I respect Matt Yglesias quite a bit, but I have to disagree with this.
“Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBrietbart dead.”
Leave aside the insulting reside such things leave for his begrieved wife, children, and friends. It’s just not true.
More people, more ideas, more wrongs, more amends, more potential. More life. Right and wrong and undetermined: life is beautiful.
Some people just kick ass. Witness: Victoria Woodhull- via Lawyers, Guns & Money’s Erik Loomis.
This is an ugly post. But I need to say it: Catholic Bishops and Cardinals need to adapt to their compromised moral authority.
Briefly: if this view is true, contributions to the Catholic Church should immediately cease. “Immoral activity” is certainly a part of the human condition, and also a part of The Church. Leaving ‘The Church’ free of ‘The State’ would have left in place the status quo of child rape factories posed as gates-to-heaven.
Count me out.
… for making Santorum’s big night even grosser:
Ew. Stay ‘nice’ MN.
Chris Matthews to Tom Tancredo: I got the feeling that your guy, your new guy, your new flavor of the month, Santorum, is running for Vice President.”
The middle-class have a way Way better safety net: middle-class incomes.
This interview is stunning. Cynical PR babble meet cancer-survivor Andrea Mitchell. No wonder this organization is laden with crap judgments: they buy their own corporate obfuscation.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Reading up on the Komen foundation, in light of their recent decision to pull funding for cancer screening from Planned Parenthood. It’s pretty sad. While their marketing gimmicks have raised a ton of money, and done a ton of good, they seem more interested in selling absolution than actually helping people.
1. Buy a pink keyring
2. Feel good about self
3. ???
4. Cure Cancer!
The actual good they do, helping spread screening and early treatment to folks without access, is forfeit to their ideological mission. How could their money for mammograms have been channeled into abortions? It couldn’t. Even healthcare providers in TX can tell boobs from bellies. These screenings were a crucial line of defense for poor women.
So what is to be done? It’s simple: give your money straight to an organization that cares about women’s health: Planned Parenthood. Among the benefits: efficiency. The Komen foundation only spends around a quarter of every dollar on actually helping fight breast cancer. Where does the rest of the money go? They might as well set much of it on fire:
In a 2010 story for the Huffington Post, writer Laura Bassett pointed out that, according to Komen’s own financial records, it spends almost “a million dollars a year in donor funds” aggressively going after other organizations that dare to use the phrase “for the cure” – including small charities like Kites for a Cure, Par for the Cure, Surfing for a Cure, Cupcakes for a Cure, and even a dog-sledding event called Mush for the Cure. Let me just give you that number again. A million bucks a year. Robert Smith, better watch your back.
Robert Smith. Heh.
Some of the money would be better burned:
Komen has additionally sold a pink-hued “Promise Me” perfume that contains several toxins – including galaxolide, a synthetic musk that critics claim is a hormone disruptor. Komen has promised to reformulate the scent this year, but as Uneasy Pink calculated last spring, that’s still a lot of questionable chemicals to buy when roughly only 3 percent of the purchase price will go to Komen’s oft-invoked “cure” anyway.
This is what happens when moralizing business-worshippers run charities. The efficiency of the market, indeed.
Brad DeLong, never one to suffer fools patiently, brings some vintage snark from Adam Smith on the idea that the rich are so used to their luxury that to take it away creates a special kind of suffering.
“Class warfare,” in this view is NOT the habitual temptation of the Have-nots to resent the Haves. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argues quite the opposite. We have a deep identification with the rich, imposing upon them the fantasies of our own would-be enjoyments. The charge of “Class warfare”, then, is a clever ploy designed to harness a sinister perversion of moral sentiment: status worship.
This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though nec- essary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the con- tempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages. (Chapter 3, paragraph 1, pg 53).
So, to defend the honor of the super-rich, and to demean our President, FoxNation comes up with this headline:
Wow, you think, that IS a fair point. I mean, giving to charity is awesome, and not only is Romney giving WAY more money to charity but also a greater portion of his income. Like 15-to-1. Who’s greedy indeed.
If you only get your news from Fox, you may end up thinking that was the whole truth.
But, if you have other sources of information, you might see something like this:
So, how are we to sort out this obvious discrepancy?
Now, we lean in a bit closer and realize:
A. That Fox’s headline cherry-picks the leanest year of the Obama’s charitable giving (2004)
B. That they round Romney’s contributions up a good bit.
C. That they DO NOT compare 2010 figures to each other. If they had, the headline would have been a dud: “Who’s Greedy? Obama gave 14% to Charity, Romney gave 14% too, but Gingrich gave only 3%”