The Real David Brooks

I'd just about given up on David Brooks. Often described as the "liberal's favorite conservative," Brooks can both read and write. [That's an obscure T. E. Lawrence reference, actually.]

As a student at the University of Chicago, he wrote a satirical piece for the school newspaper about a William F. Buckley book called "Overdrive." When Buckley later gave a lecture at Chicago, he announced from the podium, "David Brooks, if you're in the audience, I'd like to offer you a job."

I wish Brooks wrote more satire. His satirical pieces are much, much better than his very serious pieces.

Take for example, this biography of The Real Romney:

Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Virginia and several other swing states. He emerged, hair first, believing in America, and especially its national parks. He was given the name Mitt, after the Roman god of mutual funds, and launched into the world with the lofty expectation that he would someday become the Arrow shirt man.

Romney was a precocious and gifted child. He uttered his first words (“I like to fire people”) at age 14 months, made his first gaffe at 15 months and purchased his first nursery school at 24 months. The school, highly leveraged, went under, but Romney made 24 million Jujubes on the deal.

Mitt grew up in a modest family. His father had an auto body shop called the American Motors Corporation, and his mother owned a small piece of land, Brazil. He had several boyhood friends, many of whom owned Nascar franchises, and excelled at school, where his fourth-grade project, “Inspiring Actuaries I Have Known,” was widely admired.

The Romneys had a special family tradition. The most cherished member got to spend road trips on the roof of the car. Mitt spent many happy hours up there, applying face lotion to combat windburn.

The teenage years were more turbulent. He was sent to a private school, where he was saddened to find there are people in America who summer where they winter. He developed a lifelong concern for the second homeless, and organized bake sales with proceeds going to the moderately rich.

 The whole thing is here.

The Emperor's New Clothes

Why does Paul Ryan always remind me of The Emperor's New Clothes, the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale? In it, two weavers make a suit of clothes for the king that they claim is made of a special cloth, invisible to stupid people or people unfit for the office they hold. When the king dons his "new suit," and sees nothing at all, he and the members of his court are too afraid of seeming stupid or incompetent to admit aloud the obvious.

In his analysis of Ryan's famous "budget," Paul Krugman suggests the solution to my puzzle:

First, there are a set of tax cuts for higher income brackets and corporations. The Tax Policy Center (pdf) estimates the cost of these tax cuts, relative to current policy, at $4.3 trillion.

Second, there are spending cuts. Of these, approximately $800 billion comes from converting Medicaid into a block grant that grows only with population and overall inflation – a big cut compared with projections that take into account rising health-care costs and an aging population (since the elderly and disabled account for most Medicaid expenses). Another $130 billion comes from doing something similar to food stamps. Then there are odds and ends – Pell grants, job training. Be generous and call all of this $1 trillion in specified cuts.

On top of this we should add the $700 billion in Medicare cuts that Ryan denounces in Obamacare but nonetheless incorporates into his own plan.

So if we look at the actual policy proposals, they look like this:

Spending cuts: $1.7 trillion
Tax cuts: $4.3 trillion

This is, then, a plan that would increase the deficit by around $2.6 trillion.

How, then, does Ryan get to call himself a fiscal hawk? By asserting that he will keep his tax cuts revenue-neutral by broadening the base in ways he refuses to specify, and that he will make further large cuts in spending, in ways he refuses to specify.

And this is what passes inside the Beltway for serious thinking and a serious commitment to deficit reduction.

 Indeed.

Job Creators

Andrew Tobias recommended this 6-minute video, and so do I.

Sempringham Calls Another One

It was no surprise to the highly intelligent readers of Sempringham when Paul Ryan was announced as Mitt Romney's choice for vice president. After all, they'd had the tea leaves read for them.

Why The Stock Market Is Still Not A Safe Place To Be

Something very significant happened on Wall Street last Wednesday: HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, decided to get into the stock market at a firm called Knight Capital Group. Before they pulled the plug, HAL had lost the company $440 million. Not bad for a half-hour's work.

HAL was able to do it because the days of value investing in the stock market are close to over. Instead, the place is given over to boys with their toys: high speed computerized stock trading programs that buy and sell huge blocks of stocks several times a day based on penny differences in price. No "buy and hold" for this crowd.

Felix Salmon has an amazing animated graphic which illustrates the increase of computerized high frequency trading. Please take a look at it. Please, please, please. Keep an eye on the dates in the lower left-hand corner, and watch it to the end. (It's in a continuous loop, it will be obvious when it has started again.)

Salmon says:

Back in 2007, I wasn’t a fan of a financial-transactions tax; today, I am. And this chart shows better than anything why my opinion has changed. The stock market is clearly more dangerous than it was in 2007, with much greater tail risk; meanwhile, in return for facing that danger, society as a whole has received precious little utility. Are spreads a tiny bit tighter than they might be otherwise? Perhaps. But that has no effect on stock-market returns for long-term or even medium-term investors.

The stock market today is a war zone, where algobots fight each other over pennies, millions of times a second. Sometimes, the casualties are merely companies like Knight, and few people have much sympathy for them. But inevitably, at some point in the future, significant losses will end up being borne by investors with no direct connection to the HFT world, which is so complex that its potential systemic repercussions are literally unknowable. The potential cost is huge; the short-term benefits are minuscule. Let’s give HFT the funeral it deserves.

That would be a start, but just a start.  Glass-Steagall, the repeal of which played a large part in the Crash of 2008, is no closer to being restored than it was then. Not a confidence builder.

Andrew Sorkin reports, "Of 878 students at 18 high schools across 11 different states surveyed by the Financial Literacy Group, three-quarters of them said they agreed with this statement: “The stock market is rigged mostly to benefit greedy Wall Street bankers.”

Pretty smart kids.

Very Cool

Don't miss this little video that compares the speeds of Olympic 100-meter sprinters since 1896. Maybe, like me, you don't really care about track and field. Watch it anyway. It's very cool.

Romney's Tax Plan

Kevin Drum is my go-to guy for clear analysis of tax policy. This rundown on the recent Brookings Institution/Tax Policy Center report on Romney's proposed tax cuts lays it out very clearly.

There are two parts to Mitt Romney's tax plan. Here they are:

Part 1: Romney wants to lower tax rates. This part of his plan is extremely detailed. Tax rates would be cut by a fifth across the board. Taxation of investment income would be eliminated for families with incomes under $200,000. The estate tax would be eliminated. The Alternative Minimum Tax would be eliminated. Obamacare's payroll tax increase on the wealthy would be repealed. The corporate tax rate would be cut to 25%.

Part 2: Romney wants to eliminate or reduce various tax credits and deductions in order to increase revenue. This would make up for the lost revenue from Part 1. However, he has provided zero detail about this part of his plan.

Isn't that odd? Romney has extremely specific thoughts about lowering tax rates and is willing to share chapter and verse. But when it comes to the part where you raise some taxes to make up for it, he suddenly thinks he ought to defer to Congress on the details instead of doing their job for them. Why is that?

The analysts at the Tax Policy Center provide a pretty good clue today. Romney himself won't say anything about the credits and deductions he'd target, so they made the most progressive assumptions they possibly could about them by "starting at the top." That is, they made a list of all the possible credits and deductions and then completely eliminated them for the highest income group. This would produce the largest possible increase for the wealthy. Then they worked their way down, and by the time they got to the bottom group they reduce the credits and deductions only enough to make the whole plan revenue neutral. This produced the smallest possible increase for the non-wealthy.

So: the biggest possible increase for the wealthy, the smallest possible increase for the less wealthy. For technical reasons, they could only model this down to $200,000, but that's enough to show what Romney's plan would do. ... When you combine the decrease in rates and the increase from credits and deductions, millionaires would get a tax cut of 4.1%. Everyone under $200,000 would get a tax increase of 1.2%.

At this point, President Obama's problem is trying to get people to believe that Romney actually supports a plan that's so outlandishly friendly to the rich. When the Priorities USA Super PAC tried to inform voters about Paul Ryan's similar plan, Robert Draper reports that "the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing." And Romney, of course, will hide behind the fact that he himself hasn't endorsed any particular basket of tax increases to make up for his rate cuts, so the Brookings analysis is just guesswork.

 

Mr. Bean goes to Poland

Loved this, from Paul Krugman:

So on the third leg of his foreign tour, Mr. Bean Mitt Romney lavished praise on the Polish economy. It wasn’t quite as big a blooper as his praise for Israel’s single-payer-plus-price controls health care system, but it wasn’t good.


For one thing, Poland has substantially bigger government than the US; in 2007, that is, pre-crisis, the Polish government spent 42 percent of GDP, compared with 37 in the United States. And despite what Romney claimed, there was no obvious trend toward smaller government; Polish spending as a share of GDP was about the same in 2007 as it had been in 2000.

Oh, and universal health care too.

What's the Matter with Texas?

Ian Millhiser at Think Progress offers a profile of Ted Cruz, who will be the Republican candidate for Kay Baily Hutchinson's seat in the Senate. According to Millhiser, Cruz has "considerable intellect." I guess the bar for considerable intellect has been lowered considerably lately. As Millhiser details, Cruz:

1) Believes George Soros is behind a U.N. plot to eliminate golf courses.

2) Thinks Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

3) Thinks two states can join together to ignore national laws they don't like.

4) Thinks Sharia law is an enormous problem in the U.S.

And my personal favorite:

5)

Cruz’s very first campaign ad encouraged GOP primary voters to support him because he helped make it easier for Texas to kill an “illegal alien.” According to the ad, “Cruz fought all the way to the Supreme Court” after “the UN and World Court overruled a Texas jury’s verdict to execute an illegal alien.” In reality, the case Cruz won had nothing to do with whether Texas had the authority to kill this man. Rather, it concerned whether Texas could defy a treaty requiring it to inform foreign nationals who are arrested of their right “to request assistance from the consul of his own state.” Even North Korea honored this treaty that Cruz fought to undermine.

Something is misfiring in this considerable intellect.

Who Didn't See This Coming?

The three most predictable news stories following a mass shooting:

1.  Gun control advocates call for stricter laws.

2.  Gun sales increase.

3.  Man shoots self in buttocks, injuring others.

Thorium

All of sudden I'm seeing articles and videos about thorium, a radioactive metal once considered for nuclear power plants but rejected in favor of uranium. This article from Popular Mechanics actually has the best executive summary. A snippet, with my highlights:

Three to four times more plentiful than uranium, today's most common nuclear fuel, thorium packs a serious energetic punch: A single ton of it can generate as much energy as 200 tons of uranium, according to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carlo Rubbia. In the mid-twentieth century, some U.S. physicists considered building the nuclear power landscape around thorium. But uranium-fueled reactors produced plutonium as a byproduct, a necessary ingredient for nuclear weapons production, and uranium ended up dominating through the Cold War and beyond. 

[snip]

In a traditional light water reactor, uranium-235 interacts with uranium-238 to produce plutonium-239 as a byproduct—a radioactive isotope that can be used for weapons. But when thorium is used instead of uranium-238 as a fertile material to kickstart nuclear fission, the thorium eventually "becomes uranium-233, which fissions almost instantaneously in the reactor, generating other isotopes that make power," Grae says. That means usable weapons-grade nuclear material is not produced, which would theoretically eliminate some security issues now associated with nuclear plants. Grae also claims thorium-powered light water reactors produce a much smaller volume of waste products that decay to relatively safe levels in just six to seven hundred years.

 Interesting.

Aurora, Colorado

Roger Ebert in today's NY Times:

Immediately after a shooting last month in the food court of the Eaton Centre mall in Toronto, a young woman named Jessica Ghawi posted a blog entry. Three minutes before a gunman opened fire, she had been seated at the exact place he fired from.

“I was shown how fragile life was,” she wrote. “I saw the terror on bystanders’ faces. I saw the victims of a senseless crime. I saw lives change. I was reminded that we don’t know when or where our time on Earth will end. When or where we will breathe our last breath.”

This same woman was one of the fatalities at the midnight screening in Aurora. The circle of madness is closing.

I've given up on gun control. There are valid arguments against gun control, but the loony bin is overflowing. This is partly the fault of gun control advocates, who think there's no valid reason to want a gun, so don't understand why anyone would resist gun control. It's certainly the fault of the American Rifle Association, which created and encourages the stereotype of the gun owner as a paranoid fetishist.

It's not going to be resolved in my lifetime.

Thanks, Senator McCain

Wow! Somebody in the GOP is finally standing up to the nut cases.



There is still a large group of Americans who think Joseph McCarthy was a patriot. 

Why Won't Romney Release His Tax Returns?

The contemplation of Romney's refusal to release tax returns left out an obvious and likely possibility:

In one or more years he paid no taxes at all, or ridiculously low taxes, on significant income. We'll call that one the Leona Helmsley Defense.

Romney and the Middle Class

The Tax Policy Center has released it's analysis of Romney's tax plans and Ezra Klein at the Washington Post created a little chart to compare Romney's vision to Obama's:

The numbers along the bottom are the income quintiles: lowest 0-20 percent, etc. The last two bars represent the effect on the top 1 percent and the top .1 percent. You're going to have to click on the chart to make it bigger in order to read it. Among the many jaw-dropping aspects of Romney's plan, please notice that taxes on the lowest 20 percent will increase.

Mike Lux at Crooks and Liars:

As someone in Romney’s opposing camp, I am enjoying the spectacle [of the increasing call for Romney's tax records]. But this whole mess with Romney and his financial secrets reminds us again of a bigger, deeper truth: the rich - at least people who got rich the way Romney did - really are different than you and I. The story of how Mitt Romney got so wealthy, and then how he hid all that wealth and avoided taxes on it, is also the story of the modern decline of America’s middle class.

Right around the time Mitt Romney went into business in the early ‘80s was the moment when, aided directly by Reagan administration policies and the kind of corporate sharks Romney became, the middle class in this country began to decline in size, strength and prosperity. Mitt Romney and his fellow Wall Street sharks became so stunningly wealthy precisely because most of the rest of us got poorer. The working and middle class in this country got laid off, down-sized, out-sourced; their wages went down or flat, their out-of-pocket health care costs went up, and their pensions disappeared; the price of energy and groceries and other necessities went way up; and when the bubble caused by the out of control speculation of Wall Street burst, their one remaining asset - their homes - lost much of its value.

Meanwhile, the guys like Romney who were doing the out-sourcing, lay-offing, wage and benefit-slashing, and financial speculating got filthy rich, and then because of our unprogressive tax laws and because they used Cayman Island and Swiss bank accounts to hide their money, they paid a smaller share of their taxes than those hard-pressed folks in the middle class. [Bolding and paragraph structure courtesy of me.]

Back in January, Romney gave a different view of things:

According to Mitt Romney, the nation's growing focus on income inequality is all about envy.

"You know, I think it's about envy. I think it's about class warfare," the leading Republican presidential candidate said Wednesday on The Today Show.

Obama on the Right Track

Two good current ads from the Obama campaign:

For days we've been reading that the Bain attacks are working, so it's no wonder that, despite Romney's demand for an apology (which would apparently remove forever the possibility of Obama being called a "great" president), the Obama campaign is not backing down. I was worried when I saw Krugman's VSPs (Very Serious People) again missing the forest for the trees.

Paul Krugman:

A lot of people inside the Beltway are tut-tutting about the recent campaign focus on Mitt Romney’s personal history — his record of profiting even as workers suffered, his mysterious was-he-or-wasn’t-he role at Bain Capital after 1999, his equally mysterious refusal to release any tax returns from before 2010. Some of the tut-tutters are upset at any suggestion that this election is about the rich versus the rest. Others decry the personalization: why can’t we just discuss policy?

And neither group is living in the real world.

About those tax returns:



And I especially liked this one:



Why is Romney refusing to release more than his most recent tax returns? I've come up with four possible explanations, though I expect there are more.

He's hiding something that would be very bad for his campaign. The most obvious explanation, though even Krugman couches it with an adverb: "[Romney is] evidently afraid to let voters see his tax returns." Let's call it the Willie Sutton defense.

He's hiding something that would be injurious to himself in the business world, by either tipping his hand on investments or showing himself to be duplicitous to his partners or others: the Unregulated Business defense. Since Romney has already released his 2010 tax returns, the "tipping his hand" part seems unlikely.

He strongly believes his personal privacy is very important, and should not be compromised in order to run for political office. Let's call this one the Candide defense.

There's nothing there. He's just waiting for the attacks to peak, then he'll release his tax returns to show that his detractors are just a bunch of fruit cakes. The Obama's Birth Certificate defense.

If the reason he's reluctant to release the tax returns is related to the Candide or Obama's Birth Certificate defense, we should expect them to be released fairly soon. He's taking a beating.

If the reason he's holding back is either the Willie Sutton or Unregulated Business defense, we'll probably never see them.

Can you think of another reason he won't release his tax returns? Let me know if you can, but be sure to give the defense a name.

Some Good Zingers

Although the Tea Party crowd claims the Founding Fathers as their political ancestors, their sense of American History is based on fantasy.

Benjamin Franklin:

"All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it. "

James Madison:

"There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by … corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses."

Thomas Jefferson:

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." 

Hat tip to Hullabaloo and Andrew Tobias.

Tobias then quotes a reader, Mike Martin:

The Republicans trumpet their anti-tax message cloaked in ‘Tea Party’ garb as if the Boston Tea Party was a tax protest. Read the history: the British government had just LOWERED the tax on tea when the protest occurred. The issue was not the tax requirement, it was that only licensed tea merchants could sell tea, which undercut both John Hancock’s commercial empire and the widespread smuggling of tea. But perhaps more importantly, after the American Revolution they formed a government without a strong power to tax. After the Shay anti-tax rebellion, George Washington and others held the Constitutional Congress with the Shay’s rebellion as the clarion call for a stronger central government. In other words, the United States of America, the government formed under the U.S. Constitution, was formed precisely to COUNTER an anti-tax rebellion. So the existing Republican Party forms its foundation on opposition to the United States of America and its Constitution: they regularly claim that government is the enemy of the people … ”

 Mike Martin has it absolutely correct.

Musical Interlude

I used to own the album shown in this video. It's a bootleg copy of a Bob Dylan recording session. But I lost it in a one of Chicago's wonderful floods.

And I always loved this particular cut of the album. Dylan was going to sing it on the Ed Sullivan show, and Ed was cool with that, but the CBS lawyers freaked out, and said he couldn't sing it. Dylan walked off the set, and never appeared on the show.

Listening to it now, you might wonder what the hubbub was about. Funny how often that happens.

It's a very funny song, and it makes fun of a bunch of people who – decades later – look absolutely ridiculous. Sort of like Republicans today.

The Education of Judge Richard Posner

Back in 2009 we alerted you to the fact that one of the "intellectual giants" of the conservative movement, federal circuit court judge Richard Posner, had become a Keynsian.

It's taken three years, but Posner kept thinking:

Posner expressed admiration for President Ronald Reagan and the economist Milton Friedman, two pillars of conservatism. [Give him time; give him time.] But over the past 10 years, Posner said, "there's been a real deterioration in conservative thinking. And that has to lead people to re-examine and modify their thinking."

"I've become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy," he said. [Editorial note: That was 32 years ago.]

Posner, who was appointed to the appeals court by Reagan, speculated that the leaks about the deliberations over the national health care law — which are apparently designed to discredit Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion upholding the law — would backfire. "I think these right-wingers who are blasting Roberts are making a very serious mistake," he said.

"Because if you put [yourself] in his position ... what's he supposed to think? That he finds his allies to be a bunch of crackpots? Does that help the conservative movement? I mean, what would you do if you were Roberts? All the sudden you find out that the people you thought were your friends have turned against you, they despise you, they mistreat you, they leak to the press. What do you do? Do you become more conservative? Or do you say, 'What am I doing with this crowd of lunatics?' Right? Maybe you have to re-examine your position."

Tee-Hee!

Amy Sullivan in The New Republic online:

A Republican state representative in Louisiana now says she was confused when she enthusiastically supported Gov. Bobby Jindal’s voucher bill to fund private schools. From the Livingston Parish News (free registration required):

"WATSON — Rep. Valarie Hodges, R-Watson, says she had no idea that Gov. Bobby Jindal’s overhaul of the state’s educational system might mean taxpayer support of Muslim schools …

'I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school,' Hodges said.

Hodges mistakenly assumed that 'religious' meant 'Christian.'

HB976, now signed into law as Act 2, proposed, among other things, a voucher program allowing state educational funds to be used to send students to schools run by religious groups …

'Unfortunately it will not be limited to the Founders’ religion,' Hodges said. 'We need to insure that it does not open the door to fund radical Islam schools. There are a thousand Muslim schools that have sprung up recently. I do not support using public funds for teaching Islam anywhere here in Louisiana.'"

I love that line about mistakenly assuming that “religious” meant “Christian.” It happens to so many people…

The Meritocracy at Work

Q.  How do you build your tax-sheltered IRA to a value of $100 million when the annual contribution is limited to $6,000?

 A.  Be Mitt Romney.

A New Blog

I've started a new blog that I'm calling Down the Rabbit Hole. It's where I'll be putting the little stories I discover when researching 19th century photographs. The first post is up.

If you're interested in those things, you might want to subscribe or sign up for the RSS feed, so you don't have to check it all the time.

BOHICA!

Bend over, here it comes again!

Losses on JPMorgan Chase’s bungled trade could total as much as $9 billion, far exceeding earlier public estimates, according to people who have been briefed on the situation.

[snip]

“Essentially, JPMorgan has been operating a hedge fund with federal insured deposits within a bank,” said Mark Williams, a professor of finance at Boston University, who also served as a Federal Reserve bank examiner.

A spokesman for the bank declined to comment.

 Gee, I wonder what Jamie Dimon's thoughts are on what the function of regulators should be.

Affordable Care Act

Most pundits expect the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act – or large parts of it. As I write, announcement of the decision is still 3 hours away.

This morning the NY Times' Linda Greenhouse has a prediction:

The most useful way to read a Supreme Court decision, I figured out years ago, is to start with the dissents. That way, you can proceed to the majority opinion as a better informed reader, with the full range of possibilities in view: What arguments did the majority reject? Which did it respond to, and which did it not even bother to acknowledge? Most important, what was the disagreement really about?

[snip]

Since this column will be coexisting in cyberspace with the court’s Affordable Care Act ruling, due on Thursday morning, it’s undoubtedly foolhardy to repeat my prediction that the court will uphold the law. Well there, I just did.

And who does she see as the deciding vote? Chief Justice Roberts.

If she's right, I think we can expect Scalia to actually pop!

Forward to the Past

From the Washington Post.

Tipping

I'm usually a big tipper. Usually more than 20%.

Why? I was once a cab driver, and I learned how important tips are to people in jobs that are tipped.

But I didn't know this:  the minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour. And it hasn't changed since 1996, thanks to Herman Cain. Remember him?

Read about it here.

How Do YOU Spell Freedom?

Maybe, like me, you've listened to some Tea Party paranoiac bemoan his loss of freedom and wonder what the hell he's talking about. This should shed some light on that.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

They closed his Hooters!

Mattie Lyon Breed

Here's a light rabbit hole story for you. I recently picked up this photograph of a very attractive lady, identified on the back as Mattie Lyon Breed and Mrs. R. E. Breed.

Mattie Lyon Breed

The actual photo is somewhat faded, so I've darkened it a bit to make it clearer. Here's the back:

Reverse

Before we start researching her name, what can we say about the photograph? Well, first of all, it's what was called a carte de visite, which was – for all intents and purposes – the first commercially successful photograph that could be reproduced in limitless numbers. Cartes de visite were the size of a modern business card, and were commonly passed out like calling cards among friends. You can see on the back, at the bottom, that the cards were usually sold by the dozen. They were quite the rage for a decade or so, and people often collected their friends' cartes de visite in albums. Sort of the original Facebook. Photographers would often take portraits of famous persons, then sell their images as cartes de visite. They were so commonplace that many "original" carte de visite portraits of Abraham Lincoln, for example, are still available for modest sums.

Cartes de visite were very popular in the 1860's, but generally died out in the 1870's as the larger cabinet cards appeared, though they continued to appear even in the 1890's. So here we have a general time-frame for the portrait.

An unusual item in the picture, as it turns out, is the bow. I looked through quite a number of 19th century pictures while researching this portrait, and the only time I saw big bows under the ladies' chins have been within a few years of 1870. That doesn't exactly nail the date, but it's suggestive.

Finally, there's the photographer: Graham, at 93 Wood St., Pittsburgh.  The Pittsburgh City Directory for 1867 contains this entry:

Pittsburgh City Directory, 1867

There was no Directory entry for Thomas Graham in 1866 or 1868, so we would be justified in thinking this portrait was taken in about 1867. A puddler, by the way, was someone who held a difficult and dangerous job in the iron industry.

So we've established a reasonable timeframe for this portrait; let's flip the back of the photo 90º and consider what's written on it.

This is a portrait of Mattie Lyon Breed, also known as Mrs. R.E. Breed, who was the mother of "flnfer" Breed. (I just can't make that out; can you?)

As luck would have it, there WAS a Mattie Breed married to an R. Breed, and only one, who lived in Pittsburgh at about this time. We find them both in the 1870 Census:

1870 Census of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

If you look carefully, you'll see that Mattie Breed, the mother of three regularly-spaced children, was 32 years old in 1870, which would make her about 29 in the picture. Richard Breed, her husband, had real estate valued at $40,000 and a personal estate valued at $10,000, both of which were a LOT of money in 1870. I mean, a LOT! So maybe it's not surprising that they had a cook, a chamber maid, and a gardener living with them; because they had a LOT of money.

Throughout the 1860's, Richard E. Breed is listed in the Pittsburgh Directory as a dealer in china, glass, and "queensware," a type of Wedgwood china. In the census above you can barely make out the word "merchant" in his occupation field.

At some time in the next 30 years Richard and Mattie moved to Marion, Indiana, with their son, Richard E. Breed, where the younger Richard took up glassmaking on a large scale and became president and treasurer of the Marion Flint Glass Co.

Boys work here but the boss would not permit any photographing.

If you Google "Marion Flint Glass Co." you will find several pages of reference to a 1908 photograph taken there by Lewis Hine, with Hine's annotation, "Boys work here but the boss would not permit any photographing."

Hine took other photographs of Indiana glassworkers, however.

The Ball Team, composed mainly of glass workers. Indiana, 1908, by Lewis Hine

Midnight at the Glassworks, Indiana, 1908, by Lewis Hine

By 1900, Richard, Sr., was owner of a general insurance agency named Breed & Ball. When you say the name Ball in Indiana, it means something. Ball jars may seem mundane today, but they made the Ball family very comfortable financially, and quite the philanthropists. Though I haven't researched it, it seems very likely, with his son in the glass business, that Richard Breed Sr.'s partner was connected to the Ball family.

The 1900 Census showed Richard and Mattie still living in Marion, but reading between the lines there's more than a hint of sadness. Mattie, or Martha, as she's called here, is shown as the mother of six children, of whom only four are still living. Sadly, this would not be considered unusual at the time.

Whether it was the deaths of her children or another cause, Mattie's health deteriorated to the point that in 1910 the census taker found her a patient at the Norway's Sanitorium in Indianapolis.

Norway's Sanitorium

The website Historic Indianapolis describes Norway's Sanitorium:

Neurologist Dr. Albert E. Sterne ... opened Norways, a private sanatorium, in 1898. It was a hospital for people with nervous and mental disorders at a time when mental illness was starting to be understood as a disease. The facility attracted customers from across the country and, at an average price of $50 per week by 1918, this was an expensive stay. Advertising mentions that the sanatorium was for people who were “used to luxury.” Attendants treated all forms of “constitutional maladies,” (including rheumatism, diabetes, stomach and kidney troubles, paralysis, and drug addictions) particularly those cured by the use of electricity, baths, massage, diet, and rest.

I can't say it's typical, but when the census taker arrived there on April 18, she recorded 28 employees in residence (counting Dr. Sterne) – and two patients.

1910 Census of Norway Sanitorium (partial)

Online genealogies of the Breed family say Mattie died in Nashville, Indiana, in 1917, and is buried in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh. Her husband, Richard, died in 1923. Online genealogies are notoriously unreliable. These particular ones are unsourced or poorly sourced, and I was unable to confirm the dates, but think that in this case they may be correct.

In 1906 Mattie's son, Richard E., Jr., the employer of child labor, was an original investor/partner in the American Gas and Electric Co., later to become the American Electric Power Co., and was well on his way to joining the meritocracy.

Jon Stewart Does It Again

Last month the NY Times' Bill Keller had a column titled Murdoch's Pride is America's Poison. "At last!" I cried, "Somebody is about to do an Edward R. Murrow on Fox News."

I was being delusional, of course. The column was milquetoast in comparison to Murrow.

So for the time being, we still have to depend on a comedian to let us know that Fox hasn't changed a bit.

The Daily Show

Mitch McConnell Lies. Imagine That.

There was once a time in America when facts and truth mattered. Then the modern Republican Party happened. And now everything is corrupted.

Kevin Drum:

From Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, describing the Obama campaign on Fox News last Friday:

What they’re trying to do is intimidate donors to outside groups that are critical of the administration. The campaign has rifled through donors' divorce records. They’ve got the IRS, the SEC and other agencies going after contributors trying to frighten people and intimidate them out of exercising their rights to participate in the American political discourse....Of course, the temptation of anybody in power is to try to silence your critics.

If that were true, I'd be the first to call for Obama's impeachment. But it's not, of course. McConnell just figures he can say whatever he wants and no one will really call him on it. And he's right about that.

I would add, unnecessarily, that Fox News is the absolutely best place to tell lies. After all, Fox News watchers know less about current events than people who watch no news at all. Imagine that.

Jamie Dimon's Testimony

It is really breathtaking how incredibly corrupt Congress is these days. The future looks bleak.

The Daily Show

St. Paul of Krugman

Politico is not a place I like to be, but they have done a real service by collecting 13 of Paul Krugman's best GOP zingers.

My favorites:

"Sometimes you do wonder if these guys are moles, Manchurian candidates for I don't know who, if their real job is to bring down America because they really are doing the best they can.” — May 18, 2012, on MSNBC's “Martin Bashir,” speaking about House Speaker John Boehner’s and other Republican leaders’ economic policies.

“I have a structural hypothesis here. You have a Republican ideology, which Mitt Romney obviously doesn’t believe in. He just oozes insincerity, that’s just so obvious. But all of the others are fools and clowns. And there is a question here, my hypothesis is that maybe this is an ideology that only fools and clowns can actually believe in, and that’s the Republican problem.” — Nov. 20, 2011, on ABC’s “This Week,” speaking about the 2012 Republican presidential contenders. 

“All he does is make scary noises about the deficit, with mood music, with organ music in the background about how ominous it is, and then propose a plan that would in fact increase the deficit.” — May 3, 2012, speaking with TPM about Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI).

“Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are? If you’ve been following his campaign from the beginning, that’s a question you have probably asked many times.” — April 22, 2012, in a column titled “The Amnesia Candidate.” 

“If you don’t know multiple people who are suffering, then you must be living in a very rarefied environment. You must be maybe a member of the Romney clan, or something.” — June 9, 2012, speaking at the Netroots Nation conference.

“It was his time, the Republican base does not want Romney and they keep on looking for an alternative, and Newt — although somebody said ‘he’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like,’ but he is more plausible than the other guys that they’ve been pushing up.” — Nov. 20, 2011, on ABC's "This Week," speaking about Newt Gingrich’s surge in the 2012 race.

“The odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.” — Aug. 28, 2011, in a column titled “Republicans Against Science.” 

“Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Actually, it’s the noise a great political party makes when it loses what’s left of its mind. And it happened — where else? — on Fox News on Sunday, when Mitt Romney bought fully into the claim that gas prices are high thanks to an Obama administration plot.” — March 22, 2012, in a column titled “Paranoia Strikes Deeper."

“If Ron Paul got on TV and said ‘Gah gah goo goo debasement! theft!’ — which is a rough summary of what he actually did say — his supporters would say that he won the debate hands down.” — May 1, 2012, blogging “On the Uselessness of Debates.”

“In fact, all four significant Republican presidential candidates still standing are fiscal phonies. They issue apocalyptic warnings about the dangers of government debt and, in the name of deficit reduction, demand savage cuts in programs that protect the middle class and the poor. But then they propose squandering all the money thereby saved — and much, much more — on tax cuts for the rich.” — — March 1, 2012, in a column, “Four Fiscal Phonies,” about Romney's warning of a "Greece-style collapse" under Obama. 

Ray Bradbury

I'm not a big reader of science fiction, but this article made me realize what a loss Ray Bradbury's death was. A sample:

... [I]t is worth pausing, on the occasion of Ray Bradbury’s death, to notice how uncannily accurate was his vision of the numb, cruel future we now inhabit. 

Mr. Bradbury’s most famous novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” features wall-size television screens that are the centerpieces of “parlors” where people spend their evenings watching interactive soaps and vicious slapstick, live police chases and true-crime dramatizations that invite viewers to help catch the criminals. People wear “seashell” transistor radios that fit into their ears. Note the perversion of quaint terms like “parlor” and “seashell,” harking back to bygone days and vanished places, where people might visit with their neighbors or listen for the sound of the sea in a chambered nautilus.

Mr. Bradbury didn’t just extrapolate the evolution of gadgetry; he foresaw how it would stunt and deform our psyches. “It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you,” says the protagonist of the prophetic short story “The Murderer.” “First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy.” 

Anyone who’s had his intended tone flattened out or irony deleted by e-mail and had to explain himself knows what he means. The character complains that he’s relentlessly pestered with calls from friends and employers, salesmen and pollsters, people calling simply because they can. Mr. Bradbury’s vision of “tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, ‘Now I’m at Forty-third, now I’m at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first” has gone from science-fiction satire to dreary realism. 

“It was all so enchanting at first,” muses our protagonist. “They were almost toys, to be played with, but the people got too involved, went too far, and got wrapped up in a pattern of social behavior and couldn’t get out, couldn’t admit they were in, even.” 

Most of all, Mr. Bradbury knew how the future would feel: louder, faster, stupider, meaner, increasingly inane and violent. Collective cultural amnesia, anhedonia, isolation. The hysterical censoriousness of political correctness. Teenagers killing one another for kicks. Grown-ups reading comic books. A postliterate populace. “I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths,” says the fire captain in “Fahrenheit,” written in 1953. “No one wanted them back. No one missed them.” Civilization drowned out and obliterated by electronic chatter.

The rest of the article is here.

You probably figured out the meaning of anhedonia.

Thinking Like Descartes

The key to understanding Republicans lies in understanding that Republicans are ununderstandable.

Rene Descartes had it pretty well summed up:



Get it? SUMmed up? Careful, this video has bad language in it.

Austerity vs Stimulus

In this BBC discussion with austerity advocates in Britain, Paul Krugman promises to be a fiscal hawk when the Lesser Depression is over. Actually, a pretty succinct encapsulation of the austerity vs stimulus argument, with both sides making their points.

And reasonably short.

Krugman is right that the austerity advocates here base their solution on ideology rather than empirical evidence, but he just couldn't stop himself from being insulting about it.

The Donald

It appears that Mitt Romney is the only person alive who's afraid of Donald Trump. George Will isn't. On the Sunday talks Will called him a "bloviating ignormus." That's putting it mildly.

But Alexandra Petri has it right: Donald Trump beats George Will. Although how somebody who was seven in 1995 has a column in the Washington Post is a mystery.

You'd Think This Many Starlings Would be a Disaster

What do you get when a few hundred thousand starlings gather overhead?

No, that's what I thought, too. It's actually called a murmuration. Observe:



Hat tip to Chicago Ted for pointing me to this.

John Edwards Update

From the Washington Post:

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Something exceedingly strange is happening at the John Edwards trial: all four alternate jurors dressed in red shirts Friday. They each wore bright yellow the day before.

Coincidence? Few here think so.

The demeanor of the alternate jurors and their behavior has become the talk of the courthouse. The alternates enter the courtroom each day giggling among themselves. One of the alternates, an attractive young woman, has been spotted smiling at Edwards and flipping her hair in what seems to some to be a flirtatious manner. On Friday, she wore a revealing red top with a single strap and an exposed right shoulder.

Her actions have not gone unnoticed by courtroom observers, some of whom have chatted about her in increasingly anxious tones during the long stretches of down time while the jury, now in its sixth day of deliberations, meets behind closed doors to decide whether Edwards should be convicted on six campaign finance and conspiracy charges.

 The rest of the story is here.

Crazy Arizona

Timothy Egan:

We interrupt reality to bring you Arizona, once known as the Grand Canyon state....

Let’s start with the secretary of state, a wide-eyed fellow named Ken Bennett. He is Arizona’s chief elections officer. He is a Republican. He is also co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s campaign in Arizona. Recently, a few hundred people who probably spend their lives searching the Internet looking for proof that the moon landing was fake asked Mr. Secretary of State to investigate the birth certificate of the president of the United States.

Bennett got right on it. He put the full force of his office to work on a nonissue that was resolved for all but the looniest of tunes months ago. And, at the height of his “investigation,” just last week, he threatened to keep Obama off the ballot if his questions were not answered to his satisfaction.

In response, more than 17,000 people this week put their names on an online petition asking the secretary of state to investigate whether Mitt Romney is a unicorn.

An Insight Too Good Not to Share

From The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, by Adam Hochschild:

At the end of our meeting, [a former Bolshevik who spent 20 years in Stalin's gulag] tells me a joke; like a haiku verse, it contains a hint of what went wrong in the Russian Revolution, and of what might have been, a path not taken.

"A descendant of the Decembrists (reformer aristocrats who rebelled against the Tsar in the 1820s), a woman, sees a crowd demonstrating in the street and she sends her daughter outside: 'Masha! Go and see what's going on.'

"Masha returns and says, 'Lots of people are out in the street.'

"'What do they want?'

"'They're demanding that no one should be rich.'

"'That's strange,' says the woman. 'My grandfather went out onto the street and demanded that no one should be poor....'"

Reverend Wright

You couldn't have missed the news stories last week about a proposed Republican ad campaign intended to bring back the "God damn America" speech of Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Andrew Tobias pointed his readers to this column by Pat Cunningham in the Rockford (Illinois) Register Star.

I ask you:  Whose words were worse?  Jeremiah Wright’s, for inviting God’s punishment of America for its racism? Or Jerry Falwell’s, for saying that God had punished America [on September 11, 2001] —  and rightly so — for its liberalism?

Last Saturday, Mitt Romney delivered a speech at Liberty University, a school founded by Falwell, and said this of the late reverend:

In his 73 years of life, Dr. Falwell left a big mark…The calling Jerry answered was not an easy one. Today we remember him as a courageous and big-hearted minister of the Gospel who never feared an argument, and never hated an adversary. Jerry deserves the tribute he would have treasured most, as a cheerful, confident champion for Christ.

I will always remember his cheerful good humor and selflessness.

There were no qualifications in Romney’s praise of Falwell, no hints of disapproval of Falwell having blamed America for Sept. 11, no effort to distance himself from the suggestion that God had punished America for not hewing to Falwell’s moral code.

 So, there you have it. Barack Obama has disowned the man who said “God damn America,” but Mitt Romney has praised the man who said God has rightly punished America with horrendous acts of terrorism.

And yet, some people want us to believe that Obama’s morality is the more questionable in all of this.

So why is Jeremiah Wright so much more upsetting than Jerry Falwell?

Oh, yeah. There's that race thing.

What They Didn't Tell You During the Kentucky Derby

According to this NY Times article, Doug O'Neill, the trainer of this year's Kentucky Derby winner, I'll Have Another, has been sanctioned 12 times in the last 14 years for doping his horses.

But the problem is bigger than that. Takeaway quote:

The racing industry has come to realize that lax regulation and the absence of meaningful punishment have fostered a culture where top trainers with multiple drug violations are more the rule than the exception. Of the top 20 trainers in the United States — measured by purses won in 2011 — only two, Christophe Clement and Graham Motion, were never cited for a medication violation, according to the Racing Commission International database.

Enjoy the Preakness.

Musical Interlude

Leonard Cohen in Helsinki.



Click on "Full Screen" in the lower right-hand corner of the video.

The full name of the song is "La Complainte du Partisan." It was a song of the French Resistance. Another version is here.

Nicholas Katzenbach 1922-2012

If you were around to see news coverage of Nicholas Katzenbach's 1964 confrontation with Governor George C. Wallace at the door of the University of Alabama's Foster Auditorium, you're not likely to have forgotten it.

MSNBC has a tape of it here.

Best line: "I'm not interested in this show."

Interesting stuff from the NY Times obit:

Mr. Katzenbach was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he played hockey, and Princeton, where he majored in international relations and public affairs. As a 19-year-old junior he drove to New York to enlist after the Pearl Harbor attack. A month later he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Air Forces and became a navigator on B-25 bombers. On a mission in 1943, he was captured when his plane was shot down. (He was awarded an Air Medal and three clusters.) As a prisoner of war in Germany he read, by his count, 400 books in 15 months. 

After the war Mr. Katzenbach convinced Princeton that his reading qualified him for an undergraduate degree. The university had him take nine examinations and write a thesis, and in two months he graduated cum laude, in 1945. Two years later he graduated from Yale Law School, where he was editor in chief of The Yale Law Journal. On a Rhodes scholarship, he studied at Balliol College at Oxford.

A pretty good start.

Beyond Redemption

Two comments on the Indiana Republican Senatorial race:

Senator Dick Lugar in a prepared statement

If Mr. Mourdock is elected, I want him to be a good Senator. But that will require him to revise his stated goal of bringing more partisanship to Washington. He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.

This is not conducive to problem solving and governance. And he will find that unless he modifies his approach, he will achieve little as a legislator. Worse, he will help delay solutions that are totally beyond the capacity of partisan majorities to achieve.

Former Senator John Danforth (Republican) speaking in December 2011

If Dick Lugar, having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.

Ennui avec Henri

Hat tip to Andrew Tobias.

The original Henri video is here.

A New Definition of Crazy

This post is mostly directed to Chicagoans, but maybe it will be of interest to folks from other cities.

This, courtesy of a site called Crash Portal, is a map of bicycle crashes in my neighborhood of Chicago from 2007-2009:

Click on it for a clearer view of your neighborhood. The red circles with dots in them are fatalities. I presume most of these crashes are between bicycles and automobiles, as opposed to between bicycles and other bicycles or lamp posts.

As bicycling has become even more popular in the city since 2009, there is no reason to think the number of dots hasn't doubled since then. Search Google for "bicycle crashes Chicago" and you get a list of personal injury lawyers eager to hear from you.

Bicyclists are probably a lot like motorcyclists in that, while most are safety conscious, you see enough future organ donors on the road to think they're all crazy.

Drive a couple of miles on Addison Ave on any night, and you're going to see bicyclists wearing dark clothes, with no lights or reflectors. Or maybe you won't see them, and they'll turn into dots on the map. Chances are good.

I've seen families of bicyclists, with small children, riding down heavily trafficked Elston Ave. And more and more, you see bicyclists riding down the middle of a lane, instead of keeping as far to the right as they can. I guess they're exercising their rights.

Future dots.

I own a bicycle. I enjoy riding it. But these people are nuts.

Drinking English Wine

A few days ago the New York Times ran a long article presenting the view of the most (only?) respected climate change denier, Richard Lindzen of MIT. Lindzen believes clouds will have a mitigating impact on any human-caused temperature increases.

In a followup Q & A this morning the article's author, Justin Gillis, responded to questions from the original article's readers, including this question that apparently pops up from time to time in climate change denial arguments:

Can someone explain to me why vineyards used to exist in Britain when it was occupied by the ancient Romans and why the obviously warmer earth of the time was a bad thing?

Strictly speaking this is not a global warming denial question, of course – it's sort of a fellow traveler, a "What's so bad about global warming?" question.

The answer refers to an article that is interesting for anyone vaguely interested in the history of wine (it counts the number of vineyards listed in the Domesday Book) and includes the answer to the age-old question, "Why does drinking English wine require four people?"

Paul Ryan, Thomist

Uh-oh! Looks like Romney's giving Paul Ryan a serious look as a VP candidate.

How do I know? Looks like somebody got to Ryan and told him he's got to distance himself from the favorite philosopher of adolescents everywhere: Ayn Rand.

A recent article in the National Review tried to help Ryan rewrite history:

"You know you’ve arrived in politics when you have an urban legend about you, and this one is mine,” chuckles Representative Paul Ryan, the Budget Committee chairman, as we discuss his purported obsession with author and philosopher Ayn Rand.

Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, recently called Ryan “an Ayn Rand devotee” who wants to “slash benefits for the poor.” New York magazine once alleged that Ryan “requires staffers to read Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s gospel of capitalism....

These Rand-related slams, Ryan says, are inaccurate and part of an effort on the left to paint him as a cold-hearted Objectivist.

 "I reject her philosophy," Ryan said, adding that he prefers Thomas Aquinas.

Well, gosh, if Paul Ryan isn't an Ayn Rand groupie, where on earth did we get that crazy idea?

Was it this?



Or his 2005 speech to the Atlas Society, in which he said:

I just want to speak to you a little bit about Ayn Rand and what she meant to me in my life and [in] the fight we’re engaged here in Congress. I grew up on Ayn Rand, that’s what I tell people..you know everybody does their soul-searching, and trying to find out who they are and what they believe, and you learn about yourself.
 

I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with Atlas Shrugged. People tell me I need to start with The Fountainhead then go to Atlas Shrugged [laughter]. There’s a big debate about that. We go to Fountainhead, but then we move on, and we require Mises and Hayek as well.

But the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.

 

In almost every fight we are involved in here, on Capitol Hill, whether it’s an amendment vote that I’ll take later on this afternoon, or a big piece of policy we’re putting through our Ways and Means Committee, it is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict: individualism vs. collectivism.
 

And so when you take a look at where we are today, ah, some would say we’re on offense, some would say we’re on defense, I’d say it’s a little bit of both. And when you look at the twentieth-century experiment with collectivism—that Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did such a good job of articulating the pitfalls of statism and collectivism—you can’t find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism than Ayn Rand.

 

It’s so important that we go back to our roots to look at Ayn Rand’s vision, her writings, to see what our girding, under-grounding [sic] principles are. I always go back to, you know, Francisco d’Anconia’s speech (at Bill Taggart’s wedding) on money when I think about monetary policy. And then I go to the 64-page John Galt speech, you know, on the radio at the end, and go back to a lot of other things that she did, to try and make sure that I can check my premises so that I know that what I’m believing and doing and advancing are square with the key principles of individualism…

Is this an easy fight? Absolutely not…But if we’re going to actually win this we need to make sure that we’re solid on premises, that our principles are well-defended, and if want to go and articulately defend these principles and what they mean to our society, what they mean for the trends that we set internationally, we have to go back to Ayn Rand. Because there is no better place to find the moral case for capitalism and individualism than through Ayn Rand’s writings and works.  [Emphasis mine.]

"You know you've arrived in politics when you have an urban legend about you, and this one is mine."

He's got a few months to see if he can change the reporting on this and become a viable Veep candidate. My guess is that he will succeed, because – let's face it – the press ain't what it used to be.

Heartland Institute

These guys aren't worth my time, but if you're not aware of them, a couple of minutes spent reading this article in The Guardian will give you the gist.

White House Correspondents' Dinner

Just in case you missed it, here's Obama's speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, with speech writing by staff from The Daily Show and The Simpsons.



Best line:

What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?

Pit bulls are delicious!

The One That Got Away

I'm working on a Rabbit Hole story right now. They take a while to write. But I wanted to share with you a story that will never be told.

I purchased the photo below a few weeks ago. It speaks for itself, I think. On the back, the woman's name had been written, but has been rubbed out and faded over the years. I've tried everything to bring it back – even bought a black light. But to no avail. So here she is, forever nameless.

Unexceptionalism

E. L. Doctorow offers a primer on how make America unexceptional:

TO achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world, do the following

PHASE ONE

If you’re a justice of the Supreme Court, ignore the first sacrament of a democracy and suspend the counting of ballots in a presidential election. Appoint the candidate of your choice as president.

There are four phases. The rest are here.

Whaddaya know! We're already there.

A World Gone Mad

Okay, maybe we do have a nanny state. I've seen lots of allegations to that effect, but THIS is the first hard evidence I've seen:

Folks in New York City are subject to fines of up to $2,000 – for having water in their bird baths! It's all part of an anti-West Nile Virus (i.e., mosquito) campaign.

Uh, New Yorkers? Birds are very good at keeping down mosquito populations. Just thought you should know.

Sheesh!

The Secret Service's Favorite Blog?

It's official! The all-time most popular post on Sempringham is the relatively recent What Happened to All the Prostitutes?, with 242 hits. It's still getting traffic from search engines long after other posts have faded into the ethers.

I'm sure it's because of the ground-breaking research and crisp prose.