Month: July 2009

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

As a California state employee, I have to qualify Conor's article. Only public safety employees (police, firefighters) get that retirement deal. If I retire at 50 (I started with the state at age 30), I would get 20% retirement. The deal for the overwhelming majority of California state workers is: 1% per service year if you retire at 50 2% per service year if you retire at 55 2.5% per service year if you retire 60 or later. While that is a good retirement plan, if I die young, my family gets much less than they would from a 401k with similar contributions.

The Poison Pill, Ctd

A reader writes:

It has really hit home for me now just how much the Republican Party has lost its mind. Especially after the latest soap opera.

During the months that have passed since John McCain “tapped” Sarah Palin to be his running mate, I’ve had more and more trouble reconciling the obsessive adoration of Palin by so many in the GOP, including a lot of my relatives, (some of whom are very smart and successful people) with the obvious dangers of having someone like her as president. The bizarre behavior. The vapid thinking. How do they not recoil at the smug way in which she wears her ignorance like a badge of honor? It’s just amazing to me how every word out of her mouth is taken as gospel, and when she can’t even answer a softball question without struggling to form a semblance of coherent opinion, they set off against the liberal media.

Never mind the implications of her “word salad” responses. It’s quite sad actually, especially for me to see how my own family has changed. There’s been this kind of de-evolution from a thinking, reasoned, disinterested opinion, into an irrational, crusading, narrow banded thinking process that has really made me step away from the words Republican and Conservative as labels that apply to me.

Oh well, I'm perfectly cool in the land of Independence.

What Exactly Is The Huffington Post?

This I didn't know:

[If] political coverage gets the most attention in Washington, more than half Huffington Post’s traffic is driven by gossip and entertainment stories. The day the Froomkin news broke, for example, the site’s most popular story wasn’t about health care – it was “American Flag Bikini Moments: What’s YOUR Favorite?” Indeed, the Washington City Paper’s Amanda Hess called attention to the sometimes schizophrenic nature of the site in a recent piece: “Liberal Politics, Sexist Entertainment.” Similarly, columnist Simon Dumenco, last month in AdAge, wrote that the Huffington Post “likes to pretend that it's a respectable voice in the mediasphere, but it shamelessly pumps up its traffic by being just as trashy as, say, Maxim.”

The Liberal Bears

Krugman and Reich are not seeing the green shoots. Here's Krugman, still trying to sell a second stimulus:

[The WSJ's economic forcasters] outlook is quite bleak: on average, the surveyed economists expect unemployment to rise to 10 percent, still be 10 percent in June 2010, and fall only to 9.5 percent by the end of 2010. And a fair number of the forecasters — including Jan Hatzius of Goldman, whose analysis I follow closely, and has been spot on so far — think that unemployment will actually rise through 2010.