Krugman is on form today

But what’s really happening to the plumbers of Ohio, and to working Americans in general?

First of all, they aren’t making a lot of money. You may recall that in one of the early Democratic debates Charles Gibson of ABC suggested that $200,000 a year was a middle-class income. Tell that to Ohio plumbers: according to the May 2007 occupational earnings report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual income of “plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters” in Ohio was $47,930.

Second, their real incomes have stagnated or fallen, even in supposedly good years. The Bush administration assured us that the economy was booming in 2007 — but the average Ohio plumber’s income in that 2007 report was only 15.5 percent higher than in the 2000 report, not enough to keep up with the 17.7 percent rise in consumer prices in the Midwest. As Ohio plumbers went, so went the nation: median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower in 2007 than it had been in 2000.

Third, Ohio plumbers have been having growing trouble getting health insurance, especially if, like many craftsmen, they work for small firms. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2007 only 45 percent of companies with fewer than 10 employees offered health benefits, down from 57 percent in 2000.

And bear in mind that all these data pertain to 2007 — which was as good as it got in recent years. Now that the “Bush boom,” such as it was, is over, we can see that it achieved a dismal distinction: for the first time on record, an economic expansion failed to raise most Americans’ incomes above their previous peak.

My daughter’s third grade class was having a civics lesson and the teacher explained that only citizens are allowed to vote. Then she asked how many of the kids’ parents were immigrants.

Every hand went up except one.

Philip. Zimbardo talks about the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram Experiment, Abu Ghraib and what it takes to be a hero.

Horrifying and inspiring.

David Brooks says that Obama doesn’t need his audience’s love - but he gives it to him anyway.

This was not evident back in the “fierce urgency of now” days, but it is now. And it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather — already has gathered — some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.

Rhapsody found me a new band to like today. Firewater.

Borneo by Firewater

They sound like a cross between The Pogues and Julio’s Bordello Googlie people.

John Stewart has been on form:

More on McCain’s monster from Al-Jazeera:

Probably nothing right?

Ad

Probably some fringe group - you certainly wouldn’t see it on the Sacramento Republicans’ website. Not now anyway, because they took it down.

Or maybe they were just joking like the California Republicans who printed fliers with this.

“When I opened that up and saw it, I said, ‘Why did they do this? It doesn’t even reflect our principles and values,’ ” said Warren, who served as a Republican delegate to the national convention in September and is a regional vice chairwoman for the California Republican Party. “I know a lot of the ladies in that club and they’re fantastic. They’re volunteers. They really care — some of them go to my church.”

Andrew Sullivan uses Hitchens’s defection to the Obama camp as an excuse to repeat his own mea culpa over his early support for Bush and the invasion of Iraq.

I don’t regret my support for the president after 9/11.

In such a crisis, a president of any party deserves the benefit of the doubt. I do regret deeply and indelibly my subsequent backing of the Iraq war. It was a terrible mistake. Again, it was an honest judgment based on the evidence then provided me. But it was an intellectually lazy position and far too passionately held. I have tried to atone since: on the war, on spending (which I was whining about in 2001), on torture, on the constitution, on Christianism.

I think Andrew Sullivan has a new slogan:

Intellectually lazy positions. Passionately held.

Another prominent conservative sees the light. Christopher Buckley endorsed Obama last week and endured the inevitable firestorm.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it’s pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review—a friend of 30 years—emailed me that he thought my opinions “cretinous.” One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have “betrayed”—the b-word has been much used in all this—my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, “Cancel my subscription,” I was able to quote the title of my father’s last book, a delicious compendium of his NR “Notes and Asides”: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

Like many, Buckley now wonders how the very pinnacle of conservative power turned out to be so un-conservative.

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

If I were a prominent conservative, I’d be wondering how to start over; who to allow into the tent; how to prevent the same thing from happening again.

All great Utopian movements seem to describe an arc in which a noble, hopeful dream soars up into glory until, corrupted by power, they descend into ashes and mud. Maybe their flight would sustain longer if their aims were more conservative?

Rob Smyth, in The Guardian, blames Lampard and Gerrard for compromising England’s one world-class attacking talent. Scientists claim that Consciousness is the hard problem, but the Lampard and Gerrard problem is hard too.

If we could find a decent goalkeeper and a striker who is over 5ft 2in who does not have clown feet, England would be marvellous. But we have to acknowledge that Lampard and Gerrard cannot play together, despite what Borat says.

I read of Frank Lampard that he cannot play with Gerrard. Why not? Is not allowed? Is against your law? In my country, is OK for two men to play with each other. We do all the time. Is nice.

Gotta drop Lampard and play the world’s greatest scouser behind the even greater scouser, Rooney.