No bonus for this guy:

The dark blue captain’s hat, with its golden oak-leaf clusters, sits atop a bookcase in Bryan Lawlor’s home, out of reach of the children. The uniform their father wears still displays the four stripes of a commercial airline captain, but the hat stays home. The rules forbid that extra display of authority, now that Mr. Lawlor has been downgraded to first officer.

He is now in the co-pilot’s seat in the 50-seat commuter jets he flies, not for any failure in skill. He wears his captain’s stripes, he explains, to make that point. But with air travel down, his employer cut costs by downgrading 130 captains, those with the lowest seniority, to first officers, automatically cutting the wage of each by roughly 50 percent — to $34,000 in Mr. Lawlor’s case.

The demotion, the loss of command, the cut in pay to less than his wife, Tracy, makes as a fourth-grade teacher, have diminished Mr. Lawlor, 34, in his own eyes. He still thinks he will return to being the family’s principal breadwinner, although as the months pass he worries more. “I don’t want to be a 50-year-old pilot earning $40,000 a year,” he said, adding that his wife does not want to be married to a pilot with so little earning power.

Why doesn’t everyone just quit doing what they do and go to work on Wall Street? You clearly don’t have to be competent or know anything, because these clowns trashed the economy and then ran around for months yelling hoocoodanode all while taking bailout money. Then, they turn around and take those taxpayer loans at low interest and the taxpayer guarantees, loan them back to the taxpayer at a higher interest rate, collect their vig, call it a profit, and then give themselves billions in bonuses because they are in the black again and happy days are here again. And half the public is so beaten down and broken they will look at all this and say “Hey, but isn’t it a good thing that Wall Street is profitable again?”

Why would anyone want to fly a plane for 34k a year when you can get rich being a thief, and one and a half of the two major political parties are going to have your back? Time to break out the foam fingers again, folks! USA! USA! USA!

You know what we really need? A capital gains tax cut. Hells yeah, baby!

The other night at dinner, our seminar speaker started to explain to us about how the Community Reinvestment Act caused the subprime crisis. There was a new twist in the story, he claimed there was a flawed study (which he surely made up or at least misrepresented) that had showed that whether or not people made their mortgage payments, and, as a result, the courts/federal government (he didn’t explain the mechanism) forced banks to lend to anyone who wanted it. He had all of this on very good authority from his father-in-law at Morgan Stanley. May FSM strike me dead if I am not relating his story accurately. I thought of that when I saw this from Atrios:

5 years from now it will probably be a “fact” that ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act caused the housing bubble.

And I thought of that again when I saw (on Fallows) that the Washington Post still hasn’t amended its Nobel for Neda piece to note that Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously. And again when I saw this bizarre explanation of it all from Howie Kurtz:

Fairfax County, Va.: Hi Howard, This Sunday, I read the editorials in The Post and The New York Times about the surprise Peace Prize. I liked the NYT editorial (which was pro), but like most of us, including Obama, I could certainly have handled an editorial that was anti this choice.

When I read The Washington Post editorial, I felt so sad for what this paper has become. Their whole idea was that the prize should have gone to Neda, the woman who was murdered by the Iranian police. Nobel Peace Prizes can’t be given posthumously. It’s a basic, easy factcheck. There are other fact problems, too (the protests hadn’t happened by the nomination date, Neda may not have been a protester).

So the idea that the committee made a careless or inappropriate choice is refuted by a slapdash editorial “choice” that nobody bothered to check? It just screamed out to me “we laid off almost all the copy editors.” I feel so sad for The Post I grew up with. It’s great to have an opinion. It’s bad to look dumb.

washingtonpost.com: Post Editorial: Our Laureate: Neda of Iran (Post, Oct. 10) andTimes Editorial: The Peace Prize (The New York Times, Oct. 9)

Howard Kurtz: I take your point about no posthumous awards, though by that standard Martin Luther King couldn’t have won after being assassinated (yes, I know he won the prize earlier). My reading of the piece was that Neda was being used more as a symbol (though the rule should have been mentioned). But it’s an editorial. It is by definition opinion. Of course some readers are going to disagree.

It’s not “by that reasoning”, it’s a rule the Nobel Prize committee has! How hard is it to understand that?

Were things always like this? Did newspapers always fill their editorial pages with factual inaccuracies they refused to correct? Were criticisms of the inaccuracies always defended with non sequiturs about other events? Was it always common for ostensibly reasonable, intelligent people to go around repeating stories that are not only not true but couldn’t possibly be true?

Update. I see that Mediactive wrote about Kurtz’s strange answer as well. There are some good points there.

I heard that we need one.

Write a decent health care bill and dare Olympia Snowe to filibuster it. She won’t.

Rally round the Leader:

I challenge you to think of anyone not named Palin or Limbaugh who would get this kind of full-throated defense from the blogospheric right. Dear Leader wants an NFL team, so the troops must rally.

Must be nice to be in the high-fidelity first class traveling set:

Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year—a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street’s pay culture.

Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis of securities filings for the first half of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end by The Wall Street Journal.

Total compensation and benefits at the publicly traded firms analyzed by the Journal are on track to increase 20% from last year’s $117 billion—and to top 2007’s $130 billion payout. This year, employees at the companies will earn an estimated $143,400 on average, up almost $2,000 from 2007 levels.

It is kind of funny how acrimonious our current politics is, with everyone yelling and screaming at each other over little shit, when the truth of the matter is politicians don’t run the country at all.

This strikes me as a horrible, horrible idea:

For decades, automakers have been on a quest to make cars quieter: an auto that purrs, and glides almost silently in traffic.

They have finally succeeded. Plug-in hybrid and electric cars, it turns out, not only reduce air pollution, they cut noise pollution as well with their whisper-quiet motors. But that has created a different problem. They aren’t noisy enough.

So safety experts, worried that hybrids pose a threat if pedestrians, children and others can’t hear them approaching, want automakers to supply some digitally enhanced vroom. Indeed, just as cellphones have ring tones, “car tones” may not be far behind — an option for owners of electric vehicles to choose the sound their cars emit.

Can you imagine every car going down the road blasting the driver’s music preference as a car tone. Just kill me now.

I’ve been reading a bit of this panel discussion thing about conservatism’s future. It’s mostly an epic wankfest and it’s remarkable how much Larison stands out. I liked this especially:

Conservatism rebels against the concentration of power and wealth, temperamental conservatism teaches that power corrupts, while the movement concentrates in acquiring political gain particularly on national security.

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Moby Dick:

The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! How cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

I’m sure there are also all kinds of paradoxes in liberalism or progressivism or whatever it is that people like me are supposed to have as a philosophy. And this is why I think it’s a mistake to think that pondering Burke and Hume or their liberal equivalents, whoever that would be, will lead to any kind of clarity.

In the future, the FTC can rest assured I will burn every free book from the Heritage Foundation and Regnery. Considering I felt like going on a three day bender after I read the Party of Death by Ramesh Ponneru, burning the damned things is probably healthier in the long run. If I get a copy of Going Rogue, I might just be driven to shoot smack.

As a side note, it is really hard to argue for good government when you have jackasses like Cleland running around.

(via)

BTW- Frontline returns tonight, and the subject is Afghanistan:

Should be a good one.

Vote Bitsy:

We have been slacking and really need to push hard this week. Big write-up about her in a local NC newspaper.

Go vote.

I was actually thinking of reading that Matt Latimer book until I found him writing this:

In fact, even the odd coupling of Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan agreed that excerpts from my book made Bush look smarter and funnier. Christopher Buckley and Maureen Dowd said Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney came across as characters more textured than is commonly known. (Dowd, as is her wont, said I let them off too easy.) And nearly everyone who read the book said it was funny and accurate in its depiction of the silliness of our nation’s capital.

I mention this to underscore that Republican elites in Washington have gotten so overly serious, so defensive and so insular that they have lost the ability to be self-aware and laugh at themselves, much less learn from their mistakes.

What the hell is wrong with people these days? Don’t they know better than to (a) fluff their own books and (b) pretend they’re fluffing their own books just to prove some larger lofty point?

The moment I heard Snowe was going to vote for the bill, I began furiously refreshing Red State for the reaction. Finally, they deliver:

That is right, folks. To show unhappy they are, they are going to ask you to buy rock salt through their amazon store and mail it to Olympia Snowe. They don’t call them the Red State Strike Farce for nothing.

Seriously, how do I make a joke about this?

Has anyone offered an amendment requiring employers to, somewhere on every pay stub, list how much the employer and employee contribution to their respective health care plan was for that pay period, the cumulative for the year, and how much that is up from the same time last year, over the past five years, and over the past ten years?

That seems like it could be very valuable information that could really inform people just how much money is going to the insurance boys and girls and how it is really impacting their wages.

I’m really sick of this infatuation with Liz Cheney. The only reason the media is paying any attention to her is because she will launch wild attacks on the current administration. She’s basically a less-attractive Sarah Palin with a more prominent lineage.

Who cares what she thinks? Aren’t there people who actually know things who you could talk to, or are you just eager to help Dick’s daughter rehab the family image?