“what happens to your money is of no interest to the Democrats. All they care about is politics.”

Not quite, they think it’s _their_ money in the first place.  You are just a 3rd party administrator.

Hey, Cryin’ John: Harry ‘The School Marm’ Reid is trying to take control of the narrative again — don’t let him, dammit.

Now, Duane, in the Copperhead world, slaves aren’t allowed to own property, and the fact some think they still can means they haven’t learned their place.

We’re not even administrators in their eyes, Duane.  We’re just mindless drones churning out the moolah for their pleasure.

And they wonder why we balk at their greediness.

So, Harry Reid is going to make them an offer they can’t refuse?  And you thought the comparison of the Donks and the Mob was just a rhetorical device.  Doesn’t he know that people go to prison for making “offers” like that?

I was partly kidding about blaming SFX. Whether political “narratives” are really as important as some think (which is debatable), they’re connected to issues & dynamics that run much deeper than that.

As for the movies, though, Hollywood nowadays churns out mostly garbage. You’re right, that is not the fault of SFX, which is just a (neutral) vehicle for telling a story. Here are some awful movies that relied heavily on SFX that grossed lots of money: Avatar, Titanic, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the new Star Wars series, Independence Day.

Some others that I sorta enjoyed watching, myself, but that were still pretty lame when the SFX is peeled away: Live Free or Die Hard, Iron Man, the Matrix series, etc. Much of the time now, Hollywood simply recycles old ideas, makes video games and comic books into movies, does another crappy sequel.   

No, I don’t expect Hollywood to do ”art films,” which are usually rubbish, too. But if you’re aiming to entertain, you still have to do THAT well, and Hollywood can no longer make a decent COMMERCIAL picture. In its heyday, Hollywood produced a lot of awesome commercial pics, including B films that were much better than the “A” films of today. At times, some of the screenwriters were even closet communists, but at least they could write well.

My underlying question was: How can political “narratives” supposedly take on such importance while the narrative writing out of Hollywood has never been worse?      

Right on, but how to make that understanding more widespread?

It reminds me of sharecropping: you get paid, say $20, a week, but THE MAN deducts for your room, board, water, tools, and clothes, so that by the end of the week, you end up owing him — and you never get off the farm.

“I’m here all week. Try the chalupa.”

“Let’s be clear: President Obama has orchestrated this unnecessary drama
for the specific political purpose of causing a crisis that he — with
the willing assistance of the liberal media — hopes to blame on
Republicans.”

Obama asked for the debt ceiling to simply be raised like it’s been done every other time.  Republicans refused.  So how exactly did he manufacture the crisis?  Did he use secret jedi mind tricks to force the right to hold the economy hostage?

Tlaloc-Well, well, well, if I didn’t know better I’d swear you got you a cool little Aztec name there. Have no fear, Obama is going to make sure the GOP gets the blame for the debt ceiling talks collapsing, even though he actually is the one that wants them to collapse. Haw Haw Haw see how clever he is? One of the things he can get out of funding then is our border security. Soon you might be joined by tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of your Aztlan brethren yearly. Will you kindly come to Kentucky and build one of those cool temples, the kind that allows the blood to flow from the top all the way down? They are the whip. 

Oh by the way when you get your Democrat Party approved counterfeit citizenship papers, who are you going to vote for?

IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE!

Tlaco wrote, “Obama ramped up spending during a recess, exactly like you are supposed to do to end the recession.” Hmmm, why didn’t the recession end like it was supposed to?

Actually, you’re contradicting yourself. As VDH pointed out, “The old argument that we simply did not borrow enough (say, $5, $6, $7 billion a day?) is laughable beyond the point of caricature, given that the administration followed the Bush record of record peacetime debt.” If, as you admit, Bush “ran up a huge deficit” and then Obama “ramped up spending” on top of what Bush had been spending, shouldn’t we have expected some good ol’ pump primin’ by now?

Your excuse for the faulty pump sounds an awful lot like the Marxists’ old excuses for the failure of communism: the pump (or communism) only works if it’s given 110 percent power; anything less and it’s like you never turned the pump on to start with.    

Talk about insansity: A). you Krugmanites have concluded, in backwards fashion, that the proof we didn’t spend enough is that we’re still in a recession; B). it’s becoming a cliche, but if the boot fits . . . the defintion of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

So “rich and white” automatically means “Republican”? Dude, I’d tell you to go check the donor lists for your favorite actors/directors/producers, but I’m pretty sure you’re too stupod to figure out how to do so.
In fact, I’m pretty sure you have a little reminder card in your pocket reading, “Systolic, THEN Diastolic”…

“Revenue” equals “Spending”? So if I max my credit cards, I get a raise?
Why don’t you just go try that and tell us how it works.

Which plan would that be?