Geoff Arnold's Blog

Telling the real story about unemployment is tough. Anna Marie Smith’s piece in Zmag is excellent on the complexity, but really hard to summarize (although the cartoon, right, captures one angle very nicely). Paul Krugman’s July 6th op-ed in the NYT focusses on one measure – the percentage of adults who have jobs. In Salon, J. K. Galbraith discusses the “Manchester index”, which “multiplies the number of unemployed by the average duration of their unemployment. In this way, it captures one of the most important features of being without a job: that the situation gets worse the longer it lasts.” And not all jobs are equal: as the EPI points out, real wages have been falling for the last six months. All of these articles tell a part of the story, but none of them clearly supports the kind of memorable slogan that is essential in political rhetoric.
Maybe Kerry’s best approach is to stick with the simple words of Reagan: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” For the majority of people, the answer is crystal clear.
Update July 9, 2004: FactCheck.Org has put out an interesting analysis which suggests that the “quality of jobs” issue may not be as straightforward as most people think. Essentially there seem to be two inconsistent sets of data coming out from the BLS. FactCheck normally does good, careful work, so I’m going to watch this. One omission: they don’t mention benefits, which could be a significant factor.

While searching Google’s Usenet archives looking for an old friend, I stumbled across the first Usenet posting that I ever made on the subject of politics. It was in April, 1986, and I ventured into a heated discussion in net.followup about Reagan’s bombing of Libya.
The sense of déjà vu is weird. Take this bit, for instance:
It’s ironical, isn’t it? Over the last year or so the “Great Communicater [sic]” has presided over an absolutely disastrous slide in the world perception of the U.S. […] A good indication of this is the fact that last week the Soviets felt able to launch a massive series of air strikes against the Afghan rebels, knowing that compared with the Libyan raid it would be a non-event.
Substitute Bush for Reagan, and Chechnya for Afghanistan….

Terry Karney just posted a blog entry about the IRR, the Individual Ready Reserve. Worth reading, including the comments. As he says, “we are pulling water from deeper in the well, someday it will run dry.”.

On Tuesday, according to the Washington Post, Bush uttered the following absurdity: “Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion.”
If any other politician had said this, there would have been an uproar. With Bush: nothing. Its the kind of inanity to which we’ve become accustomed. How pathetic.
P.S. Given Bush’s recent attempts to tell the EC what to do about Turkey, it’s worth noting that the USA would not qualify for EC membership. No state that employs the death penalty is eligible to join. The 13th Protocol of the ECHR is the operative text. [And thanks, Gene, for pointing out my Freudian slip.]

Remember the old HHGTTG quote about proving black is white and….? Well, on Lisa Rein’s Radar she has QuickTime clips of the 6/21/04 Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart shows exactly how Cheney contradicted himself over The Mythical Connection Between Saddam And Al-Qaeda. (Of course this was the same show in which Stewart nailed Stephen Hayes, author of the mind-bogglingly stupid book The Connection.)
I wonder what Cheney’s reaction might be? (And apropos of Cheney’s new attitude towards Congressional decorum, Juan Cole suggests that if a $275,000 fine is appropriate for Howard Stern, it should be good enough for the Vice President.)