As the cost of college skyrockets, and students and recent graduates get buried under “piles of student debt and a job-scarce, lackluster economy,” more and more of them are turning to “sugar daddies,” says Amanda Fairbanks at The Huffington Post. Sites like SeekingArrangement.com, SeekingTuition.com, and SugarDaddyMeet.com allow young, mostly female students to post “sugar baby” profiles and hook up with a “sugar daddy” for “mutually beneficial relationships,” which often involve a trade of money for companionship and sex. Is this a new way for today’s 20-somethings to pay for college?
Old and busted: “But you’re so much more mature than all those other silly college kids.”
New and hot: “I’m sure those student loan payments must be killing you.”
Who didn’t see this coming? For months we were warned that financial catastrophe would ensue unless Congress raised the debt ceiling. So Congress raised the debt ceiling and . . . financial catastrophe:
Associated Press
NEW YORK — A sell-off is erasing all of the year’s gains in the stock market, which has hit its longest losing streak in two years.
All three major stock indexes fell today as investors reacted to more signs of weakness in the U.S. economy and poor earnings from several big companies.
The S&P 500 fell 33 points to close at 1,254. The Dow lost 266 to end the day at 11,867. The Nasdaq composite fell 75 to close at 2,669. . . .
Meanwhile, in an event unprecedented in the history of spin wars, conservatives and liberals rushed to claim that the other side won.
It ended with scenes straight from a Nora Ephron movie, or one of those weaker West Wing episodes with Kristin Chenoweth as the way-too-competent consultant. Gabrielle Giffords returned to the House to cast her first vote since surviving a bullet to the brain. The House and Senate passed a debt-limit deal that got the votes of Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell. The crisis concluded with a Rose Garden speech, as if someone had just won a war.
All of that obscured the truth about the debt crisis. The truth: It was completely insane. It was, as Democrats say, largely unprecedented and mostly unnecessary. It was, as Republicans say, fogged up with hype that made the politics and market moves uglier than they needed to be. The inevitable tick-tocks of the deal and the slide shows of winners and losers obscure the fact that Washington just blew two months negotiating a 10-year budget cut right before it was about to knuckle down and … negotiate the 2012 budget. . . .
In the Bush era, Republicans once deemed the debt-limit hike as “passed” in another funding bill. In February 2009, Democrats simply added an $800 billion hike in the debt limit—from $11.3 trillion to $12.1 trillion—to the stimulus bill. There was a consensus: Play with the debt limit and you lose. That was true until July 2011, when Republicans played with the debt limit and won. . . .
So here we have a liberal (and really, Dave, any illusion that you’re not a liberal has long since ended) declaring forthrightly that the GOP won, whereas not a single conservative friend of mine agrees.
It has been said that victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan, but this bill looks like an unwanted legislative bastard.
Tom Friedman — who knows a bit about Hezbollah — calls the tea partiers the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP bent on taking the country on a “suicide mission.” All over the place, conservative Republicans are “hostage takers” and “terrorists,” “terrorists” and “traitors.” They want to “end life as we know it on this planet,” says Nancy Pelosi. They are betraying the Founders, too. Chris Matthews all but signs up for the “Make an Ass of Yourself” contest at the State Fair. Joe Nocera writes today that “the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests.” Lord knows what Krugman and Olbermann have said.
Then last night, on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack seven months ago, the vice president of the United States calls the Republican party a bunch of terrorists. . . .
“Why did [Obama] let this develop for six months…this drum roll of the Republicans saying, ‘We’ve got the baby. You don’t get the baby back unless you pay us?’ Why do you let the other side have the baby, to use kidnapping terms?”
How long, O Lord, how long? Where will it end?
All I ever wanted out of this campaign was enough money to get out of the country and live for a year or two in peaceful squalor in a house with a big screen porch looking down on an empty white beach, with a good rich coral reef a few hundred yards out in the surf and no neighbors.
Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a “vicious misanthrope” . . . or maybe it was a “cynical misanthrope” . . . but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was politics. Everything that is wrong-headed, cynical & vicious in me today traces straight back to that evil hour in September of ’69 when I decided to get heavily involved in the political process . . .
But that is another story. What worries me now — in addition to this still unwritten saga of the California primary — is the strong possibility that my involvement in politics has become so deep and twisted that I can no longer think rationally about that big screen porch above the beach except in terms of an appointment as Governor of American Samoa.
I coveted that post for many years. For a while it was my only ambition. I pursued it relentlessly, and at one point in either 1964 or ’65 it seemed within my grasp. Larry O’Brien, now the chairman of the Democratic Party, was the man in charge of pork-barrel/patronage appointments at the time, and he gave me excellent reason to believe my application was on the verge of bearing fruit. I was living at the Holiday Inn in Pierre, South Dakota, when the good news arrived. It came on a Wednesday, as I recall, by telegram. The manager of the Inn was ecstatic: he called a cab immediately and sent me downtown to a dry-goods store where I bought six white sharkskin suits — using a Sinclair Oil card, which was subsequently revoked and caused me a lot of trouble. I never learned all the details, but what was finally made clear — in the end, after a bad communications breakdown — was that O’Brien had pulled a fast one on me. As it turned out, he never had any intention of making me Governor of American Samoa, and when I finally realized this it made me very bitter and eventually changed my whole life.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
Don’t know about anyone else, but I can totally relate to that, and not merely because of Thompson’s gonzo sarcasm about O’Brien promising him a gig in American Samoa. (The actual 1964 correspondence between Thompson and O’Brien is included, pp. 454-455, 457, in Thompson’s first volume of collected letters,The Proud Highway.) Frazzled after months covering the 1972 Democrat primaries, and once more up against a deadline to supply what he called “The Final Wisdom” of it all, Thompson was hinting at a basic truth about politics:
A small number of people reap whatever direct benefit is gained by the labor of many thousands.
Well-connected insiders are appointed to cushy diplomatic jobs. Campaign consultants cash in their contracts. Lobbyists get paid to hustle the politicians to provide special consideration to interest groups. The rest of us — the field hands of the political plantation, as it were — have only the pleasure of gazing at that big Greek Revival mansion with its Ionic columns and saying to ourselves: “We’ve got our guy in there.”
This is true whether we are Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives. “We” win, but “they” govern.
Orange County’s nearly-three-dozen city managers were paid a total of $9.6 million last year, according to data in a recent grand jury report on city compensation.
That’s 34 big cheese municipal executives earning an average $281,699 each, including $207,808 in salary and $73,891 in benefits. A dozen of them earned more than $300,000.
The city manager of Santa Ana, for example, collects an annual salary of $262,272 and benefits worth $75,079; Anaheim’s city manager gets $258,351 in salary and $80,077 in benefits; Irvine’s city manager gets $250,307 in salary and $85,485 in benefits.
By comparison, a U.S. Senator’s annual salary is $174,000.
The Secretary of Defense gets $199,700 a year.
The FBI director gets $165,300 a year.
But city manager of Anaheim . . . that’s an important job!
“I stand here in abject stupefaction. The so-called ‘right’ or ‘Tea Party’ in this republic is being so thoroughly rolled and defeated that I am struggling to come up with an adequate violent submission metaphor that does not involve prison rape . . .”
— Ann Barnhardt , American Thinker
Some ramen noodles, orange Jell-O, nails, and a plank; that’s my visual representation of the professional output of one of Maryland’s finest, Steny Hoyer. After riding shotgun in the clown car that was the Congress That Shall Live In Infamy, Hoyer sports the stones to wonder aloud if the butt hurt over passing ObamaCare could have affected the debt ceiling fracas:
Hoyer, speaking on CNBC, said he thought part of the reason Republicans have refused to compromise with Democrats on the debt-ceiling package was because of how House Democrats pushed through the Obama administration’s healthcare law.
“I think that’s accurate,” Hoyer said Friday. “I don’t think healthcare was handled the way it should’ve been, but let me tell you why: There was an openness to compromise, but the Republicans said, ‘Look, we don’t like your plan, we’re not going to go there at all,’ ” Hoyer said.
When you connect the dots about the House having passed a third debt ceiling bill, while the Senate has concurrently fiddled, with this clip of Meat Puppet Carney confidently asserting that the White House will “take action”, whatever that means, if the legislation breaks down:
I’ve got a ticket to Afghanistan that says things are all going according to plan. After barely passing the House, the third debt ceiling bill fails in the Senate, fingers are pointed at the GOP, and the conditions are set for yet another vast kick in the Constitutional nuts, as the separation of powers must be further destroyed to “save” the economy. The President, magically, is going to assert the authority to raise new debt without Congressional approval.The Devil, you see, is a Cheap Trick fan:
Merely asserting power and sending in the Union goons isn’t interesting; tricking a formerly free people to beg for fetters: art.
I want to be wrong. I want the gnawing sensation that this Crisis Administration is systematically demolishing the Congress to be some mad bit of midnight paranoia. And it may be that the Senate passes legislation to retire this artificial crisis, to kick it past the next election.
In a way, that’s a fair cop. The Constitution has the House turn over ever two years, to make it more responsive to the will of the people. Congress is in a hung state at the moment, torn between the GOP in the House that are reflecting a vague sense from We The People that Stuff Has Gone Very Wrong, and a Senate that is as deeply committed to protecting the people as, say, the Senate of Rome was against Caesar. Thus, the idea that we shouldn’t make any major course changes until after 2012, to see if We The People are serious and actually care about the Constitution, while stupid, can at least be followed.
However, if the Senate fails to pass a debt ceiling bill, and the Executive commences to rule by fiat, then it will be time for the Tea Parties to do what they did all last year. This evil cannot pass unchallenged.
A related podcast at Volokh:
Rob Natelson explains why unilateral presidential creation of new debt is:
1. Utterly contrary to the Constitution’s structure of limiting executive power.
2. Directly contrary to the text of the 14th Amendment.
These next days will show whether even the lip service to the Constitution will fail. What’s next? A state of emergency that precludes an election next year?
