This year's thread is nearing its end.
War on New Year's Day? Is that a thing?
- Paul Ryan lectures Pope Francis on capitalism. Really:
It’s true that while knuckle-draggers like Rush Limbaugh attack the pope as a Marxist, Ryan has praised him, which I guess takes a tiny bit of courage since normally Republicans don’t like to buck the leader of their party. “What I love about the pope is he is triggering the exact kind of dialogue we ought to be having,” Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “People need to get involved in their communities to make a difference, to fix problems soul to soul.”
But he couldn’t suppress either his right-wing politics or his supreme capacity for condescension for very long. “The guy is from Argentina, they haven’t had real capitalism in Argentina,” Ryan said (referring to the pope as “the guy” is a nice folksy touch.) “They have crony capitalism in Argentina. They don’t have a true free enterprise system.”
And I'm sure that Operation Condor had nothing to do with that whatsoever.
- The weather in Los Angeles is warm and dry, but that can have its consequences:
As 2013 draws to a close, it is headed for the record books as the driest year in downtown Los Angeles since 1877, when official measurements began.
Only 3.60 inches have fallen at the National Weather Service station at USC since Jan. 1, about half an inch less than was recorded in 1953 and 1947, which until now had tied for the lowest rainfall.
With sun, sun and more sun in the forecast for the remaining few days of the year, meteorologists say there is virtually no chance of wet weather to undo the new record.
Now, Los Angeles gets most of its water from outside sources, so the city itself isn't in trouble. But yes, the climate is changing: Two of Los Angeles' driest years have come in the past decade.
- And on a related note, here's George Zornick on the dark money involved in climate denialism:
The thrust of the study, done by Dr. Robert J. Brulle, is that climate-denial money has largely been driven underground to dark-money sources. About 75 percent of the money backing climate-denial efforts is untraceable, primarily via conservative foundations and shadowy tax-exempt groups that obscure their funding sources.
What’s notable is that many of the big industrial funders — ExxonMobil and Koch Industries chief among them — have withdrawn their publicly traceable funding in recent years, and that withdrawal tracked closely with an increase in untraceable funding. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out what’s happening there.
As Zornick explains, climate denialism is becoming increasingly unpopular, which is forcing industries who want to protect their profits to obscure their contributions.
- Quick, someone tell the RNC that Rosa Parks didn't quite end racism just yet:
Ohio teacher, Gil Voigt, has been suspended without pay for allegedly making racially offensive remarks to a student, reports The Cincinnati Enquirer.
The 13-year-veteran teacher at Fairfield Freshman School, was accused of telling a black student, “We don’t need another black president,” after the boy expressed his aspiration to be president. The board suspended Voigt Monday night without pay, the first step needed for termination, says Fairfield City Schools Board President Dan Murray.
“He was talking to some students and said some things that were racially insensitive,” Murray explained. “We take diversity in our school district very seriously with tolerance of people who are different. We just felt this teacher had crossed the line.”
"Crossing the line" is certainly one way to put it.
- Hawaii is angling to be the site of Mr. Obama's future presidential library, but is widely considered the underdog when compared to Chicago. Either way, the efforts have been extensive:
From the governor to the state's congressional delegation and local university leaders, Hawaii has spared no effort in laying the groundwork for a potential library, gently pressing Obama's sister and close friends, and setting aside prime oceanfront real estate just in case Hawaii's favorite son chooses Oahu to host the monument to his legacy.
But as the gears start to turn in the Obama machinery that will eventually develop the library, the focus has increasingly turned to Chicago, where Obama was first elected and came into his own as a national political figure. It is a place many of his advisers and staunchest supporters call home.
Chicago is, nice, but...prime oceanfront real estate in Oahu? Is this even a question?
- Over at digby's place, David Atkins summarizes the modern economy in three paragraphs:
To make a long story short, the combined forces of globalization, flattening, deskilling and mechanization led to an inexorable downward trend in the power of wage earners in the labor market. Entire industries disappeared, employment stability decreased, wages shrank, jobs went to machines or to other countries for far lower pay, entry-level jobs became "internships", benefits shriveled, and so on. It didn't help that many countries (especially the U.S.) instituted intentional policies to benefit the rich and reduce their tax burden, but inequality has increased throughout the industrialized world to one degree or another regardless of governmental policy.
Instead of making harder choices, most policymakers took the easier way out of the quandary: increase asset values instead. Free trade deals lowered prices for goods at the expense of domestic labor; 401Ks replaced pensions to boost the stock market at the expense of retirement stability; credit cards and other lending vehicles were provided to ordinary citizens who couldn't make ends meet under normal circumstances (remember that in the 1950s most households got by entirely without credit!); the one-earner household norm was replaced with a two-earner norm at the expense of a variety of social ills; and, of course, since traditional savings vehicles, pensions, and the wages to fund them had been destroyed, huge housing incentives were created to push people into home ownership as their primary savings vehicle and hedge against inflation.
The result is the modern economy: a seemingly puzzling combination of record stock prices, record corporate profits, very strong housing prices and robust GDP gains, combined with rising cost of living, increasing unemployment in developed nations, insanely high youth unemployment rates and student debt, diminishing savings, entire industries disappearing with no hope of return, and minimal or even negative wage growth.
What he said. Question is, what to do about it?
- So there's this Silicon Valley venture capitalist who wants to split California into six separate states. Well hey: among all the other proposals out there to try to get tech entrepreneurs unencumbered by such petty things as the rule of law, it's actually one of the less crazy proposals out there.