Category Archives: media

Quigley sorts it out, as usual

Albuquerque is lucky to have Winthrop Quigley, a clear and fine writer.

ABQJournal Online » Cycle of life, death sustains U.S. economy By Winthrop Quigley / Journal Staff Writer on Mon, Oct 24, 2011

I never worry very much about the American economy, no matter how awful things seem to be. The weak businesses are culled, the strong businesses thrive, capital and labor flow to the strong, and the economy keeps growing. It’s an ugly process, but it works. …

Something amazing is going to happen, and when it does somebody else’s employer will be killed. It’s wonderful. It’s terrible.

ABQJournal Online » Cycle of life, death sustains U.S. economy

“[T]he idea that if families are tightening their belts, the government should do the same, is as deeply intuitive as it is deeply wrong.” Paul Krugman

I wasn’t surprised the Albuquerque Journal gave so much space to Mike Frese, “Corrales resident”, to repeat the hoary nonsense about the national debt as a ‘family problem.’ Family is the metaphor for conservatives – especially, Christian conservatives – because father knows best. Feel free to read Frese’s column in its long-drawn-out, ham-handed entirety, if you need your invalid metaphors spelled out in detail.

Be sure to read Winthrop Quigley’s entire column – as usual, he explains things quite clearly.

ABQJournal Online » Flirting With Federal Debt Disaster

By Winthrop Quigley / Journal Staff Writer on Tue, Jul 19, 2011

It is possible some of these politicians really don’t understand what we’re dealing with. Every time one of them compares federal finances with household finances – arguing we should tear up the credit card and balance the checkbook and live within our means, just like families do – the intellectual dead end has been reached.

The federal government is nothing like the family household. It is a very large, poorly run business with a micromanaging board of directors (Congress) and a weak CEO (the president).

The business is failing. Refusing to raise the debt ceiling is the equivalent of pre-bailout General Motors reneging on its commitments to pay its steel suppliers and fund its employees’ retirement plans. …

If the prospect of suddenly unemployed federal workers in every state and unpaid military personnel under fire in Afghanistan doesn’t impress Congress, perhaps this will: In September 2008, the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy filing cratered the global economy because suddenly no one knew if the institutions making up the world’s financial systems could or would honor their obligations.

Lehman Bros. had $639 billion in assets, about as much as it takes to run the government for slightly more than two months. It had debts of $619 billion. The failure of a firm that was in the black to the tune of $20 billion nearly destroyed the global financial system. You don’t want to see what happens if Uncle Sam becomes the next Lehman Bros.

ABQJournal Online » Flirting With Federal Debt Disaster

 

[hat tip to Line of the day | NewMexiKen for the Krugman quote]

“In Obama’s, Dem’s View, Success Must Be Punished” – WTF?!

The headline over Calcified Cal Thomas’s recent column represents a ruinous, poisonous ignorance. Taxes are NOT punishment. Taxes are what most of us pay for the common good. Moreover, some of the Founders argued for progressive taxation, under which those who can pay more do so. That view is mocked by the smarmy “you can write a check anytime you want” drivel (DUHbya – spit on the ground). These tight-fisted, cheap, selfish dimwits serve the megacorporations and ultra-rich. Let the sacred market do anything but don’t let the nation do anything – except buy war-toys. The tight-fisted refuse to recognize that the rich benefit from the commonwealth and owe something in return. The Republicans have exploited the Starve the Beast mentality for a generation. That mentality will destroy the nation.

Honk Angry If You’re!

Here’s one for the Albuquerque Journal’s blooper reel:

abqjournal design

The garbled ALL CAPS text is bad enough. But I’m honking my horn over the confusing misuse of the lines (horizontal rules), which should be used sparingly to cluster related information, not separate a heading from its content. Traditionally, a horizontal rule tells the skimming mind that a transition has occurred and that all before is one piece and all after is another. It is a visual pause that says, hey, pay attention now. Yes, you can ignore (or be ignorant of) that and use the rule purely as decoration. The real issue is making a site easy to use. Well, not so for abqjournal.com, whose Web designer is locked in a windowless room and not allowed to look at other Web sites nor read about design. The powers that be at the Journal HATE the Web and it shows.

Although there are many ways to rework this example, I’d eliminate the text above each line and the line itself, making the text currently below each line the link. For minimal change, move the line above each link so that related content is kept together and separated from other content, although that’s still an overuse of the abused horizontal rule.

PS: I would not publicly castigate an individual for the look of a personal website. The Web belongs to us all and gives each of us real freedom of expression. But this site belongs to a corporation (the heroes of 21st Century AmeriCo) and the state’s largest paper. The Albuquerque Journal must be held to some standard higher than a teenager’s fan-blog (sorry to insult teenagers with the comparison).

As a Constitutional Scholar, Harrison Schmitt is a Bang-up Engineer

New Mexicans should read Tom Cole’s quotations from Harrison Schmitt, Martinez’s proposed head of the state Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department. I’ll start with the end of Cole’s column.

ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: Harrison Schmitt: in His Words

In one posting, he says a "philosophical wedge" has been driven between the government and its citizens, creating a divide that is wider than at any other time since just before the Civil War.

        It seems to me that Schmitt has been doing some of the hammering on that wedge.

ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: Harrison Schmitt: in His Words

Schmitt on Anthropogenic Global Climate Change:

"There exists no true concern … about the true effects of climate change — only a poorly concealed, ideologically driven attempt to use conjured up threats of catastrophic consequences as a lever to gain authoritarian control of society."

Classic conservative paranoia: It’s all part of the totalitarian movement of the Left. (Just like the “Patriot” Act and DOMA.) I think Climate Change Deniers are part of a power grab by corporations that will destroy anything and everything for profit. Schmitt also supports endless corporate welfare in the form of “Cold War II” with China.

One more quote from Schmitt, who believes the Minimum Wage and Social Security numbers are unconstitutional:

"The Government violates constitutional equal protection most generally by restricting the land-related economic and recreational activities of residents of Western States when no comparable restrictions are possible in most Eastern States. …”

Yup, Western wilderness is unconstitutional because there aren’t comparable Eastern wildernesses. Apparently, engineers make lousy constitutional scholars. (BTW: I’m all for creating equally large wildernesses in the East. It’s only fair.)


A tangent regarding the endless ways in which abqjournal.com frustrates its users. When you select text to quote from the site, text is appended to that quote, such as this:

Read more: ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: Harrison Schmitt: in His Words http://www.abqjournal.com/upfront/12215407746upfront01-12-11.htm#ixzz1AphNqDcA
Subscribe Now Albuquerque Journal

Kudos to the Web designer who is so clueless about interface yet able to hack some JavaScript. Now, I know that some media sources object to the common practice among bloggers of quoting from those sources, even though every media source quotes other media sources – somehow, it’s wrong when bloggers do it. Like almost every blogger, I cite the sites I quote from. Still, abqjournal.com insists on tacking on this ugly bit of code. (Note the hideous URL.) I’ll bet this got the coder a pat on the head.

Death to Death Panel Bullshit

The Albuquerque Journal is lucky to have a writer of the calibre of Winthrop Quigley. Quigley has a knack for stepping through a logical process with dispassion. I’m thankful he takes on Calcified Cal Thomas’ resurrection of the death panels, a coldly calculated effort to frighten the townfolk into raising their pitchforks at the start of the new Congress.

ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: Doctor Discussion Hardly a Death Panel

By Winthrop Quigley
Journal Staff Writer

          It was probably too much to expect that we might enjoy at least a brief respite, now that the elections are over, from much of the nonsense that passes for public discourse. We managed to get only to the second day of the new year before Cal Thomas revived the death panel canard in his syndicated column, which the Journal publishes.

        The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as required by the health care law passed last year, has started paying medical professionals about $111 to spend time discussing with their Medicare-eligible patients anything on their minds. CMS has issued a rule saying that these so-called wellness visits, available annually, can cover the care the patients would like to receive at the end of their lives, if that’s what they want to talk about. Patients have the discussion only if they ask for it. …

Self-described conservatives like Thomas argue in other contexts that given enough information individuals make the best choices for themselves. …

When patients’ desires aren’t known, the health care system has an incentive to provide excessive care and run up expense unnecessarily, if only to avoid a lawsuit. …

In the world of death panel fabulism, it’s better your doctor not know what your preferences are. It’s better that you not know your options. It is a world where personal freedom is threatened by information and achieved through ignorance.

ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: Doctor Discussion Hardly a Death Panel

The Chamberpot of Commerce Has Its Greedy Eyes on Net Neutrality

imageWe see just how conservative — and one-sided — Trever is with his recent cartoon on the FCC and Net Neutrality. While *all* of the voices in the cartoon say "it isn’t broken," those wacky meddlers on the FCC insist on "fixing" Net Neutrality with wacky tools. Ha ha. Of course, the No Action / No Change view wants to let business decide how to throttle and divide the Net for its own profit. To insist "it isn’t broken" is to agree that money equals free speech and the Rich should have all the access they can afford. The Net belongs to all equally. The “don’t fix it” crowd wants to change that.

The Open Internet teaches net neutrality to everyone

The Open Internet is a nice little website that strives to explain the topic with very little text, and lovely vector graphics. It flows from top to bottom, with two main illustrations. The first illustration shows how things are today, with the ISP providing access to a raw "stream" of Internet goodness. The second one shows what things might be like if net neutrality is not guaranteed, with "special packages" offering "premium access" to email, Facebook, YouTube or other services many of us spend significant amounts of time browsing.
The site goes on to explain that ISPs would even be able to block access to certain services entirely so they could offer their own competing services — a frightening scenario. All in all, it’s a very quick and enlightening read and it sure beats having to explain the subject over and over again…

The Open Internet teaches net neutrality to everyone