Just want to get this post in before the year runs out.
In 1911, Ernest Rutherford proposed a model for the atom - of electrons in the outer region and a small positive nucleus - that still holds today. There have been several refinements since then, with the Bohr, electron cloud, wave, and energy state models that were more accurate, but Rutherford was the first to point in the right direction. Prior to that atoms were thought to be either hard objects with no structure or a diffuse mixture of positive and negative charges.
Of course, since 1911, a lot more was learned - especially in the subsequent 30 years of nuclear physics. Still, it's easy to forget how not too long ago, our understanding of nature was extremely lacking.
John Walsh of America's Most Wanted speaks out about cuts and taxes:
The man is getting radical. Crooks & Liars reports:
Wow. America's Most Wanted host John Walsh has an earful about cutting the government to spark economic growth this week. He notes letting police and firefighters go is bad for our communities. Flint, MI which laid off two-thirds of its police force, according to Walsh has become a "small city murder capital of the U.S."
But then, Walsh goes full Occupy.
"Who's going to pay for the economic meltdown - the huge debt?" He says, "How about companies? Companies that have made more money than in the whole history of the world and they've done it with less people. Some of the Fortune 500 companies pay no state taxes at all. We all know about GE not paying federal taxes."
And he continues to rail on this conservative cure-all for our economic woes: "It's a quick fix but it's not a good fix. We got to make the corporations pay more money and we can't let these people [police] go. You got to speak up."
Once again, CBS Evening News has - as their leadoff story - a report about how consumers are expected to spend lots of money purchasing things this Monday. No, there are no hard figures, just projections.
"As many as 100 million shoppers could hit the stores this week."
Were the ad hominem diatribes that Hitchens specialized in evidence of his moral integrity and political courage? On the contrary, TV producers and magazine editors love sensational trash talk about media “personalities,” including Jehovah. The philippics of Hitchens were calculated and successful career moves by a gifted publicity hound who spent the last part of his career, appropriately, at Vanity Fair, a magazine best known for models and actors on its covers. (...)
Hitchens was affirming rather than challenging an elite consensus when, on behalf of atheism, he mocked religious believers as not merely mistaken but contemptible and moronic. The religious are despised and dreaded by upscale Americans, and their British court jester could say what they dare not say themselves ...
Here's a story that ran on Tuesday, December 20: (emp add)
LOS ANGELES - Bonnie Ornitz has been out of work for six months.
"All those senses of accomplishment I had from doing my job - they just seem like ancient history now," she told CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy.
Ornitz was laid off by IBM in June, after 30 years in the information technology field.
Ornitz says being out of work is "exponentially more difficult," than she thought it'd be. "Not working is not an option. I come from a family where people worked until they were retired or dead."
Ornitz has applied for 30 jobs near Los Angeles and has had just two interviews. She's collected 24 unemployment checks - $450 each week. She calls the unemployment checks "a godsend."
"It is a lifeline for me and to take that away is going to be devastating," says Ornitz.
Obama to House Republicans: "This is not a game"
If Congress does not extend the unemployment benefits program, Ornitz's checks will stop coming Jan. 7.
House rejects payroll tax cut compromise
Ornitz is frustrated by what she sees in Washington.
"They don't face the things we face. They all want my vote -- but I don't exist to them. They don't want to see it. We're not important to them."
She added: "I don't think they care one bit - on either party."
According to the National Employment Law Project, 1.8 million Americans will lose their federal unemployment benefits in January. As many as six million will lose them during 2012. California would be hardest hit - 714,000 people would be cut off.
"I'm not someone who is looking to take advantage of the system," says Ornitz. "I want to get on with my life and I want to work."
She's now planning to use her life's savings to pay her bills. She may have to sell her house if she can't find work.
Viewers come off with the impression that both parties are uninterested in extending unemployment. The facts are otherwise.
Republicans were never much interested in extending unemployment. This was evident in the negotiations of December 2010 when a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts was traded for continued 99-week unemployment insurance.
But more important is this: The current (Republican) House-passed bill that extends the Social Security cut has a provision that reduces the unemployment from 99 to 79 weeks - and possibly 59 weeks (depending on circumstances).
CBS News will not tell viewers that important aspect of the legislation in their story about the impact of unemployment insurance. CBS News will not let viewers know the House Republican position on this issue.
Paul Ryan. Here's what Time has to say about the guy:
Through a combination of hard work, good timing and possibly suicidal guts, the Wisconsin Republican managed to harness his party to a dramatic plan for dealing with America's rapidly rising public debt.
Then there's this:
The supply-sider from Janesville, Wis., tapped into a deep well of anxiety over trillion-dollar deficits at home and the threat of debt-fueled calamity in Europe.
Two points. First, there was no anxiety over European debt when Ryan came out with his plan in early 2011.
Second point is that this line:
The supply-sider from Janesville ...
should read
The economic crank from Janesville ...
because supply-side is simply wrong. It doesn't do what it claims to accomplish.
FYI, it was David Von Drehle who wrote that crappy article
Remember when the major news outlets were excitedly reporting that holiday sales were up, up, up!
As usual, they uncritically reported numbers from trade associations, like the National Federation of Retailers. Turns out the real figures for November are an increase of 0.2% from the previous year, which is terrible. The previous year, remember, was considered not-too-good because bad weather hampered shopping. This year there was no bad weather.
This is a small example of how the press has abandoned their work of being real reporters instead of parroting whatever a trade group or political party spews.
Posted at 06:00 AM ET, 12/06/2011 Obama administration targeting food stamp fraud as program reaches record highs By Ed O'Keefe
With more Americans relying on the program, the Obama administration on Tuesday plans to announce new steps to crack down on SNAP fraud amid estimates suggesting as much as $753 million in federal food aid is spent fraudulently each year.
Yes, there is fraud that needs to be looked into. But you don't announce a crack-down in the immediate aftermath of a prominent politician spewing nonsense about the program. Why? Because it will validate him.
For three years, Congress and the President have lived in different realms. Obama clearly has little use for his former colleagues in Congress. Indeed, he is making one of his campaign themes opposition to the “do-nothing Congress.” The fact that he doesn’t differentiate between his own party members in Congress and the GOP stalwarts infuriates his fellow Democrats.
Congress believes that Obama makes good speeches, delivers fanciful budgets, and then heads out of town when the rough work becomes necessary.
Both sides are right.
So now, American sees Washington, D.C., divided almost into tribes. Democratic Senators who want to do something, especially something positive that may help them retain control of the Upper Body next November. Democratic House members who just sit back and watch and hope that Republicans will continue to wander around and confront lower and lower approval ratings. Republican House members, split among those who know what a legislature is supposed to do and those who oppose the very notion of a legislature. And, Republican Senators, also split, between those bound by theological opposition to taxes on billionaires and those who would like to at least give an appearance of governing.
It is this kind of tribal behavior, encouraged by the two party’s caucuses in the House and Senate, and the indifference of the President, that now threaten the nation.
It's a mess, for sure. Hard to see how much can get done in these circumstances.
The Murdoch press constantly promotes conspiracy theories. This is no surprise since Murdoch's origins are in the extreme down-market tabloid trash, now elevated in prominence since it's on television.
When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he was 69 at the time. When Bob Dole ran for president in 1996, he was 73 at the time. When John McCain ran for president in 2008, he was 72 at the time.
In each of those instances, the age of the candidate was a topic for discussion.
If Newt Gingrich becomes the Republican candidate in 1012, he will be 69 on election day. Will be there any talk about about him possibly being too old?
And excerpts big chunks. On the failure of institutions:
The Iraq war was a kind of stress test applied to the American body politic. And every major system and organ failed the test: the executive and legislative branches, the military, the intelligence world, the for-profits, the nonprofits, the media. It turned out that we were not in good shape at all — without even realizing it. Americans just hadn’t tried anything this hard in around half a century. It is easy, and completely justified, to blame certain individuals for the Iraq tragedy. But over the years, I’ve become more concerned with failures that went beyond individuals, and beyond Iraq — concerned with the growing arteriosclerosis of American institutions. Iraq was not an exceptional case. It was a vivid symptom of a long-term trend, one that worsens year by year. The same ailments that led to the disastrous occupation were on full display in Washington this past summer, during the debt-ceiling debacle: ideological rigidity bordering on fanaticism, an indifference to facts, an inability to think beyond the short term, the dissolution of national interest into partisan advantage.
We can upgrade our iPhones, but we can’t fix our roads and bridges. We invented broadband, but we can’t extend it to 35 percent of the public. We can get 300 television channels on the iPad, but in the past decade 20 newspapers closed down all their foreign bureaus. We have touch-screen voting machines, but last year just 40 percent of registered voters turned out, and our political system is more polarized, more choked with its own bile, than at any time since the Civil War. There is nothing today like the personal destruction of the McCarthy era or the street fights of the 1960s. But in those periods, institutional forces still existed in politics, business, and the media that could hold the center together. It used to be called the establishment, and it no longer exists. Solving fundamental problems with a can-do practicality — the very thing the world used to associate with America, and that redeemed us from our vulgarity and arrogance — now seems beyond our reach.
On our economic trajectory:
What was that arrangement? It is sometimes called “the mixed economy”; the term I prefer is “middle-class democracy.” It was an unwritten social contract among labor, business, and government — between the elites and the masses. It guaranteed that the benefits of the economic growth following World War II were distributed more widely, and with more shared prosperity, than at any time in human history. In the 1970s, corporate executives earned 40 times as much as their lowest-paid employees. (By 2007, the ratio was over 400 to 1.) Labor law and government policy kept the balance of power between workers and owners on an even keel, leading to a virtuous circle of higher wages and more economic stimulus. The tax code restricted the amount of wealth that could be accumulated in private hands and passed on from one generation to the next, thereby preventing the formation of an inherited plutocracy. The regulatory agencies were strong enough to prevent the kind of speculative bubbles that now occur every five years or so: between the Great Depression and the Reagan era there was not a single systemwide financial crisis, which is why recessions during those decades were far milder than they have since become. Commercial banking was a stable, boring business. (In movies from the 1940s and 1950s, bankers are dull, solid pillars of the community.) Investment banking, cordoned off by the iron wall of the Glass-Steagall Act, was a closed world of private partnerships in which rich men carefully weighed their risks because they were playing with their own money. Partly as a result of this shared prosperity, political participation reached an all-time high during the postwar years (with the exception of those, such as black Americans in the South, who were still denied access to the ballot box).
At the same time, the country’s elites were playing a role that today is almost unrecognizable. They actually saw themselves as custodians of national institutions and interests. The heads of banks, corporations, universities, law firms, foundations, and media companies were neither more nor less venal, meretricious, and greedy than their counterparts today. But they rose to the top in a culture that put a brake on these traits and certainly did not glorify them.
... that archetypal 1978 couple with the AMC Pacer was not voting to see its share of the economic pie drastically reduced over the next 30 years. They were not fed up with how little of the national income went to the top one percent or how unfairly progressive the tax code was. They did not want to dismantle government programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which had brought economic security to the middle class. They were not voting to weaken government itself, as long as it defended their interests. But for the next three decades, the dominant political faction pursued these goals as though they were what most Americans wanted. Organized money and the conservative movement seized that moment back in 1978 to begin a massive, generation-long transfer of wealth to the richest Americans. The transfer continued in good economic times and bad, under Democratic presidents and Republican, when Democrats controlled Congress and when Republicans did.
Packer's essay - and Dreher's commentary - include harping about the change in manners and morals (1960's alert!) that isn't convincing. And the establishment in the past wasn't all that wonderful. But as to the broad outline of what's happened in the last 40 years, Packer is pretty much on target.
