deadissue.com

Probably not the end but looks like they may go to a five day schedule from the current six days of delivery, given that the US mail is mostly a delivery system for bad advertising that goes straight into a landfill, it might be better to go to delivery four days a week or perhaps even three.

One of the more interesting debates over the past few months has been whether Texas should secceed, and while I recognize that it would create a third world country on our southern border, it might be for the best. Rick Perry the governor of Texas does not seem interested in being president of the worlds newest third world cesspool, and is now claiming he never talked about secceeding.

A few years ago the future president of Aftexistan would have been able to get away with denying he ever wanted to secceed, now however he is all over you-tube and their are imbedded videos of him talking up seccession.

I guess we just need to negotiate some sort of guest worker program with Texas where we know that after coming up to the 49 states to help pick fruit and vegetables we have some guarantee that their citizens will return home; then Texas can enter its rightful place as the leader of conservative nations such as Somalia and Darfur.

Yglesias trys to explain Reagan worship:

Scratch a liberal, and he’ll find some good things to say about FDR. Some good things to say about JFK. These days there’s more and more appreciation of the fact that Lyndon Johnson did some very great things along with some very bad ones. Jimmy Carter’s not so popular, but there’s still stuff to like in his legacy. Bill Clinton’s administration was in many ways a disappointment but also in many ways an exemplar of successful governance. And so it goes. History is a mixed bag, and major historical figures in the progressive tradition all have their praiseworthy aspects along with their shortcomings.

In the conservative official view, by contrast, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George HW Bush, and George W. Bush were all big government sellouts who strayed from the True Path as defined exclusively by Ronald Reagan. And yet at the very same time we’re supposed to believe that America is an intrinsically conservative country that years for hard-right policies. There’s an obvious contradiction. And the portrait of Reagan as a down-the-line man of the right isn’t even accurate. The whole thing is bizarre, and there’s genuinely nothing like it on the left.

Anyone who posts on the internet or even talks to conservatives runs into Reagan worship, conservatives seem to believe that Reagan was perfect, even though he left the country in a financial mess and at least partially created the situation we have today in Afganistan. Not to mention the whole Iran-Contra mess.

Reagan was a master of saying one thing and doing another and somehow conservatives are stuck with the the myth that Reagan did waht he said, while they try to do what he did. In some ways Reagan is a senile Albotross hanging around the neck of te Republican party until they get over their Reagan myths they will be innefective at governance and unable to create new policies or ideas.

David Schuster succinctly explains the Miss USA pageant and the people in it:

David Shuster expressed a negative view of the Miss USA pageant after Donald Trump announced at a press conference that Carrie Prejean would remain as Miss California, despite apparently breaking her contract and posing for topless photos.

“Can I vomit right now, literally, can I vomit?” Shuster said just after Trump thanked the press for attending. “Doesn’t this represent everything that is wrong with the superficial nature of these pageants?”

Shuster then proceeded to tee off on Prejean: “I mean she talked about how women could make a difference in this world. She lied. She avoided taking personal responsibility. She blamed others, whether it’s Perez Hilton or the photographer.”

And doesn’t it seem like Trump is pimping out the contestants?

Effective treatments are not the most profitable, therefore we shouldn’t use them. The market has spoken.

You’d think that doing research to figure out which treatments are most effective would be an obviously good thing. But no: it is, apparently, the first step on the road to socialized medicine. A lot of the attacks rely on this “first step” argument. For instance, the Heritage Foundation wrote that “The type of information collected by CER could eventually be used inappropriately if a “Federal Health Board” was created to decide which types of treatment would be available to whom and when.”

It could be used to do bad things! At least, if a board that doesn’t exist were created and told to use this information! Pass me my smelling salts. I await with eager anticipation the Heritage Foundation’s realization that this very same logic could be used to ban guns: after all, they too can be used to do very bad things, and (unlike comparative effectiveness research) actually are so used. Do you think consistency will oblige Heritage to come out in favor of a ban on all guns? Me neither.

But the Heritage Foundation is a marvel of sanity and good sense compared to John Griffing in the American Thinker, who describes the language providing for CER as “a line that would sentence millions of people to death”, and adds, by way of explanation: “If you are picturing Germany circa 1930, you’re right on. With the passing of this bill, government, not doctors, will decide who receives care and who doesn’t, in essence, who lives and who dies.” Deacon for Life, for his part, calls it “Mengele-esque”. The idea that Hitler and Mengele’s great sin was conducting research into the comparative effectiveness of various medical treatments is, shall we say, peculiar.

More seriously, there is something about the arguments against CER that I have never understood. The opponents of CER claim that it will inevitably be used to make decisions about care. Insurers will not want to pay for care that is not effective, and so people will be deprived of the care they need. But notice what “deprived of care” means here. No one is seriously proposing to make it illegal to purchase whatever medical care you want on your own.

This means that even if your insurance company decides that it will not pay for some treatment that has been shown to be ineffective, you will, under any proposal being seriously considered, still be able to get that care; you just won’t be able to get someone else to pay for it. If not having someone else pay for your medical care counts as being “deprived of care”, then 46 million people are being deprived of care even as we speak — and that’s just the uninsured; it doesn’t include people who have insurance that doesn’t cover the treatments they need. And yet, strange to say, the opponents of CER generally do not see this as a problem.

Moreover, once you notice that what the opponents of CER describe as “being deprived of care” just consists in someone’s deciding not to pay for some treatment, the idea that decisions about who gets what treatment are currently made by your physician is true only if you pay for your care out of your own pocket. If, like most of us, you rely on medical insurance, then someone other than your doctor is already making decisions about your care. All CER would do is allow this person to do so on the basis of actual knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.

It seems like a lot of bad policies rely on the idea that it would be a stppeing stone to something else, i.e. Marijuana policy.

I got this from a militia recruitment web site:

It is the opinion of the Militia that there is a world wide effort on the part of Islam to populate Western nations and, when numbers are sufficient enough, declare Sh’ria law. Islam is not a religion that accomodates other faiths or shares western values concerning freedom of religion. For that reason, we must reciprocate by declining your membership.

The best way to fight this imaginary threat is to try to outbreed the Muslims, who really loses in this war. The rest of us, these people overwelm the welfare system and create huge amounts of pollution with their clans and overwelm public school systems, especially when you consider these are the same people insist on teaching creation myths as science, basicaly dumbing down the rest of the country.

I don’t know how you stop these people from dragging the country down with them but I am starting to see the need for stricter gun laws and perhaps and end to welfare policies that reward people for having big families.

People forget that Reagan was also a pretty crappy president

My sense is that for the vast majority of Republicans, their current and alleged beef with President Bush is that he espoused some sort of ‘big government conservatism’. He was profligate with the nation’s finances and left the country settled with huge structural deficits.

How is this different from Reagan’s time in office exactly? They’re actually surprisingly similar.

Both presidents pushed through big tax cuts, squeezed domestic discretionary spending, though never as much as opponents feared or supporters professed to hope for, and spent lavishly on defense. Having two big wars gave President Bush more to spend on. But the broad pattern is very similar. And both ended up leaving the country with really big deficits, though Reagan did a bit in the latter years of his administration to even the balance. Again, very, very similar. So either Bush is well within the conservative tradition or Reagan is another phony.

Perhaps, had conservatives been a little more honest about the eighties maybe Bush would not have repeated all the mistakes Reagan made.

Looks like Chrysler the parent comapany of Jeep is about to go bankrupt. Which would really suck, Jeeps were cool at one time. Now they are just big SUV’s, like any other big SUV. What happened? It seems that Jeep rather than sticking with their niche of making really good off-road vehicles that were kind of cool to drive around town, ableit somewhat uncomfortably and unreliably, switched to making cars that would appeal to soccer moms. This of course meant that they were competing with Ford and Land Rover and Mercedes etc. etc.

Now the ultimate soccer mom car is of course, the Prius, leaving Jeep with a bunch of unsold vehicles that no body wants. Had they stuck with their original market they would still have a group of hardcore enthusiasts with high brand loyalty. Hopefully Jeep will survive as a company and build a cool small off-road vehicle and leave the mass marketing to another bankrupt cr company.

I love this one:

STEPHANOPOULOS: [O]n the issue of taxes, I think it’s 43 percent of people who file taxes pay no income tax at all. For the middle fifth of taxpayers, they’re paying just about 3 percent in federal income tax this year.

BOEHNER: Well, you want to go out and explain that to the hundreds of thousands of people around America that showed up for these rallies.

Since the eighties conservatives have exploited the low information voter, it now seems pretty apparent at this point that they don’t know what to do with them either.

the governor of Texas has been making quite a bit of noise lateley about secceeding.This seems like a no brainer for the rest of the country, we would need some humanitarian safeguards, specifcaly anyone from Aftexistan should be allowed to migrate north and we would have to make sure that they didn’t have nuclear weapons, but other than that it seems like a the best solution to the countries Texas problem.

The country of Aftexistan would also probably absorb a lot of the unproductive citizens from other states, and it would be a good opportunity to see if christian socialism can succeed. Texas, go ahead make my day.

At pandagon Amanda Marcotte challenges the notion that children are a bundle of joy and that we need to overpopulate to keep our economy going.

At Donkeylicious Niel Sinababu suggests immigration as a solution for those who worry about social security.

The only thing I would add is that some people view children as a material good and as such they feel a need to acquire as many of them as they can, government policies that discourage kid hoarding and perhaps and end to charites that encourage people to have lots of kids might also be a good idea.

This is really good news, hopefully the trend will continue.

There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.

The positive nature of this is somewhat tempered by the fact that the remaining christians are becoming more radicalized.

A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that “these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more ‘evangelical’ outlook among Christians.” With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe.

If that trend continues we will probably wind up with a vast underclass of people who insist on believing in creation myths and having large families, all because they know the “rapture” is just around the corner. These people will be left behind, but not in the way they think, chances are they will get bitter over generations of not seeing any of their mythology come true, while the heathens continue to live better and better lives by abandoning the mythology of the past. Leading to a small hard-core group of extremists, who sit around in caves and plot attacks on non-believers. This seems like a familiar story, I just can’t remember from where.

Some people are suggesting our standard of living might be higher with less people:

So the Malthusian logic that says that higher levels of population is a disaster no longer applies. But I’m still not at all convinced that the reverse logic that says that lower levels of population is a disaster does apply. True, lower population will lead to lower measured GDP, but the relevant issue is GDP per capita. We’ve moved away from a strictly resource-based economy, but resources are still pretty darn important. If Canada had only 30,000 inhabitants instead of 30,000,000 citizens, then it seems to me that those 30,000 Canadians could be fabulously wealthy. Conversely, if Alaska had as many inhabitants as California, then Alaskan oil revenues wouldn’t be nearly the boon that they currently are. And if the United States had 200 million citizens instead of 300 million, surely our commute times would be much shorter and patterns of residency would be more driven by where there’s demand for workers and less by where there’s affordable housing.

Also, if their were less people we probably would not have issues with climate change, and if you believe that the wars we are fighting are at least partially about resources(I happen to think they are all about resources) we would probably not be embroiled in so many conflicts.

Nurse says Octamom doesn’t care about her kids, and that is a shock to who?

Octamom lost one of her children about a year ago

Octamom would like her own TV show, this seems like a bad idea inthat it will give social services even more evidence that she is crazy.

Octamom is dissapointed that formula and diaper companies don’t want to sponsor her craziness. I wish fertility doctors were as ethical.

Their is a lot more stuff out there, I guess she is sort of a stimulus package for writers.

I got this via Pandagon as a response to the argument that we need high birth rates to maintain social security:

But without denying that the effect is real, this strikes even a lover of Social Security such as myself as a pretty unpersuasive reason to explicitly target higher birthrates as a policy objective. If it’s true—as I’m inclined to think it is—that slower population growth rates are likely to increase average living standards then people could still be made better off even with smaller transfer payments. Alternatively, a developed country that did find itself in desperate need of additional workers can always let more immigrants in.

Also, if you only have one kid chances are inheritence will be larger, after all you wont be splitting it amongst multiple siblings and by only having one kid you may actually save more money. Who knows people might even be able to afford college for their one child rather than having five of them start their adult life deeply in debt.

Looks like other people are starting to notice that low birth rates may be a good thing:

Matt recently had an interesting post reminding everyone that a lower population has the strong benefit of decreasing the number of people who need to share resources. Predictably, Ross Douthat, knowing that low birthrates are often an indicator of dangerous levels of female equality, threw a minor fit over it. Congrats to Matt for not caving to the disingenuous panic about pension programs, and pointing out a relevant point indicating that there is some level of hypocrisy/bullshitting going on

This seems a bit strange to me, however, since the people urging us to panic about low birthrates are almost always conservatives who oppose the existence of such programs. Certainly, the two commenters I was citing seemed to feel this way.

But he also brings up two things that are simply ignored by people making the argument that we need forced child-bearing to make sure that our dependent elderly are cared for:

What’s more, it’s not entirely clear to me how true this really is. After all, children are a significant—and legitimate—claim on the public purse. And high birthrates seem likely to lead to low workforce participation on the part of women, which makes sustaining your retirement benefits more difficult. Conceivably you could get around that by making public spending on child care and preschool and after school programs even more generous, but that just gets you back around to where we started.

Considering that the people making these arguments would see most women turned into housewives, they’re actually suggesting that we dump what’s probably upwards of 40% of current workers from the workforce, because we’re that desperate for labor. Another thing that seems like it would be great for the economy is cutting that amount of income to so many households, who are already not spending because they don’t have enough money. And the key to making sure that there’s enough money for a dependent elderly population is to dramatically increase the number of dependents overall. Perhaps, if women put our minds to it, we can turn 75-80% of the country into dependents.

I’m only mildly kidding. Obviously, the demographic panickers don’t expect poor women and women of color to quit their jobs and become housewives, and they probably don’t intend for them to be the ones having a dozen children. Ideally, they’d quit fucking altogether so they have more time to work. Because, from what I can tell, Matt’s right and the entire low birthrate panic goes straight back to people who are looking for any excuse to claim that women’s rights have to be revoked for the good of the world. But in order to believe that more children automatically means more wealth because it’s more labor, you have to both ignore the fact that it means less labor (because you take so many women out of the labor pool), but you also have to assume that the only thing that creates wealth is labor, and resources have nothing to do with it. Which is easy to believe if you’re already wealthy enough to shield yourself from the pains of growing prices on all sorts of items, from real estate to gas to food, caused by heightened demand, but for the rest of us, not so much.

Kids are also part of the American dream just like a big car and house in the suburbs, the problem being that all those things are enviromentally damaging and less fulfilling than people think they are. Also, they are expensive in the form of roads and fire protection for the burbs and more schools for the little bundles of joy. The government should do whatever it can to discourage people from having kids, this means making all forms of birth control readily available, mandating real sex education(not abstinence only) in any school that recieves federal money and ending tax advantages for people that have large families, and yes, an end to fertility research and treatment.

Legalizing pot should be a no-brainer

Sometimes people say exactly what you are thinking:

You can’t miss it in today’s news: US births break record, 40 percent out-of-wedlock. Frankly, my dear, who gives a shit about the wedding bands. Though that’s pretty much what all the moralizing is about.

No, what’s stupefying is the fact that nowhere in this much-travelled article does anyone ever talk about the real impact of more babies being born in the US in 2007 than any other year in the nation’s history.

So let’s talk about it. And let’s start with a really interesting study just published in the journal Global Environmental Change. A couple of statisticians at Oregon State U disengaged their mechanical pencils from their pocket protectors, clicked some fresh lead onto recycled paper (we hope) and came up with this bold analysis into that sacristy of human reproduction—to have or not to have:

A mother and father are each responsible for one half of the emissions of their offspring and 1/4 the emissions of their grandchildren and so on forever or thereabouts
Therefore, under current US conditions, each child adds 9,441 metric tons of CO2 to the carbon legacy of the average female
That’s 5.7 times her lifetime emissions
Translation: one child costs nearly 6 times your own CO2 emissions
In the pessimistic scenario, each American child adds 12,730 metric tons to your carbon legacy
In comparison, under current Bangladeshi conditions, each child adds 56 metric tons of CO2 to the carbon legacy of the average female

Conservative “leaders” seem to be defending AIG bonus’s while Republicans try to figure out what to think.

…By all appearances, the right-wing media figures are, oddly enough, sticking to conservative economic principles, while right-wing lawmakers are simply hoping to exploit public frustration for partisan gain, whether it makes sense or not.

Indeed, rank-and-file Republicans may be leaning in the direction of the media figures. The Gallup poll released yesterday gauging public anger over the AIG bonuses showed that Republican voters are far less “outraged” by the matter than Democrats, and are far less interested in seeing the government try to block or recover the bonus money than Democrats or Independents.

The Republican party, right now, is a group of politicians obsessed with winnning the news cycle, that is having their faces on the news every night, and some talk radio yackers who also seem obsessed with being in the news at all times, and the yackers seem to be winning.

I have been critical of the New York times hiring Ross Douthat, until I saw this from Brad Delong.

From Ross Douthat, Privilege, bottom of p. 184:

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–“Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?” she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business… and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered–“You know, I’m on the pill…”

The bottom line is Mr Douthat doesn’t seem to like women, he is especially offended that this one does not wish to get pregnant, it is almost like he cannot understand any reason to have sex with a women that does not involve pro-creation. The next few years of Ross Douthat collumns are going to be unintentionally very funny.

How long before Cheney starts trying to hire someone to prove him right?
H/T TPM