- Were we aware that Bailey has an occasionally sore left knee?
- Klapisch: Beane is gone if San Jose doesn’t happen. ML/v0’s take (virtually all of which I agree with; also, I have a hard time taking Klapisch entirely seriously, as he demonstrates a typical unfamiliarity with the particulars of the issue — what about Beane’s ownership share? What’s Klapisch’s source for the BRC delivering a report imminently to Tootsie? Looks like he’s just making shit up on that latter one.).
- Awesome
- 5-12-year-olds, Dude.
- 14-year-old boy, Dude.
- Dallas needs braces
Where’s my burrito? 186
186 thoughts on “Where’s my burrito?”
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3. He’s got a point, though.
Thanks, and go As.
5: “All-Star Trevor Cahill and left-hander Brett Anderson have lost 10-12.”
Sources report it is not unusual for teenagers to lose their baby fat in this manner.
On a semi-related note, has there ever been a study on the effect of weight loss (or gain, see Wells, David) for overweight pitchers? One would have to define “over weight”, which by itself could prove difficult. Off the top of my head, I would imagine the data pool is not wide enough to draw any meaningful conclusions, but who knows.
Snerk
6: Sux for Debbie.
Hasn’t Beane already passed the baton to Forst, at least as far as actual GMing is concerned?
And you have to hand it to Wolffish for being so effective with their Big Lie about attendance, such that all mainstream media reports talk about the low #s, almost none ever mention the deliberately reduced capacity, and absolutely none ever talk about the lack of marketing.
On that point, though, I will say that the A’s current promotion-based ad campaign feels more aggressive (I’m seeing it lots of places like BART, TV, and online) and more likely to be successful than most such efforts of the last decade.
One other note: I heard a disturbing piece of news on the ballpark front which could spell big trouble for Oakland’s chances. I can’t elaborate yet.
OK, I’m intrigued …
Aw c’mon.
Our google shields are up.
A newly-discovered fault line directly under 980 dooms Grunwald’s Ballpark in the Sky?
Al Davis is actually buried at Victory Court, and the spectral emanation can’t be exorcised?
VC is a high-holy Miwok burial ground/nuclear waste dump/last habitat for the five-legged Alameda aphid/bottomless sinkhole?
Am I close?
shit…
We’re all in it together!
Okay, I got it. It’s that gang-injunction, isn’t it?
A point always worth remembering
Ditto
Re2: Isn’t the assumption here that Wolff is gone if the BRC decides in favor of Oakland? If so, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Beane leaving either.
Heh, on of the NYT’s Brooks/Collins “conversations” actually gets a bit combative. Or, at least, “combative” in the sense that Collins disagrees with every point and Brooks ignores her.
Ellis doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
If I sported a coif like Ellis’ I’d keep my hair opinions to myself.
6: DENTAL PLAN
So we’ll march day and night, by the big cooling tower
They have the plant, but we have the power
WHERE’S MY BURRITO? WHERE’S MY BURRITO? WHERE’S MY BURRITO?
And everything falls perfectly into place.
DENTAL PLAN
Possibly my favorite episode ever.
If only we’d listened to that boy, instead of walling him up in the abandoned coke oven.
Yeah, it’s a great one.
They have the plants, and they want the power
In college, I sold t-shirts at the back of the venue for The Narrow-Minded Amoral Profit-Maximizers.
OK, NM, I’m going to Clybourne Park tonight. I’ve had some ACT vouchers that I won in a silent auction and couldn’t decide what to see. Thanks for the heads up.
Awesome.
Tell me what you think.
Valuation of life goes up under this administration ($6-$9M depending on which agency you ask).
Sure, but that’s only for liberal elites. Real Americans are still only valued by the GOP.
That’s only because the total life-value remained the same, but the number of lives was reduced thanks to abortion and death panels.
Don’t forget the chinese own most american lives
But what if you’re already chinese…
Then you probably own american lives, thereby reducing the supply and increasing demand for the remaining unclaimed ones.
And fallen obelisks.
Cue andeux’s all Obeliskians are the same …
Is that mean, median, or replacement value?
Serenity now!
I bought mine from Lloyd Braun.
Hey, a new FK motto: can cause paranoia, hallucinations, convulsions and psychotic episodes.
OH SHIT, THE PINK ELEPHANTS ARE TELLING ME TO BAN NT
To which the man who famously shook Saddam’s hand responded: “Nobody could support the Raiders. They’re evil.”
We know where the weapons of Mount Davis are …
We’ll be greeted by Niners fans strewing roses at our feet …
Wow, God was not a Gael tonight. That second half was as brutal as it gets. I know the field has expanded to 68, but the WCC smells like a one-bid league.
On lists like this, I always think of the 03-04 Mariners: 93 wins to 63, despite having a largely the same personnel.
salb8
No comment.
mikeA bait
Must write something about advertisements
A bit of satire on the mendacity of the Boston press.
Harden “shut down for a few weeks” after throwing 10-15 pitches.
Yeah. That was a fun waste of money.
{smirk}
Nothing is changing, OK.
O_O
Yeah, maybe try a cheap one: Fix It Again, Tony.
I, for one, WELCOME my new robotic overlords.
Ken is fun:
During tuesday’s show, I turned to ms. andeux and said that. And then the next night, Jennings wrote the exact same thing under his final Jeopardy answer.
Holy shit. A reasonable op ed in the Washington Post.
via deadspin, it looks like Miguel Cabrera is not quite staying with the program:
At the risk of posting Top Chef spoilers…
(avert your eyes as needed)
Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!
Hopefully this development will drag the AWOL Mr. Bloom back into our midst.
I hear he’s on a top-secret mission for the government… something about Chinese monetary policy and the changing of building codes for garages in earthquake-prone areas…
Might want to rephrase that
FUNERAL PLAN
That elimination challenge was really stupid. Didn’t seem like a decent test of one’s culinary prowess, just a lame way to advertise the fact that Target now has a crappy food department. Though I did like that it seemed to draw out the heretofore unknown bromance between Mike and Angelo. I figure that will be how the top talent will be eliminated–one small fatal mistake.
Now the quickfire, on the other hand, was very fun. The muppets were hilarious. I loved when Elmo shot Padma down with that “TMI” crack.
I didn’t mind the elim challenge so much. I generally like the set-up of “here’s a bunch of odd random components, see what you can do with ’em.” They took the product placement concept to ridiculous new heights, of course. But I like Target.
I do wish they’d been given more time, which would have meant they didn’t mostly all end up making soup. And it might’ve been cool if they were all somehow forced to do something like what Dale did with the steam irons, using non-culinary tools as food prep devices. And I was a little surprised Antonia didn’t win, since her degree of difficulty was so high.
I think that’s what I don’t like about it–the timing. Hey, it’s midnight and you’re exhausted…in the next 3 hours or so can you set up an entire kitchen running around a gigantic store with a standard sized shopping cart? And while you’re at it, choose from this meager assortment of ingredients and cook something up…and hey, it’s going to be for 100 people.
This one actually might have been better designed as a team challenge, with one person setting up the kitchen while the other organizes the food, or something like that.
Haven’t been watching, but I can attest that that sort of challenge, while perhaps not especially relevant to a restaurant setting, is very common in the catering trade.
and yet the caterer (Carla) did poorly
DFWAIS
Anyone else as FKin’ busy at work as I am this week?
Yes. Up to my eyeballs. And I don’t see the next 2-3 weeks being any better.
Pretty crazy, excepting the time I had on the ferry.
I’m getting daily messages daily for translation requests (nondisclosure agreements, privacy policies, and other such awesomeness) that I’m having to turn down because my actual job is overloading me (not to mention all the personal-life stress). Simply can’t handle the stress of deadlines and family avoidance (so I can work) on top of everything else.
Yes. I’m about to go for my second consecutive 8am – 10pm day.
OUch.
Yeah. That sucks. When I take on translation stuff, I often work from 8 to 2AM (including my 8-4 teaching job). And the pay really, really sucks on the translation work I do (I do it more for the experience than the money).
Yeah. I’m certainly not complaining about the salary. Of course, the marginal pay is ~$0.
Can I have 5 marginal dollars?
well, i’m at home now … but logged in to work email and working with 3 other people on the damn presentation for London Tuesday …
At least I’m drinking some of this …
Who?
/
Ms. Soren, I presume?
Yup – just back from 2 days in Pasadena, which always throws the work week for a loop.
The explanation of this (especially when considered in conjunction with this) seems pretty simple to me: Dana Milbank is paid a whole lot more than Ezra Klein is.
Yet another good anecdote about Braden
Hunh. Calcaterra represented this dude!
All political parties are the same.
If you think Republicans are bad for invoking the filibuster rules, I don’t see how you can defend this (although one of you FKers will try, I just know it).
Oh, you’re just upset about the Leprechaun-profiling.
Not all us short people look the same.
I’m also amused by the rapidity with which Godwin’s law was invoked:
I thought comparing a politician to Hitler is something only right-wing whackjobs do. Right?
Boy howdy, there is crazy *everywhere* these days.
I think hereabouts, that’s a strawman. I doubt there’s anyone here at FK who would claim that.
Fuck, I’ve made the 9/11-Reichstag parallel myself on numerous occasions.
… but, boy, union activists are mostly idiots in need of some serious PR advice.
What point are you making? That there are wacky people on the left and wacky people on the right? Or that wacky people exist in similar quantities on the left and the right? The former is obvious and not something most people would contest. The latter is untrue.
It’s easy to draw an equivalence between left fringe and right fringe, but the reality you always overlook is that the fringe has been mainstreamed within the GOP ecosystem. There is no analogue on the left – none – for the 70%+ of GOP primary voters who either believe the president isn’t a citizen or are “unsure”. To repeat: the people who will choose the GOP nominee do not think the president is a citizen. So, yes, wackier.
***
Not sure which “you” you’re talking about, exactly, but my view, and that of most lefties I know and read, is not that Republicans are bad for invoking filibuster rules. Rather, it’s:
1. They pursued an unprecedented strategy of obstruction (i.e. filibustering basically everything). No value judgment; that’s just a fact.
2. That strategy breached a behavioral norm (i.e. don’t filibuster basically everything).
3. It was a reasonable political strategy that failed in some ways and succeeded in others.
4. It’s bad that aspects of the basic functioning of government rely on observance of those now-breached behavioral norms, rather than commonsensical rules.
5. We should have commonsensical rules.
6. Yes, we should have them no matter who is in power.
I would change 3/4 to:
Filibuster rules remove the minority party’s incentive to compromise with the majority party’s policy objectives because they give the minority party the power to simply obstruct. Obstructing is a better political strategy, and thus parties are incentivized to filibuster everything.
I would also add a 7th: Unilateral disarming is stupid, and Democrats should filibuster when forced to while AT THE SAME TIME, pointing out that filibuster reform is needed.
FWIW: I think the parties should agree to end filibusters in 8 years (i.e. when no one knows who will be in power).
I certainly agree with the principle of no unilateral disarmament, but how is that “let’s do it in 8 years” resolution any different from, say, a Paul Ryanesque “let’s keep lowering taxes, and agree to cut real spending … somewhere down the road (i.e., never)”?
I don’t think you can say that obstructing is always the best political strategy. The tax compromise was a much better deal for the GOP (politically, and in terms of their policy preferences) than the health care outcome, for example.
Only because the democrats had 60 votes.
In those two examples, the obstruction happened when the Dems had 60 (pre-Mass anyway), and the compromise happened when they didn’t …
I don’t know that GOP incentives in either of those scenarios necessarily had much to do with the number of votes on the majority side. They tried to block the former because they judged Dem failure to be a huge political positive (and Dem success to be short term base boom, so win-win), and they made a deal on the latter because cutting taxes is their #1 governing priority.
Actually, given defections, the Dems didn’t even sniff 60 on the tax vote.
I don’t think the tax one is a particularly good example, as it was essentially an extension of GOP policy.
My point is in the 95% of congresses where there is not a 60 vote majority, things like HCR can be totally blocked. In the past, they would have been inevitable with more than half the votes (as HCR was in the house), so the minority party would have had every incentive to negotiate for a more favorable outcome.
I take your point, and I don’t think our disagreement is especially dramatic, but the tax deal was not an extension of GOP policy. The tax cuts were, but the *deal*, i.e. the stuff the Dems got, certainly was not. Which is my point: the GOP could have said no in December, passed the tax cuts through the House on Day One in January, and dared Obama and the Dem Senate to veto. That would have been … interesting. But they didn’t, because certainty on their top governing priority was important to them.
Which is to say, obstruction strategy (to obstruct or not to obstruct) is partially a function of what is on the table, not simply a they lose/we win calculation.
But of course I agree that it is problematic that the new filibuster norms essentially render energy, immigration, and so forth impossible, in the absence of a supermajority.
Fair enough.
Labor is much closer to democratic mainstream than tea party is to republican mainstream. And those signs are “get a brain moran” level whackjob.
1. Truthers.
2. Among Democrats, for instance, 46% say Obama is a Christian, down from 55% in March 2009.
The most irritating thing about the liberal blogosphere is that is presupposes that crazy exists only on the other side, and that the other side is mostly crazies.
***
So…good/defensible strategy on the part of WI democrats?
1. Truthers (at this point–maybe not 5 years ago) are a more a right/libertarian phenomenon than they are lefties.
2. OK, so that problem isn’t left/right, it’s white people
Labor is much closer to democratic mainstream than tea party is to republican mainstream.
Would that it were. The Dem mainstream is not the same as it was in 1975. If you read the liberal blogosphere you would know this! It’s something like a daily lament.
If the tea party isn’t mainstream, it’s weird that their priorities align so well with those of the House GOP.
Also, is the proportion of union activists who think Scott Walker is Hitler similar to the proportion of Tea Party activists who think Obama is illegitimate, we’re on the road to socialism, etc.? (and really, the guy could have come up with a better #2 dictator for that sign … Mubarak isn’t even top 50, all-time)
Anyway: Hitler signs at a union rally are not equivalent to mainstreamed beliefs that directly influence party policy/rhetoric. It’s a matter of volume and influence and media reinforcement.
***
1. Truthers.
When did Truthers comprise 70% of the Dem primary electorate?
2. […]
From your link:
Republicans who think he’s a Muslim: 31%
Dems who think he’s a Muslim: 10%
Lib Dems who think he’s a Muslim: 6%
Republicans who think he’s a Christian: 27%
Dems who think he’s a Christian: 46%
Lib Dems who think he’s a Christian: 59%
So I guess the point is that liberal Democrats are the sanest/least dumb of the bunch.
Important to note that a) the people who elect the nominee (on both sides) are ideological concentrations of the larger party umbrella, and b) interest groups matter. If you really believe that Truthers are just as influential in Dem politics (i.e. the people who vote and the people with money/organization) as Birthers are in GOP politics, I … well, I don’t know what to say to that.
***
The most irritating thing about the liberal blogosphere is that is presupposes that crazy exists only on the other side, and that the other side is mostly crazies.
Also irritating: Sweeping, caricatured claims about “the liberal blogosphere” from someone who I know damn well doesn’t spend much time actually reading the liberal blogosphere. Also irritating: using “only” in that sentence to describe a position no one holds, and using “presupposes” in that sentence to casually deny that anyone might come to this view via evidence and experience.
As an aside, all the stuff that sticks in your craw about partisans (it’s emotional rather than logical, it cultivates irrational disdain for the opposition, you pick the side you learn to pick, and/or better conforms to how you feel in and about the world, etc.) is also true of independents and non-partisans. If anything, the ego-to-principle and conviction-to-reflection ratios are higher among these folks than among traditional partisans.
***
So…good/defensible strategy on the part of WI democrats?
Good? I don’t know. Defensible? Yes. Still not getting the point … is there a gotcha in there somewhere?
When did Truthers comprise 70% of the Dem primary electorate?
I’m not saying this is the last word on it, and I’m not responding to your point about interest groups mattering, but the number of “casual liberals” who think that there was more to 9/11 than terrorists on a plane was more than just a smattering of crazies. I lived among two of the most liberal, if not informed, populations (young, educated college students in Berkeley and Cambridge) and Bush conspiracy theories were floated, accepted, and expanded upon frequently in casual conversation.
(and really, the guy could have come up with a better #2 dictator for that sign … Mubarak isn’t even top 50, all-time)
This calls for a Moneybutt-style game.
Between the “terrorists intent on striking America” PDB, Bush’s “OK, now you’ve covered your ass” response, Condi’s direct lies about no one ever anticipating using planes as weapons … depending on how you parse “know” …
This is my reaction too.
My understanding of truthers is that it goes ~20 steps beyond knowing about the attacks. Towards arguing that he planned / supported them. Which is nuts. Maybe I just don’t know my troofers.
I would have answered that question “did not know” but mostly because I didn’t think he knew much of anything. If there had not been the document MB refers to, then this would be much more surprising.
Much better case for FDR “knowing” about P.H./”knowing” in a more relevant sense/provoking it for his own ends, which is not a particularly good case, at least as to the first two parts.
My contribution to this debate: There are lots of crazy people, and even more people with crazy views, which I don’t think is the end of the world. Arguing about which side has more crazy people is stupid and pointless. I’m not really sure what I would be supposed to conclude about one side having more crazy people. Lots of people of every stripe will always want to ascribe treacherous intrigues to those with different
politicalbaseball blogging views.You know what, you’re right. We are off track.
The difference that matters is that only one party’s senior elected officials are encouraging the crazy views.
Didn’t Boehner just say the birther stuff was nonsense? (I don’t remember, thought I heard something like that.)
Rove did.
I don’t know of Boehner saying it.
I typed “Boehner birther” into google and got:
Anyway, mikeA is right, we are off track. But I disagree with nm’s parting shot.
Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama: “His father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate.”
Just for example.
Re: “I accept him at his word”, etc.
I take this view.
Also, too:
Guess the party affiliation.
My point has been/is this:
It is stupid and pointless to say, “look at these crazy people on the left with their Hitler signs, and hey, look at these other crazy people on the right, with their Hitler signs”.
However it is non-stupid and non-pointless to say, “the governing priorities of [x] party have been pushed to the [left or right] due to the confluence of people who think crazy things and media outlets and propaganda/electioneering infrastructures that exist to reinforce said crazy things, which results in a concentration of especially strident ignorance within the subset of people who vote in [x] party, and that said strident ignorance a) is not equally prevalent in party [x] and party [y], and b) does not manifest only in validation/quasi-validation of the things we have been discussing as crazy, but also in concrete, damaging policy positions w/r/t the economy, science, health, and so forth, that have real negative consequences for real people in the real world.”
(probably stupid and pointless to say all that in one sentence, though)
I agree with this.
Even Bush, for example, acknowledged global warming.
Even Reagan, for example, raised taxes.
There was some dipute as to the clarity of the questions in that Rasmussen poll. See here, for example:
Although that’s a bit skewed as well (the “because” part seems gratuitous).
Yeah. That’s a question that should be 100% no, but (of course) isn’t.
Yeah, “did he” and “why did he” really need to be split into separate questions
I was 90% positive you’d question the validity of the poll.
Hah – there was some dispute <> I dispute … I have many remaining flaws, but I think I conquered my passive aggressivity in eighth grade. Maybe tenth grade. OK, maybe in my early twenties. Whatever, it’s definitely gone now.
The poll question was “Did Bush know about the 9/11 attacks in advance?” You can decide for yourself whether that’s too broad, and how many yes’s/not sures it may have elicited from people who think he ignored intelligence, etc. (monkeyball’s list somewhere above). My view is that it’s an inherently trickier opinion to poll than the citizenship question, but that it’s hard to get more specific without getting *too* specific.
But again, it’s not about comparing Hitler signs. You can always find the Hitler signs. More important is prevalence, influence, and organization.
What irks me to distraction (people are always being driven to distraction; I prefer to be irked to distraction), and why I’ve committed way too many words to this argument, is the blithe/lazy/hand-wavy claim that those factors are equivalent in both parties at all times no matter what because that’s a law of the universe or something.
To burrow even further into my pique (and why not?), said blithe/lazy/hand-wavy claim is a staple of the sort of precious non-partisanship you see from helmet-haired media people, faux-sophisticates who voted for Clinton then Bush then Obama, and the evening news man on the street who’s disgusted because the parties won’t just shake hands and hash out a commonsense compromise.
Partisanship is to some extent an affectation, an aesthetic. An important part of that pose is that you are right and the other guy is wrong.
Non-partisanship (and here I’m talking about people who call themselves independents, not Greens or Libertarians or Marxists or whatever) is, to a similar degree, an affection. That pose is that the other two guys are equally wrong, equally stupid, whatever the case may be – those guys feel the truth, whereas the non-partisan seeks it rationally.
Just as partisans ought to resist the indignation reflex, non-partisans (anti-partisans?) ought to resist the equivalence reflex. My (anecdotally-informed) view is that the former occurs more frequently than the latter, because a) the latter pose is accorded considerable esteem, and b) to deny partisan equivalence is, in a sense, to deny non-partisanship.
I am a partisan supporter of this post.
I support ending filibuster rules (although this is a stupid quorum rule if we’re being technical). While they’re here, though, Democrats would be crazy not to use them.
You know who else used filibuster rules?
Teetotalling Americans
The teetotaling chart is a different one from the same article.
I wish to dine&wine in the restaurant where the following statement is true:
Average Americans drank just 9.4 litres of alcohol a year – the same as 470 pints of mild beer or 31 glasses of wine.
You’d rather live here?
(Note: I have some sympathy for the idea that the French were such 20th century pushovers because they all had alcohol poisoning)
Nah — but per the article, each glass of wine would need to equal the alcohol content of about 15 pints of beer. If I’ve done the arithmetic correctly (which I undoubtedly have not), that makes each glass of wine = about 3 liters. W00t.
Re ze Franche: I’ve always suspected that they used the Maginot Line primarily as one very long wine cellar.
mmm … lamb stew with barley and flageolets
Baah. But not that there’s anything wrong with blowing a flageolet with dinner.
I played rugby with this guy. I’ve never been prouder of him.
When he gets his two phone calls, will you be one of them? (and will he pay you in cake?)
Great story!
I hope not, not at all my area. But cake-based-payment is intriguing.
Awesome.
New expedited passport in hand. Redeye tomorrow to Zurich, London Monday night, flight back Wednesday afternoon.
Make sure you post a Salmagundi before you leave.
I hope you can sleep on a plane, but even if you can that’s a pretty tough schedule as far as the jet lag.
MB didn’t have a passport? I haven’t been any farther out of the U.S. than Victoria B.C. in the last 10 years but I do have a passport (as I was anticipating an A’s road trip to Toronto a couple years ago which never materialized). I think I’ll take my passport with me to Arizona for the spring training trip in a couple weeks, just in case Sheriff Joe happens to be focusing on illegal immigrants from Scandinavia while I’m there.
Last 5 flights I’ve been on (now, that’s going back a bit … ) I’ve been out cold before the wheels left the tarmac.
Yeah, I’m pretending the jet lag isn’t gonna happen. I’ve got the day+ in Zurich to hang out with my aunt and “attimeatize,” Mon night to crash at the hotel, then all-day meeting Tuesday.
And thanks to the time difference, I actually get back into sfo in time enought ot make it back to work for a bit Wednesday afternoon!
Ugh.
You must not be 6’6″.
Seriously. I once spent 26 hours flying from Paris to OKC and slept for ~1 of them.
My intercontinental flying experience dates back to the days when I was a 125-lb. teenager (Dad was on assignment in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s). I’d be lucky to get back to 170 lb. now…but anyway, last month I flew to Florida to see Mom and Dad. I was in the window seat, the guy next to me was overflowing Seat B by quite a bit, and I was getting a pretty nasty feeling of claustrophobia. I enjoy the view from 37,000 feet on the rare times I’m airborne, but as a practical matter as an adult it’s probably better to be on an aisle and be bashed in the shoulder every few minutes by someone on their way to the bathroom.
Yeah, I’m all about the aisle (and the secret lever that lets you lift up the aisle arm rest)
Emergency exit row seats are where it’s at. If you get there early, they’re often still open.
I am so sick of subsidizing the air travel of all you tall people.
SAL PAID, GIANTS LAID!
And failing that, bulkheads.
Can you have 30#?
Can I have 9″?
(TWSS)
I suppose N**o missed that in his thorough vetting of the guy, even he woulda been slightly taken back by the improper capitalization shown above. How soon before he updates his C.V. with **?
I just feel bad for the guy though. Yeah, much of this is self-brought, but he should never have gotten this far.
Right. Ballsy to ask (in a good way), stupid of others to give it to him.
I’m surprised BtB is generally polite.
they do go over the top with praise when he makes a pretty picture
The 2011 A’s are NOT the 2010 Giants
Forget that he is stating the obvious, why insert point #3? The Florida Marlins and myself do not see how has any relevance. And by the way, the vaunted 2010 Giants only won two more games at the hallowed ATT Park, than the A’s in Oakland.
With Real Madrid’s win today, Jose Mourinho has now gone 9 years since last losing a home league game (while managing Porto, Chelsea, Inter Milan and now Real).
Why it’s important to protect the non-rich:
Hooray for larger pies.
As all motion is relative, I wonder whether some of the backlash against public sector employees by the Private Sector Middle Class relates to the fact that private sector wages have steadily deteriorated since the 1970s, in a massive “income redistribution” to the Wealthiest 1 Percent. (my ‘larger pies’ link is to Colbert’s interview with Reich, wherein he details the PSMC’s three failed strategies to try to stay even).
As such, having given away the store to the W1P, the PSMC now carries the W1P’s water by attacking public sector unions, who’ve apparently done better at maintaining their members’ incomes. The upshot may be smaller government that pushes down public sector employees’ share and cuts big holes in the social safety net for the poor — to the ultimate benefit of … guess who?
The W1P must look down at this with some satisfaction, and congratulate themselves on really being “different.” The PSMC is remarkably bad at mobilizing in pursuit of its self-interest, and choosing its targets.
As someone whose politics go against my self-interest, I really really wish people whose interests align with my politics understood this.
You may just have to give it away.
Can I have $10MM?
You’re thinking top .1%
$10M?
I’ll give Bloom a $12 ticket. Howzat?
A good start. Didn’t Greg Luzinski buy-out an entire section at The Vet?
So I’m thinkin’ a Row, at least.
I’ll get right on that.
I would argue that your (or my) politics only go against your (or my) self-interest in a very narrow (i.e. short-term economic) sense.
Maybe.
But my ideal world involves me paying significantly more of what I earn in exchange for programs that help other people a lot more than they help me. Whether that actually expands the pie to the degree that I am financially better off is uncertain, and not relevant to my policy preferences. It’s probably the case that if I remain in my career it would be better for more money to collect at the top of the income pyramid, so companies can use it to pay me.
Even if such programs (and I assume we’re talking things like public health, education and retirement) help others more than they help you, they can still improve your situation relative to what it is at present and so be in your personal economic interest too.
There are two measure here – relative, where you’d lose, and absolute, where you could still win.
Not really.
Food stamps are a pure drain, for example. Phasing out the mortgage interest deduction is a pure loss. HCR marginally benefits me to the extent cost-cutting ideas work and my employer passes them along to me. Uncapping/means testing SS is a pure loss.
There are some that would help me some and others more (say, improved farm policy or soda taxes), but generally it is actually wealth redistribution. It’s just that wealth redistribution is necessary right now.
I agree that there are (and should be) many programs that redistribute wealth from relatively affluent supporters of those programs like you and I, and you already know my thoughts on (and proposals for) the mortgage interest deduction, which is a pure subsidy to the mortgage holders.
However I also believe that, for example, genuine health-care reform would have the potential to benefit you enormously, both economically and in quality of life, in the event of a catastrophic health event.
… and/or in the event of a catastrophic employment event.
I agree that a single payer system would help me a lot. To the extent you’re saying HCR is not genuine, I disagree. To the extent you’re saying HCR will benefit me directly, I hope not (since the way it is most likely to do so is if I get fired).
Maybe “comprehensive” would have better expressed my meaning. HCR is a step in the right direction (and for some – JediLeroy for example – a pretty big step) but it’s still a long way from a public health system to be proud of.
… whereas for sal it’d be a pretty tiny step?
Fair enough.
My ideal world is something like that, but also includes a lot more of the “have plenties” doing more personally and directly for the “have less/nones” — at least in the form of donating (money, food, goods, time, skills). That’s probably a too-simplistic social view, but we don’t take very good care of each other unless we’re going to get a tax deduction out of it, and sometimes not even then.
Well, I think the charity deduction is worth keeping, but otherwise people are gonna do what they’re gonna do.
Asmussen with the untold story on
Rich Harden.
I got to see the newest Mars lander down at JPL last week.
This one will parachute through the upper atmosphere, then discard that and deploy a booster unit from which it will be lowered on cables to the surface, then blow the cable bolts and discard the booster.
What could possibly go wrong …