Beneath the Shorties

LOL: Enjoy this meme while you can, I figure it’s dead in 3 weeks.

They just keep coming: Remember, the plot to kill Big Bird is still in play. There’s a Million Muppet March planned.

Twelve! Meeeeelion! Jobs!!!: Yeah, so?

Get it off me! Get it get it get it….: Is it just me, or does Mr. Romney look uncomfortable in this picture? You don’t suppose it could be that he’s being touched by a black man, do you?

Beating the dead dressage horse: What Romney’s tax “plan” could do to housing.

If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it: Scientists found a planet twice the size of Earth, largely made of diamond. Good thing it’s far enough away that DeBeers can’t get hold of it!

Like you needed an economist to tell you that: Your paycheck is being outstripped by inflation. So if low interest rates are supposedly the cure for inflation, what the heck is the Fed going to do now??

But apparently some people do need an economist to tell you this: Here’s why cutting taxes never has and never will create jobs.

Gee, maybe saying “no” wasn’t such a good strategy: Failing to pass a Big Agriculture Giveaway  Farm Bill before leaving Washington gave some Democrats an upper hand.

Judges judge things: An Appeals Court has ruled part of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.

Unexpected Excitement: Passengers on a Canadian airliner helped save a boater’s life. That beats most in-flight movies.

Wheat Ain’t What It Was: On modern wheat.

Not sure how to get out of this mess: Two out of three new college grads has college loan debt, and the average amount is $26,600. The scary part is that many of them won’t be getting jobs anytime soon. Just a reminder, it would take 3668 hours at minimum wage to pay that off. That’s 152 days of nonstop 24/7 labor. And it won’t be wiped out by bankruptcy.

Newsweek: will stop printing a paper edition.

But what about the economy?: Here’s an outline of the risks.

“The other 1%”: 2/3 of the bottom 1% of Americans are in prison.

Turns out it won’t turn good girls into sluts: Girls who get the HPV vaccine are not more likely to have sex.

Carbs: “People 70 and older who eat food high in carbohydrates have nearly four times the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, and the danger also rises with a diet heavy in sugar, Mayo Clinic researchers have found. Those who consume a lot of protein and fat relative to carbohydrates are less likely to become cognitively impaired, the study found.”

And it turns out that Doing Good might Make More Money: At least that’s Coca-Cola’s theory.

Just a few items on the economy

So let’s just start with Robert Reich, pointing out the disconnect between Washington and the economy.

The economy, by the way, is in lousy shape. It’s just that between inflation reporting that automatically inflate GDP and corporations raking in record profits, it’s easy to pretend that things like anemic jobs numbers, people leaving the workforce, dropping housing prices, declining wages, high fuel prices, and all the other things that effect those of us in the trenches don’t matter.

But here’s an odd glimmer of hope. One Fed official thinks it’s time to start raising interest rates. His reasoning is that it will encourage saving. Traditionalists should be ripping their hair out yelling about how it will kill the “recovery” (you know, the one we aren’t really having) by making it harder for businesses to borrow money (you know, the money banks aren’t really lending).

Some of those traditionalists might stop for a moment to consider that it would also stifle inflation (the inflation the feds have been trying to pretend hasn’t existed since the Clinton Administration). None of them will point out that it will make it more attractive for everyone to own bits of the national debt (the debt that Congress is arguing about). It is too much to hope that anyone other than myself is beginning to question whether super-low interest rates actually do much for the economy.

 

In Closing: porn; abortion; blast from the past; War on Drugs; humiliation; security; and cats.