Well Done, Senator Booker!

 

Senator Cory Booker (D., NJ) has surpassed Strom Thurmond's record, holding the Senate floor for an astonishing 25 hours! (Get yourself a well-deserved rest!) As he closed his speech, during which he spoke to the Trump agenda and the ways that it will hurt working families, he invoked the memory of John Lewis:

"This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right; it’s right or wrong. Let's get in good trouble," Booker said as he concluded his remarks and was met by a standing ovation from Senate colleagues. "I yield the floor."

Democratic lawmakers have been facing pressure from their constituents to respond more forcefully to the Trump administration’s sweeping policy changes, including massive cuts to the federal workforce, ramped-up deportations and sweeping tariffs.

Booker's remarks clearly resonated with many who watched them. A live feed of the speech on the senator's TikTok account had more than 220 million likes by early Tuesday night, before he exceeded 24 hours on the floor, and users were posting fan edits.

This was a demonstration about what our Democratic representation in congress can do even if they do not have the majority in either chamber--they can hold the floor adn speak to the values and concerns of the people they represent. 

That's what we want them to do--represent US. 

The Real Social Security Fraudsters, He Says

 

Howard Lutnick, late of Cantor Fitzgerald, who is not, by any stretch, a poor man, has sorted out who the real fraudsters and abusers of Social Security might be--the people who would complain if they failed to receive a check. If they failed to receive their check, that they were counting on, because they paid into the system during their entire working life? I mean, say what, now?

“What we have to do is stop sending money to someone who’s not hurt, who’s on disability for 50 years,” he claimed. “It’s ridiculous, and they have another job.”

At one point in the wide-ranging, nearly two-hour conversation, Lutnick also said that if Social Security “didn’t send out their checks this month,” his “mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain.”

“She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,” the billionaire businessman said.

A Transformative Arc of Potential Energy

 

Several Tesla vehicles were set on fire in Las Vegas early Tuesday morning, according to police.

This is wrong—violence and vandalism are never the answer.
pic.twitter.com/01l75YXARH

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 18, 2025

I have a deep and intractable vein of cynicism that runs through the entirety of my being--are all the Tesla fires politically demonstrative, or  is it possible that arson and cutting short the life of a piece of technology is not symbolic of a rage against the machine-manufacturer, but a smoke signal that the brand's issues are more immediate? I have wondered what the resale value of a Tesla is and whether that picture is likely to improve. Also, what flat sales mean for Tesla dealerships. And also, whether insurance payouts might be a motivator in some instances.

I'm not accusing people of a widespread conspiracy of bad faith. It's just if there WERE opportunists in the mix, I would totally not be surprised. 

As for me, I dislike criminality as a form of immediate protest. It gets one in more trouble personally than its effectiveness generally warrants and threatens to negatively color the message instead of raising the right kind of consciousness. I like protest movements to follow the rules of drama--start small and build to a place of pity and fear. I am very on the side of Swasticar Art and so on. Damaging other people's property, however, is a TERRIBLE TERRIBLE THING--which can also be done in entertaining ways and might be instructive, but by all means, I do protest it! How Awful! My stars and garters!

What if We Declined the Decline?

 

Reporter: A brand new analysis finds that Social Security would run out in six years if Trump's agenda is enacted pic.twitter.com/eLiOZPpvfb

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 21, 2024

Generation X people have never taken Social Security for granted, actually I think a lot of us came up thinking the rug would be pulled out from under us because that was how our generation experienced everything--as a recession. I mean, I definitely feel like at some point, someone in my lifetime said out loud with their whole chest that Social Security was the third rail of politics, but I never equally also felt it applied to me, because it felt like someone, somewhere else, was going to wind up the ladder I was supposed to retire on. 

Like, they were going to move up the age I could even get Social Security to an age where I wouldn't even be competent to apply, Like, I would have worked to my late seventies and be trying to sort out how Medicare Part D shit was going down. And just have new technocrat hoops my elderly ass would have to jump through. And a canyon my elderly ass might fall through. 

I'm in my 50's still wondering about that rug pull. Kamala Harris is eight years older than me and wants to save the thing Trump's economic plan would destroy--I guess none of his friends are counting on SS. They count on his tax cuts, though.  

The Harris Plan--Supporting Our Values

 

What if the way to support families and the middle class was to put our money where our values are and invest in the changes we want to see to make life better for the average American? 

It's a loaded question, and I get why some folks would be mad--supporting new families and encouraging homeownership are fine things for people who want to talk about financial security for households to reference, but actually doing something about it? Isn't that the business of other people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps about? 

Look, I used to do a feature on this blog about our "Know Your Class War" and just like "Climate Sunday", it fell by the wayside because we have a first-world economy with disastrous outcomes in terms of health, happiness, and upward mobility in general. Democrats have, through measures like Social Security, Medicare, the ACA, and others--actually tried to do something about this. Republicans usually dub these measures "Communism".  (See Reagan and Medicare.)

Cops Killed Jesus

 

In addition to Easter Sunday it is also the 125th Anniversary of Paul Robeson's birth. So in honor of the man who once said, “Artists are the gatekeepers of truth," here's a message from an Asheville, NC graffiti artist. pic.twitter.com/A8YMxYYbyX

— Daryle Lamont Jenkins (@DLamontJenkins) April 9, 2023

I've been saying for some time that the things no Christian should be about are blasphemy laws and the death penalty. The trumped-up charge against Jesus of Nazareth was that he played at being king of the Jews, which was an office that could only be bestowed by Rome. He claimed a moral right to the children of Israel that he politically could not claim. But he wasn't saying he was the King of the Jews, only his presence as a preacher against the princes of this world existed as a problem for them. 

His sentence was death, and before his death was carried out, he suffered police brutality in the form of a crown of thorns. In custody, he was mocked and stripped naked. His judge, Pilate, didn't seem to think he was guilty, but "washed his hands and sealed his fate". Because someone had to be made an example of. 

Call me, the atheist, a Holy Saturday Christian, because I see the Christ in the downtrodden and persecuted, in the wronged and derailed, in the fucked up and failed people around me. I don't know that the fallen rise, but I want to believe we can all get lifted by understanding one another and helping ourselves up from failure bit by bit. I have no proof for my faith, I just think it would be great. 

And Forgive Us Our Debts

 

In another BFD kind of day, President Biden announced the forgiveness of student loan debt up to $10K for borrowers with incomes up to $125,000 ($250,00 if filing jointly) and up to $20K for Pell Grant recipients. This is going to help so many people--

The White House said that 43 million student loan borrowers will benefit and that as many as 20 million borrowers will have their full remaining student loan balances wiped out.

That will be very significant for those households. Due to debt obligations, people have put off on home-ownership, starting their families, and more. Adjustments to the payments owed will also give people whose debt has not thoroughly been retired welcome breathing space. It may not be what they hoped for, but it is a change in the right direction.

Of course, people have to complain. I'm not going to focus on the more left-based criticism that the debt forgiveness should have gone further because I'm in agreement with it--I am a Gen X kid whose working class to middle class family was able to manage my education, and I acknowledge my privilege. My degree was invaluable to me, though, and I encourage people to get a good education because the broader your horizons, the better your damn time here on this earth. I got a BA in English Lit., which is one of the most humanities of the humanities degrees. It means I am proficient in my mother tongue and can discuss works people have been reading for pleasure for a long time. 

Labor Day: Is It A Crime?

 

The $7.25 minimum wage can’t pay all the bills in any state https://t.co/wTk5JHdYNQ

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) September 7, 2021

We talk sometimes about "working for a living", so I just want to interject that working doesn't always provide a living. It provides the barebones of existing, maybe feeding oneself and ones' kids, inadequately, going into soul-disrupting debt at times, relying on various kinds of assistance at others.

Labor Day, Essentially

So, as a person who was determined to be essential back in March and worked with only three unpaid days off in more or less same as normal straits and the spouse of a person who was also made essential as a grocery worker who worked for a short while far more than his usual allotment, and the relative of someone who as a nurse contracted COVID on the job and thankfully, all were young and healthy! Let's just say this Labor Day, my thoughts are with all workers who had to keep up with the COVID times, whether you got shafted entirely, had your hours reduced, or found yourself working in dangerous conditions and had to function above and beyond.

There's a kind of bias to the idea of "essential worker"--someone's paying us for our labor, so it must be worth something, whatever it is. And we are worth more than what we do for a living, even if we need work to keep our very lives together, because our jobs constitute something less than the entirety of what we are capable of.  And for those who lost jobs due to the public situation of COVID-19 spread--whose industries were harmed because of the necessary public-facing nature of those industries, nothing about the value of the work you do has changed, only the demand.

Things economically have gone awry in the US in part because of a failure to appreciate that the citizen worker is both the source and consumer of value. I'm not saying I know exactly what to do about that, but I resent when elected leaders talk about jobs in glee about gaining back half of what was precipitously lost in a short while over bad public management of a pandemic there should have been planning for, and with no acknowledgement of the lives that have been lost due to poor planning and privileging the economy over those lives.

They also need to be judged based on the products of their labors. Some may need to be made redundant.

Soup of the Day

Today, Trump most strenuously denied that he had had a series of mini-strokes, and got a doctor to back him up on that, and I am personally not the one to claim otherwise, because for one thing, I can't retrace the scoop that Michael Schmidt choose to put in a book about the president's abrupt trip to Walter Reed from last year, and for another, I choose to grant the occupant of the White House some measure of privacy regarding what might actually just be a minor health kerfuffle that is merely embarrassing.

I mean, like, let's say he got himself caught in his zipper? Or had a perfectly normal bagel-cutting mishap? Is that actually necessarily for everyone's public consumption?

Don't call it a Comeback

The May jobs report had "misclassification error" that made the unemployment rate look lower than it is. Here’s what happened. https://t.co/oFrdlw99el

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 6, 2020

When the U.S. government’s official jobs report for May came out on Friday, it included a note at the bottom saying there had been a major “error” indicating that the unemployment rate likely should be higher than the widely reported 13.3 percent rate.

The special note said that if this “misclassification error” had not occurred, the “overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported,” meaning the unemployment rate would be about 16.3 percent for May.

Look, I like happy news and am by no means rooting for the economy to do poorly--that stands for real people's jobs and income! On the other hand, when the jobs numbers had tanked so severely, we have to be realistic and not applaud too soon. The economic devastation was caused by the pandemic event, and we're not totally out of it. Also, when jobs do come back, our persistent inequalities will still be here.

Famine of Choices

WATCH: As California farmers make the hard decision to plow through crops no one is buying, analysts say the drop in food supply will be felt in a few months by consumers eager to buy produce at grocery stores https://t.co/F4LVLT5Gct pic.twitter.com/ecrWcGja7c

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 16, 2020

Some portion of my ancestors came to the US because there was, quite purposefully, no food where they came from. The one crop poor people mostly ate, failed. Just about every other kind of food a rich land produced, was exported. If it mattered enough, just a tweak of economics could have saved lives (a million people may have died, maybe a million more were saved by leaving). It wasn't that they couldn't have lived off what the land provided--it's that that nourishment was intended for other paying customers' tables. This sort of thing happens the whole world round. People starve not for a lack of food, but because the political climate doesn't allow it to be on their plates. It's either deliberately withheld, as can happen where the government is oppressive, or because there is no foresight on a government's behalf that food insecurity is a national security issue.

It's not just in light of the above story I consider that--it's a painful thing for farmers to produce good food and watch it go to waste and also know that it isn't just money they are out for their labor, but that the demand exists (people still need fed), it only needs a different path to the ultimate consumer. It's in light of images like this:

image of the line of cars waiting for food aid. Surely, they has to be a way for other plans to be made for more produce to be canned, dairy to be powdered, etc. possibly by an act of government, to make food more available for the people temporarily in want? The logistics for such a thing must exist. I know when I was a kid, people talked shit about government cheese (but it was good for grilled cheese) but that was a staple. We need the USDA to get it's top game on.

I'm not a logistics kind of person that knows exactly how to translate not plowing crops under into filling the bellies of people who just need tiding over until this virus crisis is licked, but taking inspiration from folks like Chef Andres, I know if the will existed we could find a way to do it.

That's the kind of thinking we should want in government. And the sort of thing I think government can make happen on a meaningful scale--but which shouldn't stop food relief groups, local governments, etc. from trying to manage, because I think the crisis is still unfolding, and future food shortages could drive inflation and just some really fucked-up realities. Basically, capitalism Venezuela. I could be wrong about that part, but I am not wrong about feeding the people and subsidizing the farmers. We all need to eat and we all need to take care of one another when things are rough. We are all in this together.

That is what makes a nation great.

Was Man Made for The Economy or....?

There is an argument that with respects to coronavirus and its effects on the market, cooler heads should prevail and we should jump-start the corporations that are about to start bleeding capital along with their putative stock value by bailing them out, and well, maybe smaller businesses should get cheap loans or whatever, and a little bit of a payroll tax cut and a wad of cash on the nightstand should be just fine for the working folks. 

Those people should be pilloried. At best. The reason everything is falling apart isn't because the businesses are fucked. It's because the people are. We're fucked. We're mortal. We've built a widely interconnected just in time financial universe, and time is out of joint. We can't travel or function as we once did, and the economy is a lagging indicator of what is happening to us. To people. 

Extreme measures to flatten the virus “curve” is sensible-for a time-to stretch out the strain on health infrastructure. But crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue-and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.

— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) March 23, 2020

I am considered an "essential employee" because of my government work, and my husband and brother are both in food retail. We haven't stopped working. We've worked more. But this thing about assuming that some people, the workers lower on the chain, the presumably younger ones considered at "a lower risk" should be exposed (and therefore be at a risk of exposing others, like our parents) is a tip--we're invaluable and expendable at once. We are revenue-producers and without value in ourselves. We serve the economy, and not the other way about. And our pneumatic lungs juice the wheels of commerce!

Let's consider the possibility that maybe the stock market and the health of capital shouldn't be a stand-in for the health of humanity. Maybe the important thing is that people can eat. Stay in their homes. Have access to health care. Have basic security. And that mere suffering mortals aren't born into this world to make rich people richer. What if the maxim that "Man was not made for the Law, but the Law for Man" carried over to the economy? What if no one gave a good honest fuck if the stock price of every major industry fell through the floor and then another floor and then another, but we just focused on whether human beings could afford to live?

I don't know how long the virus is going to affect everything, I only know that the length is up to us, and if we want any kind of society, we need to take a long view. We need to protect one another. That is what society means. We take a hit for one another if we need to. If my husband cuts your meat, if my brother stocks your shelves, if my sister-in-law nurses your sick, if my brother-in-law keeps your machines running, you stop seeing our service as a right the economy deserves, but the lifeblood of the economy itself. We are it. The food service worker, the farmer, the bus drivers and train operators, the people out here, right now. The EMT and cops and firefighters and the other frontline folk the rich want to starve money from (because taxes pay salaries for some folks, don't you know). The health care workers whose hospitals might be starved for money, but who are keeping humans alive, or devoutly trying to. You tend to the people first. You backstop the people doing the work. Then maybe, we can worry about the "poor" money.

But people who don't understand that the only value money has is it's fungibility for real work and real goods, and is not valuable in itself? These people! How do they price/value themselves?

I don't know. But the idea that the stock market is more of a metric for our overall health than the evidence that a virus is killing folks is absurd and insane.

No Holiday in Cambodia

"Ocasio-Cortez already receives a high number of death threats; by allowing this PAC to air an ad that links her to genocidal violence in Cambodia, ABC grants undeserved legitimacy to ideas that make her a target."https://t.co/fUWquQjDKc

— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) September 13, 2019

This is probably deeply ill-advised of me to notice, but I'm a Gen-X blogger who realized a long time ago that I'm not really presidential material (even if the fitness of the current resident makes even me and my tattoos feel a little like, what the hell? Y not?) so let me just say--wow, but by the visibly melting frame of the yet-living Hank Kissinger, are we really going to go through whether the left-liberalism calling itself democratic socialism is kinda Khmer Rougey and not take notice of the entire right-wing foreign policy failure at influencing positive change with respects to....

Why, no. No we are not doing that. Or at least, you go ahead and do that history dissertation if you've a mind, but:  This is actually just my usual warning that conservative rhetoric is inflammatory and that inflammatory rhetoric is really the thing we should worry about regarding genocide, not mere issues of domestic economy. Because conservatives have been doing this thing with inflammatory and violent rhetoric. And sometimes it results in bad things.

Elizabeth Warren is Ready To Fight

If there was anything I wanted from a candidate, it would be that they had a serious interest in crafting really solid policies that would help raise up the personal economy of working people, instead of focusing on the stock market and whether the rich did well, and showing that they were really in the race with the intention to kick ass. Senator Warren has been out here talking about the policies (I've been a fan since Occupy, and as much as I liked Senator Sanders because of his filibuster at the time, she's had me at "hello let's stop the banks from fucking people over").

She did her damndest trolling Trump last election.  That's because she has fight in her. Her "give a shit" dial is set to 11. So her considered opinion that the House should commence with impeachment strikes me as flowing naturally from her wrath that once again, some privileged asshole has gotten over and needs to get put back in his place, and we need some damn standards about what conduct is appropriate in this office.

Right now, I know Warren has the energy and the understanding of how to correct our course. I have never been ready to endorse early, but I feel like we're in a different time and place, and I don't want this weird Swalwell, Ryan, Moulton, whatever. (They are okay people--especially Swalwell--I just think I want someone for president that I have seen being president for a little while longer than yesterday.) I don't give a shit about any damn near moderate white guy lane. I don't want people who just "think they can".  I want a person who goddamn will.   I've already made my Biden feelings pretty transparent. For me, there are two people in this race, and they are Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris. Pete and Beto and 'em need to find value from doing more and better elsewhere.

I will possibly move from this position in the coming months, but this is where I am right now. Warren wants Trump gone because he is bad and all of this looks bad, and she'll fight Mike Pence if that's the guy, too.

I like her fight. She has fight that wakes up the fight in me.

Stacey Abrams Made My Evening

Stacey Abrams in Democratic response to #SOTU: "Even as I am very disappointed by the president's approach to our problems, I still don't want him to fail. But we need him to tell the truth." https://t.co/eOKGnWx6l2 pic.twitter.com/aS5UwJIvjj

— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 6, 2019

Watching the SOTU is kind of a perfunctory thing for me because, well, I do this thing on the internet where I talk about politics stuff. But I don't think I've ever had the experience of feeling like a SOTU response actually merited more of my time--usually, these are deeply awkward at best! Sometimes they seem like just a litany of negativity aimed at the current POTUS and don't so much respond to what the POTUS said, as state "I'm agin' him!"  They can go long, the speaker has the unenviable spotlight of following the actual President, and the venue, lighting, etc. all seem so less-imbued with dignity and all that. And they are so often remembered for their awkwardness! Rubio's water-grab and Jindal's walk and Kennedy's Chapstick.  Ernst's bread bags--although in retrospect that anecdote was not as corny as it could have been.

But I think what Abrams did exceptionally well was keep her message short, relatable, on point and pleasant.  (Here's a transcript and fact check via Politico--my reference to refresh my memory, but not my entire source for what I think about her speech.)

I was worried with her upfront personal anecdote about her parents that she was about to launch into a basic stump speech that made the response more about her than about US--the United States, and how and what we are doing. But what she was laying out was a vision of shared responsibility to be good to one another because we can afford to be generous and kind when we know someone is there for you. When you know someone has your back also, you will stick up for the other. When you know the government will protect your rights and safeguard you when you need it--you can excel.

She was critical of the shutdown, because it did not reflect our values, but she did not let her criticism overwhelm the bigger message of responsible government and civic participation. Her speech was a call for elected representatives of the people to be honest and do what was right, not just what was ideologically correct. She was able to use her personal narratives to illustrate what ordinary Americans are facing all of the time, regarding the cost of health care, for example. Or even ballot access for legitimate voters.

She spoke up also for the rights and value of immigrants and for the necessity of access to health care options for everyone. She addressed climate change.  Her expression of the value of civil rights was brief but said everything.

I don't really have anything to say about Trump's speech, because it had nothing to say to me. She spoke to me. She demonstrated she understood the issues, she was positive and hopeful and smiled. And I will state for the record, she is a million times more graceful about being robbed than I am about her being robbed, and I don't even live in her state.

Here's what gives me hope--the same thing that Trump acknowledged to get the biggest applause of his own speech--the women politicians who are making history and bending this arc of justice.

I don't want every politician I love to run for President, but I totally think she belongs in the US Senate because this is a stateswoman and natural leader. I just want every good thing to come her way because her speech lifted me.

Sometimes a Sandwich is Just a Sandwich

I guess I have to be a little thankful for David Brooks because he gives me a reason to not blog (again!) about Trump/Russia, and to blog about things I really have always cared about--socioeconomics and food. Basically, he wrote a column where there was so much other stuff, but the thing everyone honed in on was the friend he was going to have lunch with in a gourmet sandwich shop, who seemed put off and so they agreed to have Mexican, instead. He seems to have taken for granted (and maybe I'm compounding the error by 'assuming his assumption") that she was put off by all the exotic Italian words on the menu because she only had a HS diploma. 

All us East Coast elites like my working class BA in English ass wondered WTF. You don't need a degree to know what you want on a sandwich or to have familiarity with an array of Italian meats and cheeses. I come from the vibrant sandwich culture of Philadelphia, where sandwich literacy begins in grade school and full sandwich literacy is assumed by completion of high school. It isn't a function of class, either. The brokest person you ever saw knows whether they want spicy ham and provolone on their sandwich, or if they're hanging with the American hoagie. They know if they want hot peppers or hold the onions. If you come up in the right neighborhood, you are beyond the what goes into a sandwich and have moved on to the sublime characteristics of what's good bread (Does the quality of the bread depend on the water? Is it the heat of the furnace?) and whether the meats and cheeses are actually authentically sourced (Quiznos--is this Italian salami? No--I ask you!) by adulthood. 

It isn't even a parochial thing. Jewish deli, Italian cheesesteaks, Vietnamese banh mi (but really, order the pho--of which there are more varieties, all great, than you can shake a stick at), if you are from a pretty diverse local culture, you don't balk at Italian on the menu. If I wandered into a Nigerian restaurant (a cuisine I'm not so well acquainted with) I'd ask a server--what do you recommend? What is spicy and what isn't? What is in this? That's not education, and that's not class--I just know you have to assume food is edible and trust that no one likes food that sucks. 

But the forces that made me omnivorous across the cultural landscape didn't make my parents. They don't do sushi. They order mostly the same five or six things from the Chinese take-out.  I don't think they can hit up an Indian buffet and deal with the abundance of distinctly different palate-choices than they grew up with. But trust this--they can figure out an Italian sandwich. They are not Italian--they just got this. They did not need Intro to Salumi 101.They just aren't going to waste a buck or twelve on food they find out they don't want to eat--

Which brings me back to Brooks' friend. Maybe she digested that what was on offer was $20 sandwiches that she could get for $8 anywhere else. Maybe she didn't want aioli breath. Maybe she just knew Mexican almost always offers better value for price since it hasn't been gentrified by third generation pezzonovantes. The thing is--a lot of us middle class/working class people who get to traipse into the upper strata aren't unprepared for the secret handshake--we just balk at the prices. 

I probably could have been a little brighter and applied to schools I knew we couldn't afford--but I chose one I knew we could swing. Was I able to apply for scholarships, etc? (Maybe.) Was I afraid I'd fail? (Always.)  Did that choice make me less competitive as an employable adult? See--I get that the first several of Brooks' paragraphs talk about what I've tried to talk about in my "Know Your Class War" pieces. He's maybe not specifically laying the blame at white privilege and the whole tilted table at specific class prejudices--but he is  bringing some of it up--and I think that's kind of positive, really. But it isn't culturally about the barriers, the sort of intellectual poll tax he's assuming people are not able to pay to enter the upwardly mobile franchise. 

People have knowledge and great opinions and different opinions and a variety of experiences and a host of likes and dislikes--but the entrée to the actual society he's talking about, after all, is still money. To see that Broadway show, to have that leisure time to catch up on news/entertainment/reading, to go eat the world? Takes money. It's always about money. To live in that school district and get the ear of that congresscritter. It isn't the capicollo. It's the Benjamins.

But maybe this also adds color to the times we see some people (even of means) treat Olive Garden like a real taste of Italy, even if they are in a major city where more authentic fare can be had--they want to know what they are getting, and they trust the chains because they did not have an environment that gave them the "eatportunities" a richer cultural environment might have.  People make checkbook decisions. They don't feel like they can afford to have an unpredictable bad time. 

You have to take it all into account--and still recognize that taste is individual, and often based in experiences. Maybe a sandwich is just a sandwich--maybe one column can't really take in the scope of choice versus economic availability. I'm not here to bury or praise Brooks, just to point out that while his example is broken, his broader topic (while he does not have the range to really explore it) is a good jumping-off point for further and better discussion. 

Know Your Class War: Middle-Aged White Americans

Sometimes, trawling for knowledge in the Internets becomes distinctively scary when you realize that the information you are searching for probably relates to yourself a lot. A recent study has found a dramatic increase in deaths among middle-aged white folks in recent years. I happen to be middle-aged white folks. This made me really all kinds of concerned--am I gonna die like right now? Because I have such a to-do list it's...probably contributing to my ultimate demise.

I have reasons for thinking this related to the class war--the middle class is eroding, and a lot of middle class people are a major purchase away from being broke or in debt, or a major health crisis away from being poor. When people like Ben Carson or Tom Cotton opine about how poor folks, disabled or lazy folks or people lulled by political correctness turn to addiction, I feel disturbed by how out of touch they really are. 

Donald Trump Has this One Weird Tax Trick

Donald Trump is trying to sell us on his one weird trick to make our economy bang along on all cylinders:

The trick is pretty simple--he will just lower all the taxes. This probably would not really work very well at all--numbers crunchers think it will cost us a hefty extra $10.8 trillion on the national debt in a decade.

Even if this had a modest effect on economic growth (which I hesitatingly concede is possible in the short term) the long-term effect on the debt is terrible. Would conservatives, especially deficit hawks, go for this nonsense? Not really. This is actually more of a treat to the rich folks than Jeb Bush's scheme. But the populist ticket is, it eliminates tax responsibility for the folks at the bottom. He's counting on the mostly broke to flock to a plan to let rich people and corporations skate on their privilege and do less to keep the government that lowest tax bracket relies on the most running, with a promise of lower taxes, because...

I think this was last-minute pulled out of some ass somewhere, actually, because in the real world, that doesn't make any damn sense. It sounds like Trump being lead dog, wants to appear to have policy ideas, while not actually having any serious grounding in what solid policy would look like.

This running for president thing, Trump concedes, has left him running towards beefing with his fellow GOP candidates in a way that might be "childish", and he also admits there might come a time when he should probably bow out. It looks to me like he's still in an enamored-with-the-idea of the White House becoming a temporary Trump property state of mind, in that this tax plan looks like a "say-anything" bid for people to love him. But what if the love for a candidate relied on more than big gestures, and over the long term, needed someone who was consistent and had compassion for people and demanded a relationship that wasn't about magnifying this one guy, but making us all work better?

I still don't see how this Trump thing is supposed to be happening. Oh it could. But like taking a barrel over Niagara Falls, it isn't going to be as thrilling as it is potentially dangerous.

Climate Sunday: Climate is a Moral Issue

The Pope visited the US, and particularly my own city this weekend, so I am going to frame this post in light of the Pope's visit, and his urgent message, downplayed to the US Congress, but stated a bit more forcefully to the UN--We have got to do something about this climate change.

Marco Rubio, presidential candidate and Catholic, reminds us that the Pope "is not a politician". Bless his heart.

Jeb Bush, presidential candidate and Catholic, advises us that the Pope "is not a scientist".

The Pope is the head of the state called "Vatican City" (can you say that Marco Rubio?--Knew you could!) and represents a religion whose adherents number over a billion. You tell me that guy isn't any kind of  politician, I will laugh at you for a long damn time. The Pope also is qualified to understand science. Actually, notwithstanding the Galileo stuff, the Catholic Church is pretty reality-based regarding science. Teilhard de Chardin and Gregor Mendel were notable religious who advanced the cause of human scientific knowledge. It's not unheard of for the Church to be ahead of the curve--look at all the educational facilities and hospitals the Church has created. They aren't anti-knowledge (says the Catholic-adjacent militant agnostic).