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Here’s a 9/11 recollection from Sarah Hoyt.
Has it really been eleven years?
It was a beautiful day. I remember that. I got up to check email, and the AOL homepage had something about a plane flying into a building. I thought it was a goofy thing, like that idiot who had earlier flown into – was it the EmpireStateBuilding? – in a small plane.
It was a beautiful morning, and I had a kid to take to school. His older brother could walk on his own the five blocks to elementary, but Marshall – in Kindergarten – went in an hour later, and at any rate was too little to walk alone. (And too sleepy. I used to get him up, bathe him, shovel breakfast into his mouth and walk him to school and if I were very lucky, he’d wake up when we got there.)
So I walked him to school, waited till the teacher took him in and walked back home, under a cloudless sky, across our little mountain village, looking forward to our writers’ group meeting that Saturday, feeling financially stable for the first time in my adult life (I’d just sold my first book) and thinking “This is when we reached adulthood. From now on, it’s the easy part. Things will only get better.”
When I got home, I went to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee before going up to write. And the phone rang. It was Rebecca Lickiss and she was screaming for me to turn on the news. …
… And as an author to an Author I have to admire the plotting touch, where the three burly and brave guys who spearheaded the fight back in flight 93 were a born again man, a Jewish man, and a gay man. Can you imagine any group designed to give more heart burn to the enemies that brought down the towers and who tried to use flight 93 as a weapon?
I can’t either. But, more importantly, I can’t imagine any other culture, any other country, any other place where those three would have banded together, immediately – instinctively – putting aside any perceived differences, thinking only of trying to save the defenseless, laying down their lives for others.
Their lives were forfeit, but they died free men. They died heroes. More importantly, they died Americans.
Surely a nation that produces such men will not perish from this Earth.
We will not go quietly into that good night.
We’re the land of the free and the home of the brave. And we will stand.
Rolling Stone, in an effort to trash the Romney campaign, rolled out Matt Taibbi. A Fortune editor outlines Taibbi’s errors.
Very few of my friends understand private equity, let alone care about it. But some of them wrote me this past weekend, after reading Matt Taibbi’s new cover story for Rolling Stone about Mitt Romney’s time with Bain Capital. For example, this was from my former college housemate Andrew:
“I read the Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Reading it you can obviously see that the guy has a fairly biased opinion on private equity and Wall Street dealings in general. What’s the industry’s defense of PE? I assume the truth is somewhere between Mitt’s version of Bain as a massive jobs creator and Gordon Gekko-esque corporate raiders.”
Andrew has good instincts. Taibbi took out the long knives for this one, which means he sacrificed a bit of accuracy for potency.
His overall thesis is correct: There is a fundamental hypocrisy in a former leveraged buyout investor railing against America’s ballooning debt. Leveraged buyouts, by definition, add debt to a company’s balance sheet — weighing it down in the short-term so that it can (hopefully) thrive in the long-term. Romney defenders point out that America is not the same as a private equity-backed company, a truism that only goes to underscore the flimsiness of using Romney’s Bain Capital experience as a singular qualification for the Oval Office.
Unfortunately, Taibbi also takes a lot of wild swings at the broader private equity market that don’t ring true. So many, in fact, that his valid critique of Romney’s candidacy gets lost.
Here is an accounting: …
Mark Steyn comments on Sandra Fluke’s star turn at the DNC.
… Sandra Fluke is one of them. She completed her education a few weeks ago – at the age of 31, or Grade 25. Before going to Georgetown, she warmed up with a little light BS in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Cornell. She then studied law at one of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, where tuition costs 50 grand a year. The average starting salary for a Georgetown Law graduate is $160,000 per annum – first job, first paycheck.
So this is America’s best and brightest – or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” – and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of “personal freedom.”
America is so broketastically brokey-broke that one day, in the grim future that could be, society may even be forced to consider whether there is any meaningful return on investment for paying a quarter-million bucks to send the scions of wealth and privilege to school till early middle-age to study Reproductive Justice. But, as it stands right now, a Cornell and Georgetown graduate doesn’t understand the central reality of the future her elders have bequeathed her. There’s no “choice” in the matter. It’s showing up whatever happens in November. All the election will decide is whether America wants to address that reality, or continue to live in delusion – like a nation staggering around with a giant condom rolled over its collective head. …
Conn Carroll says the Obama recovery is turning into the Obama depression.
President Obama’s convention speech last week never mentioned “unemployment” or “unemployed.” Now we know why. Today’s Department of Labor monthly jobs report was an absolutely disaster for Obama and America. While U.S. employers did create 96,000 jobs last month, 368,000 Americans lost hope of finding a job and stopped looking for work entirely. Or as Paul Ryan said on CNBC, “For every net job created, nearly four people left the workforce.” Obama has now presided over a record 43 months of unemployment above 8 percent.
There simply was no good news in today’s jobs report. June and July job creation was revised down a total of 41,000. The manufacturing sector lost 15,000 jobs. If the size of the U.S. labor force rate had stayed the same as last month, unemployment would have risen to 8.4 percent. If the same number of Americans were looking for work today, as were looking for work when Obama came into officer, unemployment would have risen to 11.2 percent.
In fact, as the chart below shows, the U.S. economy actually lost jobs according to the survey the Labor Department uses to calculate the unemployment rate. And not for the first time. The U.S. workforce has declined for each of the last two months as has the number of employed Americans. The Obama recovery is rapidly descending into the Obama recession.
Ed Morrissey has more on Woodward’s book. This is a good read. Among other items you will learn Obama called Paul Ryan – Jack Ryan and you can see the White House try to lie its way out of the fact they trashed Ryan on purpose.
Bob Woodward’s new book The Price of Politics might make a lot of political trouble for Barack Obama in this election. The book looks at the leadership failures that led to the debt-ceiling and budget crises last year, and the historic downgrading of US bonds in August 2011. One of the reasons for the intense polarization was a speech given by Obama earlier in the year that attacked the House Budget Chair’s proposals as un-American — while he sat in the (room). In interviews conducted by Woodward for the book, Obama admitted that the attack was “a mistake“: …