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.

…

Brooks is right that most of the people in that 5% bracket log heavy hours, but where he’s wrong is in failing to recognize that most of us have enough shame to know that what we do for a living isn’t really working. I pull absolutely insane hours in my current profession, to the point of having almost no social life at all, but I know better than to call what I do for a living work. I was on a demolition crew when I was much younger, the kind of job where you have to wear a dust mask all day long, carry buckets full of concrete, and then spend all night picking fiberglass shards out of your forearms from ripping insulation out of the wall.

Like Taibbi I have some experience working blue-collar jobs.  I spent the summer after my senior year of high school working on a landscaping crew and nothing I will ever do the rest of my life will even begin to compare to that. I had it easy too.  I only had to work five days a week for one summer and my boss let me miss a couple of weeks for vacations.  Most of the guys I worked with worked seven days a week and will for the rest of their lives just to keep food on the table and a roof over their families’ heads.  They’ll never have the opportunity to improve their lot in life; their best hope is to give their kids more opportunity than they have.

And Brooks wonders why so many people resent the rich?  Brooks makes six digits a year to write a column twice a week.  He enjoys financial security, can afford the best health insurance, lives in a great neighborhood with little crime, wants for nothing and even has a great degree of control over his own work.  He can work when he wants and write about what he wants.  And what does he usually write about?  He writes about how poor people are simply poor because they don’t work as hard as rich people like him work.

Clearly those poor people working shitty jobs for minimum wage every day of the week just so they can afford to to share an apartment with 3 other families and feed their kids what barely even passes for food are just a bunch of lazy and ungrateful schmucks.  If they worked harder they would have jobs where they didn’t need to worry about whether getting sick for a day would cost them their job and keep their kids from eating.  If they worked a little harder they could afford health insurance.  If they worked a little harder their jobs wouldn’t be being outsourced to India and China.

Many liberals like to point to David Brooks as an example of a conservative they like and can find common ground with.  Brooks encourages this with some of his writing because he wants people to like him.  However, the truth about Brooks is that he represents much of what is wrong with our society today.  His lips have been so firmly attached to rich people’s asses for so long that he’s come to believe his own bs.

As the actions of the richest in our society have grown increasingly ridiculous, and the fact that they literally steal from the rest of us has become clear, they’ve grown impossible to defend.  Yet Brooks just keeps trying.  As a result, there’s really no discernible difference today between Brooks’ attitude towards the non-rich and the “let them eat cake” attitude of the French aristocracy towards their poor before the French Revolution.

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.

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.

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.”

Some of these are actually not that stupid, though I doubt most of those who think Obama has done a lot of things that violate the Constitution are talking about his real violations, which concern civil liberties and the war on terror.  And there’s really no doubt that he’s pretty much bought and paid for by Wall Street banks.  Some of the others are standard Republican boilerplate and thus not really surprising or a big deal.  Republicans are always concerned about Dems being socialist and wanting to take their guns.

What I find particularly interesting is that 57% of Republicans think he’s Muslim and 40% think he’s a lackey for Wall Street.  Do we have a new conspiracy theory brewing here?  Could a significant number of Republicans believe that Obama is a Muslim lackey for Jewish bankers?  Maybe they see Obama as a Manchurian Candidate from the Legion of Doom.

What’s particularly strange is that 24% think Obama is the anti-Christ, while only 22% think he wants the terrorists to win.  Apparently 2% of Republicans think the anti-Christ is on our side, which of course would mean that God isn’t.  I bet those 2 percenters are a real hit at party meetings.

Obviously this isn’t how statistics work; lies, damned lies and all that.  It’d be stupid to take these results too seriously.  Clearly there can be some Republicans that think Obama isn’t the anti-christ but wants the terrorists to win, and the ones who think Obama is a Muslim probably aren’t the same who think he’s a lackey for Wall Street.

Still, there is something we can take away from this poll.  That such a high percentage of Republicans believe literally insane things indicates that moderate Republicans have abandoned the party and no longer identify as Republicans.  This is a terrible sign for the Republican party, and bad news for the rest of us as well.  This country needs a sensible conservative party.  Instead we’ve got a group of insane morons who are trending more and more towards domestic terrorism.

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.

To make matters worse, the criteria in the proposed bill for designating suspects as high-value detainees are amazingly broad and theoretically could be used to detain just about anyone.

One criterion is the potential threat a suspect poses “for an attack on civilians or civilian facilities within the United States.”

There is nothing in the language drawing any distinction between terrorist attacks and other attacks on people such as simple assault. This kind of broad language is ripe for abuse.

Another criterion for designating a person as a high-value detainee is “the potential intelligence value of the individual.”

A similar justification was used to detain people for years at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp even when it was known they were innocent. This justification was known as the “mosaic theory” of intelligence.

The idea is that a person who isn’t a terrorist and doesn’t have any knowledge of terrorist activities may still be able to provide helpful intelligence if they come from a village where an attack once took place, or is third cousin to a guy who met with a suspected terrorist once, or has any other of an innumerable tangential connections to terrorism.

The theory is that innocuous bits of information from multiple detainees could be pieced together to create a mosaic used to help intelligence officials.

In theory, if this bill were passed, people from Joe Stack’s neighborhood in Austin might qualify as high-value detainees thanks to their potential intelligence value.

But those aren’t even the most odious of the criteria. The final criterion for designating high-value detainees is simply “such other matters as the president deems appropriate.” In other words, this bill would give the president the power to indefinitely detain absolutely anyone he wants for any reason he sees fit.

One would think Americans would have learned the dangers of giving the executive branch sole discretion over whom to detain by now.

“Fifteen months after the U.S.  Supreme Court rebuked the Bush administration by ruling that Guantanamo captives can sue for their freedom, civilian judges have ordered the release of 29 detainees and sided with the Defense Department only seven times,” Carol Rosenberg said in the Sept. 7 edition of the Miami Herald.

That means in more than 80 percent of the cases reviewed by courts up until September, the government failed to meet the relatively low standard of evidence required to detain a suspect.

Those numbers are not very inspiring. Even ignoring the bill’s potential for abuse, the government’s recent track record demonstrates that Americans shouldn’t be so willing to surrender their rights in the name of security.

If people give the government greater powers to employ in the war on terror, there is always the danger that they’ll end up being misused.

- The Daily Cougar

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.

“All told, jury awards, settlements and administrative costs — which by definition, are similar to the combined cost of insurance — add up to less than $10 billion a year,” David Leonhardt reported in a Sept. 22 New York Times article.

Leonhardt also said that figure is less than one-half of a percent of what the U.S. spends on health care every year.

The malpractice liability system isn’t broken at all. A study conducted by non-profit group Public Citizen found that the size of malpractice damage awards has remained steady for nearly 20 years.  After factoring in inflation, the average payment has steadily decreased since 1991.

Also, the study revealed that the number of payments made of more than $1 million — the ones that garner all the media attention — have never exceeded one-half of one percent of the annual total number of payments.

The idea that runaway juries award millions of dollars in frivolous cases is an unsubstantiated myth.

Tort reform advocates argue that the true costs of the malpractice system aren’t really seen in damage awards, but in the wasteful defensive medicine they motivate.

But Leonhardt reported that even the highest estimates set the cost of defensive medicine at around $60 billion a year — just 3 percent of medical spending.

Defensive medicine is clearly not the main factor in skyrocketing health care costs.

According to a recent Congressional Budget Office report, the proposed national tort reform measure would save $54 billion over 10 years.

That amount may sound like a lot of money, but the U.S. spends around $2.5 trillion each year on health care.

Also, an economic cost is incurred when malpractice causes the injury or death of a person and courts must decide how to allocate that cost. Malpractice insurance exists to assume that risk.

Capping liability acts like a price ceiling and socializes the cost of malpractice above the cap.  That’s right — liability caps are socialism.

Not only are they socialist, but they also transfer the cost of malpractice away from insurers, who exist solely to assume the cost, to malpractice victims and their families.

Try to imagine what that feels like for the victims; imagine a parent, sibling or child going into the hospital for a procedure.  Imagine them dying because of a negligent doctor, and then imagine that, in addition, you and your family are burdened with the financial cost.

Now, if that family had a lot of money, they might be able to recover something, even though the deck is stacked against them.

But if it’s a retired parent or an unemployed sibling or child, their ability to recover would be limited.  They wouldn’t even be able to hire an attorney, as no money would be made off of the case for years.

Consider these facts: A study conducted by the Institute of Medicine concluded that as many as 98,000 people die every year as a result of preventable medical errors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that around 100,000 more die annually due to hospital-acquired infections.

Those are just the deaths. Who knows how many more people are hurt each year?

Tort reform supporters want to make those people and their families bear the costs of malpractice.

The real goal of tort reform isn’t to save money or improve health care, but to absolve insurance companies of financial risk at the expense of malpractice victims.

Not only is that evil, but it would also remove incentives to prevent doctors from committing malpractice, which would inevitably result in more malpractice.

We don’t have a malpractice liability problem in this country; we have a malpractice problem.  The government certainly shouldn’t be doing anything to exacerbate it.

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?

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.

Carr went 22-53 as a starter for the Texans and was sacked an astounding 249 times.  Yeah, calling the Texans offensive line during those years a sieve would be charitable, but still… 249 sacks!  Any possible potential that Carr may have once had to be anything other than horrible was surely viciously beaten out of him during that time.  As if anyone needed further proof that he couldn’t play, Carolina was forced to start him for a few games in 2007 when Jake Delhomme went down.  Carr was so bad they benched him for an 86-year-old Vinny Testaverde.  Vinny was so old he had probably already had his drivers’ license revoked by that time, and he was still better than Carr.

And yet, the New York Giants signed him and paid him millions to ride the bench and watch Eli Manning for two years.

And now the San Francisco 49ers have signed him and will pay him millions to ride the bench and watch Alex Smith.  Smith is another 1st-pick-of-the-draft QB bust, but compared to Carr he’s Joe Montana.

That’s four different NFL teams that have now paid David Carr millions upon millions of dollars to suck and to ride the bench.  He’s won the lottery.  He’s made millions doing nothing.

And that’s why David Carr is what is wrong with this country.

To drastically simplify things, David Carr is Goldman Sachs (and all the other financial giants who make tons of money yet contribute pretty much nothing to the real economy, but we’ll just say Goldman to keep things simple) and NFL franchises are America.  It’s an imperfect analogy, but it’s as close as one is going to get.

Despite a proven track record of horrible incompetence, to the point that they nearly destroyed our entire economy, Goldman convinced us to hand over trillions of dollars so they could continue making money while contributing nothing, just as David Carr gets paid millions to ride the bench despite the fact that Bart Starr could come back today and be better than him.

Now here’s where the analogy gets a little, well, off.  Carr’s sitting on the bench doesn’t do any intrinsic harm to the teams he’s on.  Now if the worst happens and the guy in front of him gets hurt, Carr may go in and suck, but at that point it doesn’t really matter because we don’t expect anything from backups.  Goldman (and their peers) on the other hand, in the course of contributing nothing have the potential to destroy the economy, and inevitably will again.

So comparing David Carr to Goldman Sachs is slightly unfair to Carr, but the point remains.  Just as teams continue rewarding Carr for failure, we continue rewarding Wall Street for failure.  And it will keep happening.  Carr will probably sign somewhere else in two years for a few million more and we’ll almost certainly bail out Wall Street with more money we don’t have (because they’ve already taken everything we’ve got for the next few decades) the next time they need it.

Obviously the question is why.  Well,  whoever can actually answer that should probably be President.  Unless their answer is that we’re insane.  That’s my answer and I sure as hell don’t want to be President.

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?

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.