Doug called it

Early in our ride the other day, Doug mentioned that he hoped Tina Fey would be coming back to SNL in answer to some political comment I made. Not able to keep up as usual, I asked why, and he answered that she looks just like Sarah Palin. Dougie got his wish, in spades. I hope the characterization is short-lived.

SNL skit - Palin and Clinton bipartisan press conference against feminism

- Tried to embed the video, but while it worked fine in preview mode, it wouldn't show up once published.

apropos of not necessarily anything but probably quite a lot

The instant I saw this photo:


I thought of this painting:

Raft of the Medusa, Theodore Gericault

miles of moving garbage

Our backyard butts up to a fairly heavily-traveled train track. Last night, eating dinner on the deck, we watched a long train pass, car after car filled to the top with garbage. Plastic bags, a traffic barrel, a couch, metal, all trundling by on its way to somewhere. Piles and piles and piles of it. We've never noticed garbage being carried by the trains before. Where the hell does our garbage go, that it has to be put on a train to trundle off into the distance?

There's something fundamentally insane about fighting a war in the Middle East and paying $4 a gallon to regimes that sponsor terrorism, not to mention the extensive social, health, political, and environmental damage wrought by extraction of other resources like coal, metals, and water, all so we can enrich a country hostile to democracy and throw things out at an increasing rate, negating their potential to reduce the virgin resource stream and not just cancelling out every shred of their embodied energy, but actually increasing our energy consumption so we can continue to acquire things to replace the very similar things we just threw out.

Every shred we throw away presents a lost opportunity. Until we stop seeing the items and garbage around us as an end result, and start seeing it as part of a circle, an economic chain of events which can yield value over and over and over, we will trundle mindlessly toward our doom.

estate tax good...

…entrenched, inbred oligarchies bad.

Three paragraphs in Nick Kristof’s NYT op-ed on CEO pay illustrate why ‘moneyed’ does not equal ‘deserving’ or ‘accomplished.’

These Brobdingnagian paychecks are partly the result of taxpayer subsidies. A study released a few weeks ago by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington found five major elements in the tax code that encourage overpaying executives. These cost taxpayers more than $20 billion a year.

That’s enough money to deworm every child in the world, cut maternal mortality around the globe by two-thirds and also provide iodized salt to prevent tens of millions of children from suffering mild retardation or worse. Alternatively, it could pay for health care for most uninsured children in America.

And,

…boards [of directors] pay C.E.O.’s after negotiations that are often more like pillow talk. Relationships are incestuous, and compensation consultants provide only a thin veneer of respectability by finding some “peer group” of companies so moribund that anybody shines in comparison. The result is what critics call the Lake Wobegon effect, which miraculously leaves all C.E.O.’s above average. Indeed, one study of 1,500 companies found that two-thirds claimed to be outperforming their peer groups.

It’s easy for ‘death tax’ haters to sway the public’s opinion on this issue with semantics (‘death tax’ on its own a genius bit of framing – hardly anyone has an estate but everyone dies) because most of us harbor the hope that one day it will be us in the top whatever percent of the country financially, and the suspicion that even if we’re not, the IRS will come for our paltry savings when we die and give it to crack-addicted, atheistic, single mothers of seven or other welfare queens.

The facts are, though, that your estate will almost definitely not qualify. (Mine undoubtedly will thanks to my many wonderful invention ideas that I haven’t yet monetized but surely will.) Sorry.

One other tidbit, from Wikipedia:

In July 2006, the IRS confirmed that it planned to cut the jobs of 157 of the agency’s 345 estate tax lawyers, plus 17 support personnel, by October 1, 2006. Kevin Brown, an IRS deputy commissioner, said that he had ordered the staff cuts because far fewer people were obliged to pay estate taxes than in the past.

Estate tax lawyers are the most productive tax law enforcement personnel at the I.R.S., according to Brown. For each hour they work, they find an average of $2,200 of taxes that people owe the government.

deeply saddening

Just before we crawled into bed on Saturday night I learned that the day before, author David Foster Wallace had hanged himself in his home. The news kept me awake for a long time.

As a writer, he was intimidatingly talented, the rare kind that simultaneously motivated me to pick up a pen and made the prospect folly. But even more impressive than his ability to find and convey a story was that the personality that shone through his stories seemed so supremely likable. Self-deprecating, bitingly funny, so nice his endless footnotes felt like a conversation that would stretch long into the night out of the wonder of finding someone who gets it, he once refreshingly said that the job of a writer is to make the reader realize how smart they are.

Our loss is, to a much lesser extent, his loss: the lonely and unacceptable death, incrementally, of hope.

amazing

I've mentioned before how I love that anything I could possibly think of is already being discussed by lots of other people. Today's odd Google query for something that I never thought of before? 'Compost dog poop.'

Results? 1.2 million.

I got a little buzz of satisfaction as I typed in the query and anticipated suggestions appeared, homing in on my exact, weird, subject. TEH WEB ROOLZ!

Savages

In response to this column by Dan Savage, a friend wrote me:

Finally got around to reading Savage's column in this week's Metro Times; that's the one you asked me about, right? He managed to answer one letter before unleashing on the inane and obvious hypocrisy of Mrs. Palin and the rhetorical Right. I like his gumption, his spirit; he's a flaming gay homosexual liberal, and doesn't give a shit whether you like it or not. More so, he's not afraid of being a 'liberal,' a term the right has so thoroughly demonized that it holds almost as much esteem as 'pedophile' or 'leper' does anymore. I remember a time when being a liberal meant something good. Savage reminds me of that...

He sure does. I'm going to minimize my ranting (here, at least) about the eminently depressing prospect of the Alaskan governor as anything other than a flash in the pan we'll one day laugh nostalgically about. Her emergence and by-golly embrace ('Teen pregnancy? Oh, honey, it happens to all of us, don't you worry about it! You're a woman, hear you roar!') by the Right speaks to the exact issues people like Savage make all the more obvious; thoughtfulness, open-mindedness, rationality, objectivity, and intelligence are near-worthless currency in this, and increasingly all, elections. Obama, Savage, and others are strong, intelligent, and decisive writers and thinkers who effectively tease out the subtleties of a situation to hopefully better grasp the bigger picture. Unfortunately as we've seen, these are not requirements for holding public office. (I've been stunned by the immediate and repeated ironies of the Palin pick; the McCain ads about celebrity, the attacks on lack of experience, the Rovian mantras of lies becoming truth. Wholly less subtle and therefore more masterful than the elevation of Bush to competence over a very different McCain in 2000. Political science theses will be written on just her emergence in the race. So much for not ranting...)

I never understood so saliently before a few months ago how much people adjust their 'reasoning' to fit the situation at hand into their little box of a world view. The callous geniuses behind this race and the previous two are schooling me on just how malleable one's sensibilities are; how quickly people will turn on a dime to fit everything they say into the running commentary in their heads, even if the reality has taken a complete 180; even if they are obviously and completely refuting something they said on camera just days before. I've realized for what seems like a very long time now that most people are truly unable to maintain any consistency of strength and intelligence throughout different aspects of their lives, but it's nevertheless depressing to see such blatant proof of that splayed across the teleprompters and TV screens.

Liberalism is not exempt here - there are buckets of hypocrisy and pandering on both sides of the aisle, politics and the complexities of American life being what it is. However, in this race at least, the bullying ignorance and cheering hypocrisy of the Republican party is most breathtaking and dangerous because it could actually work for them.

WHAM!

Sweet.