Dude. Talk of the Nation regularly features such guests as J. Goldberg, A. Shlaes and D. Feith. It's the highest Broderism, on radio. Darn that liberal NPR.
In conclusion, I hate everyone.
But everyone says such nice things about you.
Even with Ray Suarez, it was annoying.
Every time I hear Juan Williams, I imagine BG gritting her teeth as well.
3: well, now you do. Perhaps you could find a dentist who tunes in to KZSU.
Call-in programs of all sorts exist mainly to convince us that our fellow Americans are all idiots. Some people enjoy that; I'd rather have my gumline probed.
Callers to sports talk radio are funny: "If our team scores more points than the other team AND holds the other team to less points than us, we stand a decent chance of winning....unless our bone-head coach screws it up."
You can have funny idiots too, Will.
At least people calling in to NPR aren't given a platform to tell their lame jokes/sing lame joke songs. I've never heard it there, anyway. That is true, right? Oh shit.
In other news, Yglesias's comments have always had a vocal racists-and-cranks component, but Jesus, they're completely unreadable any more, even the basketball threads.
Well, I suppose they were semi-readable back in 03. That's where I first read this commenter called Zizka.
I could be worse. You could be listening to World Have Your Say from the BBC.
It is amazing how dumb you can get when you try to appeal to the lowest common denominator on a global scale.
Were you aware that 80% of callers to NPR are idiots?
Back to the OP though, 20% non idiots sounds surprisingly high for radio....
The other 20% are intelligent cranks.
15: The researcher personally believes that the percentage of idiots is much higher, but restricted himself to a more substantiable claim in the post.
Were you aware that 80% of callers to NPR are idiots?
Did they launch some kind of NPR-idiot pogrom? About damn time.
I think it was TotN on which I recently heard a caller explain, articulately and at length, that every last one of Sonia Sotomayor's accomplishments was the result of affirmative action, and that she lacked even a single qualification to sit on the Court. I'm not a fan of NPR, but it's still surprising to find this brand of well-spoken but totally baseless right-wing idiocy there.
I read this post title to the tune of The Hold Steady's You Can Make Him Like You. "You don't have to go to the dentist/ Make your boyfriend go to the dentist."
The caller who related his personal experience with the Russian health care system (as a tourist!) as a warning on the evils of socialized medicine was particularly special.
The caller who related his personal experience with the Russian health care system (as a tourist!) as a warning on the evils of socialized medicine was particularly special.
The caller who related his personal experience with the Russian health care system (as a tourist!) as a warning on the evils of socialized medicine was particularly special.
Stupid browser. I shall call into Talk of the Nation tomorrow to complain about this. Thrice. Apparently, I'm well qualified.
But seriously, I really hate the way the host framed the debate, asking liberals if they'd be willing to tax health care benefits (er, isn't it conservatives who hate taxes?) and conservatives if they'd go for a public option. There's a reason the debate is so narrow and insipid, and much of its due to the gatekeepers of the public discourse like you, you stupid douche.
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Can someone explain to me how L.A. County schools were allowed to spread their stimulus funding out over 3 years? The effect of that is that there are a lot of teacher layoffs which can only drive down aggregate demand. Why don't they have to spend it now?
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30. Because there are a lot of economic illiterates on LA County schools authority, whatever it's called?
I Well, yeah, but I don't get whny the Federal Government allows it.
Can they constitutionally do anything about it? I mean, if the Fed decided to micromanage school districts all over the country, the outcry would be unbelievable.
The Feds could easily say that the money has to be spent within a year and a half, I'd think. That's not micromanaging school districts; it's just saying that these funds can't go into your reserves.
34: The problem there is that money is fungible --if the school districts spend the stimulus money, but cut their budgets from other sources to match, it has the same effect as not spending the stimulus money, and preventing that sort of thing would take micromanagement (I think. There might be some clever solution I'm not seeing.)
Could you award money to districts and projects on condition that they not cut funds already allocated before the stimulus money was offered?
Might work; I'm not sure. It would depend on the timing of everyone's budget cycle, I think.
36: Then you have to pay for audits to ensure that the district didn't do what you told them they couldn't do. Most of the time, in my highly unprofessional opinion, it's absolutely not worth it.
36: I don't know much about school budgets, but I've seen plenty of mid-level state bureaucrats and university grants administrators in action. I'm fairly certain that there is no way to work around the 'money is fungible' problem without either taking-over the whole budget or just acknowledging that any plausibly capable administrator is going to figure out how to dodge your restrictions to a greater or lesser extent.
Okay, then I guess we need basic economics education. Because the getting money and not spending it thing really pissed me off.
40: "Because the getting money and not spending it thing really pissed me off."
That's why my stimulus plan (give everybody a $200 voucher than can only be spent on domestic beer/wine/spirits and has to be spent in a given Friday to Sunday period) would have been so effective. I would have also required that all bottles sold this way have the cap removed on purchase (to prevent hording). Before you say $200/person wouldn't be enough stimulus, don't forget all of the post-splurge spending that would be needed if you drank $200 bucks in a weekend.
36 is called a maintenance of effort clause and is rather common.