A reader notes:
I’m really starting to enjoy these FOX FORUM topics on Fox News’ web page, as the right get more isolated, bitter, and bizarre. These two topics were featured last week, on the same day:
• FOX FORUM: Advice for Obama — Put a Sock in It
• FOX FORUM: Obama’s Plan Is the Great Snow Job of ’09And here’s today’s:
• FOX FORUM: Bush Should Have Gratitude of All Americans
Does that skinny woman have another book out? Or did I miss it?
This WaPo piece is devastating. The collapse of job-creation, the still hard-to-fathom increase in public borrowing and spending, the failure to resolve any long-term fiscal problems (indeed a massive worsening of them), and the toleration of a bubble economy: put in historical context, the Bush-Cheney years seem even worse. Tax cuts did not help mend structural problems. That much needs to sink in with those of us who supported them.
Hilzoy continues the PTSD Purple Heart debate:
…shedding blood is not a condition of eligibility for a Purple Heart: "A physical lesion is not required". That’s a good thing: if shedding blood were a necessary condition for being eligible for a Purple Heart, then soldiers would not be eligible if their bones were broken in combat, or if they suffered internal organ damage, or if their lungs were destroyed by chemical weapons, so long as they did not actually bleed. And that would be insane. I really can’t see any reason for this decision other than the idea that mental illness somehow isn’t real, or isn’t a real consequence of enemy action, or wouldn’t have happened if only the soldier who got it had been tough enough. That’s wrong, and it’s needlessly cruel. Moreover, holding onto these false ideas about mental illness will not help the military to deal more effectively with the psychiatric problems of its members. And that harms everyone.
Only in Japan, I guess ….
The likely incoming RNC head sets the mood. His views are orthodox Christianism. Which means that unashamed gay people have no place in the Republican party. They are increasingly defined by their loathing of gay people. It’s one of very few non-negotiable principles they have left. Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, Log Cabin is in the red by $100,000. A couple of decades ago, the possibility of reforming the GOP to be inclusive of gays was real. It is now dead. The bigots won.
Mother Jones does an experiment:
It turns out that the application for TARP funds is surprisingly simple. Interested parties can find the complete guidelines for the TARP Capital Purchase Program here. [pdf] The application is just two pages long. As a test, we decided to fill it out. Including the time it took us to explain this project to our chief financial officer, the TARP application took a mere 27 minutes to complete.
The Democrats are back, aren’t they?
Rob Horning has a poignant post on consumerism and choice:
…optional paralysis eradicates our identity, especially when we are conceiving of it as being expressed by marketplace decisions. We may argue that it is foolish to found our identity on such stuff, but that doesn’t render this sort of anxiety, this being “destroyed as a person,” any less existentially terrifying. (It’s a good reason, however, to question why identity has become so bound up with consumerism and explore alternatives.) Heavily marketed goods in the competitive marketplace translate into eroded confidence on the part of consumers in what they want and the ultimate meaning of their desires.
Beyonce has pajamaed lesbiterianism in her corner but the choreographed self-spanking can start young:
An outbreak of hirsuteness in Philly.
Video sales have been falling by 15 percent a year since 2005, and online content doesn’t deliver the returns it used to, now that Web sites such as RedTube and PornHub basically give it away. Struggling companies need investors to help right their operations, and those that are thriving in a brutal market need funding for growth.
Enter Koenig and AdultVest. He sees the porn downturn as temporary and believes that technological improvements will trigger a turnaround. One example: iPorn, a start-up in AdultVest’s portfolio that is developing an application to deliver porn to the Apple iPod. “The industry’s not going anywhere,” Koenig says. “You’ve got 6 billion people on the planet,” he laughs, “and they’re all horny.”
But one suspects that the bulk of porn purchases comes from around 50 percent of them. And the demand is, shall we say, inelastic.
The Dish 