Independence Day Picnic Treats

Posted: July 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: open thread, Treats | Tags: | 6 Comments

This is how we do it Louisiana style.

So, do you have your picnic on today? Youngest daughter snapped the crawfish boil picture there on the left !

Here’s a few Creole recipes for your next basket! We’ve still got a day left to celebrate so share some of yours!!

This is an open thread!

Sour Cream Cole Slaw

1/2 cup mayonanaise

1/3 cup sour cream

6 stuffed olives, quartered

6 radishes, sliced thin

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1/8 teaspoon pepper

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1 tsp vinegar

4 cups cabbage, finely shredded

Combine ingredients. Mix well. Toss Cabbage with dressing. Chill until ready to serve.

 Creole Deviled Eggs

6 hardcooked eggs

2 tablespoons tomato catsup

4 tablespoons chili sauce

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

6 dashes hot pepper sauce

1/2 cump shrimp, chopped fine

Pepper to taste

Cuts egg in halves. Mash yolks, moisten with catsup.  Combine other ingredients. Stuff back into whites.

Southern Ambrosia

1 cup milk

1 cup heavy cream

4 egg yolks, slightly beaten

1/4 cup sugar

1 tablespoon flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoon sherry

4-6 satsuma oranges, sectioned

1 1/2 cups fresh grated coconut

Scald milk and cream.  Stir sugar, flour and salt into the egg yolks.  Slowly ad hot milk to egg mixture while stirring constantly.  Cook mixture on low heat until mixture coats spoon.  Stir constantly.  Add Sherry. Chill well.

Layer in a dish: custard on bottom, layer of orange sections, then coconut.  Make multiple layers of all in that order.

Have a great independence day celebration!

If a Rubio screams from Down a Rabbit Hole, does any one hear It?

Posted: July 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: The Media SUCKS, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , | 11 Comments

Occasionally one of the villagers gets it right (h/t to Digby).  Today’s Awake Villager Award goes to Kevin Drum of MoJo who expresses utter contempt for the current Republican strategy of destroying the country at any cost to take down a Democratic President while mentioning that said Democratic President and his crony congress cadre have basically given said right wingers absolutely everything they’ve wanted for over a decade without a fight. I bestow this prize because the piece also recognizes the complicity of “journalists” in this charade.

People who are making policies and people giving air time to policy makers these days exist  in a state of complicity in lies. The continuation of more and more of the same damned policies are basically getting the same damned result yet real analysis of the results and the connection to the policy never occurs in the public forum.  The polices of the last 12 years induced a financial crisis and are inducing another one.  They created high unemployment and falling wages and they continue to perpetuate joblessness and income inequality. No one holds the policy makers or the narrators of the results accountable to hard, cold reality.   How is it that this game continues to grow exponentially without riots in the streets by the 99% of the country that’s been hurt and continues to be hurt by this insanity?  Are we so doped up with sports and “reality” shows that we don’t have time to take stock of what these people are doing to us?

But then, for about the thousandth time, my mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they’ve rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.

But despite the fact that this is all recent history, it’s treated like some kind of dreamscape. No one talks about it. Republicans pretend it never happened. Fox News insists that what we need is an even bigger dose of the medicine we got in the aughts, and this is, inexplicably, treated seriously by the rest of the press corps instead of being laughed at. As a result, guys like Marco Rubio have a free hand to insist that Obama — Obama! The guy who rescued the banking system, bailed out GM, and whose worst crime against the rich is a desire to increase their income tax rate 4.6 percentage points! — is a “left-wing strong man” engaged in brutal class warfare against the wealthy. And Rubio does it without blinking. Hell, he probably even believes it.

We are well and truly down the rabbit hole. The party of class warfare for the past 30 years is fighting a war against an empty field and the result has been a rout. I wonder what would happen if the rest of us ever actually started fighting back?

There are so many little gems in this assessment it’s hard to point to them all.  The Republican denial of how their policies have and continue to trash the nation’s economy is the obvious one.  The next is the obvious enabling by the press that exists in some strange struggle to seem fair or be some Orwellian version of  “fair and balanced”  that ignores facts and data and experts in fields.  The press puts party operatives and politicians on TV to lie their frigging hearts out without fact checking their statements.  Some how, fair and balanced means repeatedly letting people put out “opinions” like the sky is green and dirt is blue.  An opinion isn’t misstating facts last time I checked my notes on the scientific method and the rules of public debate.

This is what drives me craziest. The press treats “seriously” people that get on TV to present alternate reality under the guise of looking at all sides.  Misstatement of facts are not opinions.  They are damned lies.

Most journalists these days peddle in access to lies and not much more.  There is lots and lots of irrefutable, scientific evidence on evolution, climate change, and the results of “voodoo” economic policy.  One does not get an “opinion” on appendicitis except on TV news shows.  In life, a certified and trained doctor  diagnoses the condition.  Fair and balanced reporting should not mean getting a panel of grade school educated yokels on TV who insist that people can’t get appendicitis because the appendix doesn’t exist.  It also doesn’t mean that some congressman that sits on a committee looking at health issues should be freed of the burden of proving his point that the appendix doesn’t exist because god and Ayn Rand wrote it down somewhere.  There are tons of freaks these days that are funded by rich idiots–many that own said corporate media outlets–that set up “think tanks” to put out false research that basically states that the sky is green.  These freaks show up on TV news constantly.   Study after study shows that people that view Fox news–as an example–don’t just hold opinions.  They hold completely false information. This is a huge problem because an effective democracy relies on an informed electorate.  We are getting systematically fed falsehoods that are killing our country and our livelihoods. This particulary bothers me because as an economics and finance professor, I have to confront the economic and finance fairy tales daily.  I hear the economic version of “the appendix doesn’t exist” from people who think they are just expressing an opinion instead of repeating a complete falsehood.

I guess what really struck me the most about Drum’s rant was that same sense of frustration and near-depression throughout that basically haunts me too.   I have absolutely no idea how to stop what he’s described. What brought about the huge changes during the Great Depression was the vision of  a leader and the people who surrounded him and the fear of the elite that US citizens might actually take to the streets.  They feared it was the New Deal or a Communist-style revolution in which they would lose everything.  The political and economically powerful no longer fear us and we no longer have leaders with vision beyond their own re-elections.  Something is going to give eventually and I’m just hoping its not the 200+ year experience that’s called the United States of America. Over the last thirty years, all three branches of government and the press have been successfully infiltrated to represent only the most rich and powerful.  What are we going to do about it?

Oh. The answer to the question at the top is that every one hears the Rubio Down the Rabbit Hole.  That’s because we’re not only victims of crony capitalism, we’re victims of crony journalism.

Sign me up for the Hippie Caucus

Posted: July 2, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Economy | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments

melting magic mushrooms by spookychild

If you’re like me, you’ll get a big laugh out of Brad DeLong’s on-going tongue and cheek label of pretty much every economist as being a member of the “hippie caucus” simply for giving the MSM a lesson on economic theory.  It’s not exactly the most complex model or theory that drives the idea that you deficit spend during a tough economy to create jobs and stimulate business.  Every first year macroeconomic principles students learns that.  My guess is that most of congress and the President never got that far.

So, here’s a list of Brad’s Hippie Caucus and the statements based on simple economic theory that puts them into membership.  These are some big name economists basically saying what I’ve been saying for a few years now.  The deficit is a long term problem.  The immediate problem is business’ lack of customers.  It’s an aggregate demand thing and increased government spending is the obvious policy remedy.

The first member is Laura Tyson who I’d really like to see as Treasury Secretary or head of the CEA again.  She served under Bill Clinton.  You remember Bill Clinton?  He’s the one that had the best job creation record of any modern president.

But the overwhelming evidence suggests the opposite: when the economy has excess capacity, high unemployment and weak private demand, cuts in government spending reduce growth and eliminate jobs.

On this point, there is widespread agreement among experts. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently warned that sudden fiscal contraction might put the still fragile recovery at risk. The June report from the C.B.O. contains a similar warning. Even William Gross of Pimco, a vocal critic of the long-term fiscal position of the government, cautions that a move toward fiscal balance, if implemented too quickly, could “stultify economic growth.”

As Simon Johnson noted in his recent Economix post, fiscal contractions are expansionary only under special conditions. None of these apply to the United States today.

So what should policy makers do? They should pair fiscal measures aimed at job creation now with a credible plan to reduce the deficit gradually –- and pass both at once, as a package. Approving a deficit-reduction plan but deferring its starting date until the economy is near full employment will cut the odds that immediate contraction will tip the faltering economy back into recession.

Indeed, passage of such a package could bolster growth by easing investor concerns about future deficits, reducing long-term interest rates and strengthening consumer and business confidence.

The next member is Larry Summers.  You remember him, he’s the one we thought the President may have actually listened to when doing his economic policy thing?  Well, I’ve apologized for thinking Summers turned his back on his credentials and I’m having to eat my words again.

SUMMERS: I worry about a number of things with respect to growth. Most profoundly I worry about lack of demand in the United States. That means that factory capacity is unused, it means that buildings sit empty, it means that too many people are unemployed. And I look for measure that will serve to promote the level of demand in the United States. That’s why using this moment to repair our infrastructure is so important. That’s why I believe that the payroll tax cuts that put money in people’s pockets and increased employers incentives to hire are so important. And that’s why I believe that opening foreign markets and promoting U.S. exports which creates more demand is so important. And China is obviously an important part of that story.

So we already know that Paul Krugman is in the Hippie Caucus, but here’s an addition via Krugman. Traxis Partners Hedge Fund multimillionaire Barton Biggs  is saying the same thing.  Surprisingly enough, this comes from the WSJ whose editors have drunk enough Grover Norquist koolaid to be dead heads.

The U.S. and Europe are set to grow at an anemic pace for the foreseeable future unless the government can step in with an enormous fiscal stimulus, according to a veteran investor.

Speaking exclusively with The Wall Street Journal, Barton Biggs, managing partner at multibillion dollar hedge fund Traxis Partners, painted a bleak outlook for the developed world with only huge government intervention likely to improve things.

…

Mr. Biggs, former chief global strategist for U.S. investment banking powerhouse Morgan Stanley, demanded the U.S. government temporarily return to ideas used in the Great Depression as a way to get the country back to higher growth.

“What the U.S. really needs is a massive infrastructure program … similar to the WPA back in the 1930s,” he says.

The plan would be to employ some of the many unemployed people, jump start the economy, as well as help catch up with Asia, which is building state-of-the-art infrastructure from new mechanized port facilities to high-speed trains.

He suggested financing such building through the sale of U.S. Treasuries.

Okay, so Mark Thoma’s on the list too.  No surprise there either.  However, this comment is not on his blog Economist’s View, it’s at the FT.

I disagree with them that immediate austerity is needed. The long-term budget problem in the US is driven mainly by rising health costs, and we have many years to go before this begins to create big budget problems. Thus waiting, say, two years to begin reducing the deficit will not substantially change the probability of big problems down the road. But delaying austerity measures avoids placing a further drag on an already struggling economy, so the likely benefits are relatively large.

One of the arguments for austerity is that it would give the Federal Reserve “increased room for manoeuvre to adopt further quantitative easing if the economy weakens further”. I agree that the Fed fears being placed in the position of appearing to monetise the debt, but again I do not think immediate action is needed. A budget plan that both political parties can agree to, which is implimented only when the economy is stronger, would do a lot to give the Fed the confidence it needs to act.

Here’s a member of the Hippie Caucus from across the Pond.  That would be no other than the FT’s Martin Wolfe. He sums it up nicely by saying “enjoy the coming slump” but if you want to read the wonky way of saying it, here it is.

Few doubt there is excessive private sector debt in a number of high-income countries. But how is it to be reduced? The BIS notes four answers: repayment; default; higher real incomes; and inflation. Let us rule out the last and focus on the first. Repayment means spending less than one’s income. That is what is happening in the US private sector (see chart). Households ran a financial deficit (an excess of spending over income) of 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2005. This had shifted to a surplus of 3.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2011. The business sector is also running a modest surplus. Since the US has a current account deficit, the rest of the world is also, by definition, spending less than its income. Who is taking the opposite side? The answer is: the government. This is what a controlled depression means: every sector, other than the government, is seeking to strengthen its balance sheet at the same time.

Another former Obama adviser that’s in the Hippie Caucus and may join my list of people that most likely quit Obama because he wasn’t listening to any economists. That would be none other than former budget director Peter Orzag. You know I thought Christie Romer was a good one and was confused when she was supporting that weak ass stimulus.  I’m now even wondering about Austin Goolsbee.

Today’s fiscal policy debate straddles two divides: one between those who support jobs and those who favor austerity, and one between those who think additional revenue is needed and those who don’t.

On the first divide, both sides are right, because the truth is that the U.S. needs both jobs and austerity — and a combination would be more powerful than either piece by itself. We face a very weak labor market now and, over the medium- and long-term, an unsustainable fiscal path. It would make sense to combine an additional round of temporary job creation measures with a substantial amount of permanent deficit reduction that would be enacted now but take effect later.

So, I’ve been blogging around here like my hair’s on fire pretty much since this financial crisis set in.  I wrote the Obama stimulus was too little and too focused on tax cuts to appease the few Republicans resident in a then overwhelmingly Democratic Congress with a president with a mandate and political capital.  I blogged that we didn’t need to extend the Bush tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires because they were the only ones that were recovering nicely. I blogged that the President should forget about health care reform and focus like a laser on the sour economic recovery. I also said that all that would do would give the Republicans more hot air come the negotiations for the debt ceiling increase. I’ve blogged repeatedly that businesses–no matter what the tax rates or the rate of interests–are not going to spend their money on capital or labor here in the US because they need customers first and foremost.  I’ve also written extensively that all this cheap Fed money at the discount window and tax breaks for industry was likely to be used in places like Asia instead of here in the U.S.  Brad DeLong has done an excellent job showing you that many, many top economists believe the same things.  So, next time any one tells you that all economists are always caught off-guard, please remember all of this.

I truly believe that Republicans are trying to tank the economy and that Barack Obama is either tacitly or complicity or ignorantly going right down the garden path with them.  Again, if you’ve got terminal cancer and need surgery to save your life do you call some one who has never gone to med school to operate on you?  If you’re wrongly accused of murder and you need some one to argue that you’re innocent, do you want some one that’s never been to law school to represent you?  Why or why do so many idiots in the press, in the congress, and in the White House think they know more about the economy and the financial markets than those of us that have spent our lives researching, studying, and doing it?

We should be rioting in the streets like the English and the Greeks.  Instead,we’re acting like sheep to the slaughter.  What our government is doing right now is actively working against the interests of its people.  There are laws in place that require it to responsibly handle the economy and create jobs.  They are doing the exact opposite of this.  We need to get mad. Voting for idiots is not working.

Friday Reads

Posted: July 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: income inequality, morning reads, Politics as Usual, Surreality | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 20 Comments

We’re closing in on a long weekend.   It’s Independence Day!  Do you know where your constitutional rights are?  The first amendment right to keep the government from institutionalizing one religious viewpoint appears to be under systematic assault these days by the Republican Party.  How can we stop candidates like Michelle Bachmann who create their own American history and distort our laws and civil rights in the process?  Here’s Jonathan Chait’s suggestion.

The Michele Bachmann surge (confirmed most recently by the latest PPP poll) suggests the question is not whether Bachmann is a legitimate contender for the Republican nomination but what it will take to stop her from winning. As I’ll explain, I do think Bachmann can be stopped. But the general advance of conservatism within the Republican Party over the last three decades has been a repeated pattern of the unthinkable becoming thinkable, and the trend has sharply accelerated over the last two years. Moderation simply lacks any legitimacy within the GOP. It exists, but — unlike the Democratic Party, where moderation is a frequent boast — it’s undertaken almost entirely in secret. Since Barack Obama’s inauguration, virtually every quarrel within the Republican Party between moderates and maximalist partisans has been resolved in favor of the latter. Bachmann has positioned herself as a mainstream, serious figure who has also outflanked the other as-yet announced candidates. They will have a hard time attacking her without seeming to attack conservatism itself.

So, what could defeat her? One thing could be the entry of another candidate who can match her conservatism while appearing more electable. Rick Perry is the leading candidate here. Paul Ryan would be another.

A second possibility is that Republican insiders could spill the beans on why she so freaks them out.

I have no idea why any of them think that Rick Perry or Paul Ryan are batshit crazy lite.  Maybe it’s because they aren’t vagina impaired or probably because they kiss up to cults instead of joining them.  But wait, Perry belongs to a similar religious cult and Ryan is in the Ayn Rand cult, so, we’re back to vajayjay of doom explanation.   Frankly, the entire party seems bat shit crazy these days. So, we’re still stuck between bat shit crazy and totally worthless.  (Sigh.)

Another stranger than truth bit of news these days is Steven Colbert and his “SuperPac”.  A “SuperPac is”a political group that can legally accept unlimited contributions from people, corporations, and unions to campaign for candidates and causes”.

Because Colbert’s group will not give any money directly to candidates — instead airing independent ads to support them — Colbert can take donations of any size.

He forced the FEC to make this decision by planning to operate as a real political group, not a parody.

“If we’d viewed this as a funny request, that would have been a lot easier,” Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a George W. Bush nominee, told Colbert at today’s hearing.

In the end, the commission voted 5-1 to approve Colbert’s PAC according to guidelines under consideration at today’s hearing.

Colbert had sought guidance from the FEC on how to handle air-time and help from Viacom, Comedy Central’s parent company — and this is the area in which his SuperPAC has forced precedents with implications for other media companies, like Fox News.

The FEC ruled today that Viacom can fund Colbert’s group, without limit, as long as it only helps out with ads that air during his show …

I’m wondering if this is giving Scalia, Thomas and the rest of the Neanderthal SCOTUS Beastie Boys nightime heart burn?  Whoops!  No hearts!! Some analysts believe that what Colbert is actually doing is exposing holes in campaign finance law.

“I think Colbert is trying to dramatize problems in the campaign finance world in the way that he dramatizes other things,” said longtime campaign finance reform advocate Fred Wertheimer, a longtime advocate for stricter campaign finance rules who is president of Democracy 21. “But nevertheless, the proposals here would potentially open gaping disclosure loopholes in the campaign finance laws.”

Wertheimer is so concerned about what Colbert is doing, in fact, that Democracy 21 has joined with the Campaign Legal Center, another advocacy group, to petition the FEC to reject his request because it could result in the “radical evisceration” of campaign finance rules.

If Colbert gets his way before the FEC, it could blur the lines between political money and media to an unprecedented extent.

For instance, it might enable Fox News pundit-politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee to use the network’s resources to boost their own political committees, assert Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center in their FEC filing. It concludes: “Mr. Colbert’s ultimate goals here may be comedic, but the commission should not play the straight man at the expense of the law.”

Colbert’s PAC bit started as a parody of the PAC started by former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty to lay the foundation for his presidential campaign. But after lawyers for Comedy Central’s parent company Viacom expressed reservations about Colbert using their corporate resources — in the form of his eponymous late-night faux news show — to promote the PAC, the bit morphed into a riff on how corporations like Viacom can spend cash on politics, thanks to the 2010 high court decision in a case called Citizens United v. FEC.

The Gawker’s John Cook has an interesting piece up on “Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News”.   He had me at “secret Nixon-Era” blueprint.  Nothing from Nixon people even shocks me any more.  Is there such a thing as group paranoia?

Republican media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996, ostensibly as a “fair and balanced” counterpoint to what he regarded as the liberal establishment media. But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the “prejudices of network news” and deliver “pro-administration” stories to heartland television viewers.

The memo—called, simply enough, “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News”— is included in a 318-page cache of documents detailing Ailes’ work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations that we obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries. Through his firms REA Productions and Ailes Communications, Inc., Ailes served as paid consultant to both presidents in the 1970s and 1990s, offering detailed and shrewd advice ranging from what ties to wear to how to keep the pressure up on Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the first Gulf War.

The documents—drawn mostly from the papers of Nixon chief of staff and felon H.R. Haldeman and Bush chief of staff John Sununu—reveal Ailes to be a tireless television producer and joyful propagandist. He was a forceful advocate for the power of television to shape the political narrative, and he reveled in the minutiae constructing political spectacles—stage-managing, for instance, the lighting of the White House Christmas tree with painstaking care. He frequently floated ideas for creating staged events and strategies for manipulating the mainstream media into favorable coverage, and used his contacts at the networks to sniff out the emergence of threatening narratives and offer advice on how to snuff them out—warning Bush, for example, to lay off the golf as war in the Middle East approached because journalists were starting to talk. There are also occasional references to dirty political tricks, as well as some positions that seem at odds with the Tea Party politics of present-day Fox News: Ailes supported government regulation of political campaign ads on television, including strict limits on spending. He also advised Nixon to address high school students, a move that caused his network to shriek about “indoctrination” when Obama did it more than 30 years later.

It’s a long strange read that’s just perfect for a celebration of America!

Well, one democratic senator has a job plan.  I wonder if any one will discuss it?

A bill to create construction jobs and fund new highway infrastructure. A clean-energy jobs program. Reforming the immigration system for high-skilled workers. And a variety of tax cuts and credits.

None are new ideas, but they’re all part of Senate Democrats’ jobs agenda Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) laid out in greater detail Thursday as he portrayed his party as proactively trying to spur economic growth and accused the GOP of deliberately trying to undermine the recovery for political gain.

“We have now been playing entirely on the Republicans‘ field for six months and the recovery has only slowed. We have seen enough to know that their approach is not working,” said Schumer, who heads policy and messaging for Senate Democrats, in a speech to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

“And we need to start asking ourselves an uncomfortable question — are Republicans slowing down the recovery on purpose for political gain in 2012? … [N]ow it is becoming clear that insisting on a slash-and-burn approach may be part of this plan — it has a double benefit for Republicans: It is ideologically tidy and it undermines the economic recovery, which they think only helps them in 2012.”

Republicans have scoffed at that notion, arguing that Democrats’ solution to the broken economy is tax increases and a continuation of failed stimulus spending. This week, the GOP renewed its push for a constitutional amendment that would require the government to balance its budget each year.

I can’t believe the Republicans are trying that balanced budget crap again.  It’s absolutely the worst thing in the world to do and it’s one of the reasons that states’ economies have caused this recovery to be the worst on record.  They are actively making it worse by crippling state budgets and services.  A balanced budget amendment means that governments get to spend like crazy when tax revenues come in which is precisely when you don’t need it because it’s inflationary.  It also stops governments from deficit spending when they have to and should during a recession.  It causes governments to make recessions longer and more painful.  Just like now!  People like Mitch McConnell shouldn’t be making economic policy decisions based on faith-based Voodoo Economics.  He and other Republicans have basically made a living of telling people complete untruths about economic and financial theory.  Remember, even Ronald Reagan’s economic team has called all this stuff insanity!

Okay, one MORE economics story and then I’ll leave you to firecrackers, beer and the grill.  It’s not much of a surprise, but it’s an academic study that pretty much shows what we’ve thought for some time.

Economists at Northeastern University have found that the current economic recovery in the United States has been unusually skewed in favor of corporate profits and against increased wages for workers.

In their newly released study, the Northeastern economists found that since the recovery began in June 2009 following a deep 18-month recession, “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent” of that growth.

The study, “The ‘Jobless and Wageless Recovery’ From the Great Recession of 2007-2009,” said it was “unprecedented” for American workers to receive such a tiny share of national income growth during a recovery.

According to the study, between the second quarter of 2009, when the recovery began, and the fourth quarter of 2010, national income rose by $528 billion, with $464 billion of that growth going to pretax corporate profits, while just $7 billion went to aggregate wages and salaries, after accounting for inflation.

The share of income growth going to employee compensation was far lower than in the four other economic recoveries that have occurred over the last three decades, the study found.

“The lack of any net job growth in the current recovery combined with stagnant real hourly and weekly wages is responsible for this unique, devastating outcome,” wrote the report’s authors, Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada, Joseph McLaughlin and Sheila Palma.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average real hourly earnings for all employees actually declined by 1.1 percent from June 2009, when the recovery began, to May 2011, the month for which the most recent earnings numbers are available.

Yup, we’re all poorer and the one per cent is richer.  But then, you knew that!

So, here’s the firecrackers!   Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Prosser was videotaped by a news crew basically ripping a mic away from a reporter trying to ask him a question.  Be sure to go watch the video!

Grabbing the microphone – and the spotlight. Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser did both when FOX6’s Mike Lowe attempted to speak with him about the serious allegations of a physical altercation with Justice Anne Walsh Bradley on Thursday.

Six of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Justices witnessed an alleged physical altercation between Prosser and Bradley in Bradley’s chambers on June 13th.

The basic story is that Prosser was upset about Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson’s decision to delay release of the high court’s opinion in the collective bargaining case.

The story was leaked, presumably by the Justices themselves, to both liberal and conservative publications. Both cited unnamed sources. But Bradley was quoted as saying Prosser placed her in a choke-hold. Prosser has since denied that.

On Thursday, when FOX’s Mike Lowe asked Justice Prosser about the alleged incident, he grabbed the FOX6 microphone and then gave it back. Prosser did not answer any of Mike Lowe’s questions.

You can watch his odd behavior as captured by the Fox News 6 reporter.  Four of the justices who witnessed the altercation refused to comment and said the matter was under review by the judicial commission and that the sheriff was investigating the situation too.  Prosser never said anything but the body language says a lot.

Hope your long weekend will go great and that you have a few minutes to spend with us!  I understand Wonk’s got a great Hillary post coming up for us tomorrow!   Our Secretary of State is out there putting the world’s women and children first again!  You’ll want to read it for sure!  I’ve stocked up on bacon wrapped filets, Abita Amber, and corn on the cob. Just a little fun down here on the bayou!

So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Mark Halperin lets it all hang out

Posted: June 30, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, The Media SUCKS | Tags: , | 24 Comments

I have never been a fan of Mark Halperin or watched Joe Scarborough so I can’t say that I particularly care about either of their careers or politics. I will say that I believe that all cable news pundits take themselves WAY too seriously.  This item gave me a great pre-coffee giggle so I have to pass on the collective villager on-line gasps!  We’re shocked!!! Shocked I tell you!!!  I’ll start out with Steven Benen of Washington Monthly.

It’s hard not to love that “liberal” media.On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the three-hour program co-hosted by a conservative Republican former congressman, Time magazine’s Mark Halperin was asked for his assessment of President Obama’s White House press conference. “I thought he was kind of a dick yesterday,” Halperin said.

If you can watch the video, note how Halperin, ostensibly one of the nation’s most influential pundits, was smiling, with a smug satisfaction. It wasn’t a word he just blurted out in the heat of a larger discussion — Halperin thought about it, asked about whether the broadcast was on a seven-second delay, and then took his shot.

Not to be left out, Politico gives us this one.  Notice how quickly the ‘real’ press is running for the door.

Time issued a statement later Thursday calling Halperin’s comments “inappropriate and in no way reflective of TIME’s views.”

The magazine did not suspend Halperin but said, “We have issued a warning to him that such behavior is unacceptable” and noted that he had “appropriately” apologized.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said on Thursday afternoon that he called Halperin’s bosses at MSNBC.

“The comment that was made was inappropriate,” Carney told reporters in his daily briefing. “It would be inappropriate to say that about either president of either party.”

During the Morning Joe show, host Joe Scarborough asked Halperin what he thought of Obama’s press conference and Halperin asked if the seven-second delay were in effect so he could give his real opinion – apparently thinking it would be bleeped out before hitting the air. Scarborough told Halperin to go for it because they would use the delay to prevent whatever he said from being broadcast. “You fall down, I’m going to catch you,” Scarborough told Halperin.

Scarborough isn’t experiencing any fall out so far.  Here’s a fun one from WAPO’s Greg Sargent.  Go read beyond this quote.  The word sanctimonious comes to my mind, but I’ll let you dissect and see if you agree.

I’m sorry, but this is crazy. Halperin’s crack was crude and dumb, but it doesn’t deserve indefinite suspension. Halperin’s use of an expletive is trival when compared with the degradation of our political discourse we witness on a regular basis from Halperin and many others — degradation that is seen as perfectly acceptable because no curse words are employed. Suspending Halperin only reinforces a phony definition of “civility” in our discourse, in which it’s unacceptable to use foul language and be “uncivil,” but it’s perfectly acceptable for reporters and commentators to allow outright falsehoods to pass unrebutted; to traffic endlessly in false equivalences in the name of some bogus notion of objectivity; and to make confident assertions about public opinion without referring to polls which show them to be completely wrong.

It takes one to know one.

Salon‘s Alex Pareene published a pretty brutal capsule of Halperin’s poltical  analysis.

This is a great excuse for MSNBC to fire Halperin, though! I mean if they won’t fire him for being incompetent at understanding and explaining politics they now have an opportunity to fire him for being disrespectful and vulgar. (Ed Schultz was suspended over as much.)

Being a professional observer of the “horse race” is bad enough, but Halperin doesn’t even understand the horse-race element of politics. He fails at being a hack. He’s too dumb to correctly parrot conventional wisdom. He is pretty sure Sarah Palin and Donald Trump are 2012 front-runners. He thought “suspending his campaign” to fix the economy and not knowing how many houses he has were both huge messaging victories for John McCain. He wrote a book about how to win in 2008 that predicted everything Hillary did, but in his world it all worked. He thought Bush’s political comeback would come any day now throughout the entirety of the years 2006-2008. He can’t interpret polls or see through the spin of GOP consultants who are much smarter than he. If I were revising the Hack list I’d put him above No. 1.

So this indefinite suspension is a nice first step, but I bet it won’t be long before they allow him to come crawling back into Mika and Joe’s little parlor of inanity. (And will Joe get in trouble for egging him on? Does Joe get in trouble for anything?)

So, is this a case of it takes one to know one?  Go check out the huge list of reactions via memeorandum.  See the Village.  See the Village Gasp.  See the Village react in a predictably partisan pattern.

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