Now, one could make the argument that criticizing the mainstream media is picking the low-hating fruit. That’s probably true- after all, all of those ads on the side of the page for “Brand New Shiny Toy” and “Get Rich Now” aren’t there by accident. These sorts of messages are designed to make one think that worth is something you can put a price tag on and getting the bauble that “everyone” (or Every Woman, or Every Man) wants can be a substitute for the time and energy that pursing an actual relationship takes. The point of these messages can basically be boiled down to “More expensive gifts mean you care more” and it’s quieter message of “If you don’t spend a lot you don’t care that much”.

But, it isn’t just the mainstream media. My mom is paranoid about being caught regifting, I was once told by an ex-boyfriend (who came from a wealthy family) that no gift is better than a cheap gift. And seriously, what a fucked-up idea is that? If you aren’t rich, if you don’t have a ton of disposable money to go buy the shiny, you shouldn’t give a gift? You shouldn’t enjoy the feeling of making someone feel special by giving them something all done up in wrapping paper and bright ribbon? The warm feeling when their face lights up? Or, equally as terribly, if your social circle is broke, you shouldn’t enjoy getting gifts from them? Is it really so much more terrible to get a book that’s already been read as opposed to getting nothing at all?

Getting upset about regifting is a mark of class privilege that is disgusting. Now, of course, I still of the dear belief that you give gifts because you WANT to, not because you HAVE to. I am not an owed a gift, nor is anyone beholden to give me one. But, if the gift is used, but it is still clear that it’s giving was after thought about what YOU would want and need, is that really worse than giving you a shiny that you have no use for? I say “no”. It is the thought that counts, and it is clear if thought has been given.

I know that gifts are not always given out of love. There’s social obligation, there’s expectation, there’s giving to brag. And it’s really sad, because at the end, that’s what makes the holiday season stressful and annoying, as opposed to a time of warmth and joy.

Here she goes!

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

I agree, Thomas Sowell has sort of said that, along with a lot of other crap that clearly lodged itself in Sarah’s one brain cell and is responsible for the above stoned-sounding babble. To quote his crap more precisely:

The government does not have some magic wand that can “bring down the cost of health care.” It can buy a smaller quantity or lower quality of medical care, as other countries with government-run medical care do.

It can decide not to spend as much money on the elderly as is being spent now. That can save a lot of money — if you think having a parent die earlier is a bargain.

The idea of a “duty to die” has been making some headway in recent years around the fringes of the left. It is perfectly consistent with the fundamental notion of the left, that decisions should be transferred from ordinary citizens to government elites.

To briefly address his rather astonishing claim that all other countries with government-run medical care offer either less medical care or lower quality medical care–and what metrics are we using to make this sweeping statement, one can’t help but wonder? According to the WHO, in 2000, although the U.S. spent a higher portion of its gross domestic product on its health care system than any other member country, it ranked 37 out of the 191 countries in terms of actual performance. The WHO used not just one but five performance metrics to determine its rankings:

1. overall level of population health;
2. health inequalities (or disparities) within the population;
3. overall level of health system responsiveness (a combination of patient satisfaction and how well the system acts);
4. distribution of responsiveness within the population (how well people of varying economic status find that they are served by the health system);
5. and the distribution of the health system’s financial burden within the population (who pays the costs).

One could hardly accuse the WHO of underanalyzing the situation–frankly, I suspect Sowell and Palin and the other loud objectors would consider this list far too comprehensive–after all, what do they care about no. 4? And the selfish hysteria they display in regards to no. 5 is pretty pathetic–

But aside from that, it’s the euthanasia contention that really interests me here. Specifically, what really interests me is the lovely portrait both the Palinator and Thomas Sowell appear to be painting of our current private health insurance system, where apparently everyone who has private health insurance finds that all their health care decisions, including end-of-life care, are made by the individual in concert with his loving doctor, with no other outside cost-based interference at all.

For a quick anecdotal reminder that, erm, this isn’t QUITE EXACTLY the case–I can’t be the only woman who gave birth in the early to mid-1990′s, right? And I know I’m not the only woman who got kicked out of the hospital less than 24 hours after giving birth, because the majority (if not all) of health insurance plans instituted a policy of flatly refusing to pay for longer than that, regardless of the fact that the standard postpartum stay recommended by physicians was 48-72 hours. In 1996, the federal government ended up passing legislation requiring health insurance companies to pay for a minimum of 48 hours, after the postpartum complication rate for both women and newborns abruptly began to soar. Oops!

For a less anecdotal statement of fact as to why that contention is total bullshit, save me some time. For those of you who have health insurance from a non-government source, please go look at your policy. I mean really look at it, not just skim over the co-pay and how much you have to fork out a month for you, you + 1 or you + 2 or more–read the whole damn policy. And tell me what care your health insurance company–not you or your doctor–what medical decisions about your care that your health insurance company does not now control already that the government suddenly would.

I think you’ll find that there aren’t any. All you’re doing by switching from private to public, folks, is changing masters–and it’s worth a think or two that you’re changing to a master that you do at least have some elective control over, eh?

(Note to Sarah: To the best of my knowledge, dear, nobody in either the private or the public sector is recommending the euthanization of babies with Down Syndrome. So really, you can relax!)

(via)

UPDATED: More from Salon: “The ‘death panels’ are already here”

UPDATED: Even her fellow Republicans are scrambling to distance themselves from this one.

That is the title of her biography, written by one of her ex-adherents who also happened to be the wife of a man Ayn had a long-term affair with–given all that, one would expect the tone of the book to be rather more unsympathetic than otherwise. However, that’s not really the case. I read it over a decade ago for a college class–the one and only women studies course I ever took required us to choose and write an in-depth paper about an influential woman of the first half of the twentieth century. I chose Ayn Rand, for three reasons: first, because she fit the criteria as presented; second, because I have a rebellious streak and knew full well that we were expected to choose a feminist, regardless of what the criteria explicitly stated; and third, because I was genuinely interested in the woman behind Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

On CNN this morning, I caught sight of the following headline:

‘Atlas Shrugged’ author sees resurgence

This struck me as a little odd, since I know Ayn’s been dead for several years now. What, is she seeing it from Heaven? (An even odder idea, given the virulence of her atheism.) But it isn’t the first time I’ve been reminded of Ayn recently–she’s been resurrected quite often lately, both by conservative types who are threatening to “go on strike” a la John Galt and by liberals who regularly mock both her admirers and her concepts, at least as they understand her concepts, which is usually poorly. (I won’t speak much to the whole “go on strike” routine the previously mentioned spoiled-rich poseurs are engaging in, other than to say it likely would have cracked Ayn up no end.)

Now, Ayn was no great fiction writer. She had her moments, especially humorous ones–but for the most part, her novel writing skills just ain’t there. She liked to give speeches–loved to give speeches, really, really long ones–! And, as anyone who writes fiction knows, one of the cardinal rules is to show, not tell, as much as possible, and Ayn never showed it if she could tell it, and tell it in excruciating detail. On those less frequent occasions when she did decide to show, she clearly felt that there was far too much of a chance that simply showing just wasn’t going to get her extremely important point across clearly enough. Suffice it to say that she injected enough symbolism into her showing scenes to fell an ox, and with about as much subtlety. She was also fond of eroticizing rape, which I suspect stemmed from a strong personal yearning to be a femme fatale. She seemed to figure that the pinnacle of sexual tension and excitement was some guy wanting you so badly that he couldn’t stop himself from ripping your clothes off (literally!) and that you would be so thrilled by this unmistakeable tribute to your irresistible attractiveness that all other considerations would pall. And beyond the desire to be incredibly physically attractive, she obviously, badly wanted to meet a man, a male, that she could genuinely consider superior to herself–she just as obviously never did, but if she’d managed to do so, she clearly imagined the experience to be so overwhelming that her only option would be to fling herself at his feet and become his slave. (Had she actually met such a man at some point, I think she’d have figured out fairly quickly that abject servitude to him was no more fun than abject servitude to anyone else is–it’s a shame she didn’t, it might have resulted in some more interesting writing.)

While researching her, I also stumbled across her testimony before HUAC (the House of Un-American Activities Committee, which amusingly sounds much more like a group of subversive Satanists than what it really was, which was a nasty part of the McCarthy era) in the late 1940′s. The University of Maryland has a lot of great goverment stuff in its archives, unsurprisingly given it’s geographic location, so I got to read the original transcripts on microfiche. It was depressing, though not completely without justification. Ayn had a pretty bad time of it in Russia before she managed to defect–given that, her virulence towards Communism and supporters of Communism is more understandable than some other people’s. It also makes her knee-jerk revulsion towards governmental controls on private citizen’s finances more understandable–but I was very sorry to learn that she’d gotten involved at all. Who wouldn’t be?

All those caveats aside, though, it was very good for me to read her stuff when I did, which was first in my early- to mid-twenties. I had been raised in a very liberal fashion, politically-speaking, yet I wasn’t comfortable with some aspects of my core beliefs–but I didn’t really know how to articulate that discomfort. I certainly wasn’t drawn to the Republican mantra of how feminists and welfare queens (a) lived high on the hog and (b) were responsible for the decline of the high morality of our civilization–I already knew that was total bullshit, having lived much more intimately with, er, welfare queens and feminists in their actual melieu than any of those self-same Republicans ever had. But I also wasn’t satisfied entirely with the black-and-white presentation of oppressor/oppressee–see, I’d had little contact for most of my life at that time with those liberal demons, the Rich Old White Men. However, I’d suffered plenty at the hands of my supposed fellow victims–far more than I could relate to any suffering I hadn’t yet had at the hands of the ROWM brigade. Liberals were happy to address the gendered motivated aspect of my suffering, and I could resonate with that–but what about all the rest? They were ominously silent.

What was the rest of my suffering? Well, for one thing, I (like Ayn) was very bright. I had always been very bright, noticeably bright–I came to expect, every time I had a new teacher, the half-suppressed choking as he or she went over my very first reading test for placement in each class, and of course the inevitable IQ testing in the counsellor’s office that followed. Interestingly enough, that never did result in a swelled head–I was the only child, for a very long time, in a family of unusually bright adults, and I spent my childhood not realizing that a child can’t be expected to read, write, or figure at the same skill level as not only adults, but very smart adults. I remember always feeling bad whenever I lost a game of Risk to my mother, uncle and grandfather–I didn’t realize that of course a six-year-old is going to lose to those people! It was actually wildly impressive that I could compete with them on any really equal footing at all–but then, as I said, I didn’t understand that. So I never really knew how smart I was, compared to the mean, til high school.

Oh, but high school. I had it figured out at that point. And I was pretty pissed off about it, too. I remember sitting in German class and listening to lots of the other kids talking about college. It was so hard to decide which one to attend! Mom wanted them to go here but Dad wanted them to go there but they had really heard that here was the total party university–oh, those children of privilege!

Another class I had back then was Expository Writing. I did not want to take it, but I needed four full years of English, and it was convenient to my open time slot for an elective course. I hated that class. Not because I didn’t love writing–I did love to write, and clearly still do (or I wouldn’t be here). However, I simply could not relate to the teacher. He had us spend the first five minutes of every class writing in a journal, just stream-of-consciousness, to various pieces of music he would put on–I have no idea what that type of music is called, but it consisted of vaguely ocean-y sounds–I think it was supposed to be soothing. All it was, was irritating. I didn’t need that sort of exercise to allow me to practice putting my thoughts on paper. I excelled at putting my thoughts on paper. I also had no desire to share a single personal thought with some guy I barely knew. I found it invasive, boring and silly. I suspect I didn’t hide that very well–let’s just say that he and I started off on the wrong foot, very early on in our relationship.

This guy, I think, was of the politically liberal persuasion. He certainly liked to go on and on at times about some home for mentally challenged kids he volunteered at–he often had an anecdote, or wanted to share some kid’s achievement or other, or related it to some story we were reading as part of the coursework. And boy howdy, I got sick of hearing about it. Between having to listen to other kids complain about the multitude of higher learning choices available to them and how they really wanted to go where they’d have the most fun, and listening to Mr. Whateverhisnamewas rhapsodize about the massive, plush facilities dedicated to teaching some other kids with severe mental impairments how to bake a cookie, I seriously began to wonder why I was so worthless and undeserving. Nobody, not the government, not the schools, not private charities or individual doners, and certainly not my family, was forking over the $$$ to see that I got any opportunities. Quite the opposite–any job I had, my family snatched up the paycheck as soon as I got it home and dumped it into the grocery-and-gas budget. There were either no gifted school programs or practically none–but money for the mentally handicapped abounded. And why was I being punished by the government because my dad worked like a dog..? We made too much money for any kind of assistance whatsoever–not medical, not educational, not housing, nothing–but we didn’t make enough money to provide those things for ourselves, either. And instead of being mentally handicapped, I was the opposite. I didn’t feel like that made me more deserving than someone who was handicapped, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why it made me less so.

This is why I sneer at conservatives and their “bootstraps.” They certainly don’t make their own children rely on their “bootstraps,” and I can assure them, it ain’t because their kids are smarter or harder-working than I was. It’s funny really (once you get over being too mad about it to think straight) because they like to pretend that they do–a previous long-term relationship (we’ll call him “F,”) certainly a child of privilege, was extraordinarily and loudly proud that he’d “made all his money himself, nobody had ever just given him any of it.” He utterly failed to realize that his supportive family environment, healthy food and living habits of his childhood, his parents’ pickup of his college tab and their welcoming of him back home after college so that he could live rent-and-food free to save up for his first home, and his sister’s “in” with the director at the company he got his first job at, were the props that had enabled him to “make all that money himself” at all.

But Ayn helped me learn to also sneer at liberals and, as she put it, the luxury of their pity, that you pay for. They pitied the mentally handicapped, and so agitated for big bucks to be poured into educational resources for them. But they had no interest at all in the unusually bright. Because that is not pitiable, it is not worth a share of the pooled government resources. They pitied the homeless and third-generation welfare families and agitated for big bucks to be poured into them as well–but they had no pity for the working poor. When I was a kid, I was madly jealous of my friends whose families were on welfare because they got to get braces, and go to the doctor when they were sick, and eat lunch every day at school, and live in a nice trailer with wall-to-wall carpet and air conditioning–yes, I was jealous of living in trailers. They were much nicer than anywhere we ever lived, honestly. I didn’t have any of that stuff because my dad worked too hard at his miserable, crappy, blue-collar job. Somehow that made his daughter less deserving of medical and dental care, regular meals and a decent roof over her head?

And Ayn helped me free myself of my own family. My mother, in particular, who took every penny I ever made when I lived at home, thereby making it impossible for me to ever save up a dime for anything. And after I left home, suctioned up as much of my paycheck as I was able to send her. In return, she doled out emotional support…in a niggardly, grudging fashion–and of course I was aware of that. In an effort to show her that she didn’t have to be nice to me to get money, I ended up just giving her money, a lot of it! And asking nothing in return, which I think in the back of my head I believed would free her from feeling obligated to love me and would then result in a more natural expression of the same. (Yes, I know. Please, don’t mock the naivete. Keep in mind how young I was when all this was unfolding.) My mother, who on my eighteenth birthday told me she hoped I didn’t think I could just sit around at home being supported all day–I had better have some kind of plan, or else–! I was just telling my ex-husband the other day (who grew up in even poorer circumstances than I did) how funny it was that she felt the need to say that to me, who had been working and feeding cash into the family coffer since I was thirteen years old. (My ex-husband’s father put him to work on farms around the same age, and he got the same speech from him at age eighteen, so he understands how funny that was. Not.)

In Atlas Shrugged, there’s a scene where one of the main characters is facing arrest, and he goes home to his family before going on the lam. His family (mother and brother) have lived with him all his adult life and he has supported them uncomplainingly; when he gets home, they both start in on him, begging him to cooperate with the authorities and turn himself in and give them whatever money he has on him so they can survive while he’s in prison. He tells them he has no money, all his assets have been frozen–I can’t find my copy of the book, so I’m going to have to quote this from memory, and I’m sure I’m not getting it perfectly right. But this is the gist:

“If you really cared about me,” Hank said, “you’d be urging me to run, and helping me do it all you could.”
His mother stared at him, then screamed, “But what will we do without you? We need you!”
“Well then,” Hank said. “You should have known how to value me before.”

That really resonated with me. Why do I owe my hard work and life’s blood to people who have made it clear that all I am is a way for them to avoid having to work hard themselves at anything, people who clearly don’t value me, the individual, at all? In the political sense, of course, that’s a conservative argument. Their fallacy is that they are utterly unable to distinguish (willfully, I suspect) the difference between can’t work hard and won’t work hard, nor are they able to comprehend the poisonous atmosphere that children in won’t work hard families are brought up. Children believe what their parents teach them, and when your childhood is a monotonous litany of we’re doomed from the start nothing we do makes a difference they’re all out to get us anyway so we may as well sit here til we rot because That’s Just The Unfairness and Injustice of the Universe—you will internalize that to some degree. To escape it, you usually must be willing to sever all ties with your family…and most people aren’t willing to do that, and many people are incapable of doing that. It is very difficult to become an orphan by choice. Very difficult. Or, as more commonly is the case, you can keep ties with your family and endure their resentment and jealousy and self-centeredness day in and day out, in exchange for which you get to feed them a steady supply of your income.

I don’t extend that argument to the population at large. I extend it only to my family, whose circumstances I know very intimately, intimately enough that I can safely and freely say that they won’t work hard (excluding my poor beleagered dad, of course, who passed away two years ago, I should mention), and therefore they don’t deserve what I have gotten by being willing to work hard. Sorry.

All these other people who are chanting and quoting Ayn–if they did read her books, they missed a lot of the message, and that goes double for the dude currently running the Ayn Rand institute–

“So many people see the parallels with actually what’s going on, with the government taking over the banks, with the government kind of taking over the automobile industry, a president who fires the CEO of a major American corporation. These are the kind of things that come out of ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ ” Brook said.

People are idiots. In Atlas Shrugged, the government takes over healthy, productive, afloat companies and gives the money gained to inefficient, corrupt companies. What’s actually going on in our country is that the government is taking over inefficient, corrupt companies and leaving healthy, productive, afloat companies alone. Now, Ayn would have hated the takeovers even of the former–she believed in letting companies that couldn’t make it on their own merits collapse–but the people who are moaning about and drawing tight-lipped parallels to Atlas Shrugged are frequently the same people who are eagerly accepting the government bailouts funded by taxpayer money. As Jon Stewart so pithily said, “Yeah, man, Wall Street is mad as hell! And they’re not gonna take it anymore! Unless by ‘it’ you mean 2 trillion dollars in their own bailout money! That, they will take!”

So, Ayn was personally effed up in multiple areas (sexuality, the complexities of national and global economics, etc.) and often a tedious fiction writer–but she did have some things of value to say. It’s a real shame that nobody ever dwells on those, and the people who do spend time dwelling on her at all, either dwell on her flaws or on whatever misunderstanding of what she said happens to suit their agenda. But I don’t suppose that makes her any different from a lot of other well-known writers—it’s just a shame she’s not around to add her voice to the chorus any longer.

(Via.)

If you or I were to rob a bank (no guns, no violence, just a scary note and the threat of violence) we’d be facing some serious jail time. But if you are a banker and you rob the treasury department with threats of violently collapsing the entire world economy, you don’t get jail time. You get TARP money. And you still get to hand out annual bonuses and bitch about salary caps.

Now if you or I had to apply for government assistance, there would be some serious investigation into our finances. If you own a car worth more than a couple thousand bucks ($5000 I think), you have to sell it and use up that money first. If you have stocks or bonds or a 401k even a prepaid funeral plan, you have to use that up first. Then maybe you can get some kind of government help. Maybe.

But if you’re a banker, and you’ve run your company into the ground, your own assets are safe. The government will not require you to sell off your vacation house and pump the proceeds back into the bank before writing a check. They won’t even require salary cuts or end bonuses (who the fuck gives out annual bonuses at failing companies anyways?)

What is absolutely fascinating to me are the cases in between– like Kazutsugi Nami, a Japanese businessman/swindler who invented a “quasi-currency” called “Enten” (円天=”money from heaven”), and after eight years of this, recently got arrested on accusations of defrauding thousands of investors of at least $1 billion (and possibly as much as $2 billion).

You can only stand slackjawed at the awesome chutzpah of sharks like this:

Moments before his arrest in front of the TV cameras, Nami was unrepentant as he held court over breakfast in a restaurant near his Tokyo office.

“Please shoot the face of the biggest conman in history,” he said, sipping from a glass of beer at 5.30am. “Time will tell if I’m a conman or a swindler. I’m leading 50,000 people. Can they charge a company this big with fraud?”

Shortly before being led away by police, he was asked if he felt sorry for his cheated investors. “No. I have put my life at stake,” he said. “Why do I have to apologise? I’m the poorest victim. Nobody lost more than I did. You should be aware that high returns come with a high risk.”

So Red Queen is right, people get locked up for stealing chewing gum but get a private island nation if they get some buddies together to steal seven or eight hundred billion dollars at a time. What’s interesting to me is that, in this new age of economic crapitude, evidently even stealing a mere billion dollars isn’t enough to save you from the slammer.

(In truth, I think that Nami’s problem wasn’t that he wasn’t scamming enough money. Even as paltry a sum as a billion dollars is surely enough to protect you, if you do it right. It’s just that that he tried to go it on his own. Gotta go through the family. If he’d funneled just 5% of that money into lobbyists, he’d still be a free man.)

I’ve had the same mental whiplash lately with feminist issues–I had subconsciously come to accept that women were going to be irrevocably second-class citizens where the national government (and most state governments) were concerned; the fight was to move the populace as much as possible to limit the powers of governance that naturally adhered to this ideal. The notion of “top-down” changes in women’s status had completely left me as something that actually came to mind as a possible solution. All directives coming from the “top” were going to be anti-woman; the only workable strategies were going to have to come from we-the-masses.

But, back to the economic stimulus package–I’ve been really hesitant to weigh in because economics is not my area of expertise, especially on the macroscopic scale. I never feel qualified to make pronouncements about what will and will not work to help repair our national economy; however, I will go ahead and venture my tentative opinions here; I’d love to hear from others with better knowledge than me of how macroeconomics work (and who are not simply quoting a party line, from either side of the aisle).

The Prez writes, in his WaPo article:

Now is the time to protect health insurance for the more than 8 million Americans at risk of losing their coverage and to computerize the health-care records of every American within five years, saving billions of dollars and countless lives in the process.

Now is the time to save billions by making 2 million homes and 75 percent of federal buildings more energy-efficient, and to double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy within three years.

Now is the time to give our children every advantage they need to compete by upgrading 10,000 schools with state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries and labs; by training our teachers in math and science; and by bringing the dream of a college education within reach for millions of Americans.

And now is the time to create the jobs that remake America for the 21st century by rebuilding aging roads, bridges and levees; designing a smart electrical grid; and connecting every corner of the country to the information superhighway.

From which I distill the following*:

(*If I’m partially or completely off-base with any of these, definitely let me know! Like I said, this whole area of understanding is not really my forte.)

Obama’s main goals for the economic stimulus package are that it

(1) implement some form of government-covered universal health care; A
(2) build some sort of national database of medical records for the citizenry; C
(3) offer financial incentives of some description to both private homeowners and government contractors to make more energy-efficient homes and buildings; B
(4) use government money to retroactively refit homes and government buildings for energy efficiency; C
(5) use government money to fund alternative-energy research; B
(6) give money to schools to build or retrofit for more learning technology; A
(7) offer financial incentives for teachers to train in math and science and/or encourage math and science majors to teach upon graduation; B
(8) increase government funding of colleges and/or provide more government grants and loans to students; A
(9) put people directly to work for the government rebuilding aging infrastructure a la 1930′s Roosevelt initiatives; A
(10) increase funding of the DoE’s “Smart Grid” project; B
(11) I have no idea what “connecting every corner of the country to the information superhighway” means, exactly; it’s too vague. A computer with an internet connection in every cornfield..? ?

What are the bolded letters beside each one for..? Well, all of the above (except 11, which I can’t decipher with any specificity) fall into one of three categories for me:

(A) Ideas I think are great and whose time has come that I also think will be a significant at least reasonably short-term stimulus to the economy
(B) Ideas I think are great and whose time has come but aren’t really going to do much for the economy in the reasonably short-term and the long term may be a very long term
(C) Ideas I think aren’t that great regardless of the state of our economy

So, given that coding system, I tagged each concept with my opinion. In short–I think that all items marked “A” can reasonably be included in an “economic stimulus package” and all items marked “B” should definitely be a goal of the administration but really do not belong in something labeled an “economic stimulus package.” And all items marked “C” can be safely flushed down the nearest toilet.

Opinions?

And then there’s this,

A few months ago, Lewis visited Princeton University, his alma mater, “to find out what the kids who were going to be investment bankers were now going to do with their lives.” He says he was “so frustrated with how unimaginative young people had become in choosing their path in life that I thought that someone should establish a kind of ‘Scared Straight’ program for Ivy League students.” He’d require them to spend a week with a hedge fund manager in Greenwich, Conn., “just to see how miserable” they’d be after 20 years.

The plunging market has changed many of their plans, Lewis says. “The kids … who thought they were going to be financiers are having to rethink the premise, and that’s a very good thing.” — ‘Liar’s Poker’ Author Sees Upside To Market Crash, NPR

So, one of the keen benefits of a global market crash—you know, the thing that’s leaving some people struggling, and lots of people dead—is that extremely privileged white people will really have the opportunity to find themselves.

Just in case you haven’t read it, and don’t have time to wade through all fourteen full-length pages of it, I have summarized the meat of each entry below:

Jim Manzi, chairman of an applied artificial-intelligence software company and contributing editor of National Review: It’s finally happened. The middle class has figured out that voting Republican is voting against their own economic interests. The Reagan mantra appears to be losing its hypnotic effect. We must find a new chant to bamboozle them with. Hey, I know–let’s resegregate public schools, start shooting illegal immigrants on sight and concentrate on recruiting the whitest foreign nationals we can find to fill our immigration quotas instead!

Douglas Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University: Barack Obama is Ronald Reagan reborn. Also, could we stop obsessing on abortion?

Ross Douthat, author of Grand New Party and a blogger for the Atlantic: No.

Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and author of It’s My Party, Too: I refuse to believe that the middle class figured that out. Issues, schmissues– to all those people the election was just a popularity contest! and Barack Obama, unfortunately, is much hotter than Bush. All we have to do is make sure they don’t associate Bush with us from now on.

Tucker Carlson, author and commentator for MSNBC and The Daily Beast: I agree that it’s all a popularity contest, Christine–it’s not enough to dissociate ourselves from him, though, we need to find somebody even cooler than Obama to be our frontman. Also, we need to give the middle class a new strawman to hate–that was so effective during the Cold War. Our efforts to replace “Communists” with “Islamofascists” appears to have lost a lot of its oomph.

Ross Douthat: ABORTION, hello?? Abortion!

Douglas Kmiec: Reagan was a god. I really think that Obama is his second coming.

Jim Manzi: You’re probably right, Christine; and Douglas, if you think a single damn one of us is going to do anything other than flatly oppose every last line of Obama’s liberal pinko agenda with our dying breaths, you’re quite mistaken.

Kathleen Parker, author and syndicated columnist who also blogs for the Washington Post: I agree with Christine too and I’ll go even further and say that the deciding popularity factor wasn’t even Bush’s lack of cool or Obama’s abundance of it, but McCain’s horrid, stupid, winking, redneck of a MILF vice-presidential candidate. And no, it’s not fucking elitist of me to say so!

Douglas Kmiec: Ross, Obama is my hero. And I’m pro-choice. Here, let me kiss your ass vigorously to make it up to you in the most passive-aggressive way possible.

Tucker Carlson: Doug, you sound like a woman, and there is no worse insult I could possibly lob at you than that.

Ross Douthat: Well, I loved Sarah Palin because she at least was willing to call out abortion for the baby-murdering slut-enabling conspiracy that it is. But I agree with Tucker that we need to find a man who can compete with Obama for sheer coolness, though I must say that I personally thought Bill Clinton was cooler. McCain? L-O-S-E-R!

Christine Todd Whitman: Maybe if I address this post to everybody, Ross won’t realize I’m speaking directly to him?–look, the abortion bullshit is no longer a winning strategy. The only people who can’t get over it are the Jesus freaks, and clearly, they’re not a majority voting bloc, so screw them. Back to the important topic here–how do we repackage Reaganomics so that the middle class will buy it all over again? Honestly, I’m just praying that the Democrats screw up so badly that every last one of the middle class ends up completely bankrupt. They’ll come running back to us then!

Douglas Kmiec: God, I miss Reagan. Have I said that already?

(Hat tip: Synikal)