I was at the Supermarket yesterday, and a song came on. It was pretty typical pop—offensive only in its design to be utterly inoffensive. The singer was a typical American Idol style screecher. But the first lyrics struck me, “I want someone to know my favorite ice cream.” That is basically the whole song. For the next three minutes or so, she hammers home that theme that it’s nice to have someone around who gives a shit about you.

As Jonathan Richman said, “I don’t feel so alone—I got the radio on.”

The song is by a forgettable singer-songwriter, Rachel Platten. It is called Take These Things Away because in the chorus she sings, “No one can take these things away.” This makes no sense. With this line, she destroys the metaphor I originally liked. It isn’t literally that you want someone to know your favorite ice cream. You want them to care enough to know your favorite ice cream. And when they dump you, they may remember it, but they don’t care.

This is the best thing about a relationship. I think it goes back to having parents—mothers especially. When I was growing up, it seemed that my mother was more in tune with what I was up to than I was. It reminds me of a Christmas episode of The Waltons. The father was late getting back for Christmas. When he did, he arrived with presents. The present for John-Boy was writing tablets and pencils. How did his father know about his strong but unstated desire to write? Because we are not as opaque as we’d like to think, and good parents see right through us. As do good friends and good lovers.

So I like that line. Of course, I don’t have a favorite ice cream. But I want someone to know that I don’t like coffee flavored ice cream.

Afterword

Here is part of the song performed in a living room. It works well. And at a minute and 43 seconds, you get to know what the song sounds like without having to listen to it all.

For years, I’ve been arguing that journalists are centrists in their political orientation. What’s more, those that identify as liberal are generally only socially liberal; on economic issues, they are conservative. Up to now, I have based this on my observations; it wasn’t based upon research. But I just came upon a study that Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) performed back in 1998, that shows exactly this.

There are two claims that conservatives make to justify their belief that there is a liberal media bias. The first is that the framing of news is from a liberal perspective. Eric Alterman in What Liberal Media has destroyed this idea, but many others have as well. Still, the liberal media bias myth lives on with a second claim: most reporters are liberal. This is based upon surveys that show reporters tend to be registered with the Democratic Party. But Democrat hardly means liberal.

My focus is always on economic issues. I care very much about social issues, but as long as our economy is as unequal as it has been these last 35 years, social issues don’t really matter. For example, the rich can always fly to France for an abortion, regardless of the law in the United States. Anyway, access to abortion or even birth control might be practically unable to the poor even if they are legal. My problem with most mainstream journalists is that they are upper and upper-middle class in income, and thus in their economic concerns. The situation is even worse than I had thought.

The journalists involved in the the story are overwhelmingly in the upper class. In 1998, making more than $75,000 per year put you in the upper class (top 20%). Making $133,000 put you in the top 5%. Only 5% of respondents made less than $50,000 per year. Even at that level many probably found themselves at the bottom of the upper-middle class. The largest group (43%) had incomes between $50,000 and $100,000. The entire distribution skews high, but assuming it is evenly distributed, that would put 21.5% in the upper-middle class. Putting all this together, making assumptions that will understate where these journalists sit relative to the population they serve, we get the following:

Middle Class: 5%
Upper-Middle Class: 21.5%
Upper-Class: 73.5%
Top of Upper Class (5%): 41.5%

So it is no wonder that these people tend to think that free trade agreements and low taxes are great for the country. After all, such things are great for them. This fact is clear in the survey results. Most of the respondents consider themselves centrists. However, a large minority (30%) consider themselves liberal when it comes to social issues. But that large minority collapses when it comes to economic issues. Only 11% consider themselves liberal in this area. While only 9% consider themselves conservative on social issues, 19% consider themselves conservative on economic issues.

Specific issues just make things look worse for our journalists. Only 5% rated the economy as fair or poor. But 34% of the general public rated the economy thusly. This should come as no surprise. The economy was working rather well for these “objective” journalists. It is interesting to note that the same percent who said the economy was bad is the percent of journalist making middle class or less salaries.

On all specific policies, the journalists were far more conservative than the people. They thought entitlement “reform” was a top priority. They didn’t think that providing healthcare was nearly as big a priority. And above all, they thought that NAFTA was great and should be expanded. The public was not nearly so keen.

FAIR is not claiming that journalists are conservative. Nor am I. It is more complex than this. FAIR, in particular, focuses on the structural nature of the problem: corporate news will produce corporate friendly stories. But I think these results show clearly that the problem is more fundamental than even this. Despite their claims to the contrary, journalists are not objective. They dependably report the way that we would expect someone from their social classes to report.

There’s a joke going around Sweden, “Why did the wildebeest cross the road? Because it tastes like chicken!” That joke kills me! But that is probably because I made it up. (I think I’m just high-larious.) You see, there is important wildebeest news coming out of Sweden. The management of the Parken Zoo in Eskiltuna (near Stockholm) is accused of barbecuing two wildebeests for a staff party. What does wildebeest taste like? The same as any animal that crosses the road.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s kind of the plot of Andrew Bergman’s The Freshman. The plot revolved around “the gourmet club,” where people paid to eat endangered species. “The komodo dragon should go for $350,000 a plate served off the bone with a cream basil sauce—Schlegel’s trademark.” Of course, in the film, it turns out to be a big scam. And it may be the same thing with the wildebeest as the Parken Zoo.

There is no doubt that the two wildebeests were killed. According to management, they were too aggressive, but the zoo did not have enough space to keep them separately. (Too bad we can’t do similarly with aggressive assholes in society.) The question is whether they slaughtered and cooked the animals. According to the article, “The zoo’s chief executive Torbjorn Bergvall denied the meat was used for the barbecue and said somebody was trying to create bad publicity for Parken.”

It wouldn’t be hard. The zoo has been embroiled in a fair amount of controversy. Last year, it was accused of taking money collected for saving endangered species and using it on salaries. That seems easy enough to believe; small zoos have lots of economic problems. (I base this on research from the great and under appreciated Fierce Creatures and We Bought a Zoo, which I haven’t seen.) But there seems to be a certain hatred of endangered species at Parken. They’ve also been accused of killing two endangered cougars, to make way for more flashy animals (like this toad). It was not reported whether they ate them, but eyewitnesses claim to have seen them crossing the road, if you know what I mean.

Actually, I don’t see the problem with eating the wildebeests. They weren’t pets, after all. Plus, these two were the wildebeest equivalent of Biff Tannen. Who better to eat? And a culture that feeds fellow mammals to reptilian “pets” has no room to complain. Plus, all of us will eventually be eaten by one or more other creatures. Or as they say in Sweden, we will all eventually cross the road.

Do you remember the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)? It is what Sarah Palin famously called “death panels.” It is necessary for not only making more affordable Medicare and Medicaid, but all healthcare in the United States. Of course, conservatives hate it. They wouldn’t have hated it, had McCain been crowned president and the ACA been a Republican law. But it wasn’t and so the reason they claim to hate it is that it limits care. In fact, it does not. What’s more, these people who are oh so concerned that we won’t spend millions of dollars keeping brainless babies alive are not at all concerned about the 50 million Americans without health insurance.

The IPAB has come up recently because the House said it is going to stop the current law that states that the IPAB should be fast tracked. (Strangely, the vote was supposed to take place on Thursday, but I haven’t been able to find any information indicating that the vote took place.) What this means is that the Republicans are trying to kill healthcare cost containment. They claim that this is in the name of of providing “Freedom!” But of course, it is the opposite.

Ed Kilgore at the Political Animal blog write, House GOPers Fighting for Your Medicare. He notes what really should be the top story on all cable news shows: “Republicans are only interested in health care cost containment measures or ‘entitlement reform’ if it comes at the expense of beneficiaries.” This very nicely gets the the bottom of this issue.

Conservatives want to kill Medicare and Medicaid. Any proposal they make means to do that. When Romney promised to put $700 billion back into Medicare, he didn’t only do it to try to make Obama look bad. He also did it because it made the program less solvent. It is all part the “starve the beast” strategy of the Republicans. I really don’t think that you can understate just how evil the Republican Party is at its core. They are good at dressing up their ideology in pretty words like “liberty” and “strength.” But if they turned American into their ideal, it would be a dystopia that no Americans would recognize.

I found this via Mustang Bobby’s Bark Bark Woof Woof blog, A Little Night Music. It is an early TV performance of Victor Borge doing the birthday song in various styles. It is both funny and brilliant.

Watching people like Borge always makes me think of vaudeville and how it helped to develop acts. (Borge didn’t perform in vaudeville per se, but it is the same.) This really allowed (required) people to perfect their acts. In fact, before filming A Night at the Opera, the Marx Brothers went back to vaudeville to perfect the bits in that movie. I wish there was more of this. But at least we have the videos.

I like this discussion of Hillary Clinton on The Young Turks, because it goes along with my thinking. As I wrote back at the end of last year in response to Jonathan Chait’s claim that liberals would have done the same thing to a conservative in Hillary Clinton’s place, “I would have thought the Republican was lying. Similarly, I thought Clinton was lying. I pretty much always assume that people are lying when it is an excuse for doing something unpleasant. But Chait is not asking the right question.”

The question was whether major liberal news agencies would have reported such unfounded speculation about a Republican Secretary of State. I firmly believe that not only would there have been none of that; there would have been little of it in the liberal blogosphere. As Cenk Uygur says in the video, “To be fair, I was a little skeptical about her excuse. I didn’t go on air and mock her because maybe she actually had a concussion.”

The truth is that most liberals—especially in the blogosphere—love taking down their own. But this is something completely different. And even after Clinton came out of the hospital, Fox News was still questioning her. In a normal world, this would be unbelievable.

Paul Campos is a law professor. And he is not fat. So why he wrote an op-ed about our fucked up ideas of proper body weight, I can’t say. But it is a hell of an article, Our Absurd Fear of Fat. The article discusses a new analysis of data that I’ve been aware of for a while. These data indicate, among other things, that if I want to live a long time, I am better at my new pudgy weight than I was at my old skinny weight.

This paper appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But don’t hold that against it. (I’m none too fond of the AMA.) The paper is titled, Association of All-Cause Mortality With Overweight and Obesity Using Standard Body Mass Index Categories: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. What it illustrates is that those that the CDC claims to be over-weight and even the marginal obese actually live longer than those considered “normal.”

Suck on that health nuts!

But really, I don’t care that much. I’m in no hurry to die, but I am glad that it is coming. The idea that I would make myself miserable for the sake of a couple of more years of life is ridiculous. And now I know that the fattening glass of wine I drink each night not only lowers my stress level, it lengthens my life. Bathroom scale: be gone!

I’m most interested in how we got to this place where we tell everyone to be thin “for their own good” even though it is not. And that is where Campos is at his best:

So not only can we embrace our sagging figure for its health benefits, we can do it to strike a blow against our corporate overloads.

Perhaps we need a slogan: “We’re fat; and fine with that; get used to it!” If you have a better one, let me know.

In December, the economy added 155,000 new jobs. As usual, the private sector job growth was better (168,000), but we lost government jobs (13,000). These are not great numbers. The government really ought to do something about this. And contrary to what many people believe, there is much that the government could do. Unfortunately, the Republicans are in favor of policies that make both the economy weaker and the budget deficit worse. The Democrats have some decent ideas. President Obama’s American Jobs Act would help quite a lot. But it is only a start.

I don’t think that people understand just how big a problem we face. The problem is largely due to the media. While the base unemployment rate was as high as 10%, all we heard about was the budget—as though that was the most important thing in the world. If it hadn’t been for the police abusing Occupy Wall Street protesters, we’d never have talked about jobs. And now, it seems we are back to fretting over the budget again.

So how big is the unemployment problem? Here is a graph from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. It shows when the US economy will reach full employment given three different assumptions. Note that even if we add almost twice as many jobs as we have been, we will not be at full employment until the end of 2017. If we add jobs as we have been, it will take until 2025:

What do we get instead of a discussion of the employment situation? We (rightly) get discussion of the Republican plan to destroy the American economy. We get John Cornyn’s oped saying that it may be necessary to crash the economy to avoid becoming Greece, Italy, or Spain. As Matt Yglesias points out, this “solution” would be “much worse than anything that’s happened in Italy or Spain.”

It is hard to know where the stupidity stops and the bullshit starts. Cornyn, remember, is a Senator, not some idiot Representative. I hope he gets slapped down for this treasonous oped. But I doubt it. Politico reported on him as though it was just another option for how to run the government. The Dallas Morning News did much the same. And Business Insider, who I would think really ought to know better, reported it as straight news.

Meanwhile, the ultimate gauge of the employment system—total labor force participation—is flat. It seems that we are no longer going down, but we are making no progress:

But hey: Greece! Italy! Spain!

This is my favorite scene from Romantics Anonymous. It is very sweet, which is half of what I love about this film:

Angelique: My hands are clammy.
Jean-Rene: I don’t mind.
Angelique: My stomach’s growling.
Jean-Rene: I like the sound.
Angelique: I blush all the time.
Jean-Rene: I think that’s beautiful… Shall we?

Afterword

This 37 second clip caused YouTube to flag it for the copyright holder UniversumFilm. I assume that like Fox before, they will okay my use. After all, I’m just promoting the film. But whenever companies act like assholes, it takes the gloss of the piece of art that they own—especially when that piece of art is something as sweet as Romantics Anonymous.