As I’m sure you all know, the Republican excuse for the attack on unions in Wisconsin is that this is about “fiscal conservatism”, i.e. they are just trying to put through cuts on teacher compensation in order to save money, and this has nothing to do with an ideological assault on the rights of workers to collective bargaining.  Then this:

After claiming for weeks that it was essential to strip government workers of collective bargaining rights in order to help balance the budget, Wisconsin Republicans pulled a neat legislative trick on Wednesday night: by defining the collective bargaining rules as non-budgetary in nature they were able to go ahead and pass their stripped down bill.

Let’s repeat that: Wisconsin Republicans stripped the “fiscal” elements of a “budget repair” bill in order to pass it. If that sounds like a contradiction-in-terms to you, you’re not wrong.

This is and has always been about the belief that anyone that isn’t a millionaire doesn’t count as a full citizen, but is instead a prole who should be grateful to be permitted to have bread to eat and water to drink in exchange for working your fingers to the bone while the rich get richer. 

Consider that the top 400 wealthiest Americans have a combined wealth that’s almost equal to what the bottom 153 million Americans have.  Consider that Republicans are saying that’s not enough, and they will do whatever it takes to break working people and turn this country into a banana republic.  The ideal system, it appears, would be one where the rich live in heavily guarded mansions while the rest of the country is notable for its widespread poverty and deprivation. 

Still, I think that the Repubicans have made so naked their desire to destroy the middle class that people have really started to pay attention.  Most Republican voters really haven’t yet figured out that the people they keep electing want them to make less money and live in more debt and deprivation.  But in Wisconsin, people are starting to wake up to this.  And the realization is spreading. 

Urban legends: They’re the lifeblood of right wing nuttery.  Liberals crunch facts and figures, demonstrate inequalities and propose policy solutions rooted in core values such as believing that nations as wealthy as ours shouldn’t have the streets clogged with orphans begging for food.  Conservatives talk about how they heard somewhere that someone did something they don’t approve of, such as make an irresponsible decision or get a benefit/salary that someone with that skin color/gender/family background somehow doesn’t deserve.  These stories can be conversation stoppers, because they both have questionable veracity and they smuggle in a bunch of assumptions that liberals don’t agree with.  So how do you handle it when presented with a wingnut urban legend? 

Well, I have a three-pronged approach I’d like to share with you.  These are offered not in the order they should be used—-often you only need one of these approaches, or you need to bring in two or all three, but not in the same order.  These are more questions you ask yourself to get you to place to argue this crap down.

Today’s tall tale is from Haley Barbour.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour(R) said states should also be free, for instance, to compel Medicaid patients to pay for part of their medicine, saying, “We have people pull up at the pharmacy window in a BMW and say they can’t afford their co-payment.”

This has all the markings of a wingnut urban legend.  The big red flag is what urban legend researchers call the FOAF, i.e. “friend of a friend” aspect.

In some social sciences, the phrase is used as a half-joking shorthand for the fact that much of the information on which people act comes from distant sources (as in “It happened to a friend of a friend of mine”) and cannot be confirmed. It is probably best known from urban legend studies, where it was popularized by Jan Harold Brunvand.

Barbour doesn’t actually mention the relationship he has with the person who told this story, but it’s implied that it’s pretty far removed.  Barbour certainly isn’t an eyewitness to this event; he’s not working a pharmacy drive-through.  He probably also doesn’t know the person who filled the prescription.  At best, Barbour knows the guy who owns the pharmacy, which means that this story is 4 to 5 people away from the supposed event.  One should be skeptical of stories that happened to friends of friends.  Even if the person claims to be only two relationships removed from the person being discussed, it’s well-known in the urban legend world that every time a story is passed, the number of people it had to pass through to get to the person retelling it drops.  So, I hear a story that supposedly happened to a friend of a friend of mine.  When I retell it, it just happened to a friend of a friend, when actually, I was led to believe it happened to a friend of a friend of a friend.  So you see the problem here. 

Anyway, here’s the three-pronged approach when I hear a wingnut urban legend.

1) Is it even true?  As noted previously, many stories get circulated as wingnut urban legends that literally cannot be true.  If you’re in the pro-choice world, you run up against this a lot, with urban legends about abortion and birth control that are physically impossible or disproved.  (My favorite is a story that circulates about a baby being born holding an IUD.) Much of the time, a cursory examination of “too good to be true” wingnut urban legends will demonstrate that they’re not true, which is why, believe it or not, my best weapon in arguing with conservative friends online is Snopes. In fact, Ronald Reagan’s story about “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs—-which is the direct precursor to this story—-has been demonstrated to be completely untrue.  Did Reagan himself make it up?  Maybe.  But it’s also possible he heard it from a friend of a friend of a friend, and each telling—-as it was in the hands of people who believe that there shouldn’t be welfare at all—-was one where it got exaggerated and exaggerated.  Maybe there was once a woman who had a bicycle and was on welfare, and it turned into a garage full of Cadillacs when Reagan heard it.  Which leads me to the next point.

2) Are there details being left out?  Say you want to give this story the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe there’s a grain of truth.  Maybe you can’t marshal sufficient proof that it’s a lie.  Maybe it sounds plausible, which in this case, it does.  It’s plausible that there are people who have BMWs and no source of income, especially with 10% unemployment.  But are there details being left out?  For instance, let’s say there is a pharmacy worker that saw this somewhere.  Do we know how old the BMW is?  Do we know how much the person paid for it?  Do we know if they bought it when they thought they had a secure job, and then they lost that job a year ago and haven’t found one since?  Is that BMW the only thing they own?  Are they living in the BMW?  If you’re working a paycheck-to-paycheck job that makes it impossible for you to save up three years worth of living expenses, buying a BMW might still be the most fiscally responsible thing you can do.  Let’s start with the assumption that you need a car, which you do in Mississippi.  Here is a 2001 BMW for $10,000.  Here’s a 2004 BMW for $12,000.  Both of those are cheaper than even the cheapest new car you can buy, and they’re BMWs, so it’s quite likely you’re getting more car for your money, and possibly saving yourself repair costs down the road, especially if they’re still under warranty.  But needless, to say, the car payment for these falls well into what can be afforded by someone with a lower middle income.  Now, imagine that person losing their job.  They don’t have any income and can’t pay for their medication. Should they sell the car?  They’re not going to get what they paid for it, and what they could buy off the profits probably breaks down a lot, incurring more costs.  Could they go without a car?  Maybe, but that means they can’t go to job interviews that would lead to them not having to be on Medicaid anymore. 

This sort of shit happens all the time.  It’s more likely than not this is what happened, if this even happened at all.  What Barbour wants you to believe—-that this is a rich person making payments on a brand new Beamer—-is far less likely, since you have to be making below a certain amount to qualify for Medicaid.

3) Do the conclusions the conservative wants you to draw follow from this anecdotal evidence?  Imagine, if you will, that a single bank concocts a scheme to make a bunch of money by signing off a series of really bad loans, and then using fancy accounting, paper-shuffling, and selling those loans to other people to keep from showing the emptiness of their investments on their books.  Does the conservative in question believe this requires shutting down the banking system?  What if pretty much every bank in the system did it?  What then?

So why should it follow that Medicaid should be torn up and everyone on it forced to come up with money they don’t have because you heard that one person somewhere may have been cheating the system?

Let’s assume for a moment that this story is exactly what Barbour is selling it as—-some guy somewhere makes enough money to pay for a BMW that’s brand new, but he frauded Medicaid to get his monthly supply of Viagra for free.  Let’s assume the worst about a man we don’t know and have never met.  Does it follow that because this one man cheats Medicaid that all the thousands of desperately poor people on Medicaid in Mississippi should be forced to pay for his fraud?  Should, for instance, a single mother who feeds her three kids on food stamps because she can’t find a job die and leave her children orphans because she can’t afford the new requirement that she pay for her heart medication/insulin/whatever lifesaving drug you can think of?  Should her children go into foster care and develop many of the emotional and psychological problems that often accompany being bounced from home to home, which makes them less likely to get an education and pull themselves out of poverty?  Should the taxpayers take on the further burdens all this creates?  Should all this happen because someone heard from someone who heard from someone that they saw someone through a window who may be cheating the system, but could also just be down on his luck?

These are the questions I ask myself when confronted with a wingnut urban legend, and I try to craft my response accordingly. Like I said, sometimes you can shut it down simply by disproving the story, or by complicating it with realistic possibilities they haven’t thought of.  And sometimes it’s good to attack the conclusions.  Or all three.  Depends on the situation.

If there’s one thing conservatives love more than posing like they’re tough guys with guns, it’s squealing and hiding behind the couch, trembling in fear at the “thugs” and “socialists” that crowd their imaginary worlds.  The disconnect between this extreme cowardice—-who’s afraid of imaginary people?—-and the manly pose that’s otherwise adopted is just another example of how being a wingnut first requires remarkable abilities to handle cognitive dissonance. And nowhere is the right wing cowardice more evident than in the reaction to the Wisconsin protesters.  To hear right wingers carry on about it, a bunch of schoolteachers calmly refusing to leave a public area that their tax dollars pay for in protest of proposed government policies to screw them over is basically the equivalent of rioting in the streets by people who are demanding jobs as professional rapists that get paid a million a year (and without tossing any balls around during a competitive sport at all!).

Historically, reacting by lying and painting your opponents as menacing thugs is the reaction of authoritarians everywhere to people making reasonable demands for their rights.  During the civil rights era, Freedom Riders got the worst kind of rumors spread about them, including rumors that dogs attacked them because they smelled like sex.  You know, instead of because the police commanded the dogs to attack them.  (Plus, I always have to wonder what right wingers are thinking when they accuse someone they hate of—-gasp!—-having sex.  Do they really think that’s just a really uncommon behavior, and that people who do it are outlaws and perverts?  The way some people carry on, you’d think ordinary sexual congress was like smoking PCP, a rare behavior engaged in only by a deviant few.)  And, as Rick Perlstein has written, the rumors that flew around about the victims of the Kent State shootings were incredibly vicious—-the usual accusing the victims of having sex, of course, but also claiming they were hippies that were so dirty they couldn’t be taken away in the ambulance without the stench knocking out the EMTs.  And you look at these uprisings in the Middle East, and you see a similar pattern—-the dictators that are being threatened accusing the protesters of violence, deviance, drug use, and working for foreign powers.  Unsurprisingly, that’s also the accusation in Wisconsin. Protesters are being portrayed as outsiders, deviants, and violent, though I haven’t (yet) heard crying about drug use or smelling like sex.

That’s why non-violence is an effective strategy, by the way.  Authoritarians are incredibly predictable in their reactions, so what you do is compose your protest in a way that minimizes the evidence for the standard accusations, which in turn makes the leaders look more and more nutty.

Not to get conspiratorial here, but am I the only one who thinks Scott Walker is being played for a sucker here?  It’s clear that he made this union-busting move because his head has been filled with images of a presidential run in 2012.  But even if he wins this battle, he’s toast on a national level. Part of me likes to think that the RNC understood that union-busting on this level is the political equivalent of a suicide bombing—-you can only pull it off by immolating your future political prospects.  And so they looked around at their roster of governors and said, “Who in our ranks harbors delusions of a presidential run that could be exploited, though any fool looking at him could tell he comes across as just too much a weenie to really be a viable national candidate?”  And Scott Walker immediately leapt to mind.  That the head of the RNC has worked so closely with Walker in the past makes me feel even more strongly that this is the case.  Because I can’t squelch the feeling that Walker is still being told that he’s coming across as “Reagan-esque”, when in fact he’s coming across as a man who is so petty and fearful he’s actually trying to flush the protesters out by starving them. 

I’d genuinely be surprised if the RNC hadn’t put together a formal politician-handling strategy for creating situations like this.  The strategy is, “He thinks he’s Reagan, but he’s more like Tom Delay”.  But that’s just the point, isn’t it?  Delay’s career was ended because of a showdown like this one, but the Republican party did get what it wanted, and they had no problem throwing him under the bus when they’d finished exploiting him.

Update: Some useful and quick reading here.  Seriously, it’s like a paragraph.

While I said Friday that I didn’t have much to add to the discussion about Wisconsin, obviously all things are subject to change.  I’ve been watching the right wing reaction to the protests, and it’s been fascinating to see how the hostility towards people who work for a living is really coming out.  Between the union-busting sentiment and the desire to shut down contraception access for low income women, this past week has really made clear how much the end game of the conservative movement is to destroy the middle class, creating a country where a few rich people live off the labor of a impoverished proletariat.  Like the “good old days” of the Gilded Age, complete with squalid city blocks, where 10 people are packed in to each apartment because there’s no way to stop having children.  (Which is, despite what Glenn Beck may tell his sycophants, the actual misery that induced Margaret Sanger to make birth control access her life’s work.) Not that I think that your average conservative voter really thinks about the implications of demanding a race to the bottom, income-wise, for workers.  Like I recently saw a Facebook acquaintance I shall not name complaining about how hard it was to hire employees at low wages for her service-oriented business, because of the government and the unions bringing wages up.  I had to refrain from pointing out that small businesses would have no customers if it wasn’t for jobs that pay a living wage.  People supporting families on minimum wage—-especially if they have more children than they want because of forced birther policies—-don’t do things like go shopping and eat out at restaurants.  Bringing an end to collective bargaining and eventually the middle class would indeed produce a lot of people who work for peanuts, but it would also end the economy that creates demand for most American businesses. 

Anyway, I’ve been interested in seeing how right wingers can’t exactly decide what makes people who want to be paid for the job of educating children such horrible people. Even though we spend a lot of time in our culture waxing on endlessly about how the job of raising the next generation is the Most Important Job In The World, it’s also a job we expect women to do most of the work in, so we expect those who do it to be paid in crayon drawings from children and bemused pity from other adults.  Via Roy, I see that Jay Nordinger is leaning hard on sexism to justify his anti-union blather.  He really couldn’t be more condescending.

One thing about all these teachers — 40 percent of the union — calling in “sick”? They’re lying. And it’s not nice to lie, yes? These are the adults, of course, who are expected to set examples for “the children”: those vaunted children in whose name the unionists pretend to be doing everything they do.

What’s little Susie supposed to say? “Good to have you back, Miss Brown. We heard you were sick. Are you feeling better? Did you go to the doctor?” What does Miss Brown say, in response? “I was just lying, honey: I called in sick to protest our evil Republican governor.”

For those ready to deny that this condescending crap—-scolding the teachers like they were little children caught with their hands in cookie jars—-try to imagine if Nordinger had used an example of a teacher who is not “Miss Brown”, clearly a female elementary school teacher. Try to imagine that this scenario is being played out with a male high school football coach.  Yeah, I can’t either. It would read as comical and surreal.  “Golly gee, Coach Brown, didn’t Jesus say it’s wrong to lie?”  They wouldn’t have even tried that shit on “Leave It To Beaver”.  And let’s be clear—-despite Nordinger’s hypotheticals centering around female elementary school teachers, high school football coaches are also being affected and are also in teacher’s unions.

But it gets worse!

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I’ve gotten emails from people asking why I haven’t blogged about the situation in Wisconsin.  To which, I wish to reply that there’s two models of blogging.  There’s the model where you comment on anything of importance, even if you have nothing of value to add, to register that you’re paying attention.  Then there’s the model where you only write about things that you personally feel you have an interesting angle on.  I’m in the latter camp.  I am skeptical of the claims that simply noticing things publicly does anything more than bolster the ego of the blogger.  The situation in Wisconsin is amazing, but I have nothing to say beyond that, since others are more tuned into union politics than I am.  My feeling right now is that my talents are best served at keeping an eye on the ever-wackier tone of wingnuts and the threats to reproductive rights, two stories that could get washed out during a news cycle loaded with exciting events like the Egyptian uprising and the Wisconsin protests.

But hey, what’s Friday Genius Ten for if not simple gestures of support through song dedications?  And of course, the only way to do that is to build the Genius Ten off the most famous band out of Wisconsin, the Violent Femmes. Many of my favorite songs by them are dark, but this one I think is, profanity aside, a great pick-me-up song, which is what you need when you’re fighting the good fight. Leave yours in comments, comments about whatever you think is relevant, or whatever you like.  Open thread.

For good coverage of the events in Wisconsin, check out Talking Points Memo.

Original song: “Dance, Motherfucker, Dance!” by the Violent Femmes

1) “Your Racist Friend” by They Might Be Giants
2) “Soul Suckin Jerk” by Beck
3) “Gone!” by The Cure
4) “I’m Amazed” by The Pixies
5) “Piss Up A Rope” by Ween
6) “Stop!” by Jane’s Addiction
7) “Candy” by Morphine
8) “I Don’t Want To Grow Up” by Tom Waits
9) “Trainspotting” by Primal Scream
10) “Romance” by REM

Geek music day!  Videos and cat pics below the fold.

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G.D. takes a look at the argument that the “free market” would have neatly solved the problem of segregation if those impatient civil rights people had just waited it out.  G.D. tackles a writer at Human Events for this, but this argument is sadly more mainstream than that.  It was Rand Paul’s argument for why he wouldn’t have supported the Civil Rights Act, for instance. Most Republicans wouldn’t go on the record saying this, but this argument is made so often in conservative circles that I actually think it’s a matter of faith at this point.  Jay Nordlinger, as I noted yesterday, suggested that Martin Luther King would have regretted badmouthing the radical right that pushed Barry Goldwater to win the 1964 Republican nomination, and the reason in Nordlinger’s mind is that Goldwater’s rejection of federal laws against segregation were “classic liberalism”.  This comment makes no sense on its face, but it does make a little bit more sense if you understand that “the free market would have forced desegregation eventually!” is the rationale at work here. 

G.D.‘s reply to this nonsense is well worth reading in its entirety, so click the link.  A sample:

It actually is a pretty abstract proposition, since this is never the way American life, and the crushing racism of the Jim Crow South in particular, actually worked. Flynn’s example assumes a past in which Negroes had economic leverage with whites and their institutions, that some white business owner would have graciously accepted black patronage because, well, money is money. But even the most mundane transactions between blacks and whites in the Jim Crow South were proscribed by custom and law, and backed up by the prospect of bloodshed. So who was going to complain that the white renter was gauging him, or that the white foreman cheated him out of a day’s work? And to whom would that person appeal? Which white business owners were willing to risk the loss of their white clientele (or a melee) for suggesting that they dine or watch movies next to Negroes? In this world, the competitive advantage actually lay with the people who never paid their sharecroppers a cent for their labor, who didn’t sully their store’s reputations by selling to niggers.

It is this last point that I want to talk about more, because the people who are making this “free market solutions” argument are ignoring, I think in most cases deliberately, that the “classic liberals” (which is a euphemism for “reactionaries that dress their assholery up in fancy pants language”) of their time were supported by the Tea Partiers of their time, and the latter were under no illusions about why they preferred “free market” solutions.  And that reason is they wanted to keep black people out of their stores, neighborhoods, etc.  And their rationale for this was…..economic.  They believed and argued strongly that black customers are bad for business.  They did not believe black money spends as good as white money. 

A couple of years ago, historian Rick Perlstein put up a post at Our Future where he talked about the letters that poured in from white Chicagoans to Senator Paul Douglas when Martin Luther King came to town to help organize for open housing laws that would make it illegal for a someone selling a house to reject a customer based on race.  If the free marketers are right, then this shouldn’t have been a problem in the first place, since surely a person selling a house would sell it to anyone buying, right? 

Wrong. On the contrary, white people in Chicago saw it as a matter of their own economic interest to keep black people from buying houses. 

Rick has a lot of letters he collected, one of which likens MLK to Hitler, but one theme strongly emerges, which is that the white letter writers saw open housing as an assault on their economic interests.  A sample:

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Andrew Leonard has a piece up at Salon about the gold standard and the people who obsess over it. It’s amusing, but his read on why people obsess over the gold standard is, I believe, somewhat off.

Of course, to many advocates of the gold standard, restricting government freedom is precisely the point. This is a major reason why a return to the standard has always been popular with a subset of libertarians and is a staple of Tea Party discourse. If all currency was backed by gold, there would be physical limits on the amount of outstanding debt governments could carry. Big government wouldn’t be so big! We’d be forced to live within our means!

I honestly think this is giving them way too much credit.  Most people who have warm and fuzzy feelings when they hear the words “gold standard” get them for reasons that have no pragmatic or intellectual backing whatsoever.  I’d say there are two major appeals of this silly obsession:

1) Gold has an old timey feel, and teabaggers love that.  In fairy tales and the Bible, people use gold as currency.  As we all know, these kinds of fantasies and myths are more real to teabaggers than actual reality.

2) It satisfies their need to believe in a higher, absolute authority.  Just like the obsession with believing the Constitution and Bible are non-ambiguous documents that just so happen to agree with everything wingnuts do, and cannot be crossed by mere people, they like to believe that gold is a currency that has intrinsic value that puts it outside the scary world of social constructs and arbitrariness.  You get the same obsession, by the way, with English-only thinking.  The hope is that there is something solid and unchanging that has value and meaning outside of what humans imbue in it, a sort of final authority they can put their faith in. But just as the category “English” is actually not as rock solid as they think—-language is ever-changing—-and the Bible and Constitution are up for interpretation, so is it true that there’s no intrinsic value to gold.  It only has value for the same reason paper money as value, because we say so.

The actual effect of having a gold standard has little or no bearing on this.  Gold is appealing to the teabagger masses on a strictly emotional level.  In fact, one of the major problems with teabaggery in general is that it doesn’t truck with logic or pragmatism, but instead is a bunch of easily manipulated emotional responses.  It’s about nostalgia, and pretending you’re “tough” because you automatically prefer other people to suffer, even if you have to pay for it.  Which is why, for instance, they oppose health care reform even if it saves money, even though they think of themselves as “fiscally conservative”.  They’ll spend more money to make sure some people don’t have health insurance.  They need that to shore up a self-image as a bunch of hard asses. 

Never assume logic with teabaggers when the more available answer is a knee-jerk emotional response to nostalgia or sadism. 

As you’re likely aware from the heroic battlefield missives issuing forth daily, Republicans are taking a stand against basically everything until they get their way on the budget and tax cuts. 

They are, predictably, in a stage of revolution-like revolt over the omnibus spending bill, which has the following terrifying problem:

Republicans poring over a 1,924-page overarching spending bill proposed by Democrats to cover the rest of the fiscal year are threatening to grind the legislation to a halt, citing massive earmark spending, which, if passed, would be enacted into law without debate in the full Senate.

MASSIVE spending with NO DEBATE in a FULL Senate.  (It’s the last adjective that’s the most fearsome of all.)  However, just how massive is this pork package?  And is the pre or post-Extenze?

The $1.2 trillion bill, released on Tuesday, includes more than 6,000 earmarks totaling $8 billion, an amount that many lawmakers decried as an irresponsible binge following a midterm election in which many voters demanded that the government cut spending.

In case you don’t have your mathboxes handy, we’re going to hold up funding the government (and extending unemployment insurance and enacting the START Treaty and ending discrimination against gays and lesbians in the miltary and…) because of grave philosophical reservations to .7% of the federal budget.  Add in the $5.6 billion for unemployment benefits, and we’re now seeing a threatened shutdown of the American government for 1.2% of the budget. 

This isn’t just petulant, it’s pretty much nonsensical.  We now have Claire McCaskill joining ranks with Republicans in order, presumably, to show that she got the message of the 2010 election cycle: Americans want their elected representatives to waste their time fighting over the most meaningless shit imaginable, and then completely refusing to do their jobs unless largely meaningless steps are taken to confront problems that don’t need to be dealt with.

UPDATE: Whiskey Fire lists some of the worst parts of this earmark spending, such as money to keep our food supply safe.  I want viruses to ravage our grapes, goddammit, and I don’t want any socialists keeping me knee deep in jam and wine.

I have seen some serious stupid in my time while dealing with wingnuts online.  Just this morning, I had to gently correct a wingnut who assumed that not wanting children or marriage personally means that I hate parents or married people.  (My mother would be so surprised!) I also saw a really cute example of stupid plus overstretching with one of my favorite wingnut tics, which is using the word “nihilism” without having the ability to open up a dictionary to discover its definition. (Alas, there was no discussion of “Kantian nihilism”, which really puts this pseudo-intellectual bamboozling on the next level.)  But by far, the dumbest wingnut assumption I’ve seen all week is Matthew Boyle at the Daily Caller, who appears to believe that poor people only eat one dinner a month.

Boyle decided to do an “investigation” into what he believes is a scandalous fact about food stamps, which is you can buy food with them.  Boyle’s investigative technique appears to have been to defraud the government by lying about his rent to get food stamps—-he claimed to pay $1,375 in rent, when in fact his parents pay for it—-and he got what he believes is a ridiculous $105 a month for food for a single man.

To prove how ridiculously high this is, he went to Whole Foods and spent $51.10 on a single meal.

To be fair, Boyle did buy more food than a single meal’s worth.  He also bought—-after letting his money roll over into December—-$100 worth of candy.  We are meant to believe that people on assistance are sucking down gourmet meals and sugar on our dime, and then probably getting taxpayer-funded orgasms.  And you, incredulous reader, aren’t getting any partner orgasms, even though you work so hard by explaining carefully to women you meet on online dating sites that most women are crap.  The unfairness of it!

Of course, most of us with working brains immediately see the flaw in this argument, because we actually buy food for our houses, and whether we have assistance or not, we usually budget for it. Therefore, when we got to the store, we don’t spend our entire food budget on a single meal and a bunch of candy, because then we will have nothing left for the rest of the month.  Let’s assume the average month has 30 days in it, and most people eat 2-3 meals a day.  We could, like Boyle, make entirely different assumptions, of course, but I prefer to have my assumptions align with reality.  That means that if you blow your entire food budget on one meal, you have no money for an average of 74 meals a month.  (By the way, according to my math, that comes down to an average of $1.33 a meal, if you skip half of your breakfasts, which I’m assuming many people do.  However, children often don’t, so things get tighter if you factor that in.) 

After looking at these inconvenient facts that should be obvious and should put a kink in Boyle’s outrage generating, I came to the only conclusion possible: Boyle thinks the poor don’t eat more than once a month.  And even then, they do it just for pleasure, because they have no nutritional needs.

Which makes me wonder if Boyle is a creationist or otherwise subscribes to views that are hostile to basic, proven biology.  He’d almost have to be, because it would be sort of weird to be like, “Well, yeah, evolution is true, but I believe that people who make below a certain income don’t need nutrients to survive.”  I’m reminded of Rush Limbaugh’s rants against food stamps that are based around the fact that some people living in poverty are fat.  Again, a calculator plus a 7th grader’s grasp of basic biology would dispel the notion that depriving someone of all food altogether would be an effective response to obesity, but perhaps Limbaugh is also in denial about the nutritional needs of human bodies. 

Hey, I know it sounds weird to accuse conservatives of perpetuating nutrient denialism, i.e. the belief that people don’t need food to survive.  But there’s all sorts of subterranean wingnut beliefs that are passed around in email forwards, fundamentalist churches, and other social occasions that only come to the light of day when there’s a political conflict that brings them to the surface.  So why not?  They believe all sorts of other crazy shit, so why not add “people, at least poor people, don’t need to eat” on to the pile?

Swingers clubs are taking a massive hit because of the recession.

It’s a bad time to be in the swinging game. The roving swingers’ party DDeviousDelights — that’s not a typo; that’s what it’s called — has seen attendance go down 40% this year. “One Leg Up” has lost 20% of its swingin’ clientele since 2007. SINsation, and Sexxy Mofo, if you can believe it, are feeling the pinch too. High-end stationary clubs, meanwhile, are doing even worse.

The economy is getting most of the blame, but this is the sort of thing that could have multiple causes.  Jezebel hints at one—-Craigslist.  Just as a lot of would-be traditional daters are spending less time striking out by going out to public areas known as meat markets, maybe swingers are, too?  I’m imagining that if you’re a swinger with much in the way of standards, you spend a lot of time in the clubs having to let people down who hit on you, trying to find the other couple that really does it for you.  A lot of people doing traditional dating prefer finding dates online because you have more choices, it’s easier to reject people, and you have more information up front besides what someone looks like.  I’d imagine that swingers appreciate this, as well.

The flip side to this argument is that lower rent swingers clubs are doing better, so maybe people are just downsizing.  Makes sense, too.  Sex shop owners will be the first to tell you that people who wouldn’t blink to spend $75 on a night out will flinch to spend that much on a sex toy.  Outside of men who get off on buying women for sex, most people tend to think sex isn’t something that you pay for.  So paying a fee during a recession on a swingers club is probably hard to justify.  Also, I have to wonder what more you get for paying more?  If it’s cleaner furniture, well, that makes sense.  But it’s not like higher prices translates to more people you find sexy, which is presumably what they’re looking for.

Sign o’ the times #2:

Thanks to Michigan’s new cottage food law—signed just four months ago by Gov. Jennifer Granholm—home bakers and cooks all over the state have another way to help make ends meet.

They can prepare certain foods, known as cottage foods, in their own homes, rather than having to use a licensed commercial kitchen, and sell the products directly to buyers at places such as farmers markets, roadside stands and festivals.

This is good news, because a lot of people who do this are just trying to make a little extra income to help make ends meet.  The more people making ends meet, the better.  Food safety regulations should be more lax on people who sell stuff right out of their kitchen, because it’s about risk assessment.  The health risks associated with small scale markets are just way lower.  Not that someone couldn’t give people food poisoning from their homemade cookies, but the odds of it are low for a few reasons.  The scale of ingredients going in is smaller, making it less likely that one item that could spoil everything will slide in.  Plus, people cooking in small quantities eyeball the ingredients more than those who are just churning out the product as fast as they can, making it easier to spot something that’s gone bad. Most importantly, the number of people consuming the product is limited, meaning any potential damage is limited.  If a batch of beef that goes out to hundreds of thousands is spoiled, you’re looking at a disaster.  A dozen?  Not great, but not the same problem by any means.  The difference in risk is so great that I see no problem with having lower standards for kitchen-based small businesses.  I’m guessing the recession is part of the reason Michigan felt compelled to relax their standards on this.

Both links courtesy of PostBourgie.

Yesterday, for obvious reasons, I was in a crappy mood all day.  So I turned to my favorite resource for lightening a sour mood, which is Regretsy.  After reading a few pages of it until I was all caught up, I looked up at the links at the top and decided to check them out.  I found People of Walmart to be unfunny, since most of the “humor” comes from poking fun at people for being ugly, fat, or unable to afford better-fitting clothes.  But Lamebook is another story entirely.  Lamebook is funny because it, like Regretsy, gets its humor straight from the goofier aspects of human nature.  I particularly like all the posts involving parents interacting with their children on Facebook.  Facebook is great, but it was only until moms started to join Facebook that it really became the centerpiece of the new American renaissance, I say.

The site cheered me up immensely, which is why I was sad to see a link at the top of the page asking for money for their legal fund.  They’re in some legal shit with Facebook over copyright quarreling, they say.  A little googling showed that this is indeed true, and Facebook’s rationale is as poor and mean-spirited as you could imagine:

In response to the complaint, Facebook deemed it “unfortunate” that Lamebook had turned to litigation after “months of working with Lamebook to amicably resolve what we believe is an improper attempt to build a brand that trades off Facebook’s popularity and fame”.

Facebook is claiming that the site can’t hide behind satire, which is funny, because I personally laughed my ass off for hours.  Human nature might be the main target of Lamebook, but the way that Facebook has drawn out certain tendencies in people is definitely part of that.  But what really annoyed me was that Facebook expressed petulant anger that someone else out there is OMG building off their popularity and fame.  Which in no way, shape or form takes jack shit away from Facebook.  If anything, Lamebook probably just makes readers want to use Facebook even more, since it highlights some of the best reasons to waste hours on Facebook (such as laughing at the way people can be).  I know it had that effect on me.  I’m trying to imagine if creative artists reacted to each other in this way.  Can you imagine, say, Dr. Dre being so stupid as to not work with Eminem because he doesn’t want anyone to benefit from his pre-existing reputation? 

This entire situation is a great demonstration of why the ready assumption that businesspeople are motivated mainly be a rational desire to increase profits is a really dumb one.  But you see that assumption all the time!  You see it with libertarians, who argue that we don’t need regulation because the profit motive makes markets self-correcting, as if they were mindless machines that aren’t influenced by some of the more irrational thinking of actual human beings.  And you see it with liberals, who make the opposite assumption—-they believe that business is solely motivated by profit, and that means businesspeople are bound to make harmful choices if that’s how best to make a profit.  The truth is way more complicated.  Yes, profit motive is a big deal, and that sometimes results in good business decisions, as libertarians insist, and it sometimes results in BP spilling unimaginable amounts of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, as liberals insist.  But insisting that businesspeople act mostly out of pure rationality is giving them too much credit.  I think it’s also important to remember how much irrationality impacts business choices.

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Update: Now they’re denying it.

One of the ways the Republicans were able to regain power—-besides the most important tactic, the traditional suppressed voter turnout at the midterms—-was to be completely uncompromising.  In fact, they were so uncompromising that it was ridiculous.  If a liberal said the sky was blue, they’d say, “Nuh-uh, hot pink!”, and then run to Fox News to complain that the liberal elitists were bashing their religious beliefs. 

There are many lessons you could learn from this, but the most important one is that these aren’t people for whom concessions will ever come.  Not when they’re in power, and not when they’re out of it.  They won’t be seen by their base as agreeing on anything with the man they’ve painted a Muslim Kenyan who stole the Presidency so that he can have a steady flow of infant blood to drink.  Which is why this news story is me giving up on the Obama administration and using the precious minutes saved from the day to work on other things, read novels, and play Rock Band.

President Barack Obama’s top adviser suggested to The Huffington Post late Wednesday that the administration is ready to accept an across-the-board, temporary continuation of steep Bush-era tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest taxpayers.

That appears to be the only way, said David Axelrod, that middle-class taxpayers can keep their tax cuts, given the legislative and political realities facing Obama in the aftermath of last week’s electoral defeat.

“We have to deal with the world as we find it,” Axelrod said during an unusually candid and reflective 90-minute interview in his office, steps away from the Oval Office.

When will they learn that you don’t deal with bullies by acting like bullies are people who can be reasoned with.  What the Democrats need is Jack Donaghy on hand to explain the world to them.

To modify Jack’s point for the situation at hand: “The Republicans are being irrational, and irrational behavior doesn’t respond to rationality.  It responds to fear.” 

Though I suppose you could point out that the Republicans are being entirely rational with their over-the-top assholery, promotion of irrationality, and grand-standing.  It’s basically bullying, and they have correctly assessed that their targets give in to bullies.  The lunch money will be handed over every single time.  In this case, the lunch money is our nation’s viability as a proper Western democracy with a substantial middle class.  The Republicans made a threatening gesture at Democrats, and Democrats caved immediately and gave Republicans the banana republic they want.

There are no political gains to be made from this.  None.  The Republicans will always find a way to cater to corporate interests and the rich more than Democrats, so believing that you can win over those folks to support you more than Republicans—-something that’s bound to be haunting Democrats after Citizens United—-is an utter fantasy.  And you have to ask yourself, what’s the point of winning elections if you let the losers dictate your choices for you?  Might as well stay home and play Rock Band.  At least you’re using fewer of the planet’s resources, and by letting the situation go to hell the easy way, you have less stress and might live longer.  Long enough to watch all the horrible consequences for our once great nation when you take all our economic resources and put the hands of a tiny, ego-crazed minority of people.

Well, I spent far more time than I should have googling around, looking for a KFC ad that I saw on TV at the gym today.  I don’t watch many ads—-yeah, DVR and iTunes!—-so I have no idea if this is a popular ad or not.  But it recalled the Angry Dude ads that raised so much of a fuss at the Superbowl.  Apparently, despite the outcry, advertisers really think the “show men rebelling against an evil matriarchy” ads are the way to go.  This particular ad had a bunch of men addressing the camera, explaining how they were so going to eat the Double Down sandwich—-casting off the shackles the unseen person behind the lens was supposedly putting on them.  I’m sure you could, if you were really in a rationalization mood, assumed these men are supposed to be rebelling against their doctors telling them to watch their cholesterol, but let’s face it—-there’sa very high chance the nagging bitch they were supposed to be standing up to in order to eat this disgusting wad of grease was supposed to be a female partner. 

I tried to imagine if you tried to do a gender reversal on this one, and have a bunch of women aggressively tell an imaginary (and presumably male and possibly a partner) off-camera person that they’re going to gargle grease if they want to and you can kiss their asses, and found that this was too ridiculous for even my vivid imagination.  And I don’t think this is because men are so oppressed by nattering women with their ridiculous body standards.  On the contrary, I’d say that it’s easier to address imaginary oppressions in ads than real ones, because real ones inspire actual discomfort and guilt.  Ads addressing women’s guilt about “bad” foods are pretty much just ads promoting products that present as low-calorie substitutes, such as yogurt ads that imply that you can quell the craving for a piece of cheesecake with a 100-calorie serving of cheesecake-flavored Yoplait.  In other words, the body police in both ads is presumed to be female.  Women control themselves through guilt and the obligation to stay thin, and then women nag men to watch what they eat, which presumably emasculates men.  And men retaliate by reminding women that they’re men, and as such aren’t under similar obligations to keep themselves trim to maintain attractiveness.

I have no idea how effective these ads are.  They seem to speak to a very specific audience:  partnered straight men whose female partners spend a lot of time watching their diet and therefore loop those men into it somewhat, making those men feel like they’re being emasculated because they’re being expected to do feminine things like mind their diet, and who want to rebel by shoveling a bunch of fried chicken down their throat.  Then they can use their iPhone cruising time stuck on the toilet to show up at a feminist blog and whine that women don’t understand how hard it is to get laid, because being attractive comes so naturally to women.  Perhaps KFC thinks that men outside of this narrow target demographic can still relate, figuring that there’s a shot of manliness available to all sorts of men when you dump on women for being nagging, responsibility-obsessed monsters.

This was a trend that defined many of the ads during the Superbowl, but hasn’t gotten much commentary since then.  It seems much worse than it has in the past, though making or even just insinuating “nagging bitches” the villain to rebel against in ads is a long-standing tradition.  My gut feeling is that advertisers are selling these ads to clients by using the bad economy as a pitch.  The logic goes like this:

1) Men are feeling low because of the bad economy.  These bad feelings can be interpreted with ease as emasculation.
2) Feeling emasculated by the wide world doesn’t provide an easy villain to dump on.  But women, on the other hand, are right there. 
3) Direct your male customers’ general malaise towards being angry with women for being pushy broads, and
4) Suggest your product is an effective way to tell those nagging bitches to fuck off.

And, in the grand internet tradition: 5) Profit! 

Except in this case, they’re probably right about the profit. 

When I first read this article in the NY Times Magazine about how 20-somethings are delaying the supposed markers of adulthood—-marriage, kids, financial independence—-longer than they had in the past, I thought that the main flaw of it was that it didn’t address why financial independence was so hard to achieve.  By casting the entire situation as a matter of desire and choice, the author missed the big picture, which is that people delay adulthood because the ability to be an adult requires a certain amount of privilege increasingly unavailable to young people. I tweeted about it at the time, noting the answer to the question, “Why don’t people grow up faster?” is incredibly, stupidly simple—-because they are no longer any jobs for people in their early 20s that provide the means to be a full adult.  Full stop.  I don’t mean that entry level jobs only pay enough for a small apartment or a simple lifestyle.  Often, they don’t pay enough to cover the rent on that small apartment—-if they can find those jobs in the first place—-and that’s why people move back in with their parents.

Which is why I saw red when I read this smarmy, self-righteous screed from some Baby Boomer.  It’s a classic example of being born on third and thinking you hit a triple.  She assumes that her ability to pay rent with her first job out of college is strictly because she’s so much more fucking awesome than you spoiled kids these days, and her parents were so much more responsible than the softies of today.  For a millisecond, she ponders the possibility that things have changed because of financial constraints, but then dismisses that possibility with a handwave.  It’s so much more fun to be self-righteous!  It’s way more fun to wag your finger at young people and tell them how you lived on Ramen and beans to afford your apartment, never pausing for a moment to wonder if those kids might not be able to afford that apartment even if they lived on dog food.

Everyone I know who did a stint of living at home while legally an adult, including myself, did so out of financial necessity.  That’s 100% of folks I’ve heard of doing so.  In a way, it’s too bad, because the notion that living with your parents after becoming an adult is some great marker of shame is a relatively new idea, born out of the prosperity of the mid-century in America that our smug Boomer seems to think is just evidence of her super-awesome-better-than-you-ness.  Throughout most of American history, family living with family wasn’t considered anything but normal, and in fact sort of the point of having a family.  Indeed, I have to wonder if people who think that living with your parents after becoming an adult is non-negotiable aren’t speaking from a very narrow upper middle class perspective in general.  When I was a kid, both of my parents went through stints of living with their parents after they were divorced.  If you step outside of the world of status markers and fear of appearing too working class, the benefits of living with your parents in some situations are kind of obvious.  It can be a bulwark against loneliness for all parties involved.  It can save everyone money.  (Notice how the assumption is that kids who move in aren’t contributing?  In the real world, they’re often paying rent to their parents.)  Atrios pointed out that the people who are preening about financial independence at an early age often were capable of this because they didn’t have to borrow to get through college.  For parents who were unable to provide a free ticket through college to their kids, helping them get on their feet by sharing expenses after college is a way for the parent to help out while also relieving their own financial burden.  It’s win-win for many families. 

The fact that there was a brief period in American history where there was enough wealth going around that parents of all sorts of classes could provide enough for their kids to create “financial independence” at a young age is no reason to shame people who have to revert to the old ways now that our economy has reverted to the old ways of huge disparities in wealth between the classes.  If you think that it’s so important for every 22-year-old to live on their own, with the illusion of having no help, then we need to return to the economic situations of the mid-century in America that allowed that to happen.  And some of that may be hard to achieve, such as the far more affordable housing of that era.* 

And hell, the notion that you could walk right out of college and into financial independence even then is something of a lie.  I will point out that for all her preening, the Salon author didn’t actually achieve the financial independence and adulthood she’s so sure about:

The eyes of 20-somethings glaze over when we recount how we lived — sharing living quarters with a pile of friends, having only battered old belongings (and few of them to boot), eating cheap food we cooked ourselves, and spending little or nothing on entertainment.

She is of course, still full of shit, since that’s exactly how most people that age still live if they live on their own.  Hell, I didn’t buy a single piece of real new furniture until I was about 30, and even then it was 50% off and from Penney’s.  And technically, that’s still the only real piece of substantial furniture I own that’s new. 

But let’s look at the larger story she tells—-one of having roommates.  This, despite her preening, is exactly the “extended adolescence” that she shames young people now for engaging in.  Nelle Engoron can think she’s hot shit because she was so grown-up that she still lived like a college kid in her 20s, but I think she’s fudging a little.  I could just as easily gloat that I was way adult much younger than her, because I never had a roommate again after I graduated college.  After spending some time living with my mom, I moved in with a boyfriend, and was still pretty young at the time.  I could say that while Engoron was flopping around smoking dope with her roomies like a college kid, I was starting to do grown-up things like going to dinner parties with other couples.  But that would be something of a lie—-not the dinner parties part, but the part where adulthood is so cut and dry.  After all, I’m turning 33 in a couple of weeks, and I still mostly own used furniture, still go to rock shows and play video games for fun, and still live in an apartment that’s way too small for kids, not that I’d ever want any.  The problem isn’t that human beings are failing to achieve arbitrary markers of adulthood.  The problem is assuming, incorrectly, that there’s something universal and unchanging about standards that were based on a very 1950s-era idea of what middle class mores should be.

*We were watching “The Apartment” last night yet again, and one of the things that stuck out to everyone was that C.C. Baxter was able to afford an apartment on west 67th St. in Manhattan for less than a week’s salary a month.  Nowadays, that is, of course, completely impossible for a man that I think we’re supposed to assume is 25 and in an entry level job for a college-educated man.  In fact, that would probably be very difficult to afford for the executives whose positions he craves now. 

Regardless of the nit-picking in the mainstream media about whether we’re in a “recession” or a “downturn” or a “recovery”, for the American public, we’re living in a straight-up Depression.  There’s 10% unemployment, and many of those lucky enough to hang on to their jobs are seeing their hours and wages cut back.  Foreclosure rates are sky-high and people who are managing to hold it together stay up at nights in fear that the bottom is going to fall out any day now.  Our Village idiots seem to take arguments about how it’s more important to avoid taxing the rich than to keep our roads paved and our lights on.  But Americans know that things are bleak.

Which is why you’ve seen not one, but two stories this week that are folk legend ready that share the theme of telling The Man to fuck off. Most Americans can’t even dream of doing it; things are so bad that they fear that anything short of keeping their head down and working for free when asked will result in their name getting on the list of those to ax during the next round of layoffs.  But we can read and we can dream.

Exhibit #1: Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater has had enough of your bullshit.

After a dispute with a passenger who stood to fetch luggage too soon on a full flight just in from Pittsburgh, Mr. Slater, 38 and a career flight attendant, got on the public-address intercom and let loose a string of invective.

Then, the authorities said, he pulled the lever that activates the emergency-evacuation chute and slid down, making a dramatic exit not only from the plane but, one imagines, also from his airline career.

On his way out the door, he paused to grab a beer from the beverage cart. Then he ran to the employee parking lot and drove off, the authorities said.

Like John Cole, I must say that grabbing the beer on the way out is the sort of touch that propels this from “funny story” to “folk legend”.  I’ve seen some grousing about this guy’s actions from people, but I have to say, complaining about Steven Slater just makes you sound like an elitist.  I fly somewhat frequently, and I wish someone would tell the imperious fuckheads who break the rules and end up wasting everyone’s time to fuck the fuck off.  And even when the rules don’t make any sense, I think it’s an asshole move to disrespect the flight attendants who have to enforce them.  They’re not the ones who decreed that your iPod that doesn’t transmit any signals is a danger to the aircraft’s communications systems. 

And since this post will inevitably bring about, “But but but I’ve seen flight attendants who are legitimately bad at their jobs!”, no one is defending some motherfucker who takes out his anger at the world by riding your ass or making stupid mistakes that cause flight delays.  But for anyone who’s worked in the service industry, it’s hard not to smile at this one.

Exhibit #2: This amusing story told in shots involving a whiteboard.  In sum, the young woman in the shots tells the story of being an assistant to a man named “Spencer”, who she portrays as a real douchebag and who she claims drove her to quit by calling her a “HPOA”, aka “Hot Piece Of Ass” behind her back.  Even if her whole story isn’t true, this kind of harassment is all too common.

In fact, the point of these stories isn’t that they’re true, but the opposite.  People eat them up because they’re fantasies of what they can’t have, which is a chance to tell an overbearing boss to fuck off.  On the contrary, one of the great underdiscussed aspects of unemployment is the emotional toll it takes on many Americans, who have lost leverage at work.  While many of us are blessed with coworkers and supervisors we like, if you hate your boss—-and a lot of people do—-then the increased pressure to keep a job means even more subservience, word-swallowing, and daily humiliations.  No wonder these stories make us smile.