David Leonhardt completely destroys the nonsense about only 47% of households paying taxes.
Excellent Links
Early Morning Open Thread
I was looking for reviews of Treme, because even apart from David Simon’s track record, John Goodman and Melissa Leo are both on my “Actors To Watch, No Matter the Other Details” list. But cable does not happen in this household, and I’m too old & techno-cowardly to figure out bittorrent, so I won’t be able to watch actual episodes until the DVDs come out or HBO decides to Hulu. So, a link from an otherwise neutral-to-mildly-hostile review on the AOL site led me to Back of Town: Blogging Treme and (among other fine things) the following wisdom from Athenae:
Who has the right to tell your story and hear your story? Who has the right to be let in that deep? Telling a story is letting someone into your heart, into the things for you that are like the things of the church, the things you don’t talk about, that are knit into your muscle and bone. We were always trying to be conscious of that, at my last paper, that ain’t nobody obligated to give you shit about their lives and that if they do, you tread on that as if it’s sacred ground. We didn’t always get there but I’d never say we didn’t always try. Here’s the crazy thing, though: Show up on someone’s doorstep after their grandkid died in some horrific car accident or school shooting or something, call up somebody after 20 years who said he was molested by a priest, invite yourself to a funeral, join a Muslim family for dinner after their children have been spit at on the street, and more often than not people want you there. They invite you in. Feed you, even. They talk for hours. They want their story told.
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We all know as fucking human beings, somewhere deep down, that our own memories only live as long as we do and the way we teach each other how to live is to tell our stories. And if we can’t tell them ourselves, we tell them this way: Books. Newspapers. TV shows. Movies, even. Radio. We’ve expanded the campfire where we used to share tales of the hunt to the entire fucking world. This is how we do this now.
Happy Tuesday, everybody. And… what did you think of Treme?
If They Can Do It
It’s not just the troops’ uniforms that are green: The U.S. military says its investments to conserve energy and water are beginning to pay off, with benefits for cost, national security and troop safety.
The Army has cut water usage at its permanent bases and other facilities around the world by 31% since 2004, according to Pentagon data. The amount of energy used per square foot at Army facilities declined 10.4% during that same period.
The data do not include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where increased troop levels caused energy usage to rise, but the military has several green measures in place there.
For example, the military has spent more than $100 million on “spray foam” insulation for tents in Iraq and Afghanistan, cutting leakage of air conditioning by at least 50%, says Tad Davis, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for environmental issues. The energy savings usually recover the investment within 90 days, he says.
The military’s green efforts will result in at least $1.6 billion in savings through the projects’ lifetime, says Joe Sikes, director of facilities energy at the Defense Department.
Ninety days. They recoup their money in ninety days on some investments.
Things I Did Not Know About
Bob Herbert’s latest New York Times column celebrates “A Voice of Reason“:
[…}One of the reasons so many conservative Republican absurdities became actual U.S. policy was the intellectual veneer slapped upon them by right-wing think tanks and commentators. The grossest nonsense was made to seem plausible to a lot of people — people who wanted to believe in a free lunch. When Mr. Reagan told the country that “government is the problem,” the intellectual handmaidens of the corporate and financial elite were right there to explain in exhaustive detail why that was so…
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The liberal or progressive community was slow to counter the remarkable effectiveness of this intellectual offensive from the right. But during the 1990s and into the early-2000s, that began to change. And one of the progressive organizations that has done a really good job (but has never been particularly well known) is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary.
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Demos, headquartered in New York City, grew out of a series of meetings of scholars, activists, journalists and elected officials who were concerned about the ever-increasing influence of the right on public policy. “The thinking was that there should be more moderate, liberal and left-of-center voices,” said Miles Rapoport, the group’s president. The group was formed in 2000, a year that would later see the disputed election that gave the presidency to Mr. Bush.
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It didn’t take long for Demos to begin issuing loud warnings about the danger that ever-increasing debt was posing to American households, while pointedly disputing the argument that over-the-top credit card debt was primarily the result of excessive consumer spending.
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Working people from the middle class down were in serious trouble, and Demos, along with many other voices (the bankruptcy expert and middle-class advocate Elizabeth Warren comes quickly to mind) was sounding the alarm long before the Great Recession hit like a Category 5 hurricane…
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[…] Ronald Reagan and the right-wing zealots who revere him have preached a gospel that, when carried to its logical conclusion, would all but abolish government. It’s a failed philosophy.
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Demos has responded with admirable real-world scholarship, a highly respected fellows program to encourage new writers and thinkers and steadfast efforts to promote civic engagement. (It’s a big champion, among other things, of same-day voter registration.)
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It’s not just comforting but essential to have sane countervailing voices like Demos to remind us that government action is necessary to plan for the common good, to set proper rules for economic activity and to be a bulwark against predatory practices in the private sector.
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Demos is holding its 10th anniversary celebration on May 11, and Ms. Warren will be one of the honorees. If you think about it, raise a toast in the group’s honor.
For some reason, I had not previously been aware of Demos’ website, www.demos.org. Looks like much more than one weekend’s worth of good reading over there.
This Deserves a New Thread
The new nine part seventy minute review of Star Wars II is now available:
I actually like bagpipes, though. I’ve been known to wake up roommates who kept me up too late with their drunken antics with an early morning Black Watch cd at ear bleeding volume. But I like bagpipes for other reasons, too.
White Peoples’ Colorful Tribal Customs…
Dave Weigel’s new blog at the ‘Kaplan Daily’ is a giant win for the sane people among us. Now he’s got a larger and presumably more “mainstream” (i.e., low information) audience for his keen sense of the ridiculous:
CNN’s decision to embed with the Tea Party Express as it traveled toward D.C. — Fox News did the same thing last year, in the run-up to the Sept. 12 taxpayer march on Washington — befuddled the right and left alike. Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher speculated that the network was out for “nuggets of gold,” video and photos of tea partyers waving racist signs.
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That’s not how CNN’s Shannon Travis describes his embed experience.
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“[H]ere’s what you don’t often see in the coverage of Tea Party rallies: Patriotic signs professing a love for country; mothers and fathers with their children; African-Americans proudly participating; and senior citizens bopping to a hip-hop rapper. … It is important to show the colorful anger Americans might have against elected leaders and Washington. But people should also see the orange-vested Tea Party hospitality handlers who welcome you with colorful smiles. There were a few signs that could be seen as offensive to African-Americans. But by and large, no one I spoke with or I heard from on stage said anything that was approaching racist.
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Almost everyone I met was welcoming to this African-American television news producer.
Of course, Weigel’s got plenty of important sercon posts about conservatives in general and Republicans in particular. But it’s his Menckenian eye for the ridiculous that I really appreciated when he was writing for The Washington Independent, and his new post will give access to more sources as well as larger targets.