One damned thing after another.
I also collect 24 research papers that have to be graded by Thursday morning. Friday morning I give my final exams and have to turn those around by Monday. Then it's comment writing time.
It could be worse, I suppose. I could - like My Most Wondrous and Delectable Wife - be a class dean and have to write an additional 40 letters.
So, I leave you with this from Charlie Pierce:
The president had a plan to put people to work repairing this country's disgraceful infrastructure. This was knocked down in the Congress, not because it wouldn't work, but because it might. I would like any of the glibertarian nitwits who scorn these kinds of programs to explain to a father of three that he's better off working six weeks stocking Chinese-made crap at some electronics-store chain than he would be working for a year fixing a bridge, or building a water-treatment plant, or retrofitting a building with energy-saving technology. I grow tired of the prevailing assumption that we are simply a nation of temp workers in waiting. You can take your grandchildren to see a bridge you built. (I knew old WPA hands who did exactly that, and there was a railroad bridge out in the woods in the state forest in which I once worked that old folks would walk down the trails just to visit.) Work has to be more than a paycheck graciously granted to you by some board of directors that might as well be on Mars. People want more than jobs. They want to produce something. They want to contribute to something bigger than themselves that isn't necessarily The Company.
Instead, we get vague promises of a golden age of global capitalism. We get invective about the unemployed, and those people who are outside yelling at the buildings wherein the lifeblood of the American economy continues to be siphoned off into business that produce nothing. And eight percent of us could be building bridges, and are not.
Politically, this should be unsurvivable. For anyone. Politically, this should be a more serious bit of business than who got jiggy with whom back way back in the day. Politically, this should be the moment at which the country adopts this blog's fundamental economic theory:
Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money.
Instead, things are looking up!
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/job-numbers-for-november-2011-6607826#ixzz1fTrECjmd
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