In other news ….
Posted: December 15, 2012 Filed under: open thread 19 Comments
There’s a few other headlines I’d like to share tonight on this open thread.
It seems that Senator Kerry will lull us to sleep the next four years as Secretary of State. Senators Graham and McCain must be very proud of themselves tonight.
President Barack Obama has chosen Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts to be the next secretary of state, a source has told Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed.
His replacement as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the Sneed source said.
This comes on the heels of Thursday’s announcement that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice had removed herself from the list of candidates to take over from Hillary Clinton. Rice said that what was sure to be a contentious and lengthy approval process took attention away from more pressing problems facing the nation.
Results of the 2012 election continue to show exactly how much single women don’t like the GOP.
As Republicans dust off their Election Day drubbing last month, their party must confront the reality that the ranks of unmarried women are growing rapidly, and these voters overwhelmingly have backed Democrats for decades.
Women increasingly are graduating from college and joining the workforce, and postponing marriage. From 2000 to 2010, the number of unmarried women increased 18 percent, according to census data.
Republicans have spent the past month tallying up all their demographic weak spots, including with Hispanics and Asian-Americans. But some warn that single women, already one-quarter of the electorate, represent the most serious threat to the party’s viability.
“It’s a faster-growing demographic than most others,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster. “That’s a cultural zeitgeist that demands a political response.”
In 1960, the average American woman married at age 20. Now it’s 27. That reflects, and is partly the cause of, a boom in solo living, with nearly one-third of all U.S. households comprised of single people living alone, according to Eric Klinenberg, a New York University sociologist and author of a book on the subject. In 1950, it was 9 percent.
Around the world, as women gain more education and earn more money, they increasingly are delaying marriage, said Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and is director of research for the Council on Contemporary Families. “Nowadays, women don’t feel so driven to get married because they can support themselves,” she said. “A lot of this is driven by women and a combination of lowering payoffs to just marrying any man and rising expectations” of what marriage will bring, she added.
Economist Dean Baker tells Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that the biggest lie about the current fiscal situation is the idea that we actually face a fiscal cliff.
DEAN BAKER: Well, there’s an endless number of myths, but the first and foremost is that we face any sort of cliff. You know, you’ve had this effort, certainly in Washington, to hype this December 31st deadline. Basically, if we miss that deadline, nothing happens. You know, you come to January 1st, we’ll be subject to higher tax withholding rates. Not a lot of us are going to get paid January 1st. If there’s a deal worked out somewhere in the first, second week of January, we’ll probably never see anything extra deducted from our paycheck, and even if we do, we’ll get it back in the second paycheck. I mean, no one wants to see money deducted out of their paycheck, but, you know, if you’re going to get it back in the second check—I mean, I know that will be a hardship for some people, but the impact on the economy will be pretty much minimal.
And on the spending side, President Obama controls—has enormous control over the pace of spending. And if there’s a deal outlined that—you know, outline of a deal that he sees with Congress, he’ll just keep spending in accordance with that deal. So this idea that, somehow, if we don’t get a deal by the end of the year, you know, we’re going to see the economy collapse, go into a recession, really that’s just totally dishonest. And I’ve seen that said I don’t know how many times. And it’s based—the basis for this is that we don’t have a deal all year. And the fact that you don’t have a deal December 31st does not mean you don’t get a deal by December 31st, 2013. And I think everyone knows that.
The American Right is fond of putting itself inside the minds of America’s Founders and intuiting what was their “original intent” in writing the U.S. Constitution and its early additions, like the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms.” But, surely, James Madison and the others weren’t envisioning people with modern weapons mowing down children in a movie theater or a shopping mall or now a kindergarten.
Indeed, when the Second Amendment was passed in the First Congress as part of the Bill of Rights, firearms were single-shot mechanisms that took time to load and reload. It was also clear that Madison and the others viewed the “right to bear arms” in the context of “a well-regulated militia” to defend communities from massacres, not as a means to enable such massacres.
The Second Amendment reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Thus, the point of the Second Amendment is to ensure “security,” not undermine it.
The massacre of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday, which followed other gun massacres in towns and cities across the country, represents the opposite of “security.” And it is time that Americans of all political persuasions recognize that protecting this kind of mass killing was not what the Founders had in mind.
I personally think that today’s “gun enthusiasts’ are really insurrectionists. I’ve been watching some interviews on MNBC with the sister in law of Nancy Lanza mother of the Connecticut Child Shooter. It appears she was preparing for the collapse of the economy. That was a root source of her gun “enthusiasm”. My biggest question isn’t how this happened, but why is some one allowed to leave guns around the house and buy an arsenal when you live with a person with developmental disorders and allegedly some kind of personality disorder? Why would a shooting range let a child with emotional and developmental issues shoot guns? You can see the video here.
As family and friends talk to national media, one answer to that question has emerged — Nancy Lanza was more than a “gun enthusiast,” she was “something of a survivalist” who bought guns because she “had been stockpiling” for the coming “economic collapse” ,,
I’m sure the FBI profilers have been finding some pretty interesting things in the computers in that house and I”m looking forward to finding out more about this.
Meanwhile, this is an open thread. I going to make myself a vodka martini as I think about what kind of crap the right wing will come up with to justify that kind of thinking that says training emotionally disturbed children is okay coupled with an easily accesible arsenal. This kid had the training to really do the damage he did and he even knew which of the weapons would do the most damage.
Investigators have linked Nancy Lanza to five weapons: two handguns, a semi-automatic rifle and two traditional hunting rifles. Her son took the two handguns and the semi-automatic rifle to the school. Law-enforcement officials said they believed the guns were acquired lawfully and registered.
Nancy Lanza is being described by a family member as a “survivalist,” and someone who owned a collection of guns.
My oldest child’s godfather is a hunter. It’s something his wife and I don’t understand but it’s part of his Fargo ND upbringing. We’ve been friends for about 30 years and both of them are just the sweetest people I know. We used to eat antelope stew a lot and backstrap steaks back in the day. Back when I didn’t hold Buddhist vows. It’s not my thing nor will it ever be. It’s something he does with his dad every year. I never saw his guns. They were always locked up in a hunting locker at some place that rented things like that. He only used them when he went hunting. As I said, if I found there were guns in a house, my kids were told to stay outside. I never took a chance that some enterprising child with an imagination would figure out a way to get at them. I’ve seen the statistics on accidents in homes with guns. I’ve really never known any one saved by owning a gun. Those numbers are minimal. I actually have to say that I’d rather not know any one that would rather kill some one then hand over junk and money. I frankly would die before I would take another life. But then, I’m a Buddhist and very much an outlier in this American Life. I now carry vows and one of them is to plead with people not to kill anything for me. Not a mosquito. Not an attacker. Not a source of food. But, that’s my choice and my vows. I just can’t fathom living with the idea of taking another life for trivial pursuits.
So, have a great night.
Open Thread: Fox News “Comedian” Suffers Beat Down in Michigan
Posted: December 12, 2012 Filed under: Labor unions, open thread, U.S. Politics | Tags: Fox News, Michigan protests, right to work laws, Steve Crowder, violence 12 Comments
Yesterday, Fox News sent Fox News contributor and alleged “comedian” Steve Crowder to Lansing, Michigan to involve himself in the protests against Gov. Rick Snyder’s “right to work for less” law. HuffPo reports:
Writer and Fox News contributor Steven Crowder aired video of his violent physical confrontation with opponents of Michigan’s right-to-work legislation, who gathered in Lansing to protest the bills’ passage through the House.
Crowder argued with protesters who began to tear down a tent pitched on the Capitol lawn by the pro-right-to-work group Americans For Prosperity. According to MLive, Michigan State Police Lt. Mike Shaw said they were contacted because several people, including two in wheelchairs, were trapped under the tent.
He was then punched repeatedly in the face by a protester, while another man speaking off-camera threatened to kill Crowder with a gun. Crowder said there was no police presence in the area during the altercation.
Hmmm…maybe the police don’t like the new law any more than the protesters?
Afterward, Crowder told right wing talk show host Dana Loesch:
“Dana, they literally would have killed me where I stood if I’d of fought back and defended myself after the sucker punch. They literally would have torn me limb-from-limb.”
Crowder’s injuries: a small cut on the forehead and a “chipped tooth.”
Here’s some video of the altercation.
According to another article at HuffPo, one observer says that Crowder was taunting the union protesters.
Ken Spitzley, a state agriculture department employee, told HuffPost that he walked to the protest at the state Capitol during a break from work and that he witnessed Crowder getting in protesters’ faces.
“He was just after everybody,” said the 56-year-old Spitzley, a procurement technician whose workplace is represented by the United Auto Workers. “There was no question he was there just to start a fight, to start some kind of trouble.”
No way!
“I definitely provoked them,” Crowder said. “I was asking them basic questions.”
Sptizley offered one specific anecdote that Crowder disputed. According to Spitzley, Crowder had an exchange with two pro-union men wearing blue jeans, hard hats and Carhartt clothing. One of the men accused Crowder of working for Amway, the family company of Michigan businessman Dick DeVos. Crowder joked that he sells soap.
“He said, ‘I sell soap. I should sell you some,'” Spitzley said, quoting Crowder.
Crowder denies this.
Gawker asks if we really have to condemn the violence because we’re liberals?
Good, serious progressives are supposed to condemn violence as a political tactic, because it’s wrong and in many cases counterproductive. But do we really need to condemn the union protestor who socked Fox News comedian Steven Crowder in the jaw? [….]
He wanted to “provoke” people into “rational thought and civil debate,” he told Fox & Friends this morning. Instead he ended up inserting himself in the middle of a tense argument between protestors and staffers of Americans for Prosperity, the anti-union group funded by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. And then he got punched in the face, for reasons that have been edited out of the video.
Click on the Gawker link to see photos of Crowder’s infinitesimal injuries.
Erik Wemple of the WaPo isn’t all that sympathetic. Right wing nuts like Brent Bozell are whining because the “liberal media” hasn’t given a lot of coverage to the Crowder beating. Bozell:
“If a Tea Partier had physically assaulted a liberal journalist or ripped down a structure occupied by a liberal organization all on video, the footage would be broadcast on an endless loop.”
Wemple’s response:
Bozell’s mistake here lies in labeling. His statement suggests that somehow Crowder was working as a journalist yesterday in Lansing. Crowder’s own comments last night on Fox News’s “Hannity” suggest a different mission: “I never went out here to try and be assaulted, as leftists might say,” Crowder told Hannity. “I went out here to prove the left for who they truly are — certainly there’s union thugs — and I’ve achieved that.”
Journalists don’t go to events to “prove” anything.
None of this suggests that Crowder deserved his closed-fist treatment. He didn’t.
I’m not so sure about that. What do you think? And remember, this is an open thread.
Saturday Night Muses
Posted: December 8, 2012 Filed under: open thread | Tags: Maurice Sendak, Republicans have no new ideas 15 CommentsThis is an open thread because, frankly, there’s nothing much going on unless you’re interested in football, national crass consumerism season, or rehashed republican politics.
Start with Jindal. An alleged policy guy, he published an almost embarrassingly empty op-ed this week that had all of two ideas: a Balanced Budget Amendment and term limits. In other words, the same old ideas that Republicans have been trotting out since …well, certainly since the Reagan administration. Okay, granted, Jindal’s version of the BBA is the souped-up one that Republicans have been pushing recently, but that’s even worse than the old-fashioned variety – it seems to track what Bruce Bartlett called “the dopiest Constitutional amendment of all time” when Tea Partying members of the House were pushing it in early 2011.
So not much there.
Marco Rubio? His big rollout speech was given while accepting a Jack Kemp Foundation award. His big idea, as Dave Weigel reported this week, turns out to be the exact same policy ideas that Republicans have been giving for some time now but labeling each one as a benefit for the “middle class.” Which mainly involves reciting the words “middle class.” A lot. A whole lot. As Weigel counted, 35 times.
Not much in the way of new ideas there, either.
Paul Ryan, meanwhile, also spoke at the Kemp shindig, and he continued the theme he evoked late in the campaign. It boils down to rejecting Mitt Romney’s rhetoric of “47 percent” and arguing forcefully that Republican policies are actually just what the poor should have always wanted. But as Jonathan Chait put it, Ryan has “no policy to offer the poor other than the incentive of being hungrier and sicker.”
Now, it’s true that Paul Ryan cannot be fairly accused of simply echoing back the same stale policies Republicans have been running on for three decades. Unfortunately, what he has replaced them with is a shell game; as Paul Krugman has long pointed out, Ryan – the Eddie Haskell of the GOP – is more con man than policy wonk.
Again: there’s nothing about either the Republican Party or conservative movement politics that makes it impossible to develop and run on serious policy proposals.
I suppose we could also discuss Bernie Saunders who considers the obstruction going on in the US Senate as deliberately unpatriotic.
“In a time of disfunctionality in the Senate, and all kinds of absurdity, this probably takes the cake when you filibuster your own” bill, the self-described “democratic socialist” lawmaker told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Friday evening. “The American people want action and it is undemocratic, it is unAmerican when a small minority can deny the majority from going forward.”
However, I’m in a girl power kinda mood tonight so …
Here’s a few links and an open thread.
Read this heart warming story about “My Life with Two Moms” at Jezebel.
My moms raised me, my sisters, and my brother the best way they could. Much like the opposite-sex families my peers grew up in, we all had our issues. I was a difficult child to handle. I was angry at the world, angry at myself, angry at my friends, angry at my biological father. I was sad most of the time and had a massive chip on my shoulder. I fought with my moms every chance I had because I couldn’t get a grip on my teenage years-or the clinical depression I was diagnosed with. I was a handful, as they say.
And there were mistakes on both our parts, as one can expect in any family raging with teenage hormones. My moms couldn’t understand why I felt or acted the way I did-not that I gave them much opportunity to-and they were sometimes disconnected from the reality I was struggling with. But they tried. And they love me, flaws and all. They love me even when I throw on my comedian hat and use them as the source of my jokes at holiday dinners.
They pushed me to follow my dreams of being a journalist, even when that meant I’d take a year off from college after graduating high school-even when it meant I’d take a detour and attend art school to misguidedly pursue a career in painting. They never restricted my creativity, and taught me how to be a strong, independent woman. They supported me every inch of the way, even when I made my mistakes with boys and jobs. They didn’t bat an eye when I decided to convert to Wicca at the age of 14. They don’t bat an eye when I get a new tattoo or piercing even if it doesn’t sit well with them. They gave me advice when I wanted it-and advice when I never asked for it.
MS: Yes. But that was in Europe. America was protected by an invisible shield. Nearly all my relatives died in the concentration camps, except my parents. They came here willy-nilly; my father came because he was chasing a girl. My mother was coming because her mother couldn’t bear her anymore. They came here and picked their way through life. But as far as I was concerned, winning the war was such an amazing and happy moment. We thought Hitler might just win. When the war ended—this was simplistic of me—I thought, That’s the end of all evil.
The world is as disheveled as it was then. But I was a child then. The shock of thinking of the people I will never know was terrible. The photographs my father had of his younger brothers, all handsome and interesting looking, and the women with long hair and flowers. And who were they? I tried to give them back to my parents when I illustrated some short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Marvelous stories. And I went through the album and picked some of my mother’s relatives and some of my father’s and drew them very acutely. And they cried. And I cried. So there was that. And there still is that.
BLVR: Could your parents talk about it?
MS: No. The only one who talked about it was my grandmother, who was a very fierce woman. The only grandparent I had. She was the only one who came over [from Europe]. Who was brought over by her idiot daughters, my aunts. And idiot uncles, her sons. They were deficits, all of them. She was the strongest. And she had an aversion to her children—not a very good mother, but a wonderful grandmother. And she could hate them, and I could hate them, too, because Grandma hated them! She had such contempt, and I loved her for it. She was so bitter and sharp. And she would sit by the window with her little prayer book and daven and daven and pray. And I would sit on her lap. She was like the bridge from the old country to the new country, and she liked me, and I wanted to be liked. I felt certain that my mother did not like me. A lot of parents don’t like their kids. It’s a terrible thing. I think people should take a test: you should or shouldn’t have a child.
BLVR: What would the criteria be?
MS: Well, you should be as sane as possible. You should have had a childhood that was as decent as possible. A mother and father who cared about you. If you don’t have those components of compassion and love and curiosity, don’t do it.
Have a great night and share some fun things if you get a chance!!!
Tom Ricks Challenges Fox News on Beghazi; Interview Ends Abruptly
Posted: November 26, 2012 Filed under: open thread, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics | Tags: Benghazi, Fox News, John McCain, Susan Rice, Tom Ricks 31 Comments
Tom Ricks, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and blogger at Foreign Policy appeared on Fox News this morning, where he was asked by talking head Jon Scott why John McCain has toned down his attacks on Susan Rice recently. Ricks opted to answer truthfully. From Raw Story:
“I think that Benghazi was generally hyped by this network especially,” Ricks explained. “And now that the [2012 presidential] campaign is over, I think [McCain] is backing off a little bit. They’re not going to stop Susan Rice from being secretary of state.”
At that point, Scott shifted the interview’s focus from McCain to defending his employer, asking Ricks, “How do you call that hype” when four Americans died in the Benghazi attacks?
“How many security contractors died in Iraq, do you know?” Ricks wondered.
“I don’t,” Scott admitted, seemingly at a loss for words.
“No, nobody does because nobody cared,” Ricks pointed out. “Several hundred died but there was never an official count done of security contractors dead in Iraq. So when I see this focus on what was essentially a small fire fight, I think — number one — I’ve covered a lot of fire fights, it’s impossible find out what happened in them sometimes.”
“And second, I think the emphasis on Benghazi has been extremely political, partly because Fox was operating as wing of the Republican Party,” the author added.
Oops! And suddenly the interview with the distinguished military expert was terminated.
This is an open thread.
Black Friday
Posted: November 23, 2012 Filed under: open thread 22 CommentsThese are the days that make me really grateful to be a Buddhist.
Not only do I not celebrate National Crass Consumerism season but I basically live in a small house full of stuff that’s been recycled from my grandparents’ houses. I don’t want any thing that I can’t really use. I don’t want a TV in every room. 
Yup, my house and nearly everything in it are around 100 years or so old. The house is actually over 150 but the stuff is mostly 1920s and 1930s although my kitchen furniture is nearly as old as the house. I only buy things when they wear out. I’m also fine wearing anything my sister ships to me that she’s worn because I don’t need that much stuff. I only have two small closets. I just don’t care about stuff any more. It just collects dust, breaks, needs to be cleaned or maintained, insured, and is mostly a bother. I hardly use any of it. I shop on line a lot and let folks deliver it to my front door and when I really need to buy stuff at a store, I make sure that it never happens during a holiday season. I don’t want to encourage the mass chaos that is National Crass Consumerism season.
However, my values don’t seem to be shared by most of my countrymen. So, here’s some of those headlines from our national season of insanity, overspending, and grabbiness.
Anything For A New TV: The Worst Of Black Friday Shopping Mayhem
The shopping tradition extravaganza that is Black Friday never goes off without a hitch. And this year was no exception.
As shoppers braved long lines and jostled in big crowds late Thursday and into Friday, tensions ran high and a few situations got out of hand. From gun-wielding in Texas to an abandoned child in Massachusetts, shoppers eager for a good deal let their best judgments slip away. Others just got caught in out-of-control crowds.
The Gun-Wielder
Late Thursday night, a dispute over line-cutting led one man to pull out a handgun in a Sears store in San Antonio, Texas, sending a panicked crowd looking for shelter, the San Antonio Express-News reports. The dispute allegedly began when one man began cutting in line and ultimately punched another man. The man he punched allegedly pulled a gun on him — though reports vary on whether he pointed the gun at his assailant or at the ground. A witness said the assailant hid behind a refrigerator before fleeing the store. The man was not arrested because he had a concealed handgun license.The Abandoned Child
A Massachusetts man allegedly left his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son in the car while he shopped at a Kmart in Springfield, Mass., and then went home with a new 51-inch television — but no child, 22 News WWLP reports. Police found the child sleeping in the car in the Kmart parking lot around 1:30 a.m. Friday. The man, Anthony Perry of Springfield, denied leaving the child in the car, saying he lost track of the boy in the store.
It’s unclear how Perry got from the Kmart to his house without the car he drove there in. Perry will be charged with reckless endangerment of a child, police say.
How would you like to spend a day or so off work this way? (Report from a local Rochester NY TV station)
When you are out early in the morning covering the Black Friday shopping rush you end up meeting some interesting characters and people who defy the laws of physics getting gifts into their cars.
Toys ‘R Us opened before midnight with a line that stretched the length of the store. Karen Jones and her daughter were first in line. As Karen said this, her daughter stared at her in disbelief. “I’m going to send her for the toys I need the most. She can run fast and I’ll get the little things,” Jones said. We’re not sure how that worked out. Inside — call it organized chaos. “You only got one way. Keep going that way,” a clerk said through a bull horn.
It was the same inside the Best Buy in Greece. Long lines for games and TV’s. Austin Suter spent 30 hours waiting for the store to open and about 10 minutes shopping. “The trick is being one of the first in line and then you get out quick. The people coming in now are going to be out by 2:00AM,” Suter said. Suter doesn’t think what he and thousands of other people do on Black Friday is strange at all. “It’s nuts not-to economically because I’m saving $3,000 for a day of time because unless you can make over $3,000 in day, legally, then why not do this?” he asked. There was the engineering feat of the morning outside the Babies ‘R Us in Henrietta. Jennifer Block and her friend Lindsey Reifsteck started shopping at 7 o’clock Thursday night.
What exactly makes people spend all that money on crap? Do they really need it? Why is spending money on crap at the heart of these holidays?
Speculation is that we’re now going to see the start of Black Thanksgiving.
This season could mark the end of Black Friday as we know it.
For decades, stores have opened their doors in the wee hours on the day after Thanksgiving. But this year, major chains such as Target and Sears ushered in customers on Thanksgiving itself, even before the turkey leftovers had gotten cold, turning the traditional busiest shopping day of the year into a two-day affair.
Despite an outcry from some employees, both stores and shoppers seemed to like it. Some people went shopping with a full belly, going straight from the dinner table to the stores. Others slept off their big meal and went to the mall before daybreak on Black Friday.
“I ate my turkey dinner and came right here,” said Rasheed Ali, a college student in New York City who bought a 50-inch TV for $349 and a sewing machine for $50 when Target opened at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving. “Then I’m going home and eating more.”
This new approach could become a holiday shopping season tradition.
“It’s Black Thursday and Friday combined,” said Jackie Fernandez, a retail expert at the consulting firm Deloitte. “This is going to be a new normal of how we shop.”
It won’t be clear for a few days how many shoppers took advantage of the Thanksgiving hours. But about 17 percent of people said earlier this month that they planned to shop at stores that opened on Thanksgiving, according to an International Council of Shopping Centers-Goldman Sachs survey of 1,000 consumers.
Meanwhile, 33 percent intended to shop on Black Friday, down 1 percentage point from last year. Overall, it is estimated that sales on Black Friday will be up 3.8 percent to $11.4 billion this year, according to technology company ShopperTrak, which did not forecast sales from Thanksgiving Day.
The Black Friday creep began in earnest a few years ago when stores realized that sales alone weren’t enough to lure shoppers, especially with Americans becoming more comfortable buying things online. Opening on Thanksgiving was risky, with some employees and shoppers complaining it was almost sacrilegious.
But many stores evidently felt they needed an edge, especially this season, when many Americans are worried about high unemployment and wondering whether Congress will be able to head off tax increases and spending cuts before the U.S. reaches the “fiscal cliff” in January.
Overall, the National Retail Federation estimates that sales in November and December will rise 4.1 percent this year to $586.1 billion, below last year’s 5.6 percent.
“Every retailer wants to beat everyone else,” said C. Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research Group, a firm based in Charleston, S.C. “Shoppers love it.”
At Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, most of its 4,000 U.S. namesake stores are already open 24 hours year-round. But the chain added special sales at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving, two hours earlier than a year ago.
The company said that its start to the holiday season was “the best ever,” with nearly 10 million transactions and 5,000 items sold per second from 8 p.m. to midnight on Thanksgiving.
Toys R Us opened at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving, an hour earlier than last year.
Macy’s, which opened at midnight on Thanksgiving, had 12,000 customers wrapped around its store in New York’s Herald Square.
The earlier start also meant the violence associated with shoppers fighting for bargains likewise began earlier. On Thanksgiving night, a couple was struck by an SUV while walking into a Wal-Mart in Washington state, and in Texas, a fight broke out when a man tried to cut the queue at a Sears store in San Antonio. Two people also were shot and wounded in Tallahassee, Fla., in a disagreement that police believe was over a parking spot outside a Wal-Mart.
Julie Hansen, a spokeswoman at Minneapolis’ Mall of America, the nation’s largest shopping center, reported that 30,000 shoppers showed up for the mall’s midnight opening, up from 20,000 last year. “This was additional dollars,” Hansen said. This year, 200 of the 520 mall tenants opened at midnight following Thanksgiving. That’s double from a year ago.
To be sure, it’s not clear whether the longer hours will turn into extra dollars for retailers, or whether sales will simply be spread out over two days.
The Thanksgiving openings appeared to create two waves of shoppers — the late-nights and the early birds.
Anyway, I really need to go to the hardware store for some plumbing stuff so I can actually flush my toilet instead of having to lift the tank and pull the chain. The plastic bar broke a few days ago. I’m wondering when it will be safe to normal things like grocery shopping and picking up a new hammer. This is crazy. People are crazy. Is there any way to make it stop now please?
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