BMBS

The budget debate is bringing out the best in some of our politicians.  On Thursday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)  mocked members of the conservative grassroots movement as “tea-party hobbits.”  Not to be outdone, freshman Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told reporters:  “I’d rather be a hobbit than a troll.”

Feeling the need to explain himself, Paul said:  “I think in reading the books, the hobbits were the heroes. They overcame great obstacles, and I think I’d rather be a hobbit than a troll.”

Imagine what they say about President Obama.

In an interview with National Geographic, former President George W. Bush explained that his non-reaction to news of the 9/11 attacks — and therefore his attention to “The Little Goat” — was a conscious decision to project an aura of calm.

“My first reaction was anger,” he said.  “Who the hell would do that to America? Then I immediately focused on the children, and the contrast between the attack and the innocence of children.”

Bush said he “made the decision not to jump up immediately and leave the classroom. I didn’t want to rattle the kids. I wanted to project a sense of calm. I had been in enough crises to know that the first thing a leader has to do is to project calm.”

The NYT reports:  “There’s a new doll entering the American toy market called the Breast Milk Baby. In addition to the doll, little girls (and boys) get a halter top that they can wear, with two flowers that symbolize breasts.  As the doll’s mouth is brought to the flowers, it makes a sucking sound, as if it is drinking milk. Afterward, the doll cries until it is burped.”

The Times asks:  “The controversy brings up an interesting question about what sort of doll is appropriate. By letting girls play with dolls that come with baby bottles — and there are many to choose from — are we conditioning them to think that the bottle is better than the breast?”

Yes, but … sort of weird, isn’t it?

Don’t know if you can say the new census statistics are worse than lies and damn lies.  They are sobering to all who believe that opportunity and a ration of equality make our country great.

Data analyzed by the Pew Research Center show that the recession has wreaked havoc on the wealth of all Americans but that whites lost the least amount as a percentage of their holdings.  The decline in median net worth between 2005-09:

– Hispanic households – 66 percent (to $6,325 from $18,359)
– African-American households – 53 percent (to $5,677 from $12,124)
– White households – 16 percent (to $113,149 from $134,992)

The median net worth of a white family now stands at 20 times that of a black family and 18 times that of a Hispanic family — roughly twice the gap that existed before the recession and the biggest gap since data began being collected in 1984.

(Household wealth is the sum of assets, including houses, cars and banking accounts, minus debts, including mortgages, auto loans and credit cards.)

It would seem that the U.S. government’s inability to deal with the deficit and debt situation has already done us a lot of damage.  Credit depends on trust, and trust depends on maturity — which clearly hasn’t been shown during this crisis.  Indeed, the so-called “Tea Party” people don’t even accept that there’s a crisis.

How will we show enough maturity and trustworthiness to earn back lenders’ trust?  Are the Chinese and other foreigners who buy our debt going to forget that, ultimately, the United States is in denial about the unsustainability of our lifestyle and spending?

Fox commentator Juan Williams has revised his views about his former employer, NPR, in a way that’s sort of creepy.  In addition to saying that NPR is very “elitist” and a “white institution” — supposedly in comparison with Fox — he says in his new book:

“NPR editors and journalists found themselves caught in a game of trying to please a leadership team who did not want to hear stories on the air about conservatives, the poor, or anyone who didn’t’ fit their profitable design of NPR as the official voice of college-educated, white, liberal-leaning, upper-income America.”

NPR’s not perfect — certainly not in its current state of intimidation by the right wing — but to say that Fox is more open-minded and, well, more liberal that NPR is a difficult case to make.  Williams will come back someday.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the people who have tormented us and confiscated our nailclippers since 9/11, have announced some good news: Airport scanners will no longer make an image of our naked bodies, and will instead “auto-detect items that could pose a potential threat” and show the locations of these items “on a generic, computer-generated outline of a person.”  Moreover, TSA says, “Passengers are able to view the same outline that the TSA officer sees.”

Pretty good.  Maybe the technology and software have been adapted because the producers feared the full-naked scans would depress sales of their zillion-dollar machines.  But at least TSA has agreed to eliminate this particular humiliation.

Daily updates on the big showdown between Republicans (led by their Tea Party faction) and Democrats (who are, as often, disunited and reactive) would be a waste of time. Sorting through the theater on the one hand, and the serious and shallow ideas on the other, would miss the main point.

Is it possible that the fundamental issue here is that neo-anarchists in one party are driving an uncompromising effort to protect and consolidate their wealth and power by weakening the ability of government and civil society to monitor and regulate them, while the other tries to find the ultimate compromise and, in the end, comes off looking weak?

The Washington Post has published a disturbing investigative piece about how private firms collect huge amounts of minutia about us — to calculate “credit scores” — and sell it to other companies.  (See full text of the article below.)

This isn’t just about credit cards, loans and financial history.  It’s about collecting cellphone usage, magazine subscriptions, prescription drug usage, and more.

There’s a curious contradiction in this:  the same people who fight for “individual rights” strongly support – and profit from – private snooping in our lives far beyond that ever contemplated by any consumer agency.

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Quick update on the sordid case of Casey Anthony, whose research into how to make chloroform couldn’t be linked with her two-year-old’s murder …   she was released from prison in the dark hours (literally and figuratively) of this morning.

On Friday she filed an appeal to reverse the misdemeanor convictions of lying to law enforcement about her daughter’s disappearance.