Good effing post man.

Amen, brother.

Count Clinton back in on the Confederacy of Dunces team...
"It is time that there are no more stories coming out of there (Gitmo) about people being abused," he said. (Financial Times, MSNBC.)
Hey Bill, the stories (hello, stories)are coming from terrorists trained to lie about...
Never mind.
No blood for oil.
Bush=Hitler.
Blah friggin' blah.

Jefe, you forgot:

HALLLIBURTON!!!

Congratulations-- you just endeared yourself to the NYT's Gail Collins. And alienated the majority of voters in all of the swing states you'll need to win in 2008.

Great point ACE, let 'em talk shit until the elections at which time all the shit-talk can be brought up again and thrown in the faces!

Thrown in their faces by whom?

I keep waiting for the ridiculous pandering the Democrats do in the primaries to be thrown in their faces in general elections--reparations, free pie--but it never happens.

I know things are changing, but '06 and '08 are just far enough away the media can claim "We forgot!" in sitting on this moonbattery.

Bank on it.

I wouldn't be so confident about 2006. 2002 was, by historical standards, a fluke - only 2 or 3 other times in the past 100 years have mid-term elections resulted in gains for the party of the president - and 2 in a row would be unprecedented (facts pulled from history.MyAss.com).

Just saying - don't get cocky, kid(s).

08?

If we do well in 06 it won't matter much if we elect a Democrat for President in 08.

Give me gridlock, sweet sweet gridlock.

Point taken, Knemon, but I think if we can give Howie and Dickie a bigger megaphone so they can 'get their message out,' the response from the American people will certainly be unprecedented.

You can’t claim (as Democrats do, incessantly) to “support our troops” and then dump them in the same category as the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge.

Yet, you can't get an asshat like McCain to publically condemn this bullshit.

Good post but I hope you are not basing your tool comment about Trent Lott based on his harmless birthday accolade to fellow long term Senator Strom Thurmond. Lott and Durbin are prime examples of how the leftists move to dominate the discourse of which there are many more examples. Liberals defend a word for word statement by claiming that the statement was mischaracterized and that even though it is a word for word quote, it did not mean what we think it meant. On the other hand, when a conservative makes what appears to be a harmless statement, that statement is interpreted to mean something entirely different because even though he may not have said those words, we all know what he meant. You just need to read between the lines.

Now that Ace seems to be developing a Marge Simpson-style online gam*bling compulsion, I think we ought to set up a pool to see how soon a senior Democrat will start calling for Bush's impeachment. My guess is we'll be hearing it by mid-September.

Ace makes a good point here. The out-of-touch tone-deafness of the Dems is truly awesome, and I'm starting to think they really won't make any gains in '06. More and more, the Democratic Party is looking like that T-Bird in the closing seconds of Thelma and Louise

I finally removed Andrew Sullivan from my bookmarks five minutes ago. I didn't want to do it, but his virulent and nonsensical defense of Durbin left me no choice.

Amen to this post, Ace.

There just can't be that many people out there that agree with Sen. Durbin, are there? I, for one, certainly hope not, but it frightens me that someone this out of touch can make it that far up the food chain...

Your senator's call to extend voting rights to all felons nationwide also sort of fits into what you said, ace.

The one thing I miss about Limbaugh's TV show is that he'd have these great clips of libs engaging in total jackassery and playing it at just the right time.

The GOPers should be making up ads featuring Durbin for every race in 06 "This is what Durbin said and (insert lib name here) refused to condem him"

I actually posted this comment over at Goldstein's place last week in discussion of a similar issue. It's apropos to Durbin as well, so hopefully Ace won't mind if I recycle, with a couple small tweaks:

What the conspiracy theorists and the moral equivalency brigade describe as “bravery” is not bravery at all; on the contrary, it’s the height of passive-aggressive cowardice.

By hiding behind the pretense of “I’m only asking questions; what’s the matter with asking difficult questions?”, they attempt to have their cake and eat it too, i.e., to abdicate responsibility for the outrageous bullshit they spew, by (a) pretending that they didn’t really say what they so cleverly insinuated, and (b) the classic passive-aggressive move of shifting the blame to the listener for getting upset, rather than on the speaker for saying something so fantastically stupid, insulting, and irresponsible.

“B-but I didn’t accuse Bush of having the Twin Towers blown up; I just asked why it’s so terrible, why it isn’t allowed, for us to consider the possibility that he might have!”

"But Durbin didn't say that our soldiers are the same as the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge; all he said was that other people might make that comparison if they heard what our soldiers had been doing!"

“Why are you getting angry at me? I was only joking when I said your ass was fat. Jeez, can’t anybody take a joke anymore?”

Really, if anyone can identify a meaningful distinction between the first two statements and the last one, give it your best shot.

Forgot to add this to the end of the strawman Durbin remark I added to that recycled comment above: "The noise machine of the far right never stops and it's gotten so much more in operation in the last few weeks . . . This is all a distraction by the White House."

The first part of that strawman remark is mine. The second part that I just tacked on is a direct quote from Harry Reid, from this article where Durbin is also quoted doing the passive-agressive weasel-disclaimer of his insinuation.

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050617-095036-9355r

>>This was a colossally stupid, dangerous, anti-American, and politically disastrous thing to say.

All true of course, but also, and I think very telling - just plain flat out *wrong*. I don't mean morally wrong, but incorrect-wrong. When I first read a post of the Time article, I thought it was a *joke*. Durbin's comments show just how truly, utterly, out of touch the insular cliques you describe have become.

What sort of silly world does he live in?

Yeah, Scott McLellan gets asked a question about Durbin's remarks, and answers the question,

thus creating a distraction from the White House.

bunch of assholes.

Someone reading Durbin's remarks might wonder whether the Senator on occasion takes untoward liberties with farm animals.

I'm not saying he does, that wouldn't be fair, I'm just thinking out loud here, for argument's sake. I sure hope it doesn't become a distraction.

Sullivan has been laying very low on the Durbin matter - there's not another mention of it on his blog, if you scroll down the entire page. He just put up one post on a remark by the Daily Kos. He should have just kept his mouth shut; better to be thought a coward than a bigoted idiot. And I don't know why he figured he'd take a swipe at Hugh Hewitt. Maybe he was a bit stung because Hewitt linked to his *endless* comments on the Lott affair several years ago. But Hewitt didn't breathe a word about the comparative absence of any such outrage on this matter; of course, he didn't have to, the discrepancy speaks for itself, and it seems to have stung. Anyway, I think the Freakout Advisory will need updating soon; he'd been so blase about this issue up until now, I was thinking it would be necessary to add a "comatose" category, but it looks like he's decided he'd rather link arms with Durbin after all.

Gridlock, sweet gridlock, mmmm - I agree. To a point. Domestically, gridlock can be good in the neighborhood - our nineties boom took off right around the time The Gingrinch shut the mother down, no?

But as The War goes ... uh-uh. Gimme Rudy, Rudy Can't Fail.

Re: Durbin - it actually does sound like things may have gotten a little ugly with the whole feces and the fetal position etc. Maybe someone should have gotten a reprimand. I don't know. I'm not a JAGger.

I do know that the Pol Pot shit is way out of line. Sullivan defends it? Yuk, I can't even bring myself to go over there and read it ... maybe later.

"Yet, you can't get an asshat like McCain to publically condemn this bullshit."

And of all people you think would tell Durbin to STFU, you'd think McCain would rank pretty damn high. How many years did John stay in POW custody in hellish conditions that can't hold a candle to those at Gitmo?

Erm... that Gitmo doesn't compare to... in my previous post. Proofread, dammit!

You get the point...

Folks,

Dianna ( http://www.dartemis.net/users/squishy ) has it right. Call the office of your Senators and your Representative. If they have NOT issued a condemnation or sponsored a resolution of censure, send a follow up letter expressing your outrage at their moral cowardice and attach a single feather.

It's a long shot, but shame may work...

Great post, Ace.

Of course, nothing could, nor did, stop Juan Williams from coming to his rescue. He actually argued that Durbin didn't mean 'literally' what he had said, and that basically everyone who complains is a moron for taking his remarks in the liberal sense.

So, essentially, he defended Durbin because he was only spouting rhetoric.

Brit just sat there dumbfounded.

Lot of bad things going against the Republicans for 2006. Bush's Social Security plan is going up in flames, wealth is rapidly concentrating in the hands of a few, Americans are insecure about globalization, immigration, jobs, health care, globalization, and the idea that Bush has botched the Iraq situation. Oil just went over 60 bucks a barrel, gas is now 3.00 a gallon in some places. A majority of Americans answer Democrats are more concerned about "problems and issues affecting Americans like me" in polls. When asked which Party favors the wealthy and corporate interests - almost 80% say the Republicans..

The hope for the Republicans is that now so many Democrats have become obsessed about "Terrorist civil liberties" and the need to all but hug terrorists to show how nice we are, that they are extremely vulnerable if another big terrorist attack happens right before the 2006 and 2008 elections.

If I was Bush, and I knew where Binnie was, the way things are going for Bush and the Reps since their Schiavo fiasco......if things continue to unravel, there best shot at staying in power is another Al Qaeda attack. So I would write Binnie if I were Bush saying - "I hate you and want to kill you, but if you have another big attack we don't know about and can't stop ----please schedule it for summer or early fall of 2006, but if delayed, the same time in 2008 would be nice!"

Well, you are a vile piece of shit aren't you?

"Conservatives almost always see these shit-storms coming, because we know every false-footing (yeah, I know the French term, but fuck 'em) . . ."

So, I was already a fan, but now you have my undying respect and admiration for declining to say "faux pas". Anybody who can insult the French in such an off-handed manner is a hero to me.

I got curious as to what our ol' pal Sully was actually saying about the Durbin mess, so I decided to take a gander at his website. God, I'm an idiot. But just so the rest of you won't have to suffer his hysterical nonsense, here goes:

DURBIN SAID NOTHING WRONG: I've now read and re-read Senator Dick Durbin's comments on interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. They are completely, perfectly respectable. The rank hysteria being perpetrated by some on the right is what is shameful. Hugh Hewitt should answer one single question: does he doubt the FBI interrogator who witnessed the appalling treatment of some detainees at Guantanamo?

The genius goes on to mention 5 detainees who were allegedly "tortured to death by U.S. interrogators," zooming past the fact that NOBODY HAS DIED AT GITMO--NOT ONE DETAINEE at an alarming speed.

He ends his abortion of a blog post with the following:

It is this administration that has brought indelible shame on America, and it's people like Dick Durbin who prove that some can actually stand up against this stain on American honor and call it what it is. Good for him. Thank God for him.

If I was Bush, ...

But you're not, much to everyone's relief. You see, that's why he's President, and why most people who read and comment here are glad of that fact, while you're making weaselly insinuations about him on blog comments (see my comments above) - which, while annoying, is at least generally harmless.

Hardnose, my representative is Rahm Emmanuel, and my senators are Barack Obama and, yes, Dick Durbin. I think I'll save my dime. The Land of Lincoln has fallen on hard times.

Brown Line,

Spend the dime!

More importantly, send the feather. If shame won't work we need to at least make sure that its DOCUMENTED.

Oh for simpler times...

Cedarford, I really wish you'd stay away from things you know nothing about and economics is one of them. You're so brainwashed by your Stormfront buddies that you never actually think about what you post. Then, when you do expound on some subject you know something about--or just get lucky--no one believes it's actually you.

You claim wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Can you back that up? Hell no. We minted more millionaires than ever. The increasing (actually stable) numbers at the bottom of the heap can be entirely attributed to immigration.

Home ownership, historically the greatest store and creator of personal wealth, is at an all time high.

You mentioned globalization (twice). What evidence do you have that anybody beyond the dopey kids with their stupid puppets gives a rat's ass about globalization? I'll tell you--zippo. Like outsourcing, the media kicks up an issue, everybody pretends to care for a week or so, then it's BBQ season and pfft. No one cares.

Stick with what you yourself know and we can limit your hidings to the ones warranted by your anti-Semitism. Because you agree with your "populist" buddies on the perfidy of those stinking Jooooos, you don't have to buy the rest of their propaganda. Next time you repeat your misstatements about the economy I won't let you off so easy.

Let him off easy, spongeworthy, please. It likes being beaten.
Better still, ignore it.

Coincidentally I've taken advantage of globalization by outsourcing my BBQing.

Good thing I like curry.

Spongeworthy, you are one stupid person if you don't think wealth is concentrating. A mark of your idiocy is that you say it can't be so because more millionaires are being created in the very wealthiest class.

If you would bother to look at 10, 20, 30 year stats tracking growth in income or loss in income of quintiles tracked by Commerce and the US Census - the bottom quintile has declined, middle quintiles stagnant, top quintile rocketing up, largely due to tremendous gains in wealth of the Top 1% and especially the top 0.1%

This has been under great discussion in Business Week, Forbes, NYTimes, WSJ, Barrons....along with a lowering of class mobility and a shrinkage of numbers of people in the middle class...There is no real debate over wealth concentrating - the only debate is if "trickledown" is dead as economic theory.

I presume you don't read that sort of publication much, Spongeworthy???

I have a MBA. You clearly don't.

An MBA from where? Bob Jones? Where were you when they taught about mobility between quintiles?

And if more money is concentrated in the hands of fewer people. how can we be creating more millionaires? Are you denying this?

And how can the rich help but become richer? Once your bills are paid, the money left over grows--it is ever thus. This is a bad thing?

I don't deny the middle class has stagnated by some measures, what I deny is whether these measures accurately reflect 1) mobility between classes and/or 2) the effect of immigration on the median income used to determine these classes.

And, Mr. MBA, why don't you tell us what effect the shrinking number of middle class would have upon that same "median income"? The only way it could remain stable is if we minted rich guys at the rate we added Mexicans, right?

Adding millions of broke Mexicans to the fold every year is going to effect your quintiles and it's going to do so in a pronounced fashion during times of great influx. The only way you can reconcile your view of the state of Americans to fit the numbers you cite is to ignore immigration and pretend those in the lowest quintile are Americans who have fallen on hard times.

Is it your claim that this is the case? How do you reconcile that with low unemployment and record home ownership? Or should I say, how so the guys at Stormfront explain it?

It is a good story, but false on many levels. For a start, this slow growth in median income overlaps with a scale of immigration into America outpacing all immigration in the rest of the world put together. Many immigrants have come precisely to take up the lowest-paid jobs. As a result, in the 20 years to 1999 some 5m immigrant households were added to those defined as below the poverty level. Yet among native-born Americans, poverty rates have declined steadily since the 1960s. In the case of black families, median incomes have recently been rising at twice the pace for the country as a whole.

Strip out immigrants, and the picture of stagnant median incomes vanishes. Indeed, for the nine-tenths of the population that is native-born, middle-income trends continue their improvement of the 1950s and 1960s. For these people, inequality is not rising, but falling. Gregg Easterbrook cheekily points out in his excellent recent book, “The Progress Paradox” (Random House), that if left-leaning Americans seriously want better statistics about middle-income gains, then they should simply close their borders.

Mr Easterbrook points to something else about the figures for median household income. A quarter-century ago a typical household had three members. Today, it has just 2.6 members. Simply by this effect, median households have seen their real incomes rise by a half.

One of the sources us dumbass, non-MBA's use a lot to justify our kooky wingnut belief system.

The use of illegals is a factor in holding down wages in the lower half of the population and using the labor savingd profits to largely benefit the top 10%. If illegals magically disappeared, the poorest 2 quintiles would still be poor until wealth transferred from profits to the upper 10% back to the lowest quintiles as labor became scarcer, hence more valuable.

From 1979 to 2000, wages declined in real dollars in the bottom Quintile by 5.8%, while soaring in the top 10% of the population by 139%, with most of those gains concentrated in the top 1%.

From 1989 to 2000, the Fed reported the following distribution of new wealth created in America: 1/3rd was sucked up by the Top 1%, 1/3rd went to the next 9%, 1/3rd went to the bottom 90% of Americans.

Under Bush, who has borrowed money from China or Japan to give "tax cuts" - inequalities in wealth have worsened. Fully 1/4 of the Asian money the next generation will pay off went to the Top 1%.
Over half the borrowed money went to the Top 10%.

Fed Reserve Report on Concentration of Wealth

At the same time, we are seeing all the Latin America countries that tried the globalist, trickledown approach abandon it for a more Leftist, progressive economy --because it just created an oligarchy of the wealthiest few enjoying "crony capitalism".

As for mobility, researchers have found the long-held notion that America is one of the most mobile societies is no longer true. They found that mobility is higher in Europe, Canada, Australia, and most Asian nations. They cite a lack of government attention in America on transitioning poorer people to "next step up" jobs, and lack of American focus on using High School and universities to allow younger people to move up in "class".

Got a cite for that mobility claim?

And how much new wealth could go to the bottom 90%? Think about it. It's wealth. If you get it, you aren't going to be poor anymore. You move out of the lower 90%. A great deal of the lower 90% are students, retired, immigrants and the indolent. How much of that new wealth should go to them?

I'll bet when you remove those categories from your figures, you'll see that new wealth is distributed about as one would think it ought to be. People making 35k a year are in the lowest 90%--how are they going to build wealth?

By making more than they spend, that's how. Then they can invest and build themselves some of that new wealth.

It always slays me to see how the same people who lament crappy jobs being done by Chinese people in Beijing decry the problems of the lower middle class. Do you actually think Americans are going to improve their lot by sewing feathers on a child's toy for a living? You don't think Americans could maybe find more productive uses for their efforts?

One last thing: You note that wealth in the top 1% grew 139% over 21 years. Simply shocking. Until you note that that's an average of 6.6%, about what you'd expect from the markets over that span. So what you're saying is that the rich grew their wealth at about the market average over the 20 year period. The government needs to do something about that!

You haven't come close to proving your litany of complaints. Do they teach bitching at Bob Jones?

I just have a old undergradute degree but I personally know one of the new millionaires is a lady who worked retail making less than 10.00 per hour who retired after 30 years at the age of 55. The power of compounding and stock purchase plans. Only in America. .

Link on mobility?

Here's one. A study on intergenerational mobility in N America and Europe. The USA and the UK come out towards the bottom, Canada and the Nordic countries towards the top. In Asia, as the US is gutted of manufacturing jobs, there is higher social mobility than in Canada or countries like Finland.

Sutton Institute Study

You come across as a jingoist apologist, Songeworthy...almost convinced that patriotism involves boasts that America is second to none in health care, education, social mobility, all people sharing in the wealth created by our society....but the facts are more mixed. The way to deal with them is not deny them - as you attempt to do about the problem of wealth being concentrated more and more in the hands of a few Americans - but confront the ramifications of America becoming an oligarchy run by a small economic elite in the style of Brazil or Mexico. Is that desirable???

You are also unrealistic in the ramifications of available jobs if all high tech and classic industrial jobs are outsourced. If you lose industries, you lose the scientists and engineers clustered around those industries, the accountants, managers, architects...not just the "factory manufacturing line worker". You talk about how America losing skilled manufacturing jobs and the whole net of skilled support professions that attend manufacturing will "free" the engineers, managers, scientists, workers to "seek more exciting jobs".

Exactly what exciting jobs do you see?

New high tech industries are mostly going overseas. Computer hardware, plasma screens, cell phones, CA manufacturing, nanomanufacturing, robotics have relocated, along with high tech services...and new fields like biotech and bioinformatics - for venture capitalists - come down to one question - as the field matures, makes mony and creates lots of jobs....do you locate in China or some other Asian country???

I love it when you sneer at stupid people, Ace.

If you lose industries, you lose the scientists and engineers clustered around those industries, the accountants, managers, architects...not just the "factory manufacturing line worker".

Absolute nonsense. Reveals a complete misunderstanding of how outsourcing really works.

As far as mobility, I have seen just about every study done on the issue, and in every case so far the slowdown in mobility between quintiles can be attributed to the spread in quintiles which, BTW, blows your concentrated wealth claim out of the water too, for reasons you probably can figure.

If you divide incomes into five groups of equal population, the existence of more rich people drags the quintiles up. Of course it's going to make it harder to move betweeen quintiles, but it says little about the wealth of those in these quintiles relative to their standard of living in America's "golden years".

http://www.econopundit.com/archive/2005_06_01_econopundit_archive.html#111938104597742523Try here, which concldes this way

Also by counting this way the NYT and others suggest the social fabric of the US has changed, whereas the more likely explanation is that small and stochastic changes in income are less likely to change one's quintile. You need to increase your average income by about $73,000 to jump from second to first quintile in 1998, whereas $42,000 was enough to do this in 1979.

I would guess the large increase in income needed to enter a higher US quintiles is the reason you guys get lower relative mobility compared to Sweden, where even a small random wage increase is enough to put you in another quintile in another year.

Wow- a sideways swipe at the Frogs AND a reference to Confederacy of Dunces.... now that's somethin'. Well done. Oh, and thanks for punking the punk from my shameful state (Chicago resident, sadly).

Spongeworthy, Cedarford:

Nice debate fellas, very interesting stuff. At this stage, gotta give it to Spongeworthy though.. probably due to bias on my part, but it seems like the Sponge is countering your arguments rather handily Cedarford. You also didn't do yourself any favors trying to play the MBA card either..... I've had the displeasure of working with far too many book competent/life eejit MBAs for that to cut any ice.

Guess I'm missing something here.... why is this concentration of wealth issue such a heated topic recently? I'm noticing a drift by the lefties to bemoan the horrible concentration- the alleged Rev. Jackson doing so in his last ghostwritten editorial in the SunTimes being one example, the comic book known as the NY Times being another. At least in Jackson's incoherent screed, no mention is made of what the criteria were for "middle class", "lower class" and "poverty" levels, and also no mention of which income levels paid/pays what percent of the taxes.

Only conclusion I can come to is that our economy is unarguably doing quite well, so the lefties in desperation are pulling the ole' class envy and warfare card out of the deck. Ooooh, there's a shocker.

"why is this concentration of wealth issue such a heated topic recently?"

When the economy is bad, the left complains about the bad economy. When the economy is good, the left complains about the unfairness of the econonmy (unless its a Democratic administration).