Innocent Bystanders

A Little Perspective on the “Million Jobs Created or Saved” October 31, 2009

So let’s take the administration’s very suspect claims at face value, and say “Sure, I believe that you saved 1 million jobs.” Sounds great, yes? In fact, it sounds so great that it makes me want to plot something up:

At the maximum presumed benefit of the stimulus, it has only saved or created about 1/4 of the jobs needed to keep the unemployment situation from getting worse. Apparently that’s entirely satisfactory to the administration, which is bragging about this anemic result. All their statements over the past couple of months indicate that they’re perfectly content with continuing job losses – we’re just going to have to be content with a jobless recovery, and a long-term unemployment rate over 10%.

Heckuva job Larry, Christine, and Jared.

Moses Update October 27, 2009

(because Lipstick gets cranky when I don’t regularly post pictures of “Mo’ Money”)

  The second weekend in October is always the Madison County Covered Bridge Festival here in Winterset.  Crafts, pioneer re-enactments and all the fried food you can eat.  Here, Moses meets an Alpaca for the first time.

  This is more his speed.  He’s an old hand at sheepherding, since we’ve been taking him out to my cousin’s farm since he was barely able to crawl.

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Paul Krugman: Dillweed, Crouton, Garden Gnome October 26, 2009

Paul Krugman wrote yet another fair, objective editorial, based on analytic substance and extensive economic experience. All right, all right, that’s obviously a lie. If he had written such an editorial, it would have been his first.

No, what he really wrote was his typical batch of concentrated malarkey, featuring this gem:

But the teabaggers have come and gone

Yes, Krugman joined the august ranks of fey twit David Schuster, the mistress-of-bias Rachel Maddow, and the supremely smug Anderson Cooper in using that pejorative and filthy term to describe average Americans trying to express their political concerns. I don’t know why he stooped so low and felt it necessary to traffic in insults and obscenity, but that has taken me from simple lack of respect for his competence, to sheer loathing.

Of course Krugman’s not the only one to blame here. Certainly the editors at the NYTimes share some of the culpability. How could they have let that through? Even if the Tea Party movement wanted to be called “teabaggers,” you’d think they would have avoided the term.

I mean, is “teabagger” really listed in the NYT style guide? Did they replace Strunk & White with The Potty-Mouth Primer? Did this really used to be the premier newspaper in the United States?

And they couldn’t even get the facts right – the Tea party movement has just kicked off a new series of rallies. Nice work, dillweeds.

UPDATE: There’s a liberal myth that the Tea Party Movement started calling itself “Teabaggers,” thus bringing this upon itself. The myth appears to be based on a sign that one protester held up in February, and on a website in April which said that legislators should be teabagged by sending them teabags. Obviously the first incident was not an invitation to label the entire movement, and the second occurred in complete innocence of the alternate meaning of the word. And the second, too, did not seek to label the movement.

What About Arlington? October 26, 2009

In light of the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Mojave Desert War Memorial case maybe somebody will ask the above question. And then punch the ACLU square in the nuts.