Rick Perry releases final Iowa ad

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 7 Comments

If the last extant copy of this picture were inside a burning orphanage, I hope I would save an orphan.

You can tell a lot about a person by what they think will make you happy. If every time you fight with your husband he tries to give you a pretty necklace, yours may not be the relationship of mutual respect you want it to be. We’ve all known people whose attempts to please us are less nuanced than they think. Perhaps Rick Perry is no such cynical manipulator. Maybe he’s more like the aunt who took you to a Cubs game once and now sends you jerseys and Harry Caray biographies every Christmas. Whatever he’s up to, Perry decided this week that abortions shouldn’t be legal even in cases of rape or incest, then walked back his position to theoretically allow them when a woman’s life was at risk. He also produced his last campaign advertisement before the Iowa caucuses. Video after the jump.

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Median net worth of Congress increases 15% since 2004

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 5 Comments

Millionaires

“I don’t see myself as a man of great wealth,” says Arizona representative and millionaire Ed Pastor in this article from the Times. “To say that I’m enjoying a millionaire’s lifestyle—well, I can tell you, I guess a millionaire’s income doesn’t go very far these days.” He’d be surprised what it’s like to be a thousandaire. The median income for Americans not elected to Congress sits around $31,000 a year. Net worth—assets minus debt, which means house minus loans for a lot of people and World of Warcraft character minus rent for the rest of us—medians at $100,000, and it’s dropping. Even the richest 10% of Americans have stagnated since George Bush Jr. vied for the presidency against John Kerry, and the overall net worth of Americans has dropped eight percent. Yet over the same period, the median worth of a member of Congress has increased 15%. That seems like a troubling indicator.

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Vombat!

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 3 Comments

 Combat! blog incurred a terrible hangover last night in the process of observing the thirtieth birthday of a certain federal employee who shall not be named. Nothing is so important as holding our eyes absolutely still. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to admit light through his pupils, much less read, so instead here is the annual holiday greeting from MMA Fighting’s Ben al-Fowlkes. I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.

 

Terrify yourself with CIA statistics

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 3 Comments

Children in Cameroon, the country whose distribution of wealth is most similar to that of the US.

Did you know that the CIA keeps statistics on distribution of wealth and income in various nations? Historians and sociologists have long considered income equality a prime indicator of social stability, which is why our friends at Langley have something called the Gini Index, which assigns numerical ratings to income/wealth distributions according to their deviation from the Lorenz curve. Don’t try to understand the Lorenz curve from that Wikipedia introduction or your brain will explode. In fact, don’t think about the CIA’s inequality ratings at all. Especially don’t think about how the difference between the US Gini Index score from 2000 and our score from 2007 is greater than the difference between our 2007 score and that of Papua New Guinea. Since the end of the Clinton administration, America has gotten halfway to achieving the economic equality of Mexico. We’re more than halfway to Zimbabwe. We continue to be less equally distributed than Iran and Cambodia. Of course, our overall standard of living is much, much higher than what those countries enjoy. Considering that the Gini Index is tabulated as a measure of social stability, though, it should be noted that our Central Intelligence Agency considers us a more fertile land for unrest than Turkmenistan. But that’s nothing to worry about.

Happy holidays from Combat! blog

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 2 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5ZFenb_flY

 

Combat! blog starts its vacation today so that I may fully prosecute my war on Christmas. I call it Total War on Christmas, and it strikes at Christmas’s very ability to wage war. Anyway, enjoy whatever culturally reified version of an earlier religious ritual is most meaningful to you this year, and I will see you next week. I presume I will be typing on that solid gold touch-screen Zune.