The Senate Cut California’s Kids Out of the Stimulus
Unemployment in California is already near 10%. The catastrophe has begun.
As we Twitter around, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and California’s Democrats are slashing at California’s budget. A $40 billion dollar definitely no deficit is no joke. And since our Governor and the Republicans in the Legislature who have enough votes to prevent any budget from passing have been unwilling to pass any tax increase that doesn’t regressively punish the poor, you can bet one day soon Californians are going to wake up to a nightmare scenario.
Millions of people will be put out of work just as community colleges are cut. And that’s the good news. Adult education in some districts may be completely eliminated.
Californians one hope was the Stimulus bill supported by President Obama and Congressional Democrats. By now you know what happened. To appease three Republican lawmakers, who are scared shitless by Obama’s numbers anyway, $80 billion dollars or 600,000 jobs were cut from the bill.
The bulk of the cuts were made to prospective funding to support education spending by the states. This crucial money isn’t onloy going to create jobs and opportunities for kids and laid-off workers, it will save jobs. Lots of jobs.
California’s predicament foreshadows the problems the rest of the country will face soon. Services are stressed and politicians are unwilling to ask the rich to pay more in taxes. It’s an untenable situation.
Governor Schwarzenegger, speak to your Republican colleagues. Let them know that their ironic attempts to teach us about spending will cost California too dearly. Remind your peers that the Republicans let the Depression go for years before taking any serious action. See if you can get them to remember what the Hoover brand did for the GOP.
Sending money to the states now is crucial to this economy, and Washington can’t let California go down the drain. If three Republicans can cost us the educational future of our most vulnerable citizens, then we are begging for a depression, a depression that will cost our grandkids more than government spending ever could.
The Congress needs to restore the state funding for education. And they need to do it now.
President Obama, Please Don’t Get Fooled Again
Hopefully this week Barrack Obama and his White House learned a lesson.
After spending the salad days of his presidency meeting unconditionally with Republicans, our President was completely blindsided by a coordinated full-scale attack on his stimulus program.
Did Obama forget that the same maniacs who ran policy for the Bush Administration are now running the anti-Stimulus offensive?
Obama’s open hand was met with a Republican clenched fist as they parroted rhetoric the Obama 08 campaign would have combated and quelled faster than Ted Haggard could put on a pair of chaps.
The good news is we know the Republican talking points don’t work when they’re met with a coordinated rebuttal and counter punch.
Fianlly, Obama is placing the blame for this crisis back at the GOP’s feet. And he needs to trumpet how embarrassed these people should be to offer the same BS that got us here to get us out.
When FDR was elected there were already breadlines because the GOP doesn’t know to make government work. Obama needs to say he’s not willing to wait till unemployment hits 10%. He has a plan, a plan the American people demand. The GOP better get with the program or face the consequences that other Hooverites had to suffer.
Fiscal Economic Bang for the Buck
One year $ change in real GDP for a given $ reduction in federal tax revenue or increase
in spending
Tax Cuts
Non-refundable lump-sum tax rebate 1.02
Refundable lump-sum tax rebate 1.26
Temporary tax cuts
payroll tax holiday 1.29
Across the board tax cut 1.03
Accelerated depreciation 0.27
Permanent tax cuts
Extend alternative minimum tax patch 0.48
Make Bush income tax cuts permanent 0.29
Make dividend and capital gains tax cuts permanent 0.37
Cut in corporate tax rate 0.30
Spending Increases
Extending UI benefits 1.64
Temporary increase in food stamps 1.73
General aid to state governments 1.36
Increased infrastructure spending 1.59
Source: Moody’s Economy.com (PDF)
Via Rachel Maddow’s Twitter. Winky emoticon.
Guess What: You’re Not a Perfectionist
Recently North America has become overrun with perfectionists.
Everybody is a perfectionist. And because of that, nobody does anything. Why? Because they can’t stand not being perfect. It’s tragic.
You think with so many perfectionists we’d have a much more perfect world. But instead it just kind of makes makes us lazy, incompetent and slightly wussy.
But here’s the good news. You’re not a perfectionist. Your problem is that you think perfection exists—and whatever it is in your mind that supposedly is perfect is what you’re supposed to be. You’re not a perfectionist. You may be a bit of an arrogant dickwad. But you’re not a perfectionist.
From now on, a perfectionist is ONLY someone who continually tries to make things perfect. And guess what, you don’t want to be that.
Martha Stewart is a perfectionist. So was Jeffrey Dahmer in a certain way. Hitler too. Perfectionists are people so arrogant to believe that what that deem perfect should not be denied to them. It’s a double-negative clusterfuck and there are better excuses for not being all you can be. You’re picky, sensitive. Choose one of the other excuses. Be accurate. Do it just because maybe you’re trying to be a perfectionist for once in your silly, sloppy life.
Why You Aren’t a Perfectionist
1. You’re even a little fat. There that eliminates almost everyone.
2. You didn’t save your report cards.
3. You brush less than 2 minutes at a time, two times a day.
4. You believe that some skidmarks are inevitable.
5. You’ve ever waked and baked.
6. You’ve had sex for under $500.
7. You’re not Mormon.
8. You know the world continues when you close your eyes.
9. You stop a list at nine, knowing a perfect list always has ten items.
Baby College: Stimulus That Gives Poor Kids a Better Chance
Baby College—as conceived by Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children Zone—has a real chance of making a significant dent on generational poverty in our time. What we’re learning about education says that the first five years of a child’s life are crucial to a kid’s success, and Baby College makes sure the parents are up to the task of giving poor kids the good stuff middle class kids have been getting for generations.
It’s an amazing project and for fraction of the price of some tax cuts we could be giving poor kids a real shot and creating good jobs for educators across America. If it were done right, the program could be subsidized considerably by more affluent parents who could afford and would be willing to pay for the program.
Give me one good reason—besides debt and tax cut mania—that universal Baby College should not be part of the 2009 stimulus.
How You’ll Die: The 15 Leading Causes of Death
You’re going to die. You can stop worrying about that. It’s going to happen. But how you will die is the great mystery of your life. Suspenseful, chalkboard-grating music. Or is it? Read more »
The Few Things Actually Worth Worrying About
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the most awkward thing in the world is being in a car, or any close quarters, with a stranger, any person you don’t really know. In that silence, that emptiness of context, we can imagine every kind of worst-case scenario: Kidnapping, cult initiations, forced stomach stapling.
But it isn’t strangers we should spend so much time worrying about.
It’s the people we know who we might need to be more careful of, particularly if they are male and drunk and you are a foreign-born female. So the next time you are in the car with a stranger, please consult this list of threats you should actually be freaked out about. I hope it’ll remind you that your family, friends and cars are more dangerous than strangers, terrorists and thugs.
1. Unchecked Anger
We are decent beasts until anger blinds us.
2. Cars
We like to get sick with fear when we board airplanes or strap into roller coasters. But the real villains in our national tragedy are our precious automobiles. Over 40,000 people die a year on the road. That’s almost fifteen 9/11s every single year.
3. Male Family Members and Friends
(Especially if they are drunk and you are young foreign born)
It’s the strange man we fear—the footsteps in the dark—the unlocked back door. The correct part of the constant American crime fantasy is that it is usually a man hunting us. Approximately 90% of all murders are committed males. But stop worrying so much about strangers you don’t know and think about the strangers you know. Too often, we invite our predators in and offer them a drink. The leading cause of death for black women from 18-45 is domestic violence. The New York Health Department found that lovers committed 60% of all murders of women. Young foreign-born women were 87% more likely to be killed by a lover than a stranger. Females are much more likely to be victimized by someone they know. Strangers committed about 14% of all murders in 2002 while a family member or an acquaintance committed 43%. Family members commit two-thirds of murders of children under five. Two-thirds of violent crimes committed by acquaintances involved alcohol. Think about that at your next dinner party.
4. People of Your Own So-called Race
An extension of our narcissism is the belief that people who are like us are sane. But it’s the people who are most like us who are mostly likely to kill us. Blacks murdered more than 90% black murder victims. White criminals murdered more than 80% of white murder victims. I’m not saying strangers are safer than the people we know; I’m just saying they might be.
5. Your Appendix and Gallbladder
God or the creator packed us with more extra parts than IKEA ever would. Look out for these ticking time bombs inside your body. That stomach cramp may be the beginning of something very, very bad.
5. Fast Food
Heart disease is the leading cause of preventable death. We all know that each cigarette takes about thirteen minutes off of our lives. How about each French Fry? Each Biggie Shake?
6. Every Chemical/ Cigarettes
If you can’t stop breathing in all the crap in the air around you, please, at least, stop smoking.
7. Pro-Lifers
Good Christians are good for society, right? Well, large amounts of evidence show that the decrease in violent crime, which reached its lowest rate in 2005, can be directly attributed to the national legalization of Abortion in 1973. Pro-Lifers could also be called Pro-Enabling-the-Birth-of-Fatherless-Po or-Males-Who-Will-Likely-End-Up-Murderi ng-An-Aquiantance-Especially-If-They-Dr ink.
8. Detroit
This probably goes without saying, but there are some places where fearing a stranger makes sense. Detroit, for instance. “In Detroit, there were 41.79 murders per 100,000 people in 2002. This is alarmingly way above the national average rate of 5.6 for the same year.” (crime.org)
With gratitude to Hype Machine, the 5 most important songs of 2008:
5. LazyTown featuring Lil John—Cooking By the Book
This freaky mashup explains in a few minutes why American kids are so messed up. Within one decade a suburban kid goes from being spoon-fed cheery moralistic nonsense to humpdancing to brutal misogynistic nonsense. Plus it has a great beat
4. Bon Iver—Creature Fear
I wanted to pick one of the more obscure songs, but this song is the story. You know that around the blogs—in the blogrihood as they call it—Bon Iver is massive. He’s bigger than Womanizer and even Lily Allen’s Womanizer cover. I often quote myself saying, “The human heart has a weakness for the human voice.” And Justin Vernon’s overdubbed voice(s) could clear your corroded arteries given the proper amplification.
3. Jenny Lewis—Acid Tongue
Jenny Lewis’ words and voice combine to proffer so much subtext that listening to her songs too closely can trigger sudden outbreaks of painful introspection.
2. TV on the Radio—Dancing Choose
When I’m socked with intense intellectual insecurity, I often refer to TOTR’s Tunde Adebimpe as the Jean-Michel Basquiat of Indie-Rock. But there is a vitality and volatility to TV on the Radio that makes most of the sad guitar rock I listen to seem as safe as the European Masters.
1. My Morning Jacket—Evil Urges
Isn’t good rock music about making evil urges ok? Then this My Morning Jacket track is the song that sums it all up.
Jewish Jokes
“I may be a bit of a Jew.”
-Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
I believe that there are three basic themes for Jewish jokes:
Read more »
This Jew’s First (and Only) Christmas
Just before I turned eleven-years old, my mother began dating her second serious boyfriend after the divorce. His name was Meyer and he smelled like lasagna. Read more »