Picking on David Brooks

Matt Taibbi’s latest critique of David Brooks is making the rounds on the interwebs and perfectly illustrates nearly everything wrong with our favorite NY Times writer.  In a recent discussion on the Times website with Gail Collins, Brooks managed to hold up Duke’s victory over Butler in the NCAA Championship as a metaphor for how the rich in society today work harder than the poor.

Taibbi does a good job tearing apart that argument:

I would give just about anything to sit David Brooks down in front of some single mother somewhere who’s pulling two shitty minimum-wage jobs just to be able to afford a pair of $19 Mossimo sneakers at Target for her kid, and have him tell her, with a straight face, that her main problem is that she doesn’t work as hard as Jamie Dimon.

Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.

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My op-ed on the Catholic Church molestation scandal

My op-ed on the Catholic Church scandal ran today in the Daily Cougar and can be read here.

I really wish my deadline for the piece had been pushed back a day given this gem from Cardinal Angelo Sodano at the Vatican’s Easter service:

Holy Father, the people of God are with you and will not let themselves be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials that sometimes assail the community of believers,” Cardinal Sodano said.

How stupid are these guys?  Now press coverage of decades of child molestation pervasive throughout the Church all over the world and the Church’s cover-ups is simply petty gossip?  Is there no line they think they can’t cross?  It’s pretty clear that they think that raping children just isn’t really that big a deal.

Just how disconnected from reality is the Catholic Church?

If this blog post written by the archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York is any indication, they’re living on another planet.  The whole post should be read to really get a glimpse into the pathology of the Church. It’s rare to see such a spectacular display of narcissism and self-pity.  That it comes from such an important and supposedly holy figure is amazing.  The archbishop twists the truth to defend the Church’s conduct and tries to lay the blame for the rampant sexual abuse by a particular priest on everyone but the Church.  But that’s not even the worst part.

What causes us Catholics to bristle is not only the latest revelations of sickening sexual abuse by priests, and blindness on the part of some who wrongly reassigned them — such stories, unending though they appear to be, are fair enough, — but also that the sexual abuse of minors is presented as a tragedy unique to the Church alone.

That’s right, the archbishop of the New York Diocese used the “we weren’t the only ones molesting children!” excuse. And apparently the worst part of the entire ordeal according to the archbishop isn’t that so many children were molested by priests, or the criminal efforts to conceal the rampant abuse, but that people are using this issue to denigrate the Church.  CLEARLY that’s the real problem here.

Republican insanity/fun with statistics

A recent Harris Poll of Republican voters revealed some interesting information:

Majorities of Republicans believe that President Obama:

• Is a socialist (67%)
• Wants to take away Americans’ right to own guns (61%)
• Is a Muslim (57%)
• Wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government (51%); and
• Has done many things that are unconstitutional (55%).

Also large numbers of Republicans also believe that President Obama:

• Resents America’s heritage (47%)
• Does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him to do (40%)
• Was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president (45%)
• Is the “domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitution speaks of” (45%)
• Is a racist (42%)
• Want to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers (41%)
• Is doing many of the things that Hitler did (38%).

Even more remarkable perhaps, fully 24% of Republicans believe that “he may be the Anti-Christ” and 22% believe “he wants the terrorists to win.”

The Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act

On March 4, Sen. John McCain introduced a despotic bill that would give the president unprecedented and unacceptable powers over American citizens.

The bill, which was co-sponsored by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, is called the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act and would grant the commander-in-chief authority to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely. It mandates that any suspected terrorists be transferred to military custody upon their apprehension, where they would be denied access to an attorney and their rights against self-incrimination.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, a national debate has raged over how much power the government should have to fight the war on terror, but never before has it claimed such broad powers over American citizens.

My tort reform op-ed

This was published a couple of weeks ago and I just forgot to post it:

During a health care summit hosted by President Barack Obama on Thursday, Republicans in attendance were quick to propose their solution to all of the problems with the current system — tort reform.

Their argument went something like this: The medical liability system is broken, and juries give out massive awards in frivolous cases, causing insurance rates to skyrocket and scaring doctors into practicing wasteful defensive medicine.

Throughout the past decade, Republicans have consistently claimed that the medical liability system is the biggest factor behind excessive health care costs.

What is their solution? To limit the damages that plaintiffs can recover in malpractice lawsuits.

But there is one tiny problem with their argument: It’s wrong.

More stupidity in the battle over textbook standards

I’m not sure what my favorite part of this is:

They’ve decided to delete a reference to Thomas Jefferson and substitute Thomas Aquinas in a discussion of the Enlightenment, either because a) T-Jeff didn’t know shit about the Enlightenment, or b) He was a nasty Deist.

Even better is the discussion about whether the current standard should be kept that describes the U.S. economic system as “free enterprise (capitalist, free market).”

Board conservatives want the description to simply read “free enterprise.”

Because “capitalism” is apparently a commie term.

Dropping the term “capitalism” is hilarious and unexpected, but subbing St. Thomas Aquinas for Jefferson when discussing the enlightenment requires unimaginable stupidity.  The SBOE is now telling us that they don’t know how linear time works.

St. Thomas Aquinas died in 1274.  The Age of Enlightenment began about 400 years later.  The term “rewriting history” may be thrown about excessively in discussions over textbook standards, but in this case it’s completely accurate.  They’re literally lifting St. Thomas Aquinas right out of the Middle Ages and transporting him to the Age of Enlightenment, simply because Thomas Jefferson wasn’t Christian.

The funniest part of the whole thing to me is that Thomas Aquinas was Catholic.  How often do you see Protestants demonstrating such respect for Catholics?  Now we’ve got evangelical Protestants on the SBOE promoting Aquinas simply because he was religious.  What’s next, are they going to start showing respect for Muhammad?

They’ve decided to delete a reference to Thomas Jefferson and substitute Thomas Aquinas in a discussion of the Enlightenment, either because a) T-Jeff didn’t know shit about the Enlightenment, or b) He was a nasty Deist.

Even better is the discussion about whether the current standard should be kept that describes the U.S. economic system as “free enterprise (capitalist, free market).”

Board conservatives want the description to simply read “free enterprise.”

Because “capitalism” is apparently a commie term.

David Carr is what is wrong with this country

Over the weekend the San Francisco 49ers took a big step forward in fighting the perception that they might have finally figured that whole football franchise thing out.  They’ve got a highly respected head coach who has made the team significantly better since he took over less than two years ago and they went 8-8 last year; their first non-losing season since 2002.  They were on the right track and looked like some smart guys who knew what they were doing.

Then they went and signed David Carr and promised to pay him 7 digits a year.

I’m not sure any player in the history of the NFL has ever done less to earn more than David Carr.  JaMarcus Russell is certainly up there, but that’s Oakland and their owner is clinically insane so he doesn’t really count. Carr, on the other hand, has now somehow convinced four different (supposedly sane) teams to pay him millions for him to either fail miserably or ride the bench while wearing pretty gloves.

Really Harris County?

I just bought tickets for next week’s Muse concert at Toyota Center from Toyota Center’s website.  On top of the complete bs but expected $11 convenience charge, there was also a mandatory fee I also had to pay simply to obtain the tickets.  I could choose between paying $6.50 to have them mailed or pick them up at will-call, an absolutely absurd amount, or I could pay $4.50 to print them myself.  That’s four dollars and fifty cents on top of the $35 ticket and $11 convenience charge just so I can print the damned things on my own computer.

Thanks a lot Harris County, I really appreciate my wallet being violated to such a ridiculous degree.  I’m sure all the other taxpayers attending concerts agree.  I don’t remember anyone being told when you asked for our tax dollars to build the stadium in the first place that we’d be getting nailed with absurd fees for every non-Rockets event we want to attend there.  Hell, if you’re going to charge a damned $4.50 fee just so someone can print out a ticket they’ve already purchased to attend a concert at a venue their tax dollars helped pay for, why should we use our tax dollars to build stadiums?

Right-wing obliviousness

Victor Davis Hanson at National Review on American exceptionalism:

2) Proletariat — Perhaps it would be better, when speaking of an early rural society, to talk of an absence of peasantry: We had no concept of a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs; instead, yeomen agrarians were the Jeffersonian ideal, a nation of independent farmers rather than peasants (as John de St. Crevecoeur wrote).

How can anyone with any degree of intelligence argue such a thing?  It’s not like slavery is one of those things you can easily forget about, like whether you left the oven on or something.  It only caused our Civil War.  I guess that’s no big thing.

Or maybe Victor just doesn’t consider blacks to really be people.