The Radio Shack guide to dead tech

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3 Chords & the Truth: The water's fine!

Dear folks,

Hope things are going well back at 3 Chords & the Truth! Am having a great time on this mental trip to the Bahamas.

The water is fine, the beach is pristine, and I'm doing my own musical thing here! Nobody looks askew at me when I play wild, crazy, improbable collections of all kind of music -- because here on the beach, in the Bahamas, everybody's free to do our own thing, baby!

And I'm a-doin' it! You can make book on that.

You just wouldn't believe the fineness going on here by the ocean, in the Bahamas of my mind.

Sweet!

I MEAN, all these crazy artists are here -- like, people who would NEVER play on the same bill -- and they're having this amazing jam session on the beach outside my cabana. OMG!

Really . . . wish you all were here!.

Hello! This is the Internet, people . . . you can join me on my mental trip to the Bahamas! WOOT!

Did I mention the water's fine?

Anyway, gotta go -- time to play some more tunes! So join me on the Big Show, won't you?

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Oh, wait. "Aloha" is Hawaii, isn't it?

Why did Santa Anna bother?

Mis amigos en México,

We are sooooo, soooooooooo sorry about the late unpleasantness of that whole Mexican-American War thing. We are also soooo, soooooooo sorry that, previously, American settlers moved into Tejas and caused so much trouble for you with that most unfortunate war of independence.

We'll forget the Alamo if you will.

I'll tell you what. Take Tejas back, with our deepest apologies. Really, it's yours. No, go ahead. We were wrong to have annexed it in the first place.

Nuestras mas sinceras disculpas.

Somos lo siento. Realmente.

Dial 'N' for numbskull

Don Imus said he was sorry, too.

Yet that wasn't enough to save his butt . . . or his TV and radio shows. And pffft, he was gone. For a while.

And back in 2007, Imus didn't even get the Rutgers women's basketball team on the other end of a phone line in order to drop "nappy headed hos" on 'em direct. Or taunt them with the N-word.

Over and over again.

No, that's what Dr. Laura Schlessinger did the other day. On the radio. With an African-American caller on the other end of the line.

"Jade" called in to the program to ask what to do about her white husband, who did nothing when friends and relatives came into their house, made insensitive racial remarks to her and even bandied about the N-word. In her presence.


YOU WOULD THINK that's pretty cut and dried. Somebody's ass needs to be kicked here. And it ain't Jade's.

Well, Dr. Laura's a shrink, and I guess shrinks just don't think like regular people. From a transcript on the Media Matters website:

CALLER: OK. Last night -- good example -- we had a neighbor come over, and this neighbor -- when every time he comes over, it's always a black comment. It's, "Oh, well, how do you black people like doing this?" And, "Do black people really like doing that?" And for a long time, I would ignore it. But last night, I got to the point where it --

SCHLESSINGER: I don't think that's racist.

CALLER: Well, the stereotype --

SCHLESSINGER: I don't think that's racist. No, I think that --

CALLER: [unintelligible]

SCHLESSINGER: No, no, no. I think that's -- well, listen, without giving much thought, a lot of blacks voted for Obama simply 'cause he was half-black. Didn't matter what he was gonna do in office, it was a black thing. You gotta know that. That's not a surprise. Not everything that somebody says -- we had friends over the other day; we got about 35 people here -- the guys who were gonna start playing basketball. I was going to go out and play basketball. My bodyguard and my dear friend is a black man. And I said, "White men can't jump; I want you on my team." That was racist? That was funny.

CALLER: How about the N-word? So, the N-word's been thrown around --

SCHLESSINGER: Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger.

ON WHAT PLANET does Jade's dilemma warrant a rant on "If black comics can say it, why can't we?" That's the kind of thing I used to hear from my late, incredibly racist old man.

In the Deep South.

And on and on Schlesinger went, using "nigger" at every opportunity, over and over -- as a taunt of the "hypersensitive" black caller.

Unbelievable . . . not.

I wonder how "hypersensitive" the Orthodox Jew psychiatrist would be about people coming into her home bragging about how this one guy wanted way too much for his house, but he Jewed him down.

Or telling her to her face that the damn "Kikes" were just too hypersensitive about racial and ethnic slurs.

Somehow, I don't think she'd be amused. I'd hope she would respond with an uppercut to the jaw.

BUT DR. LAURA is very, very sorry now, because this is national talk radio, and Don Imus-type money is on the line here:

I talk every day about doing the right thing. And yesterday, I did the wrong thing.

I didn’t intend to hurt people, but I did. And that makes it the wrong thing to have done.

I was attempting to make a philosophical point, and I articulated the “n” word all the way out - more than one time. And that was wrong. I’ll say it again - that was wrong.

I ended up, I’m sure, with many of you losing the point I was trying to make, because you were shocked by the fact that I said the word. I, myself, realized I had made a horrible mistake, and was so upset I could not finish the show. I pulled myself off the air at the end of the hour. I had to finish the hour, because 20 minutes of dead air doesn’t work. I am very sorry. And it just won’t happen again.

LET'S HOPE it doesn't. But sorry, as Dr. Laura would be quick to tell a caller, isn't necessarily enough.

And if she comes out of this whole thing with her national radio empire intact, somebody needs to apologize to Don Imus.

Every idiot for himself!

It would appear that a lot of Omahans think there really is such a thing as a free lunch in life.

It also would appear that a lot of Omahans think that you can cut whole big chunks out of city government -- which is the alternative to taxpayers manning up and, like, paying the cost of running a city -- and that the Good Life fairies will magically stop that city from becoming a dilapidated s***hole, and that they won't find themselves on the very short end of Every Man for Himself.

KETV, Channel 7, as a public service, today offers this excerpt from a very long book -- People Are Too Stupid for Direct Democracy:

A group of concerned Omaha property owners said it has polling data that show local taxpayers are fed up with Mayor Jim Suttle's proposed tax increases.

The Metropolitan Omaha Property Owners Association said it commissioned a polling firm to survey hundreds of Omaha residents in all parts of town, asking hot-topic questions about the city's budget crunch and taxes.

The group said that its results show that most Omahans disapprove with the direction that City Hall is currently taking.

Rental property owner John Chatelain said he's worried that he'll have to sell the west Omaha house he rents if property taxes rise again.

"That would mean that the profit flow will be even less, which means that people will be able to pay even less for homes, which means property values will go down," he said.

Tom Jizba of the Metropolitan Omaha Property Owners Association said Chatelain is not alone.

"We have been increasingly concerned about the growing intrusiveness of the government," Jizba said.

He said that the poll found that 70 percent of the respondents felt Omaha is on the wrong track and that 67 percent said they disapproved of the way Jim Suttle is handling his job as mayor.

THAT'S DEMOCRACY for you -- whiny babies demanding all the benefits and services government offers, but completely unwilling to shoulder any of the responsibilities of self-government.

I grew up in a place where that ethos had an iron grip. It ain't pretty, and Omaha doesn't want to go there.

Trust me on that one.

Pssssst . . . Eve! Take this smart phone

If you want to learn about modern life -- especially postmodern life -- look at your smart phone.

Because if your life . . . er, your smart phone, is anything like the deal one Omaha man got, congratulations! You're a officially a member of a club born when Eve bought the serpent's line about that apple.

If not that Apple.

IT'S ALL in the book of Sprint, Chapter 4G (as told to the World-Herald):

For two days in late July, Monty Poland searched Omaha for something that didn't exist.

Poland, 39, had just purchased a new smart phone from Sprint, the HTC Evo. The handset, purchased at a discount with a new contract, cost Poland $275, excluding a $100 mail-in rebate.

It was loaded with features, including bundles of applications, the latest version of Google's Android operating system, a touch screen, dual cameras and wireless Internet that could be channeled to make the phone a wireless hot-spot.

Poland discovered those just fine. What he couldn't find was a place to use a feature Evo has that few other smart phones possess: the ability to connect to Sprint's 4G wireless network.

He tried to access the network from many places. At his home near 72nd and Giles Streets? Nope. In downtown Omaha? No way. At the La Vista Sprint store where he purchased the device? Not even there.

That's because even though Sprint proclaims Evo's 4G capabilities on in-store signage, the company's website and in commercials, 4G service isn't available anywhere in Nebraska or Iowa.

The term 4G stands for “fourth generation,” meaning the latest and fastest version of digital mobile functionality. It is superior to 2G, which was introduced in the early 1990s, and to 3G, which dates to around 2002.

Having the latest and most reliable technology is key to companies' profitability, because smart phone customers are hungry for faster mobile Internet connections to stream video, download applications, or “apps,” and browse the web. Mobile phone companies engage in heated battles to reach pacts with network providers while investing billions in the updated networks.

But in the end, all the whiz-bang features need to work.

“It's like buying a laptop computer with supersonic speed, but the local Internet provider doesn't offer supersonic Internet connections,” Poland said. “Why spend the extra dough to buy something you can't use?”

After two frustrating days, Poland revisited the Sprint store and asked a manager why the 4G connection wasn't working.

Poland learned that 4G wasn't available in the Midlands. In fact, it is available in only 48 U.S. markets, of which the closest is Kansas City, near Sprint's national headquarters in Overland Park, Kan.

OVERPROMISING -- and, alternatively, getting suckered -- is what we do as children of the first consumers, who believed Satan when he advertised that "your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad."

I'll bet the scaly SOB stiffed 'em on the 4G service, too.

The thing is, we never learn.

Never.

Ever.

In fact, our entire Western economy is built upon the fact of our permanent placement in planetary special ed. Let's just say it's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Men World.

AND THE hell of it -- literally -- is illustrated by what Monty Poland did when Sprint offered him a full refund: He turned it down.

Which explains why America's churches are so empty come Sunday.

Gitchi gitchi ya ya Gaga

One of Britain's top hitmakers thinks, anymore, that pop music is one giant miss.

And that Gaga is no lady.

And that you'd be mortified to listen to any of what he calls "soft pornography" with your mum in the room.

Mike Stock, with co-writing or co-producing credits on 16 No. 1 records in the U.K., is mad as hell . . . and he's taking his anger to the pages of the Daily Mail:

The man who helped launch the career of Kylie Minogue yesterday condemned modern pop culture for 'sexualising' youngsters.

Mike Stock, one third of the legendary pop factory Stock, Aitken and Waterman, said: 'The music industry has gone too far. It's not about me being old fashioned. It's about keeping values that are important in the modern world.

'These days you can't watch modern stars - like Britney Spears or Lady Gaga - with a two-year-old.

Ninety-nine per cent of the charts is R 'n' B and 99 per cent of that is soft pornography.'

He continued: 'Kids are being forced to grow up too young. Look at the videos. I wouldn't necessarily want my young kids to watch them.

'I would certainly be embarrassed to sit there with my mum.'

Mr Stock, 58, pictured below, was behind the rise of Miss Minogue in the late 1980s when she stormed the charts with I Should Be So Lucky.

In the accompanying video, she wore a simple black cocktail dress. The lyrics were similarly innocent.

In contrast, 24-year-old Lady Gaga, who burst on to the scene two years ago, has regularly used crude metaphors in her lyrics as well as posing in revealing outfits.

Mr Stock believes that today's children are being 'sexualised' as a result of images put out by the pop industry of stars such as Lady Gaga.

He said: 'Mothers of young children are worried because you can't control the TV remote control.

'Before children even step into school, they have all these images - the pop videos and computer games like Grand Theft Auto - confronting them and the parents can't control it. Talking to mothers' groups, they were saying that even they have lost faith in brands like Disney.

THE PROOF in Stock's pop-tart pudding, however, just might be found in the comments on the story on the Mail's website:

"I'm a 17 year old girl and completely agree with this article. I don't watch these music videos, but other kids in my school do. With them having that image of what's 'cool' they make fun of everyone else who isn't like that. I'm part of the 'popular' group at school, but I'm still constantly made fun of because I don't have sex and I don't dress sexy," says Christina from Ohio.

But there's another big criticism of the whole pop-sleaze phenomenon no one has mentioned yet. It's boring.

It's stupid.

It's mindless.

And all in all, music built almost exclusively upon a foundation of disinterested, mechanical intercourse barely rises to the time-honored romanticizing of lust. Actually, this masterpiece of tediousness by Lady Gaga sounds more like a junkie's ode to the monkey on his back:

I'm on a mission
and it involves some heavy touching, yeah
You've indicated you're interest
I'm educated in sex, yes
and now I want it bad, want it bad
A lovegame, a lovegame

Hold me and love me
just want touch you for a minute
Maybe three seconds is enough
For my heart to quit it

Let's have some fun, this beat is sick
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick
Don't think too much, just bust that kick
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick

AND THEN the big finale:

Let's play a lovegame
Play a lovegame
Do you want love
Or you want fame
Are you in the game (Don't think too much just bust that kick)
Dons the lovegame (I wanna take a ride on your disco stick)

Huh!

OK, not a junkie's ode. Make it a crack whore's instead.

Huh! indeed.

It's always 10:30 on the Internet

Boy, we had some good news today about the Internet.

How good was it?

It was so good, that you'd have thought they'd announced that every surviving recording of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was being uploaded to the Web.

And if you thought something do deliriously, wonderfully nutso . . . you are correct, sir!


YES! IT'S TRUE! We found this ABC News story a bit down the Information Superhighway, just past the Slauson Cutoff:

Johnny Carson went off the air long before the age of YouTube and viral video, but now, 18 years after stepping down from "The Tonight Show," he's making a comeback online.

Carson Entertainment Group (CEG), which owns the archive of the late-night host's 30 years on "The Tonight Show," announced today that it has digitized all 3,300 hours of existing footage from Carson's reign and created a searchable online database for media professionals.

While the library is only accessible to those who license clips for professional purposes, CEG plans later this year to put out 50 full-format shows on DVD and post a rotating group of 40 to 50 historic clips for general consumption on JohnnyCarson.com.

"I can't believe there's so much interest after all these years, it's wonderful," said Jeff Sotzing, president of CEG, Carson's nephew and a former "Tonight" producer. "The show had such a large audience for such a long time. It was such a big part of people's lives. I don't think you have that anymore because the television viewing audience is so fragmented."

Until 1999, Carson's archive had been stored in a salt mine in Kansas. It was impossible to view as a whole because the show had been recorded in three different media formats. Last year, Sotzig reached out to Deluxe Archive Solutions to transfer the footage to a digital format. Now, producers and researchers can call up Carson clips by plugging a keyword into the online database.

"We realized that if we could make this footage accessible in a non-linear fashion, more people would be able to experience this material," Sotzig said.

WHAT DOES your humble correspondent make of this news? I dunno, how about "HIYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"?

The big Mac attack

You know, it's said that if you hold on to something long enough, it will come back into style.

World, meet my ubercool, old-school Mac.

This is it in the bottom of the basement closet, where it's been sitting for years. In fact, the 1993-vintage Performa 450, with a whopping 32 MB of RAM and a massive 120 MB hard drive, hasn't been hooked up and turned on in eight or nine years.

Ever since we got . . . ahem . . . a Windows machine.

Mac didn't mind, however. It was in the closet plotting world domination. And, lo, it might just happen.

When nobody was looking -- or at least looking at iPhones, iPods and iPads -- the cool but hopelessly niche Macintosh computer was getting popular. Really popular.

And now people are saying Microsoft may be in trouble.

IT STARTED with this little article in The Washington Post:

Shares of Microsoft Corp. edged lower Wednesday after Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry downgraded the software giant in part due to increased competition from Apple's Macs to its Windows operating system.

THE SPARK: Chowdhry, who downgraded Microsoft to "Equal Weight" from "Overweight," said in a note to investors he does not expect the company to see any upside to his estimates for the next 12 to 18 months.

Increasingly, companies are giving their employees a choice to either use Microsoft Windows PCs or Apple Inc.'s Macs, the analyst said. And, increasingly, employees are choosing Mac over Windows. To boot, Chowdhry said 70 percent of college freshman are entering school with Macs, up about 10 percent to 15 percent from a year ago.

AND THAT got picked up by the tech media. The Mac blog OSXDaily was downright giddy:

I hope the raw statistics and research data is released so we can get the precise details, but speaking from experience I can definitely say that Macs and Apple hardware are overwhelming college campuses. Sure you’ll see other computers and electronics around too but a clear majority of people are using at least one of Apple’s signature products, whether it’s a Mac, iPhone, iPod, or iPad.

So Apple is pretty much taking over, dominating college campuses, the USA, and reaching to the highest levels of power with President Obama and the White House staff all using Macs and iPads. Amazing.

THEN TOD MAFFIN, lecturing at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, decided to do his own college computer survey. He asked the students to hold up their MacBooks. The lecture hall was awash with glowing Apple logos.

He then asked the students to hold up their PCs. One student held up a lonely Windows machine.


SENSING the time was ripe, I dug the old Mac out and set it up. After nearly a decade in the closet, would it work? Could it work?


IT WORKED. Started right up. Now we're partying like it's 1995.

I think my next computer is going to be a Mac.

Again.

Home in the rear-view mirror

When did I first see Evan Mather's Scenic Highway on the Web? Three years ago, maybe?

As I recall, the combination memoir/documentary/mockumentary wasn't in a particularly embeddable format then, so I didn't post it on the blog. Or maybe it was due to a charitable swing of my famously conflicted emotions about my hometown, Baton Rouge.

Baton Rouge is what Scenic Highway is all about. And, no, Scenic Highway, the main thoroughfare into north Baton Rouge, isn't. That irony -- and the spirit behind naming one's film for the decidedly unscenic stretch of road -- is what drives the film.

I am from Baton Rouge. I, too, put the city in my rear-view mirror a long time ago. I totally get the concept of an homage noir to the old hometown -- albeit one conceived, perhaps, by the Monty Python troupe on a bloody terrible bender.

Still, at the time, in the aftermath of Katrina, I was kinda sorta thinking, "Isn't that a little mean?"

THOSE WERE the better angels of my nostalgia talking. The real me knows better.

It's why the hell I hauled ass. It's why I am Omaha's biggest damned fan today; Nebraska's largest city, my home, is pretty much everything Baton Rouge ain't.

If you've been hanging around the blog much, my feelings on this question are no surprise to you. They're . . . well . . . complicated. Intense. Somewhat conflicted.

Bottom line: I am glad I'm here. I am glad I'm not there. And I recognize the unpredictable ebb and flow of how life -- and cities -- often play out can quickly make an ass of you while you're otherwise occupied expounding on crap and plotting out the future.

Still. . . .

I KEEP coming back to what my hometown ain't. Like secure in its identity, for example.

A gag bit in Scenic Highway about a "call" to the state capitol's information hotline has the earnest telephone voice expounding at great length -- and proudly -- about a 1933 Leni Riefenstahl film, Reichitekht, which outlined the great influence the structure had on Nazi architect Albert Speer and the great fascination it held for der Führer himself.

Obviously ridiculous, you say. Pure fiction. And, no, the Germans didn't bomb Pearl Harbor. Of course, I say.

But that doesn't mean I didn't check it out . . . just to make sure. Because it sounded just sooooooo perfectly Baton Rouge.

Does the name David Duke ring a bell? He's a white supremacist. He used to parade around LSU, as a student, in a Nazi uniform. He grew up to become the head of one of the national Ku Klux Klan organizations.

Louisiana almost elected him governor in 1991. Then the feds put him in prison.

ANOTHER THING my hometown ain't, is committed to public education -- or much education of any stripe.

This is why it never will be what its mayor-president keeps saying it is -- "America's Next Great City (TM)." People want to move to great cities; nobody wants to move to Baton Rouge.

The proof is in the population, which hasn't changed much since I was in college there. Thirty years ago.

I was reminded of this by that Elizabeth Warren lecture on the tribulations, and pending extinction, of the American middle class. Here's the part that did it for me, the part that just completely distills why Red Stick is hosed:

There's a great . . . study out of San Diego, where they're having parents do preferences on where they buy. Parents would rather live near a toxic waste dump than a place where they thought the schools were underperforming -- where they thought their children would not have as good a chance in school.

WARREN CITED another study, this one from Boston, that compared side-by-side area municipalities, matched for every factor -- racial composition, mass-transit access . . . you name it. It found that just a 5-point increase in third-grade reading scores in one school district over the other translated into tens of thousands of dollars' difference in housing prices.

"Families are buying schools," she said. Of course, that's obvious. But now there's the data to quantify what we already knew.

Well, at least what some of us in America already knew.

Welcome to Baton Rouge. The toxic waste dump (or at least the next best thing) is the city's biggest employer. This is it, at right -- the Exxon-Mobil refinery, the second largest in the country.

There are lots more like it all around the capital city.

And this is the kind of thing you can expect when dealing with the East Baton Rouge Parish school system.

And here's what my old high school looked like three years ago:


NOW IT'S being renovated, which means all but the main building is being torn down and rebuilt. And the main building, dating back to 1927, is being totally renovated.

Thirty years of neglect will do that for your construction budget.

One can only imagine what 30 years of test-score carnage and resegregation -- a school system that white flight has taken from 65-35 majority-minority to 85-15 minority-majority in a single generation -- has done (and will continue to do) to Baton Rouge.

Probably something not unlike what happened to the one really unique thing Evan Mather found in his -- and my -- hometown, just north of town just off the not-so-scenic Scenic Highway. It was a massive geodesic dome built by Buckminster Fuller in the late 1950s -- the biggest in the world at the time.

It used to belong to the Union Tank Car Co. They used to fix massive numbers of railroad tank cars in there -- until time passed the facility by within a decade or so.

Bucky Fuller's masterpiece soon fell into disrepair. That's how Mather found it almost five years ago.

And the year after Mather released his short film . . . it was torn down.

Because that's what Baton Rouge does.

The poorhouse, explained

The fatal flaw of the tea party movement -- OK, the most fundamental of its myriad fatal flaws -- is that it long ago got what it now clamors for.

And that's what's killing us all. Check that. Not all.

The rich, they're doing fine, despite everything. It's the fast-disappearing middle class and the poor taking it in the shorts.

Despite all the angry rhetoric from the tea-party delusionals, despite all the laissez-faire rhetoric and faux solidarity with "real Americans" coming from millionaire hucksters such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the real problem here, alas, is not that Barack Hussein Obama is a socialist working hard to turn the United States into a people's republic.

No, the real problem is that America is becoming less socialist every day -- that the sort of laissez-faire, free-market social Darwinism that lets the rich man grow ever richer, unfettered by the "socialist nanny state," has been wildly successful at redistributing wealth away from the poor and middle class and into the hands of Corporate America and the wealthy.

What the tea-party marionettes clamor for -- the magical shot of "freedom" that supposedly will cure all our ails -- is just more of what we've had for decades, decades during which the American middle-class family has been beaten into a vegetative state.

If you're not familiar with Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and current chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, stop right now and watch the above video. Want to know what the hell happened to you (and the economic world around you) over the last 40 years? This will explain it all.

Warren tells you how the middle class has come to the brink of extinction, why both you and the missus are busting your butts and still living paycheck-to-paycheck, and why you're just a layoff -- or a serious illness -- away from oblivion.

IN THE VIDEO, she tells you all this on Mar. 8, 2007. A year and a half before the crash.

Things haven't improved since:


THE MSNBC INTERVIEW followed publication of this column of hers last December in The Huffington Post. Read on, if you've guts enough:

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.

But core expenses kept going up. By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago -- for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance.

To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce. But higher housing and medical costs combined with new expenses for child care, the costs of a second car to get to work and higher taxes combined to squeeze families even harder. Even with two incomes, they tightened their belts. Families today spend less than they did a generation ago on food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and other flexible purchases -- but it hasn't been enough to save them. Today's families have spent all their income, have spent all their savings, and have gone into debt to pay for college, to cover serious medical problems, and just to stay afloat a little while longer.

Through it all, families never asked for a handout from anyone, especially Washington. They were left to go on their own, working harder, squeezing nickels, and taking care of themselves. But their economic boats have been taking on water for years, and now the crisis has swamped millions of middle class families.

The contrast with the big banks could not be sharper. While the middle class has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.

AND THE CURE for this is supposed to be less regulation? Less government? Fewer taxes on the wealthy? Removing the last of society's unraveling safety nets?

Fighting "socialism" is the answer here? For the love of God, send us a real socialist, not some too-cool, dispassionate poseur like Barack Obama.

You know, like Franklin Roosevelt. Or Harry Truman. Or Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Hell, even Richard Nixon.

By tea-party/Limbaugh/Beck standards, all these presidents were raving Bolsheviks. And under their political tutelage, we still had a middle class. We still had hope for America's future.

And now?

During Warren's 2007 lecture at the University of California-Berkeley, she explains that according to Gallup, most people in 1970 judged that it required a high-school diploma and hard work to launch a young person into the middle class. But by 2002, Gallup reported, twice as many Americans thought the moon landing was faked -- staged on a Hollywood sound stage -- as thought that someone could make it into a middle-class life with just 12 years of schooling.

From the presentation:

"The difference is -- when you look at middle-class families -- if you needed 12 years back in 1970? The taxpayer paid for it. You got it all for free. All you had to do was show up . . . live there and show up.

By the year 2000, if you need a college diploma, you pay for it yourself.

Sure Berkeley and other state-supported schools? I guess that means you guys aren't paying any tuition? [Laughter]

Room, board, books, right? It's not very much -- I guess you borrowed maybe a dollar or two in order to do this?

But notice what that means. It means the launch -- what parents have to do to get that next generation into the middle class -- has shifted from being something that everybody pays for to something that only the families with children are paying for.

WITH THE ADVENT of what is an almost-mandatory two years of preschool for toddlers, Warren noted that -- in little more than a generation -- we've gone from a shot at a middle-class life requiring 12 years of free education to requiring 18 years of schooling, one-third of which parents are on the hook for.

Now imagine what it's like to be poor in America today . . . because we of the former middle class may all be there soon enough.

Listen my friends . . . to the Moby Grapes

Guten Morgen! This is your daily Omaha or, in this case, your daily "Omaha," with Moby Grape on the Mike Douglas Show in 1968.

Perhaps, though, I ought to just call the seminal psychedelic group "the Moby Grapes," so as to not publicly embarrass the ghost of Mike Douglas. Moby Grape, and the whole counterculture thing, confused Mike*. A lot.

(I had forgotten to add the asterisk to Mike Douglas*, which is a major faux pas for anyone who lived through 1960s and '70s television. Mike Douglas* always gets an *. It may have been somewhere in federal law, actually.)

But, yeah, Moby Grape confused the hell out of Mike* in 1968.


OF COURSE, things had not gotten any better by 1976, when Tom Waits first appeared on The Mike Douglas Show*. Tom Waits may have confused Mike Douglas* even more than "the Moby Grapes" did.

Mainstream America doesn't do eccentricity well. It does "eccentric genius" even less well.

And by the time you're done watching Mike Douglas* and Marvin Hamlisch -- and let's face it, Mike* wasn't musically fit to hold Waits' ashtray -- awkwardly condescend to the young eccentric genius, you have this intense desire to travel back in time, flick your Bic and hold it really close to their polyester duds.

Don't miss the end of the show. Young people's lack of exposure to really, really dumb, really, really awkward spectacles such as that has left them wholly unequipped to deal with a lot of crap life can throw at a person.

Is what I'm saying.

Dear Royals, sign this guy

Pay him what it takes.

But you won't, because perennially losing major-league teams are made, not born.

What we don't know won't hurt BP

We don't know what we don't know about what BP has done to the Gulf of Mexico . . . and all the fish in the sea.

And the Angel of Oily Death is happy to keep it that way.

When you're suspected of criminal acts, and surely liable for God knows how much civilly, you'd just as soon the Almighty be the only one Who knows the full extent of what you've done.

I suspect that's why BP . . . British Petroleum . . . the Angel of Oily Death . . . Those Lousy Rotten Capitalist-Pig Bastards -- whatever the hell you wish to call that destroyer of worlds -- is balking at paying for long-term testing of Gulf seafood.

THIS LITTLE THING is merely crucial in determining whether or not your oyster po-boy is going to send you to an early grave, or whether you're getting a heapin' helpin' of petroleum and Corexit with that shrimp etoufée or crab au gratin. New Orleans' WWL television reports:

State Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham says so far, BP is refusing to commit the dollars.

"BP has been slower and slower in responding to us and seems to be dragging their feet in making a commitment to fund the studies that we're going to need to ensure that this multi-billion dollar industry is viable in Louisiana," said Barham.

BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles says the company is still considering the seafood testing plan.

"Some of those requests went quite far out in time," said Suttles. "They were looking at up to 20 years. At this point in the response, it just isn't appropriate to actually look that far out."

Suttles suggests that the state look at paying for the program with money BP has already pledged to the oil spill recovery effort.

"The gulf research initiative, the $500 million we have made available to do long term impact assessments here in the gulf," said Suttles.

Secretary Barham says if BP doesn't voluntarily agree to the long term seafood testing plan, there are both criminal and civil remedies the state can use in an attempt to force BP to pay up.

It may be more and more difficult to talk to BP," said Barham. "It may be their attorneys that we're talking to."

IT'S ALL ABOUT confidence. It's about whether people are confident that Gulf seafood won't hurt them. It's about whether the Gulf fishing industry will survive or not.

But, hey! The well's no longer gushing! BP figures it's not their problem -- at least not until the law tells them it is.

And the "small people," fishermen and consumers alike, get drilled again.

Why We Bite

In the 1940s, the government propaganda machine revved up to produce the Why We Fight series of films, explaining to ordinary Americans why we were neck deep in the Second World War.

I realize we no longer have the genius of Frank Capra to call upon, but maybe the Ad Council could do something with this old Charles Nelson Reilly commercial to explain to the average Joe how, exactly, we came to be just another banana republic.

Oh, you'll go bananas. . . .

It's a Tony Hayward world out there, and the soon-to-be-ex-BP CEO's monumental solipsism and tone deafness obviously is catching.

The Obama clan has it now, probably transmitted from Mr. Let 'Em Eat Oil to the president when he "kicked" Hayward's ass at that White House confab a while back. And then Barack gave it to Michelle who, while eschewing yachting after killing the Gulf of Mexico, did settle on a high-dollar Spanish fiesta while the American economy burns, the Gulf states smother and the ordinary Joe languishes.

OF COURSE, robber barons and the diffident rich always have behaved so, even throughout American history. But when the First Family starts behaving like Marie Antoinette amid hard times, widespread austerity and spreading decay, you just may find you've become a banana republic.

And even the Australians, a world away, are noticing. Look at this in The Age from Sydney:

As the U.S. economy endures high unemployment and a jittery stock market, President Barack Obama has preached sacrifice and fiscal discipline. But the pictures coming out of a sun-splashed Spanish resort may be sending a different message.

First lady Michelle Obama is in the midst of a five-day trip to a luxury resort along with a handful of friends, her younger daughter, aides and Secret Service. Her office said the Obamas would pay for personal expenses, but would not reveal the taxpayer cost for the government employees.

Elected officials -- Democrats and Republicans -- were reluctant to weigh in, not wanting to appear critical of the President's wife. But the trip provided fodder for television news shows, talk-show hosts and bloggers. Critics portrayed the foreign getaway as tone-deaf to the deep economic anxiety back home. Every first family takes vacations: the criticism aimed at Mrs Obama is that she chose to visit a foreign country rather than remain in the US and support its fragile economy.

Just last month, Mrs Obama flew to the Florida panhandle, a tourist draw hit hard by the oil spill crisis, and delivered the message that for parents "looking for things to do with their kids this summer … this is a wonderful place to visit."

The opulence of the European trip also has drawn scrutiny. Mr Obama has urged frugality in lean economic times. He once cautioned that families saving money for college shouldn't "blow a bunch of cash in Vegas."

AT LEAST in Vegas, there's the slimmest of chances you might hit it big, though. When you're dealing with Washington, politics and the public's bankroll, not so much.

Because while money still talks (in this case, en Español), Obama's bullshit has just taken a walk.