Catch of the Day

I liked this comment by lambert strether that neatly summarized the record of animal cruelty among key GOP heavyweights. The comment is in response to Digby’s post and the story from Newsweek about how David Huckabee (Mike's kid) maliciously killed a dog when he was younger.

I was also impressed (for entirely different reasons) with Frank M.’s troll: “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you’ve got no reason to be worried about the wiretapping” in response to the Think Progress post citing Greenwald’s “The Lawless Surveillance State” and the revelations from the New York Times about pre-9/11 warrantless wiretapping & telcomm complicity. I don’t doubt that there are many people who subscribe to Frank M.’s authoritarian sentence, but far too many people spent time angrily responding him when the space could’ve been put to better use. By comment #53, I think Frank M. “won” the game: one sentence, big reaction, troll jackpot.

The catch of the day is off Digby Isle from a grim post titled “Digging Through the Rubble” about the catastrophic economic circumstances facing the new president in ’09. The post primarily quotes from Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s article in Vanity Fair. R. Porrofatto comes out eloquently with a comment about who benefits from contemporary economic instability. One might take issue with the phrase “deliberately engineered,” but only by degrees. I read things like this about the rich/poor gap and sense that R. Porrofatto’s comment is spot-on:

One person's damage to the economy is another's boundless gain. The obscenely inflated income and wealth of the upper-upper class over recent years has been deliberately engineered, to the detriment of the entire country, and it's been wildly successful. For example, the value of all that increased productivity that didn't go to the workers who produced it had to go somewhere, and that's one reason the Wall Street parasites will pay themselves close to $40 Billion in bonuses this year. And just as it did in Reagan's era, the massive tax cuts to the rich engendered the need to borrow it right back from them. But no matter. This is the kind of “damage” that certain people will not suffer from one iota—if anything servants will be even cheaper and there will be more contractors available for the umpteenth remodeling of the mansions, etc. Many Americans have no idea of just how immense the looted sums are, and seem to think that the rich get richer while everyone else gets poorer is a divinely ordained state, or a purely natural phenomenon that not even governments can control. A cursory look at history not only belies this, but shows something even worse—the rage fomented by severe economic inequality is more often than not creates animosity among its victims for each other. It’s gonna be a fun ride.