John Edwards Is Off the List. So Is his Hair.

John Edwards ought to have lost any credibility as a Democratic presidential candidate when he paid $400 for a haircut. There are other, more solid reasons: Edwards' vote on the war, and his inability to man up about enabling Bush and killing thousands are more serious signs of his disconnect with reality. But people understand haircuts. I have a relative who works as a "celebrity" hair stylist in a major city, doing quite nicely, thank you, and to actually experience the mental canyon between those in the upper income brackets and most Americans makes the class war a concrete reality.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, "the richest 1 percent of American households held one-third of all wealth in the U.S. economy, and took in 14 percent of the national income". The right wing economists who built this economy with Milton Friedman complain about the implied rebuke: how is that YOUR problem? Does it really harm anyone that CEOs make 400 times as much as the people on the shop floor, instead of 20 times as much? By even mentioning the income gap, are we not (gasp; pause for the image of Dick Cheney dressed as Aunt Pittypat, fanning himself and calling for his salts) fomenting class warfare? Is this not simple selfishness and resentment on the part of the poor?

Isn't it pretty to think so? Larry Bartels of Princeton actually did the numbers, counting the voting record of the Senate between 1989 and 1994. "In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes." And this was during a time when so-called Wall Street "Democrats" controlled the Congress. Work by Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota and Benjamin Page at Northwestern shows that the same income gap shapes the votes of politicians in international affairs... who loses their job, and who gets sent to war.

If bloggers are the new pamphleteers, we need to keep pestering the candidates until someone (Barack Obama, who still talks as if he's actually read the Constitution and thought about it, would seem the natural choice) starts talking about this in public, and presents the research, and doesn't let the media parrot the latest quote from the corporate candidates about "class warfare."

Commonplace Book of Quotations

"Be as gentle as doves, but subtle as serpents."

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“Miss New Jersey USA resigns after getting knocked-up? I just never thought that, in a country like America, beautiful women with great teeth and giant knockers would be having sex.” (Nerve.com)

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“If Bush did like to get his nose into a book instead of over the handlebars of his mountain bike, he could glance at Sun Tzu, who said, avoid protracted war and attack cities as a last resort.”
(Alexander Cockburn)

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“We should not assume that market forces will decide wisely. The market is rigged by manipulation and infantilisation.”
(Michael Bywater)

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“Some people really are bad people,” said Mark I. Rosen, a social scientist at Brandeis and the author of “Thank You for Being Such a Pain: Spiritual Guidance for Dealing With Difficult People,” “but I don’t think the percentage is as high as people think it is.” Instead, he said, “most people fall into the category of incompetent or oblivious.” (NYT)

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“Every year young people enter the teaching profession hoping to emulate the teachers they’ve seen in films. ...But when you’re confronted with the reality of teaching not just one class of misunderstood teenagers (the common television and movie conceit) but four or five every day, and dealing with parents, administrators, mentors, grades, attendance records, standardized tests and individual education plans for children with learning disabilities, not to mention multiple daily lesson plans — all without being able to count on the support of your superiors — it becomes harder to measure up to the heroic movie teachers you thought you might be.
“While no one believes that hospitals are really like “ER” or that doctors are anything like “House,” no one blames doctors for the failure of the health care system. From No Child Left Behind to City Hall, teachers are accused of being incompetent and under-qualified, while their appeals for better and safer workplaces are systematically ignored.
“Every day teachers are blamed for what the system they’re just a part of doesn’t provide: safe, adequately staffed schools with the highest expectations for all students. But that’s not something one maverick teacher, no matter how idealistic, perky or self-sacrificing, can accomplish.”
(Tom Moore)

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“...historical amnesia is common in relation to a president’s mistakes and controversial policies. For example, the museum in the Reagan Library does not mention the Iran-contra scandal.”
(Benjamin Hufbauer, author of Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory)

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“We love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and we don't give a damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They're confounded pretty, and that's all we know and all we need to know!”
(H.P. Lovecraft, In a letter to James F. Morton, December 1926)

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“At the heart of this alchemy is the issue’s, and indeed the series’ presentation of male loneliness and longing as a normal, even integral, component of Peter’s heroism. In fact, I don’t think it would be too much to say that Spider-Man has been, at various points in its history, a romance comic for boys in the guise of an action serial.”
(Jim Roeg, Double Articulation)

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"The fruits of the toil of millions are baldy stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few … from the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes — tramps and millionaires." (Populist Party Platform by Ignatius Donnelly, Populist Party platform 1882)

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"The wealth gap in America has long been in the making. In the 30 years between 1975 and 2005, U.S. households in the bottom 80 percent income bracket saw their share of national income actually fall. Those in the bottom 40 percent saw a drop in their incomes when adjusted for inflation. Only the top 20 percent of households experienced an increase their share of the total national income; much of that went to households in the highest 5 percent of the income bracket.... U.S. households in the top 20 percent of the income distribution earn own well more than 80 percent of the nation's wealth.... Households in the top fifth of the income bracket earn almost half of the nation's income."
(National Public Radio, based on Census Bureau figures)

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“Proposing that Jane Austen was a lesbian or Sophocles a cross-dresser is one way for those who have nothing especially stunning to say about irony or tragic fate to muscle in on the literary scene. It is rather like being praised as an eminent geographer for finding your way to the bathroom.”
(Terry Eagleton)

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Doing caricatures forces you out of drawing formula shapes. Animation is such easy prey to formula. Animators should constantly caricature in the hunt for new shapes and ideas to keep us from falling into habit.”
(John Kricfalusi)

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“The Hayes story is a familiar one, and of a kind the art world loves. Not only was he tragically unrecognized but, we now learn, he was also hugely influential. ... [the] artist sinks into an obscurity from which he should now, finally, be raised. But he will not be raised, because there is no Lester Hayes. He never existed. He is entirely an invention of ...the gallery’s directors, Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett, the co-publishers of the magazine Art on Paper, who ... cobbled together all the “Hayes” work from scrap material and cooked up the detailed biography to go with it.
“... Is contemporary art largely a promotional scam perpetuated by — in no particular order of blame — museums, dealers, critics, historians, collectors, art schools and anyone else who has a sufficient personal, professional or financial investment riding on the scam to want to keep it afloat?.... Imagine the consequences if lots of people started creating “fake” art without acknowledging what they were up to? The whole art-as-investment illusion would evaporate. The market would crumble. Art myths could no longer be trusted. The Triple Candie [gallery’s] Hayes biography, in other words, is spun largely from myths and clichés that sell art and artists today.”
(Holland Cotter on the show“Lester Hayes: Selected Work, 1962-1975” at Triple Candie Gallery in Harlem)

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“She [Molly Ivins, who lived in Austin] loathed Dallas, once describing it as the kind of town ‘that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.’”