From our You Just Can’t Make This Shit Up Dept.: A pair of polo-playing, stretch-Hummer-driving asshats who hope to get their 15 minutes with the Bravo reality-TV show “The Real Housewives of D.C.” crashed Adolf Obama’s first state dinner and subsequently posted pix of their top-shelf grip-‘n’-grins on Facebook.
A publicist named Mahogany Jones, an unavailable Hollywood shyster called Paul W. Gardner Esq., and a Secret Service with egg all over its face — hey, what’s not to like? Especially if you’re a writer for Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or SNL.
Barbara Ehrenreich is at it again, this time in The New York Times op-ed section, reminding us that the “Nouveau Poor” aren’t the only story out there. The author of “Nickel and Dimed” has revisited some of the people she met while working on that 2001 book, reconnecting with “the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times.” Writes Ehrenreich:
Larry Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, offers data showing that blue-collar unemployment is increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment. The last two recessions — in the early ’90s and in 2001 — produced mass white-collar layoffs, and while the current one has seen plenty of downsized real-estate agents and financial analysts, the brunt is being borne by the blue-collar working class, which has been sliding downward since deindustrialization began in the ’80s.
What are they doing? Moving in with already-overcrowded relatives, stripping, hunting urban game like squirrels, and plummeting “from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all.”
“In good times and grim ones,” Ehrenreich writes, “the misery at the bottom just keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due.” It’s the first in a series of such articles; stay tuned.
Now there's a Mavic wheel for ya: Open Pro rims, stainless-steel DT spokes and Dura-Ace hubs. And the only thing cracked, broken or bent is the sumbitch ridin' it.
I don’t want to turn this site into a poor imitation of the DrunkCyclist “Biker down” series, but you really should check out this article by VeloNews editor in chief Ben Delaney — especially if you’re riding a Mavic R-Sys wheelset (even a post-recall version). He had a post-recall front wheel explode underneath him during a race and took a header, breaking his shoulder.
Ben and I have always ridden Mavic wheels, and will continue to do so — but only steel-spoked models. For years the wheel of choice around here was the Excel Sports Cirrus, a pair of 32-hole Open Pros laced to Dura-Ace hubs with DT spokes. That wheel has been replaced by the Nimbus, which uses Ultegra hubs, but I’m still riding my old Cirrus wheelsets on two ‘cross bikes. Nary a broken spoke in many a bumpy mile.
I also like the Neuvation wheels — I have a pair of R28 SL3s on my road bike, and they’ve been rock-solid (plus the prices are killer, especially right now).
• John Crandall update: Kathy Crandall reports that John had a good day yesterday — pain under control with medication and “lots of physical therapy,” including a device similar to a recumbent bicycle. “In occupational therapy he got to take a shower … first one in 11 days,” she adds. I’ll bet that felt good.
• One less psycho on the roads: And finally, the driver who killed two Colorado Cyclist employees is in the hoosegow for three years. Barbara Thomas was stoned on prescription morphine and barbituates and driving without her glasses when she swerved her 1986 F-350 into a pack of cyclists at 26th Street and Westend Avenue, killing Jayson Kilroy, 28, and Edgar “E.J.” Juarez, 30.
Police reportedly said Thomas had been shoplifting at the Safeway on West Colorado Avenue and clipped a man’s car in the parking lot before driving off toward the fatal collision. She also had quite the rap sheet — an outstanding summons for a hit-and-run two months previous, four shoplifting convictions, a citation for drinking in a vehicle and minor traffic infractions, according to the Bibleburg Gaslight.
That a 64-year-old woman who takes 18 daily meds to control pulmonary disease and arthritis is rolled away to the slammer in a wheelchair, clutching an oxygen tank, is not a moment for glee. But I can’t conceive of any suitable alternative. Unless it would be jailing the family members who let her careen around town, full of drugs, in a one-ton truck.
• Plenty more where she came from: You think that’s bad? Take a squint at this. There are 53,201 people who have three or more drunken-driving offenses in Colorado? Jesus H. Christ. I may never ride the roads again.
The Aztec sun god Tonatiuh, a life-taker and heart-breaker.
More snow. Feh. The sun god Tonatiuh is angry. Let us feed him the hearts of American auto industry executives and beg his forgiveness in order that spring may return.
I’m not quite certain what to think about the feds getting all medieval on Detroit. I don’t have any sympathy for The Big 3’s management — my second and last American auto was a 1996 Ford F-150 that was possessed by evil spirits, and it’s been nothing but Subarus and Toyotas around here since — but you have to feel for the grunts who actually made things over the years instead of shuffling worthless pieces of paper around. As usual, the shit will roll downhill, and the working stiffs will be inhabiting a dank and smelly valley.
Over at The Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris sees some useful lessons from previous federal interventions in the railroad industry, a tale told by Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation. Meanwhile, dday and Josh Marshall wonder why it’s all hugs and kisses for bank execs but cold shoulder for the auto bosses.
Myself, I’d like to know when the crucial cycling-humor industry will be getting its fingers off the keyboard and into Uncle Sam’s bottomless pockets. I need a new snow shovel, and I’ll be happy to surrender my private jet if that’s what it takes.
Late update: Also at Washington Monthly, Hilzoy opines on “cramdowns,” or allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce homeowners’ mortgage principle, noting that “it’s no good trying, for instance, to save GM if we don’t have customers who are able and willing to buy cars. As any number of commenters have said, we need to shore up the not just businesses’ balance sheets, but consumers’, since if they are not able and willing to spend, then even the best-run businesses will fail.” Well said.
In Sacramento, a tent city that has sprung up near the American River already has some 300 residents and is growing like the proverbial weed as working-class people join the chronically homeless in life in the great outdoors.
A spokeswoman for a Sacramento non-profit that provides “survival services” for the neo-homeless told The New York Times that the number of unsheltered people in her town rose 26 percent in one year:
“We have lots of folks living in their cars. People are buying storage units and living in them. People are trying to do what they can to put a roof over their head. Sometimes people romanticize camping, that they are free spirits. In fact, it’s an act of desperation.”
There are many such Hoovervilles in Bibleburg, albeit on a smaller scale. Walk 10 minutes north or west from Dog Central and you will see a cheap tent here, a ragged bedroll there; head south along the Monument Creek trail and you’ll see the po’-folks’ version of the RV camp — battered shopping carts and bicycles, and the soup kitchens and shelters just a short hop away.
Seven hundred people eat daily at the Marian House Soup Kitchen, up 40 percent from last year, according to the Gazette. And with unemployment up to 8.1 percent as of January — the highest level in nearly 17 years — they’re not likely to get lonely anytime soon.
Elsewhere, a Yale student is suing US Airways over a lost Xbox 360. He wants a million smacks for his pain and suffering, plus $1,700 to replace the hardware. A guy could buy himself a sweet little tent for that kind of money, and maybe a shopping cart to go with it.
Mad Blog Media 