Meh

The Washington Post -- pthththht. Kessler hates the chart that would dare show that Obama didn't somehow magically increase the debt the way the right wing likes to pretend he did.

"But the biggest problem is that this is just dumb math. What really counts is not the raw debt numbers, but the size of the debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product."

Really? Dumb math? Maybe you could argue that's a methodological error. But the bad math accusation doesn't really hold water here. (There apparently had been a math error but Nancy Pelosi's office corrected it and that's reflected in the chart above.) The math is perfectly fine.

What they would like to see is a chart which shows debt as a percentage of GDP. Which, by wacky coincidence, makes Obama look bad (although it arguably makes Republicans look worse).

But the claims that Pelosi is somehow "cherry - picking" her data by insisting the data be cherry-picked even more is absurd. Yeah, if we put enough disclaimers on our charts (that it's "public" debt vs. gross debt) or add enough figures (debt as a portion of blonde-haired-children GDP) then I'm sure we can find numbers that will please the Tea Party.

But the fact is that the chart isn't bogus. 

Bore Me

I don't like my government to be exciting. I like it to be bland and boring. That's why I like Barack Obama as a President. In campaigns he's good at being fiery. But when he's actually governing he's staid, mature, and thoughtful.

You Know What?

I don't feel like reflecting on the tenth anniversary of 9-11. Why should those ass monkeys who killed thousands of people be able to tell me what to do with my Septembers from now on? Those douche canoes don't deserve the time of day, much less a week of hand wringing remembrance.
The people who were killed? Well the way I was brought up I believe that they don't care. They've moved on to a better place.

The people who loved those who were lost? Actually, those people can and should do whatever they want. Grief is a complicated thing.
I just don't want the media shoving it down my throat for the next few days.

I'm sorry

Do you still doubt my contention that 911 wouldn't have happened if Al Gore had become President?
This bunny is as surprised as you are.

Sarah Palin is a communist

OK, so it's kinda obvious that if Sarah Palin were running in a different universe, in a different country at a different time she'd be going on and on about how perfectly socialist her state of Alaska, where they share the oil wealth among the people. Oh wait, she already does that.
Yeah, sometimes she really sounds like a fellow traveler.

Like here when she was in Iowa she would like 2012 candidates to fight "croney capitalism."
Are we suddenly Union guys back in a company town? In 1911?
She sounds like Eugene Debs for crying out loud.
Of course, to be fair, she did follow that up with a screed about lowering corporate income taxes. But to me she sounds like someone who in a different place and time would be the great SP party member...
Then the right wing would make fun of her kids' names.

Socialism and You

So my eldest brother, as my eldest brother will do, posted a pro-union screed on Facebook about the Verizon strikers winning the strike because Verizon didn't force givebacks.
My brother has what we might euphemistically call "conservative" friends.
The first response on the Facebook thread was:

Contribute to your health benefits like all the rest of us do. Why should you be any different?

Why indeed?
What's fascinating to me is that essentially this argument is communistic. Why should one set of workers be any different than another set? We should all be the same, comerade.
Now, I'm sure the writer consciously believes in "free markets" and hates unions and otherwise despises all things that are Left-ish or Liberal-ish.
But he also wonders why some workers should be any different than others.
Why? This isn't any kind of Marxist communism, this is just down-home, 1863-style (heck, maybe even 1789-style) communism.
Of course, the Lefty answer to "why should you be any different?" is "Well, because we used collective bargaining we didn't push for higher pay, but rather health care, and because the employer gets better tax breaks for providing health care, that's what they agreed to. We'd like them to hold to that agreement."
So... that's a thing.

Why should those Verizon workers be any different?
Maybe all workers should be paid the same. Hmm...

A Break

Ahh, I get it now. The Republicans will pretend the whole Libya thing never happened. None of them will eat their words, of course, especially not Bachman whose dismissive "if it's led by the French then it can't work" attitude.
There's an attempt to blame Obama for not doing... er... something... fast enough. Nobody really knows what that is either.
A Republican administration would have mucked up the whole thing. Didn't you hear Cheney complaining about how Mubarak was "our friend" when we were giving him the bum's rush?
So, are we seriously not giving Obama credit for getting Usama Bin Laden? Or for diplomatically helping usher in the Arab Spring? Or for not committing the military when Qaddafi was bombing civilians?

Gimme a break.