but Steny Hoyer says that social security deform is on the table.

Our pets have become yet another victim of the poor economy. Though, a few are questioning whether some people are using the economy as an excuse:

Behind boarded doors of foreclosed homes, in Dumpsters and in parking lots are an unprecedented number of abandoned dogs and cats. Their owners, desperate and broke, have left the animals to die without food or water. Real estate agents and landlords are finding the once-beloved family pets in vacated houses all over Metro Detroit.

Good Grief, Pete Peterson!

However, there is one step that President Obama can take to boost the economy without going through Congress: He can reaffirm his support for Social Security and assure the baby boomers nearing retirement that he will not allow their benefits to be cut. Snip

with these pictures of fruits and vegetables that are just ... well. If Hefner'd cornered this market, that girl wouldn't've been running away from his manse, y'know?

So what are y'all gonna plant this year?

The folks at Propublica made this nifty Obama Promise Clock.

"While some candidates on the presidential campaign trail treat paint (sic) promises in glittering generalities, President Obama was often quite specific about what policies he’d implement as president, with exhaustive lists of promised policy plans [1] on his much-ballyhooed website.

As part of our ongoing “Promises Clock” feature, we’ve chosen five of these promises to keep an eye on.

As Jim Hightower points out in his blog entry, while the prices don't increase for some commodities at your grocery store and the packages look the same, the amount of product is dropping -- sometimes dramatically.
Then there's the excellent "Mouse Print" web site, which reveals the fine print (in readable fonts) behind many retail, coupon and online offers. You could do worse than read both sites regularly, folks, if you -- like me and many others -- want to avoid waste and scammage.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Alcohol stoves are reliable, cheap to fuel, and easy to carry. Thus, backpackers, hikers and campers are fond of them. Alcohol burners are commonly used in junior high and high school science experiments.
If it costs Zen Backpacking Stovessomething like two pop cans and 30 minutes to build an alcohol burner, why do you have to replumb a school building to accommodate a real science class? Surplus school alcohol burners sell for circa $9 a pop, if the school is afraid of insurance liability.
Geeze -- has the entire budget been sucked away to defend against lawsuits, or something?

Jeebus, Bob, couldn't you have waited 'til Wednesday?

You know when an Op-Ed starts out by inveighing against "polarizing dichotomies", the big wienie's gonna come. Here it is:

In addition to restoring a sound fiscal regime, we could improve our personal savings rate and expand retirement security by establishing some kind of individualized account separate from Social Security, financed by an appropriate revenue measure.

But why touch Social Security at all? From a public policy perspective, there's no need to. As the late, great Molly Ivins -- who has a hell of a lot more credibility these days than a Goldman Sachs alum like Rubin could have -- opined:

Q: Can we at least agree that we have a problem? A: No.

The argument in favor of "no" has two parts. One involves the incredible shrinking doom date. As Kevin Drum [Hi, Kevin!] of Washington Monthly points out, the Social Security trustees, always operating on a properly gloomy forecast, have been predicting disaster for the system for years, but the projected point at which it will go bust keeps moving.

In 1994, the system was supposed to go bust in 2029, a mere 35 years from the date of prediction. Now, it's supposed to go bust in 2042, 38 years down the road.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, using a more realistic model, the trust fund will run out in 2052, and even then it will cover 81 percent of the promised benefits. To fully fund this shortfall would require additional revenue of 0.54 percent of GDP, less than we are currently spending in Iraq. Or, as Paul Krugman noted in The New York Times, about one quarter of the revenue lost each year by President Bush's tax cuts, "roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with incomes of $500,000 a year."

What problem is Rubin solving here, exactly?

  Read more…

If you don't care about brands, meat, fresh vegetables, and you don't crave the eye-glazingly hypnotic experience that today's modern superstore short-circuits your cortex with, then dollar stores are just fine.

Do the math: A jar of spaghetti sauce for $1.00, spaghetti for $1.00, that's good for two days, so that's a month's worth of eating for $30.00, and who cares about brands? And we haven't even gone for the luxuries like Canadian cookies ($1.00) or Romanian shampoo ($1.00) or cheap, bad light bulbs ($1.00) or Russian tsotchkes you can stock your hutch with or even sell on E-Bay ($1.00). If you're in a city--if Philly isn't famous for its dollar stores, it should be--different stores specialize in different varieties and flavors of detritus from the global supply chain, so you can even shop around.

As for vegetables, you can grow your own in the summer, and buy potatoes, turnips, and winter squash in bulk when the cold comes. And last I checked the supermarket actually had cans of beans at four for $1.00 which, in a pinch, is four meals.

As for meat, some of the dollar stores do have Spam...

Anyhow, dollar stores saved me when my personal economy crashed and burned after the dot com bubble burst in 2000, and I ate that way for quite some time. I got thinner, but that was partly because of all the walking I did, and I didn't get sick.

Of course, there's one assumption hidden in this survival strategy:

Denzel Washington stared in a 2002 movie called "John Q" about an average Joe Public whose child needs a procedure the insurance at his job won't cover -- despite

On Monday, Mrs. Greenspan was full of shit as per usual when she said that most Americans wanted Scooter Libby pardoned. Actually 18% wanted him pardoned according to a CNN poll released that same day, but I guess that is just being a stickler for details.

This will be a shamelessly personal post, but at the same time one I suspect to which many of our readers can relate. I just finished up with a job interview, it went very well and I have lots of fuzzy feelings about it and I assume the interview does as well. In a nutshell, I'm almost perfectly qualified and didn't flub any part of it, and got him to laugh and listen to my well prepared presentation of my list of experiences and qualifications. In short, I couldn't have asked for it to go better, and now all I have to do is hope that no one else on his list has more than me.