Two out of three races is pretty good, but it’s not a sweep.

[Found via AZSpot.]

Speaking as a guy who prefers President Obama over anyone the increasingly deranged Republican Party has to offer, I have to say that no, he didn’t earn a Nobel. Wonkette editor emeritus Ana Marie Cox summed it up quite succinctly on Twitter: Apparently Nobel Prizes now being awarded to anyone who is not George Bush.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has this to say:

This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the ‘hyper-power’ as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it’s a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was ‘normal history’ rather than dark aberration.

You can expect to hear much sturm und drang from the already-verging-on-deranged conservative side of the political spectrum; even among officials, the expected window of graciousness through gritted teeth has been skipped. So much for their calls for people to “Respect the Office” when their guy was in charge.

Were I in the President’s shoes, I’d say: “Thanks guys, I’m honoured, but I’m sure that there are more deserving people and I haven’t earned it…YET.”

As the health insurance debate in the United States heats up, we need to remember who the real victims are: health insurance executives. Will Ferrell, John Hamm, Olivia Wilde, Linda Cardellini and other Hollywood celebrities step up to defend health insurance companies in this video from FunnyOrDie.com…

[Thanks to Margot Lewis!]

Here’s a selection of my favourite political editorial comics of the week:

Bloomberg: Canadian Health Care, Even with Queues, Bests U.S.

Allan B. Bevere: On Why the Church in America Cannot Speak Truth to Power

Cogitamus: Wingnut Values on Parade

The Root: Jimmy Carter, True Son of the South, Hits Nail on the Head

FiveThirtyEight: IBD/TIPP Doctors Poll Is Not Trustworthy

[Thanks to AZSpot!]

R.I.P. Patrick Swayze. (In case you don’t get the Kanye West joke, here’s the backstory.)

He forgot a couple: "Martyr complex" and “Can’t spell”.

My spider-sense is tingling, and not in a good way: Disney is buying Marvel Entertainment (yup, that Marvel, as in Spider-Man, the X-Men and so on) for $4 billion in stock, acquiring the rights to all their characters. Soon we’ll see the cast of High School Musical as the newest young mutants to join Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and a Marvel Team-Up featuring Spider-Man and the Jonas Brothers.

I feel like this:

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Back in April. Adam Sacks of the blog Adam Thinks created this so-funny-because-it’s-true graphic:

After getting so many requests, he’s decided to make it a t-shirt. You can order it online from Printfection for US$20.00:

Squeaking By on $300,000: even in fat times, the headline of that article, which appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post, is far too tantalizing to ignore. What sort of person “squeaks by” on three hundred large?

One such person is Laura Steins, whose life – especially the socio-financial bits – is the subject of the article. She is a a vice president at MasterCard and lives in Birch Hill, a wealthy suburb outside New York City, and a divorcee with the custody of her three children.

I read the article and the the commentary about it on the web about the article and have written my thoughts below.

The Situation

She and her family live in a 4,000 square foot house valued at US$2.5 million; after the divorce, she bought out her husband’s half. The picture below shows both its exterior and interior:

The article’s opening paragraphs flesh out her situation a little more:

"Morning," says Laura Steins, 47, wearing a dark Armani suit and take-charge heels. Her blue eyes are lustrous and her skin is golden, and even with wet hair and no makeup, she radiates confidence.

But she’s months overdue for a visit to her colorist, a telltale sign of economic distress for a woman such as Steins. The smell in the basement could mean a crack in the septic line; unlike a $200 hair appointment, a plumber will be in the thousands. And from the breakfast table comes one more urgent need from a 10-year-old.

"At my birthday party, every single girl had a phone," says Katie Steins, making the case that an enV2 phone with matching cover is just standard in her crowd.

Steins kneels down to face her daughter. "If you continue to tell the world how undesirable your phone is — it’s not a flip, it’s not a swivel, it’s not an LG — you will not have a phone."

Steins takes a breath. Life in this $2.5 million house was built on the premise of two incomes, not the income of a divorced mother of three in a tanked economy. Her property taxes are $35,000 a year, the nanny is $40,000 and the gardener is $500 a month.

"I can ride this storm out," says Steins, which means having tiger-striped hair and getting her kid a generic cellphone and ignoring the stinking basement.

Follow the Money

Although Steins probably considers herself to be part of the middle class – perhaps upper middle class, but middle nonetheless — her circumstances put her farther ahead in the game than most people in her situation. Consider her sources of income, which the article lists as:

At $275,000, she’s making 5.5 times the 2007 median U.S. family income (according to Wikipedia’s page on median household income) and almost 7.5 times the 2007 median income for a family run by a single woman (according to this article in the Washington Area Women’s Foundation blog). It’s almost $100,000 more than the lower limit of the top 5% of U.S. household incomes for 2007.

As far as assets go, Steins has a treasure trove compared to most of us. She doesn’t just have a house on a nice lot in a tony neighbourhood, but all the accoutrements: furniture, appliances, electronics, clothes and so on. On the more liquid side, there’s her personal investment account. If it’s providing $50,000 to “pick up the slack” (her words, as quoted in the article) this year, I have to ask:

• What companies is this account investing in?
• If $50,000 is this year’s payoff, what’s the principal?

You Can’t Go Back

It’s easy for us to ask why Steins doesn’t sell her house. She explains that she doesn’t want to uproot the kids and that it’s near her work. There’s also the issue of the current economic climate: it’s hard to sell a house right now, especially one worth $2.5 million.

Her explanations, while reasonable, sound like rationalizations. As Chris Rock put it in one of his stand-up routines (in a very funny, very vulgar way which I’ll leave you to discover for yourself): once you get used to a certain lifestyle, it’s hard to go back. It’s a fair bet that when she was still with her husband, the household income was closer to a half million per annum.

Steins may also be holding on to her lifestyle, and especially the house, as a source of comfort in the wake of her divorce. In times of overwhelming, unpleasant change, we look for comfort in the familiar, and what’s more comforting and familiar than home?

Keeping Up Appearances

Keeping up appearances is also a factor. There’s a couple of telling anecdotes in the article, the first of which is Steins’ daughter complaining about her mobile phone wasn’t an LG enV2 — a model name so appropriate for the article that it’s downright Dickensian – which is the standard phone among her friends.

The other notable story about the importance of appearances is about a theme party in Steins’ neighbourhood. Its theme was the recession, the food and drink came from Costco, and guests were asked to dress down in old clothes and bring something non-perishable to be donated to the food bank. One guest violates the rules and shows up wearing a blazer and khakis, explaining that he wanted to show up in jeans but his wife wouldn’t let him. “They were so vintage,” she says by way of explanation, “I couldn’t bear it.”

Funny Because It’s True

There’s a quote in the article that made me laugh out loud. It comes from Kathy Shellogg, Steins’ live-in nanny, who in describing the Steins’ food preferences, says “They are big mayonnaise people.”

Violating the Unwritten Rule

Steins is breaking the rule that you learn by osmosis if your parents are professionals and have at one time or another owned a Swedish automobile or a sailing vessel at least 20 feet long: You should appear in the newspaper three times at most – your birth announcement, your wedding announcement and your obituary.

I wonder what she was thinking when consented to be covered in this story.

Wife 2.0

One of the photos in the gallery accompanying the article shows Steins with her daughter Katie, her ex-husband and her ex-husband’s new wife. Wife 1.0 and Wife 2.0 look eerily similar, right down to the way they dress:

Rorschach Test

The article makes a pretty good socio-political Rorschach test. People from different points on the political spectrum reacted to the article differently.

There were over 1,000 comments made directly to the article. Most of the commenters seem to have trouble feeling sorry for Steins, and some asked why the article even made it past editorial.

On sites like OpenLeft, there’s not much sympathy for Steins either; author David Sirota considers the article part of a larger stealth marketing campaign “designed to make us believe that very wealthy people are suffering the most”. A commenter on Brazen Careerist went so far as to question the wisdom of having three children: “That’s expensive and not necessarily ideal, on the kids or the parents, or society.”

Meanwhile, “Freepers” – participants on the right-wing Free Republic message boards – tend see the article as a ham-handed attempt by the Washington Post, part of that cabal known as the Liberal Media, to engender class envy and foment class warfare. Some of them wondered if she or her ex-husband were benefiting from TARP money (they apparently don’t), most praised her for having a good job, a couple said that their employees don’t make as much money as Steins’ nanny and a few wondered if she voted for Obama, being one of them no-good east coast lib’ruls.

The one thing shared by commenters on both ends of the political spectrum was the statement that they could squeak by on far, far less. Since Steins’ income is certainly in the top 5% and likely even in the top 3%, that’s probably true.

The strange accusations about Barack Obama coming from the American wingnut brigade – Socialist! Radical Muslim! Foreign-born! – are nothing new:

Image courtesy of Brian Kane.

Squeaky Fromme is free? Damn, I’m old.

Click the photo to see Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s Wikipedia entry.

(I wish I’d come up with the title, but alas, that clever turn of phrase is the name of a team that played at a trivia league in New York City last week.)

What a difference 16 months makes! (And wow, does the Daily Show have an amazing video archivist!)

Last night, the Daily Show did the public a great service by airing two clips. The first was from January 2008 featuring faux journalist Glenn Beck talking about how terrible the care he received at the hospital it was and how it reflected the sad state of the American healthcare system. In true Beck-ian fashion, his piece was called Beck from the Dead.

The second clip is from May 2009. Sixteen months later, the American healthcare system has become, in Beck’s own words, “the best in the world”. Now that the Socialist Kenyan Usurper is driving a movement to bring universal healthcare to the United States – the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t provide it to its citizens – it’s now the best system in the world, which the lefties are trying to dismantle. It’s quite impressive how it went from terrible to “best in the world” in so little time.

You really have to watch the clip to see Beck say one thing and then say the exact opposite thing afterwards, with the same fire and conviction. If you’re in Canada, you can watch the clip on the Comedy Network’s site; if you’re in the U.S. the Daily Show site has the clip.

It’s ironic that a show that purports to be a comedy show that just comments on current events is doing a better job of telling the truth than a network that purports to tell you the truth but ends up doing unintentional black humour.

Gawker sums up Glenn Beck perfectly in a couple of paragraphs:

This should serve as yet another bright, shining example of how much of an utter fraud Beck is. You gotta give the guy some credit though — he’s a charlatan’s charlatan, a near-perfect modern television bullshit artist who fully understands how the slightest glance, vocal inflection, or codeword can plant a seed deep down inside of a feeble mind and germinate.

But still, it’s hard not to watch this clip and come away feeling that he’s an even bigger piece of shit than you probably thought he was previously, because it’s just so goddamn obvious that the man will do or say anything to dig his hook even deeper into the sad dolts who tune into to his show each day seeking guidance.

And it’s spelled properly, too!

When I read that Twitter and Facebook were attacked for the sake of targeting one guy, my first thought was “Who is this guy, Jason Bourne?”

Over at my Coffee and Code blog, I write about a topic close to home for me: cafe owners in New York, fed up with laptops users lingering but not buying anything, are shooing them away.

The Toronto Garbage Strike of 2009 may be over (as might be David Miller’s reign come election time next year) and garbage collection is resuming today, but that’s no reason not have a song about it. The Toronto Star posted a story today about The Toronto Garbage Song (a.k.a. Flush Your Garbage), which was written and posted to YouTube by Ian Kelk.

This isn’t the first strike song to gain exposure through the internet. London Underground is still my favourite. It’s a reworking of The Jam’s Going Underground by British comedy singing duo Amateur Transplants (Adam Kay and Suman Biswas).

Here’s a homemade video that someone made for the song – be warned, it’s a little sweary:

In a comment to an earlier article of mine showing FOX News’ tendency to mislabel badly-behaving Republicans as Democrats, “RODAN” pointed me to this map of the middle east shown on FOX News in segment where Neil Cavuto interviewed John Bolton on Monday – note the country marked “Egypt”:

The problem is: that’s not Egypt, that’s Iraq! Here’s a real map of the middle east:

You’d think that with their obsessions with terror, Muslims and safeguarding the nation, not to mention the presence of a former representative to the U.N. present, they’d know where Iraq was.

…which means that if it’s ratified on Wednesday, the strike will well and truly be over. If that happens, garbage collection and other services provided by the people represented by CUPE Locals 416 and 79 could theoretically be back by Thursday. For reasons unknown and unfathomable to me, it has been said that services could take days or weeks to resume.