Category: Quick Hits

So I started to work through the year-end tradition that is naming the Ginandtacos.com Cocksucker of the Year and…frankly, I didn't have it in me last night. It felt like covering a lot of ground that I've covered quite thoroughly over the last 12 months.

In general, 2010 was a pretty lousy year. Everything that happened in Washington was disappointing.
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Our political discourse defied expectations and got even dumber. Our economic problems worsened. I could throw a dart at a list of 100 different national media and political figures and name any one of them the CotY with equal justification.

It is rare that I get overwhelmed by the negative, but right now I am. Did anything good happen this year? Is there anything we can point to and say "Hey, look!

A sign that things are getting better!"? In general I am feeling pretty low about the fact that these typical year-end rituals – reflecting on the last 12 months and looking forward to the next 12 – seem to be a fairly dismal routine. We look back at the previous year and say, "Boy, that sure sucked. Let's hope the next 12 are better!" and then 12 months from now we say the exact same thing.

It would be nice to break that cycle, but I feel like we'd have to do quite a bit of grasping at straws to re-imagine 2010 as a good year.

A lack of internet access and the Christmas season demands of three small nieces and nephews precluded finishing Part II for Wednesday. Please check back later today or, failing that, Thursday.
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But who am I kidding, you check back daily anyway.

I've just spent many hours grading 50 research papers (fortunately from upperclassmen) of considerably varying quality; accordingly my brain is oatmeal. Not the fancy steel-cut kind, but the store brand Instant kind that ends up looking like a cross between that paste they fed RoboCop and an amusement park vomit patch liberally sprinkled with sawdust. I have an Epic Funny that I planned to run today but it's just not gonna happen at the moment with two final exams to dish out and hurriedly grade starting at 8 AM tomorrow.

As an aside, I never feel bad about whining about having to get up before 8. I know a lot of you get up at 5 or 6, but I'll bet that those of you who do aren't up working until 2 AM every night. It's a fair tradeoff. But I digress. Is it possible to digress in a post about nothing?

Can we pretty much stick a fork in Obama at this point? Mike has the fancy high-end take on the recent "deal" he made over extending tax cuts to your corporate lords and masters, a deal in which, according to this much less intricate analysis, the serfs (surprisingly!) get reamed.

So, we all understand what the score is. Half the country thinks he is some combination of Satan, Osama bin Laden, and Stalin. His liberal base struggles mightily to resist the urge to puke every time he opens his mouth to explain why trading $25B in unemployment extension over 13 months for $200B in top-bracket tax cuts over two years was a good deal ("I agreed to buy the GOP a Ferrari, but it's a great deal for us because they said we can borrow it for a day. If they're not using it.") A lot of those enthusiastic new-ish voters who showed up in 2008 will never be seen again. What happens now?

The easy answer is that he gets his lunch handed to him, or more accurately that he loses Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida (not to mention ACC states like North Carolina and Virginia that he had no business winning in the first place). That's plausible.

Equally plausible is that, as usual, a good percentage of liberals, black & hispanic voters, young people, etc. – the usual Democratic suspects – will drag themselves to the polls to cast a vote for Obama with a profound sense of shame because, really, what else are you going to do? And if the GOP manages to nominate someone who is enough of an idiot (e.g. Palin) the "moderates" in the electorate will, with great disgust, cast Obama votes because they just can't stomach a country run by that idiot. Thus Obama, much like Bill Clinton, wins a second term even though no one much likes him, solely on the weakness of the alternatives.

When I see the list of ass clowns and retreads the GOP is kicking around for the 2012 nomination, the second option seems plausible. But if by some stroke of luck or strategy they can find and nominate a decent candidate, let's be honest: you can stick a fork in BO.

That said, lots can change in two years. We saw that between 2008 and 2010. By 2012 things could be…well, much worse.

Working on an FJM, but dammit if this loser didn't write an 1100-word column of stupid.

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I'll post it as soon as possible.

From MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson's classic article "Macropartisanship", American Political Science Review 83(4), pp. 1125-1142

I often express my disdain for the "Here are some links, now leave my lazy ass alone" school of blogging, but these two pieces are just too good to pass up. There's little I can do to improve upon either of these arguments.

1. Mike is pinch-hitting for Ezra Klein this week and has a great comment about the long-term effects of unemployment. That is, the effects that persist after the worker has re-joined the labor force after a period of being out of work. Simply put, you never make up what you lost, and the gap (for both communities hit hard by economic downturns and individuals who end up jobless) never closes regardless of how many years pass:

Figure 1 summarizes evidence from a study that compares the earnings trajectories of workers who lost their jobs in a sudden mass layoff in the early-1980s recessions to workers who maintained their jobs throughout those recessions (von Wachter, Song, and Manchester 2009). Prior to the recessions, the earnings of displaced and nondisplaced workers followed a similar pattern. After the recessions, however, displaced workers faced devastating long-run earnings losses. Even in 2000, almost twenty years after the 1980s recessions, a sizable earnings gap remained. According to the study, the net loss to a displaced worker with six years of job tenure is approximately $164,000, which exceeds 20 percent of the average lifetime earnings of these workers. These future earnings losses dwarf the losses associated from the period of unemployment itself.

Nice. The other day I was wondering how long it would take me to catch up to the gainfully employed members of my age-cohort, but it's good to be reminded that I never will.

2. Anne Applebaum checks in with a terrific essay on the latent conflict (and hypocrisy) of today's Tea Party-flavored GOP. Despite three years of Palin's attempt to sell Alaska as the frontier of personal responsibility, rugged individualism, and a rejection of Big Government, the state is of course a giant cesspool of Don Young's and Ted Stevens' pork barrel projects. Alaskans are practically drowning in other people's tax dollars, which highlights the tensions I spoke about last week.

If nothing else, Alaskans' interesting choice must be keeping the Republican leadership awake at night: When faced with the reality of actual funding cuts, a year or two from now, might not other Republican voters suddenly feel they need someone like Murkowski, too? This must be a particular dilemma for the new Republican speaker, John Boehner.

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During his two-decade career as a Washington insider, Boehner has resembled Murkowski a lot more than Miller. As chairman of the House Education Committee, for example, one of his primary tasks was to entertain and indulge the companies that make hundreds of millions of dollars from federally funded student loan programs and that have been major donors to his campaigns.

Will the new GOP Heroes pay anything more than lip service to their promises to "cut spending" and "eliminate earmarks"? Or will Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, et al have their lips firmly attached to the Federal teat as soon as they hit K Street?
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Yeah, I'll put money on the latter.

No morning post, because I'll be devoting the vast majority of Election Night to liveblogging. So, you know, if you get tired of listening to Wolf Blitzer or you need to see some election discussion peppered with dick jokes and profanity, make G&T your election night home. You're probably going to need to swear.

As I sat down to craft NPF late Thursday evening, a journal rejection popped up in my email and I was too bummed out to do anything except watch 15 minutes of Iron Chef and fall asleep.
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Since I had a good topic worked out, I'll do it sometime today and post it for Saturday. I'd call it "NPS" but for fear of being sued by the National Park Service.
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Which, by the way, just added its 393rd unit in a rare example of preserving the history of the almost entirely forgotten War of 1812.