Nothing to see here folks. Move along

meh, it's the "I miss times when it wasn't trivially easy to scare the **** out of people".

Kind of surprised that the Bush Tax Cut impact grows over time like that. I guess they're projecting that a growing portion of individual income will fall under the tax brackets where the tax cuts applied.

It also seems somewhat disingenuous to be talking about how much of future debt is due to a particular prior tax cut. You could also take any previous tax cut from the last 100 years and model out how much additional revenue you would have if you put those rates back in place. Of course the Bush tax cuts are very recent and were scheduled to expire, so it's not a totally misleading thing to do.

When was this?

My point exactly. You used to have to make a big propaganda effort, get out posters, etc. And you could only scare people over really big things that they were already scared about.

Now all you have to do is say "Ok what's our best agitate-the-Republican-base story this week? ... Really, a rapper in the white house? That's it? No illegal aliens getting penis implants or Muslims trying to build a mosque somewhere sensitive? ... Oh well I guess that's the best we got this week. Start the machinery..."

And since the machinery is starving for something to talk about, it basically just takes one-page story from somewhere in the bowels of the pundit-o-sphere. Then talk radio, fox news and the right-wing internet echo chamber takes the ball and runs away with it. Now imagine if they had something real to squawk about like raising taxes?

And yes I realize there is a liberal counterpart to this, although I don't think it's nearly as blatant or fine-tuned. But it is effective enough to freak people out about losing Medicare obviously.

So basically we can never raise taxes, or cut medicare, so we're ****ed. 20-30 years ago you might have been able to sneak one or the other of those by the general public. That's my point.

Fan Tan parlors are nothing but money laundering fronts. Everyone knows that.

Is this a game where we're supposed to guess what this chart means?

Yes.

Go.

I shouldnt need to ask this, but it wasnt the end of his speech was it?

It means that certain commodities have gotten a lot more expensive since the federal reserve was started.

Which means, of course, that our standard of living is much worse than in 1913.

Things move much more quickly now, yes. But that doesn't mean people are any less easily frightened. Back in the day, you didn't have to come up with a weekly plaint. You could roll with one huge lie and hope it sticks:

http://www.neatorama.com/2008/01/28/...ns-in-history/

Sure, it was harder to get a poster campaign going tehn than it is to write a blog post now, but one huge lie went a long, long ways

Well duh. Things were so awesome back then. I can't even bring my 8-year-old to work with me in the coal mine anymore.

Man, you're good at this game.

I thought it would take at least 10 posts to get to, "That chart means I want suzzer to work in a 19th century coal mine," yet you got to it in a mere 4.

I'm ever vigilant against the scourge of progressivism.

Today's bad headline comes to us by way of my NYT feed:

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/...er=rss&emc=rss

Clicking on the link reveals the headline to be a little bit less ridiculous, as apparently the feed appends the name of the blog to the front of the headline, but even with out the first "At War:" the headline is a little too much "Department of Redundancy Department."

This could be interesting: Showdown between Texas & Department of Justice over Texas anti-pat-down bill.

The gist is that Texas is attempting to pass an anti-pat-down bill, and the DOJ responded with a letter telling them that they'd be running afoul of Federal law and that the TSA could cancel all flights departing Texas.

Don't Molest With Texas

This would be awesome if we applied the same argument to, say, repealing drug prohibition.

I think the reason for this is, that the tax cuts add to the deficit every year. Every year people would pay more taxes without the tax cut obviously.

Now for some of those "emergency" measures against effects of the financial crisis you don't have that and only need to add interest.

Things were so awesome back then - my Coca Cola had real cocaine in it and I could get heroin from my doctor?

lol @ people believing there was a secret underground tunnel from the Vatican to New York.

Couldn't the pope just use a telephone?

No, back when drugs were legal you could take your kid to work in the coal mine.

The 60s had the National Guard vs. Alabama over integration. We get the feds vs. Texas over pat downs.

Can't kiss the ring over the telephone.