"Month of May" - Arcade Fire
Because tomorrow is today here at the Cogblog.
"The kids are still standing with their arms folded tight."
I'm slightly embarrassed by the degree that I find these guys so captivating -- I know they can seem slightly pretentious and earnest, but there is something so energetic and open-hearted about them. The songs can be uneven, but when they are good, they are great.
- Slightly late to getting around to this, but I highly recommend that those of you who haven't read it take a look at the New York Times Magazine piece on Stanley Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mother. It's a fascinating read about a woman who seems like she was incredibly bold at a time when such boldness was very far from the norm. It also gives you a glimpse into the unsettled and exotic world in which Obama was raised, the Indonesia of the late 1960s, and possibly some insights into how he acquired that sense of self-possession that seems to be his defining characteristic. Well worth a read.
- Charles Blow has an outstanding column today in the Times about Donald Trump, birtherism, what it means, and a host of other things. Is it me or has Blow undergone a substantial sea change in recent months? For a while he seemed to be heading into Broderesque territory and now he seems to have all of a sudden grasped the ugliness at the core of the Republican enterprise and begun to write viscerally against it. If so, it would be a great thing -- it could help fill the void left by Bob Herbert's departure to some degree.
- Scary statistics from the Employee Benefit Research Institute - One of the things that Blow mentions in his short but far-ranging piece is the complete ongoing failure in our society to get people financially ready for retirement. To me the most mind-boggling of these statistics is that 56% of American workers have less that $25,000 saved for retirement, with 29% having less than $1,000. This is beyond frightening. People without defined benefit pension plans -- a pretty huge chunk of the universe now -- need to have savings in at least the hundreds of thousands in order to be able to retire comfortably -- higher income people who expect to maintain a comparable lifestyle in retirement need to have seven figure savings. The bottom line is that we are not going to be able to cut Social Security, we are ulitmately going to have to enhance it. The study also shows that 36% of workers now expect to work past age 65 and that 70% expect to work in retirement. God forbid that these people experience health problems or find themselves unemployable. Jokes about the cat food commission will seem decidedly less amusing.
- Finally, one last Times related thing. I thought this piece by Andrew Leonard in Salon describing Paul Krugman's critique of the Obama Administration's policies and Leonard's take on the political constraints within which Obama has found himself operating is pretty much spot on. Krugman is right on the substance, but Obama was probably correct on the political calculus, frustrating though that is. It's also well worth reading.
Alright, got a plane to catch. Add your thoughts while I'm winging my way east.
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