Saturday: Matt Continetti Comedy Gold

Some Obots are taking to stand-up.  In this video clip of Blogging Heads TV at The New Republic, Matt Continetti does a brilliant parody of an Obamaphile who has finally come to grips with the fact that Obama is not a liberal and instead puts all of his eggs in the basket of the liberal paradise that is the new Congress.  He’s hillariously funny when he enthuses about how now that Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House, she is going to get those new Blue Dog Democrats to roll over just like she did last session.

Eve Fairbanks plays the cynical smirker as Matt tells us all about Liberalism on Steroids.  I don’t know who wrote this material but it’s brilliant!

What’s that?  Not a parody?  REAlly?

Nevermind.

Other curiosities:

• The ugly truth hatches out about the recent economic collapse.  Amity Shales in the WSJ takes on Krugman in The Krugman Recipe for Depression.  What was it about The New Deal that drives capitalists absolutely nuts?  It’s the effect it had on labor.  Yeah, with Social Security insurance and strengthening of the country’s labor laws, workers had greater autonomy.  They started getting paid real wages and had health insurance too.  I’m of the opinion that those New Deal fixes lead to one of the greatest periods of entrpreneurial spirit and prosperity that the country has ever seen. Well, Shales will have none of that.   Shales believes that a job, ANY job, is preferable to a job with insurance.  I’m not sure about that.  I’m listening to Timothy Egan’s book, The Worst Hard Time, on the Dust Bowl of the 30’s and he tells the story of one schoolteacher who worked in Oklahoma for a whole year without pay.  Yep, the school district offered her a warrant that she was supposed to be able to redeem for cash at the local bank.  Except the bank wouldn’t accept it.  Niiiice.  What Shales seems to be missing is that the reason so many people are defaulting on mortgages or are in debt up to their eyeballs is because real wages have actually eroded over the past 40 years.  The social safety net of the New Deal is in tatters.  And when people fall through it, they can’t pay their  bills.  It’s really very simple cause and effect, Amity Shales.  If there is a solution to this current morrass, it *has* to have a strong labor component.  We are the bulk of the taxpayers in the country and if there is no taxbase, there is no recovery.  It’s really too bad this doesn’t fit with Amity Shales worldview but this is America.  Love it or leave it.
• Dr. Violet Socks’ brilliant compilation  of the consequences of electing Barack Obama is reprieved in #13 from early November.  Keep this in mind when you hear more about Hillary, Samantha Powers and Christina Romer.  But I think her recent post on taxation is something we should all be asking ourselves.  We have taxation without representation.  Our votes for Hillary last year during the primaries were completely disregarded.  What is the meaning of suffrage if your vote doesn’t count?  And why are we paying taxes into a system where our representation in the general population is greater than 50% but our representation in elected office is only 17%?  It’s just nuts.
• Murphy at PUMAPac pointed me to this article in the NYTimes by Alex Kuczinsky about her struggle with infertility and her hiring of a surrogate in Her Body, My Baby.  Unlike a lot of the commenters on this piece, it doesn’t bother me that she paid for the treatment or the surrogate instead of adopting.  The money she threw into the system is benefitting someone.  It’s her money and she has the normal reasons for doing IVF- eleven times.  And I think the pictures are a hoot!  Only the most arrogantly unaware wouldn’t see the unsubtle classist overtones.
  

  Alex and Max....and the baby nurse?

  No, what strikes me is the incredibly cold account the author gives of her relationship with her surrogate.  Cathy Hilling, the vessel, loses her identity as soon as she gives birth to the author’s nearly 11 lb baby.  As Murphy notes, enough of the nurturing, mother stories already.  It’s a part of life but not the only meaningful part of a woman’s life.  But the story as written shows Alex Kuczinsky as probably one of the most selfish, insensitive, catty, snobbish, pseudo-intellectual and heartless women I’ve ever read.  Nature unfortunately didn’t bless her with a working uterus.  It’s doubly unfortunate that she seems to be missing a soul.  Pray for the poor kid.