w1HpVjXWTUc
Creepy, controlling and dangerous
I went out with a guy like this once. Right from the beginning, I should have known: He was bragging how, if anyone fucked with him, he could ruin their credit record.
Why I gave him my phone number, I’ll never know. I guess I was just bored, and he was good-looking, tall and was employed.
But I did, and he called before I was home from work, and my son answered the phone. When I came in, my kid said, “Mom, some weirdo called for you.”
He called back a few minutes later. “Oh, that’s the game you’re playing? You tell me you can’t see me tonight because you already have somebody there? That’s the kind of whore you are?”
Believe it or not, this did not endear him to me.
“Who do you think you’re talking to, you creep? Don’t ever call me again.” I hung up on him.
I never told him my last name and he didn’t know where I lived. Thank God.
Also: I was just reading this Breaking Bad review, and wanted to add a variation on this theme:
I thought a lot about the parallels between this storyline and the endless, idiotic discourse about “family values” in our society. “Family values” is a code word for maintaining a patriarchal society where men rule over women and children. Like Walt, those invested in this system justify it by pretending that they just want what’s best for everyone—that it’s about making men take responsibility blah blah blah. But this is the reality: The responsibility for providing for the family is all too often a cover story for a system that is actually geared towards protecting male egos and power. If there’s a conflict between women and children’s actual well-being and maintaining the system of male power, then male power will win. If there’s a conflict between men’s emotional and human needs—like the need for love and companionship that we all have—the men’s needs will be sacrificed. Everyone loses in a system geared towards preserving the power structure.
Look how many times we’ve seen this in action, where an abandoned husband kills his wife and kids because they can’t exist unless it’s within the framework of his existence. (Some women kill their families, but it’s usually because she’s mentally ill.) But this story, we see every holiday season: The man goes back and kills the family for the sin on continuing without him. It’s what happens when society denies male vulnerability and forces everyone into rigid gender roles.
Powerless
I’m sitting in a cafe, antsy as hell because I can’t go home. The power’s out in my immediate neighborhood and I can’t work at home. This makes me cranky.
Stranger than Strangelove
I was back at the shack, beside myself with angst, reading to the swamp rabbit about a catastrophe that almost happened a half-century ago:
A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.
The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.
I reminded the swamp rabbit that we live a hop and a skip from Philadelphia. The bomb might have wiped out Philly and the rest of the mid-Atlantic region faster than you could say “Duck and cover.”
“‘Almost’ don’t count,” the swamp rabbit said. He was drinking Wild Turkey and Coke, a rustic concoction that brings out the philosopher in him. “The Germans almost took Stalingrad. Dylan almost died in a motorcycle accident. What’s your point, Odd Man?”
I threw an empty bottle of Guinness at him and said, “The point is that real life is stranger than fiction. Even Stanley Kubrick, in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, couldn’t have made up a story this strange. If not for one measly switch, that bomb would have gone off.”
The swamp rabbit gulped his drink, spilling some on his greasy coat, and said, “So what? If the bomb had gone off, then you wouldn’t be sitting here worrying out loud like some old lady with rheumatism. That was Kubrick’s point, don’t you know? In an absurd world, why worry?”
I watched the Guinness bottle bobbing in the swamp and said, “You stupid rodent. Dr. Strangelove was a cautionary tale. Kubrick was trying to wise people up to the danger of nuclear war.”
“Dr. Strangelove was a comedy,” he said. “Ain’t no way nobody like you could have done nothin’ about no nuclear war, not when the Cold War was on. You might just as well laugh. If you want to worry, then worry about where you’re gonna sell them stories you write. Worry about where you gonna git money for food now that there ain’t no jobs.”
I almost tossed him in the swamp by his ears but resisted the urge. What good is angst if you don’t have an audience for it?
Ted Cruz is a whack job, part 27
The elite academic circles that Cruz was now traveling in began to rub off. As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz’s law-school roommates: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”