There is a new post up on my other blog. Please click the link at the bottom for the full post….
There has always been a myth that New Englanders locked their crazy relatives in the attic. Everyone knows, in the South, most of ours roamed free.
However in the 1970′s another phenomenon occurred: People started putting their teenagers in the basement.
More: Chapter 40: In the Basement | My Southern Gothic Life.
Filed under Danville, My Journey, Social Commentary, Style, The South, Virginia
One of the best post-election articles I’ve read….
“Why don’t they fight back?”
That’s the question I’ve been hearing from the Democratic Party’s stunned and dispirited base. For the past month, I’ve been on a book tour that has taken me to Asheville, N.C., Terre Haute, Ind., Austin and elsewhere. Everywhere I go, supporters of President Obama and his agenda ask me why so many Democrats in Washington don’t stand up for what they say they believe.
I confess that I don’t have a good answer. What I can say with confidence, however, is that the White House and Democrats in Congress ignore these grumblings at their peril. Call it polarization, call it conviction, call it whatever you like: These are not wishy-washy times. If you don’t stand for something, you get run over.
We saw this principle in action last week. Anomie among the Democratic base was not the main reason the party suffered what Obama called a “shellacking” in the midterms, but clearly it was a factor. Elements of the party’s traditional coalition – minorities, women, young people – voted in much smaller numbers than they did in 2008. The “enthusiasm gap” turned out to be real, and it had real consequences.
I’ve been hearing frustration at the willingness of Democrats to accommodate a Republican Party that refuses to give an inch. To progressives who may not understand the subtleties of inside-the-Beltway thinking, this looks like surrender.
AND:
The conventional wisdom in Washington is that those who say the lesson from last week’s drubbing is that progressives should get a spine simply “don’t get it.” The explanation given by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and some others – that aside from stubbornly high unemployment, one contributing factor was the Democrats’ failure to explain their program and counter Republican misinformation – is seen by the conventionally wise as delusional.
But I’ve been meeting an awful lot of progressives around the country who share that delusion, if that’s what it is. They despair that their neighbors don’t know that it was George W. Bush who proposed the TARP bailout, not Obama – or that it worked, or that taxpayers are getting their money back. They wonder how health-care reform came to be defined not as a moral issue or a way to slow rising costs, which it is, but as a “big government takeover,” complete with “death panels.” Which it isn’t.
What I’m hearing is frustration, and it’s getting louder. I’m hearing the view that the Obama administration, which has done much good, can do better – by speaking clearly, standing its ground – and, when pushed by bullies, shoving back.
via Eugene Robinson – Where’s the Democrats’ fighting spirit?.
Filed under Health Care, History, Politics, Social Commentary, The Economy, Uncategorized
Great blog about Frank Rich’s Sunday New York Times Column. It really help that Rich gets this….
Americablog does this summation better than I, so I encourage you to click the link to the full post:
That’s the title of Frank Rich’s latest column, and it’s the key question, not just of this election cycle, but perhaps of the first half of the new century.
Who will stand up to the superrich? From the columnist who coined the phrase “billionaires’ coup” (my emphasis throughout):
The wealthy Americans we should worry about … are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.
Just a note on that last line, “grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.” What do you call it when absolutely everything on the planet is for sale to the only people left with money? Mission accomplished. Frank Rich again:
The Americans I’m talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid — the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.
Good numbers to remember when your “Reagan Democrat” hate-the-hippies uncle mouths off at Thanksgiving. The top-1% folks went from 9% of all pretax income to 23% — your “Reagan revolution,” and his tax dollars, at work.
via AMERICAblog News: ‘Who will stand up to the superrich?’.
Filed under History, Media, Politics, Social Commentary, The Economy
Great, succinct article on the current economic situation….
For the past thirty years the rich have been waging war on the middle class. It’s been astonishingly effective, partly because it has been undeclared. But even that pretense is now being abandoned. The President’s National Deficit Commission has effectively declared that the rich will now go after what is left of working and middle class wealth and will take whatever steps are necessary to seize it. If allowed to succeed, their plan will reduce Americans to a state of serfdom.
Ronald Reagan began the war on the middle class with his “supply-side” economics. Its very purpose, according to David Stockman, Reagan’s Budget Director, was to transfer wealth and income upwards. It cut the marginal tax rate on the highest income earners from 75% to 35% while dramatically expanding spending for war. The results were two-fold: massive federal debt and an astonishing rise in the share of income and wealth going to those who were already the wealthiest people in the world.
The national debt quadrupled between 1980 and 1992. George W. Bush would repeat Reagan’s policies and double it again between 2000 and 2008. Meanwhile, the share of national income going to the top 1% more than doubled, from 9% to 24%. The share going to the top one-tenth of 1% of income earners more than tripled. We now have the most unequal distribution of income in the developing world and the inequality is growing rapidly.
Shifts of this magnitude over such short periods of time have never been seen in American history. With the rich getting much, much richer, its means that everybody else is getting poorer. And in fact, real wages for median workers are lower today than they were in 1973. Indeed, while the inflation-adjusted income of the bottom fifth of workers fell by $6,900 between 1979 and 2007, the top 1% saw its annual income increase by $741,000!
To try to keep up with living standards Americans resorted to debt. They increased their personal debt-to-income ratio from 62% in 1980 to 130% in 2008. When housing prices fell 35% nationwide in the recent collapse it left Americans with a smaller share of equity in their homes, 48%, than at any time since the Great Depression. The share they have lost has been taken by the banks.
In other words, all of the income and wealth gains for middle Americans from the “golden years” between 1945 and 1975 have now been wiped out. Or more accurately, have now been transferred to the very rich. The top 1% holds 34% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50% holds just 2.5%. The bottom 40% owns absolutely nothing.
Filed under Politics, Social Commentary, The Economy
Seems appropriate to this rainy Monday….
But then, Karen Carpenter is always appropriate…
Filed under Entertainment, Media, Music, Style, Television
New post up on my other blog:
I’m walking a thin line with this blog. I’m not mentioning people who are still alive and active, so the one’s I mention can’t fight back.
My memories may be colored by time and hazy as a result. But, I won’t go farther in this forum. I love and respect my friends- and some of my family- too much to share secrets they might not want me to share.
That makes me a little sad to have so many important memories that I share with people who are no longer here..but I guess that’s one of the downsides to getting older. You realize you have outlived some of the most important people in your life.
But you are still here. And you carry then the ones who are gone with you as part of yourself. And that counts for a lot…
Filed under Danville, Gay, Social Commentary, Style, The South
This was the first “disco” song played at my college fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha, at Washington and Lee University in the late 1970’s.
As I recall, it was quite controversial to play this as previously it had been all Beach Music or some strange Southern rock stuff late at night…
But my friend Ralph prevailed. He was after a new attitude for the parties…
And the parties got much better…
It was a good mix…
And we danced all night…
Because it might have been “disco” but you could still shag to it…
Filed under Entertainment, My Journey, Social Commentary, Style, Virginia
And why is anyone surprised?
When Crown Publishing inked a deal with George W. Bush for his memoirs, the publisher knew it wasn’t getting Faulkner. But the book, at least, promises “gripping, never-before-heard detail” about the former president’s key decisions, offering to bring readers “aboard Air Force One on 9/11, in the hours after America’s most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor; at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq,” and other undisclosed and weighty locations.
Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial “decision points” of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush’s character: He’s too lazy to write his own memoir.
via George Bush Book ‘Decision Points’ Lifted From Advisers’ Books.
This man is dumb as dirt….
I live in North Carolina and know….
Nancy Pelosi is one of the few Democrats who know how to fight. And she delivered. She’s one of the most effective Speakers of the House I can remember.
She’s being blamed for the dysfunctional Senate and the lack of message control and balls in the White House….
The good new is this- and this fool- is going no where….
Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) is setting the stage for an official challenge to Nancy Peolsi’s bid to lead the Democratic minority in the next Congress. Shuler, a moderate from the North Carolina mountains, will make his intentions official on the national stage this weekend, The Hill reports.
Shuler pitched himself as a moderate alternative to Pelosi as leader of the House caucus before she officially announced her run for Minority Leader in the next Congress.
Now, with most observers thinking Pelosi has the position locked up, Shuler appears ready to make good on his promise to take her on.
He “is scheduled to address his leadership plans during appearances on CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ Sunday and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program on Monday,” The Hill’s Mike O’Brien reports.
Even Shuler says he’s the under(blue)dog in a battle against Pelosi for House Democratic leader. He told one local paper in his district that “it is probably a race we can’t win.”
via Here Comes Shuler: NC Dem Set To Make His Leadership Bid Official This Weekend | TPMDC.
Filed under History, North Carolina, Politics, The Economy
Lost in the 21st Century 
Making the Case for a $140 Turkey: bonappetit.com
We’ve gotten our Thanksgiving Turkey from these folks for the last 4 or 5 years. There is no going back once you’ve had a real, heritage breed Turkey. It’s expensive, but it’s only once a year. And we look forward to it all year long. It is a truly amazing difference in how much better these taste. I’ll never be able to eat a Butterball again…
Patrick Martins, Co-founder, Heritage Foods USA, Brooklyn; 718-389-0985; heritagefoodsusa.com
More: Making the Case for a $140 Turkey: BA Daily: Blogs : bonappetit.com.
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Filed under Entertainment, Food, History, My Journey, Social Commentary, Style