"What Does Sex Mean to Me?" - Human Sexual Response
- The song seems appropos of our recent discussions and it is the only one I can think of that mentions Betty Ford.
- Speaking of whom, Betty Ford, who passed away the other day at 93, ended up being a strangely consequential figure I think -- I would argue much more so than her husband. Although she came across as the quintessential, upright midwestern housewife, she had a pretty interesting background, having studied dance with Martha Graham in New York and having helped support herself as a model. She was divorced prior to marrying Gerald Ford. Her struggles with alcoholism and her candor about those struggles were really quite ground breaking. She was shockingly liberal by the standards of today's Republican Party, enthusiastically supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, being frankly pro-choice, and, back in the mid-1970s, showed a kind of open-minded candor and common sense when discussing controversial issues of the day from marijuana use to premarital sex. She was also very open about having breast cancer and needing a mastectomy at a time when cancer was still sometimes shrouded in secrecy. She was very well liked by the vast majority of the American public to whom I think she seemed like a neighbor you'd like to have. Anyway, she was a mensch -- it's sad that they don't really make Republicans like her anymore.
- I thought this was a good article yesterday about the immense and continuing hardship visited upon the American middle class by the collapse of the real estate bubble. The piece reiterates something that has been raised here before -- but remains, in my mind worth repeating. In an era of stagnant wages and disappearing retirement plans, people relied upon their homes (and the easy credit available for both purchase and home equity purposes) to both finance purchases and as retirement asset. In the process, they became highly leveraged, betting on constantly rising prices as a hedge against this increased debt. The collapse of the residential real estate market in so many places has led to a loss of $7.38 trillion in wealth. Now those wounded in this process have had to pay down debt and refrain from consuming, with predictably contracting results for the economy. Sadly, as the author points out, even three years after the bubble burst, consumers still maintain higher than normal debt to disposable income ratios. All signs seem to indicate that this process has still got some time to run before recovery occurs. The challenge for Democratic policy makers is to both hasten this process and, for the longer term, figure out a way to boost middle class income in ways that do not involve this kind of casino approach to the economy.
What else is happening out there?
