Sun rises in east, dog bites man, and Thanksgiving will once again fall on a Thursday this year.
It was good to see the WaPo take a firm stand on the necessity of dealing with unemployment: "The main point is that unemployment remains well above what it should be; the longer this persists, the more we risk a “new normal” of structural unemployment, which is a fancy term for elevated human suffering and snowballing economic waste. We dare not let this happen."
Of course, they then proceeded to explain why we couldn't actually do anything about it: inflation fears, the invisible bond vigilantes, and all that. As everyone from Krugman to Yglesias has pointed out, there is absolutely no mechanism by which an inflationary spiral could be set off. In particular, workers are too fucking powerless in this economy (a reality that Sir Charles deals with daily in his professional life) to demand wage hikes if prices should go up. Krugman, of course, has the full takedown.
Next up, of course, is the way the Obama Administration, in the wake of taking out Osama bin Laden, absolutely dominated the Sunday morning talk shows this weekend.
Except they didn't, of course. The Republicans dominated even more than usual, with something like five Bush Administration officials on the tube, including Liz fucking Cheney, who doesn't know jack about shit.
You know, if next week we took out Qaddafi, and Obama convinced the Iranian leadership that they'd been wrong about everything since 1979 and they petitioned for Iran to be our 51st state, and Hillary negotiated a peace treaty between the Israelis and Palestinians, they'd still fill the Sunday talkies with Republicans to explain it all to us.
Finally, George Will meditates on the joys of being 70. "Playing with house money," he calls it. Getting older really isn't bad, if like Will, you get there with a decent pile of money, and life and work haven't turned your body into a wreck. Will apparently thinks that's true for practically everyone who makes it to threescore and ten and beyond:
The crisis — the obsolescence — of the previous century’s welfare state is a result of the social triumph represented by something unimagined 70 years ago, an enormous and expanding cohort of octogenarians.
Because the only way "an enormous and expanding cohort of octogenarians" could render Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid obsolete is if they reach that age in good health, and are sufficiently well-off that they can pay for their own health care, and that the income they get from Social Security is an afterthought.
Just another reason why nobody should ever read George Will, except to point out that he's wrong about everything, and pathetically out of touch with what life is like outside his charmed circle.
