But of course:

For that matter, this notion that Palin was widely ridiculed because of “class” is crazy. The governor may find it embarrassing, but she’s upper-middle-class. Playing the victim, and suggesting the media is picking on her because she isn’t wealthy is absurd.

But Palin wasn’t done, telling John Ziegler (remember him?) that Katie Couric and Tina Fey have been “capitalizing on” and “exploiting” her, that her embarrassing interviews during the campaign had been “sliced” together, and that she thinks MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann is “evil.”

Remember, she was nearly the vice president of the United States.

And some people still think that would have been great!

Actually, the most interesting part of her interview with Ziegler is where she seems to imply that after Katie Couric, it would have been better if she hadn’t done any more interviews, at all:

“I knew it didn’t go well the first day, and then we gave her a couple of other segments after that. And my question to the campaign was, after it didn’t go well the first day, why were we going to go back for more?” she said. “Because of however it works in that upper echelon of power brokering in the media and with spokespersons, it was told to me that, yeah, we are going to go back for more. And going back for more was not a wise decision either.”

Power brokering in the media and with spokespersons.

You know, there were unwise decisions made in terms of Sarah Palin’s candidacy - but the decision to make her available to the media might have been the least of them.

New vid is up.

Rush, at it again:

Rush Limbaugh falsely asserted that Rep. Barney Frank “created the problem” of the subprime mortgage crisis, claiming that Frank’s “definition of affordable housing was to make sure that people who couldn’t pay the loans back got the loans, the mortgages. He forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to do this.”

Forced.

Because, see, the banks - they never would have made irresponsible “creative” mortage loans to people who couldn’t afford them if Barney Frank and big government wasn’t forcing them to!

But then… what about Washington Mutual?

On a financial landscape littered with wreckage, WaMu, a Seattle-based bank that opened branches at a clip worthy of a fast-food chain, stands out as a singularly brazen case of lax lending. By the first half of this year, the value of its bad loans had reached $11.5 billion, nearly tripling from $4.2 billion a year earlier.

Interviews with two dozen former employees, mortgage brokers, real estate agents and appraisers reveal the relentless pressure to churn out loans that produced such results.

You mean Barney Frank was pressuring WaMu?

Why, no:

According to these accounts, pressure to keep lending emanated from the top, where executives profited from the swift expansion — not least, Kerry K. Killinger, who was WaMu’s chief executive from 1990 until he was forced out in September. …

<snip>

During Mr. Killinger’s tenure, WaMu pressed sales agents to pump out loans while disregarding borrowers’ incomes and assets, according to former employees.

But wait! This would imply that the beloved free market bears some culpability!

This might imply that the banks and mortgage companies saw big money to be made by being cavalier, and didn’t need Barney Frank or his big evil government to push them - because were already jumping.

And that can’t possibly be the case, because it contradicts the narrative, which is that the subprime crisis is entirely the fault of  big government and the brown people they lent do.

And Barney Frank - he’s gay! Case closed!

Hm.

So Obama today clangs the warning bell, saying that unless the economic stimulus is sufficiently big/expensive, “a bad situation could become dramatically worse.” Paul Krugman has been writing about this as well - this is, he writes, beginning to look more and more like a depression rather than a mere recession. And if it is a depression, a smaller stimulus package, which takes months to pass, may wind up “enough to slow the descent, not stop it. Meanwhile, deflation is setting in, while businesses and consumers start to base their spending plans on the expectation of a permanently depressed economy — well, you can see where this is going.”

Instinctively, I’m opposed to the idea of these unprecedented deficits - $1.2 trillion this year. But what I need to be careful of is letting that instinct get in the way of sober analysis (which is, after all, my constant critique of conservatives).

But I hadn’t considered the political aspect of the GOP criticism of Obama’s plan:

However, from the standpoint of Republicans, the more ominous lesson of the New Deal policies is that it left the Democrats firmly in power for more than 20 years. The Republicans did not regain the White House until 1952, 20 years after President Roosevelt was first elected.

Imagine how terrifying the prospect of 20 years of Democratic presidencies must be for the current generation of Republican leaders. This would mean that they would not retake the White House until 2028, just 20 years before the Social Security trust fund is first projected to face a shortfall.

In 2028, Newt Gingrich will be 85 years old; Mitt Romney will be 81; Mike Huckabee will be 73 and Senator McCain will be 98. Even Sarah Palin will be a less than youthful 64. In short, if President-elect Obama is allowed to carry through with his stimulus package and the rest of his ambitious domestic agenda, most of current leadership of the Republican Party can expect to spend the rest of their political career in the political wilderness, far removed from the centers of power.

There’s an inherent political problem here for the GOP, as well. Ideologically, not only are they opposed to the idea of bigger/more expensive government, but many are wedded to the notion that - as Reagan said - government is the problem and not the solution.

Now we come to a point in our history where government may be the only plausible solution. If I were Republican - I’d be frightened, too.

Story on the front page of today’s Era:

Is Lancaster County due for its first plowable snow Friday night into Saturday? Maybe even up to 9 inches, as one computer model shows?

Yeah.

Here’s my official prediction: A quarter-inch of snow, followed by freezing rain.

It says here we don’t have a single snowfall over 2 inches the rest of this winter. Though I - and the boy and his snowboard - would love to be proven wrong.

Remember when Bush wanted to privatize Social Security?

Italy did for retirement financing what President George W. Bush couldn’t do in the U.S.: It privatized part of its social security system. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

The global market meltdown has created losses for those who agreed to shift their contributions from a government severance payment plan to private funds meant to yield higher returns. Anger is rising both at the state, which promoted the change, and money managers such as UniCredit SpA and Arca Previdenza, which stood to profit.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s administration is now considering ways to compensate as many as 1.2 million people who made the switch, giving up a fixed return for private plans linked to financial markets.

Had the U.S. done this, ideological conservatives would have been the first to switch their money over; they would have also gotten crushed by the market. Glad they or anyone else didn’t have to go through that. But it would have been very interesting to hear their argument in favor of a bailout.

I don’t disagree with Steve Chapman here, that more and better regulation wouldn’t have been a magic bullet that prevented the likes of Bernie Madoff from doing what he did:

Advocates of stricter regulation often talk as though the choice for protecting investors is between imperfect market mechanisms and foolproof government regulations. In fact, governments, like every other institution, are staffed by fallible individuals who can be fooled as easily as anyone else.

The call for more federal control overlooks inconvenient facts. The first is that con artists will often outfox regulators, if only because they have far more to gain from carrying off a fraud than civil servants have to gain from stopping it. If the SEC couldn’t catch the brazen Madoff in eight tries, what suggests we should place greater faith in the ability of other agencies trying to monitor a vast network of financial companies?

But the takeaway from this is that there is no way to “monitor a vast network of financial companies”; that society has absolutely no way to prevent excesses, and government shouldn’t try.

That doesn’t exactly re-establish faith in the economy, is it? Government is fallible, so the only option is to trust in the morality and prudence of markets, except that markets aren’t always going to moral or prudent, and in fact sometimes might be unbelievably reckless. But them’s the breaks. Get used to it.

Whaddya mean, you’re keeping your money in the mattress instead?

But pregnancy doesn’t:

The Centers for Disease Control released a new report today that found that Mississippi “now has the nation’s highest teen pregnancy rate, displacing Texas and New Mexico for that lamentable title.” The report found that in 2006, the Mississippi teen pregnancy rate was over 60 percent higher than the national average and increased 13 percent since the year before.

Why might that be? Maybe because Mississippi focuses heavily on abstinence:

A reporter for ABC News’s Jackson, MS affiliate explained, “The Mississippi Department of Human Services says abstinence is the only birth control that is 100 percent effective. And that’s the only message teens need to hear.”

One of the fundamental disconnects of our society is the fact that the moral thing isn’t always the effective thing. We may think abstinence education the (only?) moral type of sex education.

But what happens when the “moral” approach ultimately makes the underlying problems worse?

Ever wonder what Joe the Plumber was doing these days?

Me neither.

Nevertheless, we stumble upon an AP story noting that Joe is now going to be a war correspondent:

The Ohio man who became a household name during the presidential campaign says he is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for the conservative Web site pjtv.com.

Samuel J. Wurzelbacher (WUR’-zuhl-bah-kur) says he’ll spend 10 days covering the fighting.

He tells WNWO-TV in Toledo that he wants to let Israel’s “‘Average Joes’ share their story.”

Wasn’t he, like, supposed to buy a plumbing business or something?

At a time when Obama has warned of “trillion-dollar deficits for years to come,” his economic stimulus package includes $300 billion in tax cuts:

The legislation Mr. Obama’s team is developing with Congressional Democrats will devote about 40 percent of the cost to tax cuts, including his centerpiece campaign promise to provide credits up to $500 for most workers, costing roughly $150 billion. The package will also include more than $100 billion in tax incentives for businesses to create jobs and invest in equipment or factories.

Tax cuts are always popular, but at a time when we’ve bailed out the banks and bailed out the auto industry and will need to bail out who knows what next; at a time when we continue to fight expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one wonders what the term “fiscal responsibility” even means anymore.

Is it responsible for the government to shoulder all sorts of new obligations, then reduce revenues via a tax cut? I can’t help but think that’s the attitude that got us into this mess in the first place.

Lovely “storm” we got here, once again. Watching the Weather Channel, the jet stream appears to be moving directly over Lancaster County - meaning, perhaps, that we won’t get any snow this winter, at least nothing worth measuring.

I’m so old I remember when we used to get the occasional single-digit day, with enough snow for kids to build snow forts. Wonder how long ’til this corner of Pennsylvania gets back to that. If ever.

Yeah, this one’s gonna go down well with that certain segment:

Just as Tiger Woods forever changed the country-club culture of golf, and Will Smith confounded stereotypes about the ideal Hollywood leading man, hip-hop’s rise is helping redefine the American mainstream, which no longer aspires toward a single iconic image of style or class. Successful network-television shows like Lost, Heroes, and Grey’s Anatomy feature wildly diverse casts, and an entire genre of half-hour comedy, from The Colbert Report to The Office, seems dedicated to having fun with the persona of the clueless white male. The youth market is following the same pattern: consider the Cheetah Girls, a multicultural, multiplatinum, multiplatform trio of teenyboppers who recently starred in their third movie, or Dora the Explorer, the precocious bilingual 7-year-old Latina adventurer who is arguably the most successful animated character on children’s television today. In a recent address to the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies, Brown Johnson, the Nickelodeon executive who has overseen Dora’s rise, explained the importance of creating a character who does not conform to “the white, middle-class mold.” When Johnson pointed out that Dora’s wares were outselling Barbie’s in France, the crowd hooted in delight.

Paul Krugman had a bit last week in which he wrote:

Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

He may have overstated it, but there’s a lot of truth in it. Back to the Atlantic piece:

“I think white people feel like they’re under siege right now—like it’s not okay to be white right now, especially if you’re a white male,” laughs Bill Imada, of the IW Group. Imada and Newman-Carrasco are part of a movement within advertising, marketing, and communications firms to reimagine the profile of the typical American consumer. (Tellingly, every person I spoke with from these industries knew the Census Bureau’s projections by heart.)

“There’s a lot of fear and a lot of resentment,” Newman-Carrasco observes, describing the flak she caught after writing an article for a trade publication on the need for more-diverse hiring practices. “I got a response from a friend—he’s, like, a 60-something white male, and he’s been involved with multicultural recruiting,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘I really feel like the hunted. It’s a hard time to be a white man in America right now, because I feel like I’m being lumped in with all white males in America, and I’ve tried to do stuff, but it’s a tough time.’”

“I always tell the white men in the room, ‘We need you,’” Imada says. “We cannot talk about diversity and inclusion and engagement without you at the table. It’s okay to be white!

“But people are stressed out about it. ‘We used to be in control! We’re losing control!’”

Yeah, they are. And the danger is that the brown people treat the white people the way the white people have treated the brown people.

Finally, how this plays out politically:

These phenomena reflected a growing sense of cultural solidarity among lower-middle-class whites—a solidarity defined by a yearning for American “authenticity,” a folksy realness that rejects the global, the urban, and the effete in favor of nostalgia for “the way things used to be.”

Like other forms of identity politics, white solidarity comes complete with its own folk heroes, conspiracy theories (Barack Obama is a secret Muslim! The U.S. is going to merge with Canada and Mexico!), and laundry lists of injustices. The targets and scapegoats vary—from multiculturalism and affirmative action to a loss of moral values, from immigration to an economy that no longer guarantees the American worker a fair chance—and so do the political programs they inspire. (Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan both tapped into this white identity politics in the 1990s; today, its tribunes run the ideological gamut, from Jim Webb to Ron Paul to Mike Huckabee to Sarah Palin.) But the core grievance, in each case, has to do with cultural and socioeconomic dislocation—the sense that the system that used to guarantee the white working class some stability has gone off-kilter. …

<snip>

The result is a racial pride that dares not speak its name, and that defines itself through cultural cues instead—a suspicion of intellectual elites and city dwellers, a preference for folksiness and plainness of speech (whether real or feigned), and the association of a working-class white minority with “the real America.” (In the Scots-Irish belt that runs from Arkansas up through West Virginia, the most common ethnic label offered to census takers is “American.”) Arguably, this white identity politics helped swing the 2000 and 2004 elections, serving as the powerful counterpunch to urban white liberals, and the McCain-Palin campaign relied on it almost to the point of absurdity (as when a McCain surrogate dismissed Northern Virginia as somehow not part of “the real Virginia”) as a bulwark against the threatening multiculturalism of Barack Obama. Their strategy failed, of course, but it’s possible to imagine white identity politics growing more potent and more forthright in its racial identifications in the future, as “the real America” becomes an ever-smaller portion of, well, the real America, and as the soon-to-be white minority’s sense of being besieged and disdained by a multicultural majority grows apace.

Next four years are gonna be fun times.

This is pretty much right on the mark:

I never believed that GWB actually tricked the nation on the “weapons of mass destruction” rationale for invading Iraq. Rather, the nation fooled itself into thinking that the war, in the first place, was anything but an act of vengeance for the gross injury of 9/11. After a couple of years, the public adopted the stupid narrative that they were “lied to,” rather than recognizing the difficult truth that 9/11 had to be answered with lethal force, that international hostilities are far from wholly rational, and that Saddam Hussein got whacked because he was the Arab head-of-state who was the best candidate for getting whacked.

Hm.:

Conservatives are now brushing off the Schiavo case to use it against Thomas Perrelli, President-elect Obama’s pick for the no. 3 spot at the Justice Department. Right-wing websites are outraged at Obama’s association with Perrelli, since he was one of the lawyers who represented Michael Schiavo, who wanted his wife’s feeding tube removed. The Washington Times today reports that these conservatives are now gearing up to fight Perrelli’s nomination.

You could pick a lot of moments at which the Bush presidency - and the conservative movement that propelled it into office - went south. Lots of people would point to the Katrina debacle and the president’s/right’s reaction to it.

But the first undeniable crack in the wall was the Schiavo case. It was the crossroads of “pro-life” government interventionism - proof that cultural conservatives would meddle in anyone’s personal family decisions if they felt it  “necessary” - with the cold, crass political calculation that the movement had (until that time) employed so expertly.

Americans got a long, hard look at what movement conservatism was all about. And recoiled in horror.

And that was the beginning of the end.

To paraphrase the old line, though - they forget nothing, and they learn nothing. So we’re likely to be treated to another round of conservative outrage over the whole issue - from those who couldn’t understand why the country wasn’t with ‘em the first time around.

Too bad, so sad:

NBC CUTS COULTER; KEEPS PEREZ
Mon Jan 05 2009 17:50:57 ET

**Exclusive Details**

The nation’s top selling conservative author has been banned from appearing on NBC, insiders tell the DRUDGE REPORT.

“We are just not going to have her on any more, it’s over,” a top network source explains.

But a second top suit strongly denies there is any “Coulter ban”.

“Look for a re-invite, as soon as Wednesday,” said the news executive, who asked not to be named.

NBC’s TODAY show abruptly cut Ann Coulter from its planned Tuesday broadcast, claiming the schedule was overbooked.

Yeah, we actually have some non-Nazis we have to get on.

Conservatives will whine incessantly about this - it’s what they do. Which makes the title of her book all the more amusing: “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and their Assault on America.”

Liberal victims?

Poor Ann. Now she’s a victim too!

And here we just bought a Toyota:

Toyota is suspending production at all 12 of its Japan plants for 11 days over February and March, a stoppage of unprecedented scale for the nation’s top automaker as it grapples with shrinking global demand.

I understand the precipitous drop in demand for American cars - especially when consumers consider that GM, for instance, has said it would have gone bankrupt without the bailout, and who’s buying a care when the company is admitting it’s on the verge of bankruptcy?

But Toyota’s sales in the U.S. are actually in worse shape:

Overnight, Toyota reported that its U.S. sales in December were down 37 percent on year, a worse drop than Ford Motor Co.’s 32 percent drop and General Motor’s 31 percent slide.

Toyota last year suspended production at its auto plants in Alabama, Indiana and Texas for three months, and shut down output for two days in December at all its North American vehicle factories including five in the United States, one in Canada and another in Mexico.

So all this haggling over union issues up in Detroit - and workers at these southern factories may not be any better off even without the unions.

The lack of snow is depressing. January spreads out like a bleak quilt.

Welcome back, the holidays are over.

Watching “The Who Live at Kilburn,” burned by a guy I work with, very cool - the “lost” concert, and maybe “lost” for a good reason - as in, it didn’t really deserve to be found.

Keith Moon on his last legs. Nonetheless, it’s still the Who - and rocks live.

Have a quality weekend watching the playoffs, as I will.

Spent last evening with some very old, very good friends who also graduated from high school in 1985 or thereabouts. So now we’re all older and slightly wider around the middle, all with young kids… and spent the evening dipping a little too heavily into the beverages for a bunch of 41-year-olds.

As always, you get to telling the old stories, again. And we start talking music, and I’m thinking about that year in music, 1985.

It may have been the worst year in the history of popular music.

As proof, take a look at this list:

1. Careless Whisper, Wham!
2. Like A Virgin, Madonna
3. Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Wham!
4. I Want To Know What Love Is, Foreigner
5. I Feel For You, Chaka Khan
6. Out Of Touch, Daryl Hall and John Oates
7. Everybody Wants To Rule The World, Tears For Fears
8. Money For Nothing, Dire Straits
9. Crazy For You, Madonna
10. Take On Me, A-Ha
11. Everytime You Go Away, Paul Young
12. Easy Lover, Phil Collins and Philip Bailey
13. Can’t Fight This Feeling, REO Speedwagon
14. We Built This City, Starship
15. The Power Of Love, Huey Lewis and The News
16. Don’t You (Forget About Me), Simple Minds
17. Cherish, Kool and The Gang
18. St. Elmo’s Fire (Man In Motion), John Parr
19. The Heat Is On, Glenn Frey
20. We Are The World, U.S.A. For Africa
21. Shout, Tears For Fears
22. Part-Time Lover, Stevie Wonder
23. Saving All My Love For You, Whitney Houston
24. Heaven, Bryan Adams
25. Everything She Wants, Wham!
26. Cool It Now, New Edition
27. Miami Vice Theme, Jan Hammer
28. Lover Boy, Billy Ocean
29. Lover Girl, Teena Marie
30. You Belong To The City, Glenn Frey
31. Oh Sheila, Ready For The World
32. Rhythm Of The Night, Debarge
33. One More Night, Phil Collins
34. Sea Of Love, Honeydrippers
35. A View To A Kill, Duran Duran
36. The Wild Boys, Duran Duran
37. You’re The Inspiration, Chicago
38. Neutron Dance, Pointer Sisters
39. We Belong, Pat Benatar
40. Nightshift, Commodores
41. Things Can Only Get Better, Howard Jones
42. All I Need, Jack Wagner
43. Freeway Of Love, Aretha Franklin
44. Never Surrender, Corey Hart
45. Sussudio, Phil Collins
46. Strut, Sheena Easton
47. You Give Good Love, Whitney Houston
48. The Search Is Over, Survivor
49. Missing You, Diana Ross
50. Separate Lives, Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin

 After 50 we get into a few songs which you might want to listen to again in the future. But I defy you to find three songs out of these first 50 that don’t make you cringe/retch.

Ah, the mid-’80s. I was younger, thinner and Republican. But the good old days weren’t always good.

Two days late and two dollars short, but a new vid, nonetheless.

Karl Rove - who of course never served in the military himself - writes a glowing paean to the troops in the Wall Street Journal:

I felt awe that such men and women exist, and gratitude that they put themselves in harm’s way for our nation. I hope America continues to be worthy of such staggering service and sacrifice.

The subtext being - of course only Americans who value/cherish/elevate/idealize the military, like Republicans, are worthy. Because the troops, we see, trend more Republican.

All of which brings us to this extraordinarily prescient piece from October, over at (conservative!) Culture11, in which Philip Primeau writes of the new, right-wing Praetorianism:

In fact, let’s imagine that not 68% but 98% of the military backs the Republican ticket. Hell, let’s imagine that every single man and woman in uniform, active and reserve, wants Mac in the White House.

Would that deserve “serious consideration”?

Nope. End of the day, soldiers are regular citizens. Their electoral preferences are no more or less important than those of bankers (who support Obama) or cops (who support Obama) or any other profession. Does it really matter that military men and women stand behind McCain? Let’s not mince words: It only means that they see something for themselves in a Republican administration.

What is worth serious consideration, however, is that Lopez naturally figures the troops’ opinions are owed special attention, as if they are more weighty and relevant than those of your average joe (unless, of course, that average joe is a certain Midwestern plumber).

In many sections of the American right, it is widely accepted that the military is the only virtuous and worthwhile state organ. The views of service people are given preferential treatment: They are automatically assumed to arise from a selfless and impeccable patriotism.

You sometimes get the feeling that Lopez et al. would have no problem with the vote hinging upon military whimsy. They are somehow disturbed by the fact that soldiers are “merely” the Constitution’s protectors, rather than the nation’s political arbiters and moral exemplars. They are possessed by a deeply-held and thinly-disguised Praetorianism, a frightening impulse that is likely to become more defined and profound in the coming years, especially if Obama’s election leads to particularly inept handling of Iraq and Afghanistan (a definite possibility).

Emphasis all added. Rove’s essay isn’t merely a pat on the back - there’s a purpose behind it. And a frightening one at that.