Eschaton

Wednesday Night

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 03:53:00 +0000

rock on.

Debatable

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:56:00 +0000

Crazy people inform me there's another debate tonight. They can't possibly be right.

I Admit I Don't Know

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:30:00 +0000

It's easy to observe and joke that there are certain people, like the three stooges in the Senate, who basically want war everywhere all the time. And we can theorize about why they - and those who encourage them - want war everywhere all the time, keeping in mind the fact that different people might have different reasons for this view. But ultimately I don't know why.

Fetus Comes Alive

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:13:00 +0000

Things are pretty shitty for a lot of kids in this country. Once upon a time conservatives at least pretended to come up with ways to deal with the various problems. They don't even bother anymore.

Happy Hour Thread

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:00:00 +0000

enjoy

Umm....

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:05:00 +0000

Great Moments In On The Record Journalism

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:42:00 +0000

I guess Schneiderman has been beclowned.

A Man On A Street

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:45:00 +0000

Probably a miracle he wasn't tazed into submission.

Queens

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:52:00 +0000

Echoing some commenters, the point isn't that (all of) Queens is some hideous place, it's just that to outsiders New York is basically "Manhattan." People don't want to pay the big bucks to travel to New York and not be near Manhattan. People also don't want to pay the big bucks to travel to New York and then have to be rental car dependent. There's a functioning monorail ride after all, just not one that functions very well in (much of) Queens. The Chicago convention center where Netroots Nation was a few years ago was in kind of a crap isolated location, but it was at least a relatively short cab ride to not crap locations.

Fresh Thread

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:05:00 +0000

One of those days when being jacked into the Matrix seems hard.

The Devil Himself

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:48:00 +0000

As much as the Villagers love religious belief, they quickly get uncomfortable when people actually start talking about what religious beliefs actually are, other than believing that women should stop being slutty slut sluts and gay people should go away.

Devils, angels, heaven, hell, purgatory, and, yes, ghosts and other spirits aren't crackpot beliefs, if by crackpot we mean nutty and rare. They're common. I'm not the one to ask about support for these beliefs in scripture, because I don't know and don't much care, but regardless lots of people believe in this stuff and attach it to their religion.

Also, too, The Omen was a biopic.

How Could You Completely Fail To Understand Your Own City

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:17:00 +0000

You'd have to be insane to think that some out of the way spot in Queens would actually draw big conventions.

The Plan So Far

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:49:00 +0000

So this is the current plan for Greece:

1) Make everyone poorer (well, not EVERYONE, of course)

2) ...

3) MASSIVE GROWTH WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I suspect there might be a flaw in this plan.

Half The Population And A Few Of Them Vote

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:48:00 +0000

The script plays out pretty much the same way every time the Republicans plant the flag in the uterus. A bunch of men take to the teevee and the op-ed pages talking about the "culture war" (what the fuck is that anyway) and slutty slut slut sluts. Everyone concludes the Dems should cower in fear and come up with their own mandatory chastity belt plan. Then, slowly, it begins to occur to people that maybe the womenfolk are people too and have a few opinions on this stuff.

Overnight Thread

noreply@blogger.com (echidne) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 05:05:00 +0000

You Are Horrible People

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:59:00 +0000

My twitter machine feed was filled with retweets of something from the "JFKjrForum" by the monkey who runs the Mark Warner twitter account. Apparently there are a bunch of people there who think interest rates are going to spike to 7% unless we cut granny off from the teat. Or something.

I used to be slightly more open to this stuff, totebagger style. You know, reasonable people can disagree, blahblahblah. But these are just corrupt and evil people who want to steal all of that money. Not sure when I finally understood that, but much later than I should have.

North Philly Rising

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:39:00 +0000

I love the urban hellhole, but a few years ago I probably wouldn't have expected that this kind of project would be possible.

It isn't all good. Full details beyond the scope of this post, but there's been some deliberate "slum clearing" going on here. I generally think gentrification concerns are overblown, but there's a difference between relatively slow neighborhood evolution and policy aimed at cleaning out the riffraff.

A Minor Plea To Some Random Dudes On The Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:05:00 +0000

I know a lot of you are mostly well-meaning and a bit late to this party, but nobody really cares about the precise nature of how and which abortions give you an icky feeling. Either you're pro-choice or you aren't. The rest is, at best, booooooring.

Happy Hour Thread

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 22:03:00 +0000

enjoy

The Golden Age Of Television

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:41:00 +0000

I don't think the issues are simple or that everything should be free, but I do think (and the issues differ between music, movie, TV industries) that big content producers underestimate the degree to which THE INTERNETS promote and encourage interest in their products. From a pure consumer perspective, television, in particular, is much much better than it ever was. The longer form story telling which is relatively new, a departure from the 'make shows that people can watch in any order on the reruns' era, is made possible because people know they can, one way or another, legally or illegally, catch up on episodes they missed because they weren't glued to the box at the right moment.

Go, Ricky, Go

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:38:00 +0000

As I've said, I appreciate Rick Santorum drawing lines around his beliefs. I have no interest in religion in politics, but for too long we've had this basic agreement that "religion (Christiany/Jewishy religion) is good for politicians but let's agree not to disagree too much in public."

They Write Books

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:00:00 +0000

Lunch Thread

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:00:00 +0000

enjoy.

Fraud

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:40:00 +0000

There's one phrase that seems to be a magic "oh it's ok then" for any fraud committed by the lovely people in the financial industry. It's "the borrower was behind a couple of payments." First, you shouldn't lose your house simply for getting behind a couple of payments. Foreclosure is a big expensive deal for all involved. If the incentives are such that it's worthwhile to foreclose on people who just missed a couple of payments then the incentives are completely messed up. Secondly, and I can't believe I even have to write this, no matter how many payments a borrower is behind, it isn't actually a license to commit fraud.

True About Pretty Much Everything

noreply@blogger.com (Atrios) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:41:00 +0000

Krugman writes:

But thinking about today’s column, I realized that it’s even worse than that. What defines centrist heroes, as far as I can tell, is that they are people who, faced with a catastrophic slump driven by private-sector abuses, and a severe shortfall of spending, declared that our most urgent priority is … to reduce budget deficits.

That’s often described as a courageous position, but it’s actually anything but: nobody in the Beltway dinner-party circuit has ever been ostracized for demanding entitlement cuts. And aside from being totally conventional, it’s also deeply wrong-headed — and if you ask me somewhat unethical, too, because it involves exploiting a crisis to push an agenda totally unrelated to that crisis.

One of the most annoying stances of the Sensible Centrist Very Serious People crowd is that even though they are dominant force in Washington, despite not having any real constituency, they imagine themselves to be an extremely brave oppressed minority speaking truths that nobody else dares. Except for every damn day on every page of every one of our national newspapers.