Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
This week, AARP released a Social Security calculator, designed to demonstrate to the bevy of 50 and 60 somethings out there on the verge of retirement, that it is better to wait till age 66 to file for benefits, instead of taking a reduced monthly stipend at age 62.
This, of course, assumes there is a large group of people out there, who would otherwise work till age 65 or 67, but are simply lazy and waiting to take their Social Security benefits so they can put a bumper sticker on their car proclaiming “I’m Spending my Children’s Inheritance,” move to Leisure World and enjoy the senior vida loca.
This is a wrong assumption. Read on »
Tags: aarp, helaine olen, retirement, social security at 62, social security at 66
Posted in Finance, Politics |
Whatever happened between former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the immigrant housekeeper he is (still) charged with sexually assaulting earlier this year is likely destined to remain a murky bit of business. He’s got a record as a sexual harasser, she’s admitted to faking rape previously. Stir in the fact that there are plenty of powerful people who had reason want Strauss-Kahn sidelined, and you have a case that will keep everyone from feminists to Bilderberg types debating for years over what really happened in that $3,000 a night luxury suite at the Sofitel Hotel in Midtown Manhattan this past spring.
Yet, almost unbelievably, there is a victory for women in this sorry saga. Yes, a victory. Really. Read on »
Tags: Anita Hill, dominique strauss-kahn, DSK, DSK rape case, Monica Lewinsky
Posted in Culture, Finance, Politics |
My older son is in junior high school now, and he comes to me frequently with tales of who did what to whom and asking me to weigh in. I almost always determine, after about a minute of listening to the incident of the day, that there are no innocent parties involved in the fracas. “They’re all wrong,” I pronounce.
It’s a concept foreign to most Americans. We like our good guys and our villains. How can they all be wrong? Isn’t there one person more wrong than the other? How can people attempting to do good be so ridiculously and unintentionally awful? How can there be order in the world if we are all, on some level, villains?
No, this isn’t a post about Anthony Weiner and Andrew Breibart, though it could be. Instead, it’s about the article in the New York Times asking why a substantial number of students attending New York’s most elite independent schools need so much tutoring that some of their families are spending more money on private coaches for their children than on the not-unsubstantial tuition bill itself. Exhibit A is the Riverdale Country School, a school, where one anonymous parent ‘fessed up to spending six figures on her progeny’s outside helpers, on top of the school’s $38,800 annual tab to attend. The schools claim to be deeply unhappy about the situation.
When I read through the article, I quickly came to the conclusion it was a textbook case of everyone involved being wrong. Read on »
Tags: anthony weiner, new york city private schools, new york times, riverdale country day, tutors
Posted in Culture, Parenthood, Politics |
I’ll say this for New Jersey blowhard governor Chris Christie: When he performed his Christmas week disappearing act just in time for yet another snowpocalypse, he at least had the brains to leave a Democratic machine politician in charge of things, the sort of guy who knows one of the first rules of northeastern politics is this: do whatever you need to do, make whatever backroom deal you need to make, payoff whomever you need to pay off, but get the goddamn snow off the streets. Fast.
New York City Mayor for Life Mike Bloomberg, cocooned his world of Wall Street privilege, somehow never figured the golden law of snow out. And now word comes down that the city’s snow clean-up disaster might not have been as a result of simple poor planning, but a deliberate campaign of sabotage by the worker bees in the city’s sanitation department.
Well, knock me over with a fucking feather. Read on »
Tags: chris christie, mike bloomberg, new york city sanitation department, new york city snow, snow, snow removal
Posted in Politics |
As many of my friends know, I have a definite thing for the Armageddon types. I suspect I am one of those people who needs to know how much worse things can be before I appreciate what I have in the here and now (Yeah, my health insurance bites! But hey, in five years, things will be so bad we will all be living in tent cities and the plague will come and we will be weeping with nostalgia for the days when we argued over the phone for hours with Betty Jean in Bangalore about our benefits…).
So credit where credit it due. The wonderful George Ure makes predictions based on wave theory and a method in which he tracks word usage on the Internet. I’m not sure I really understand this, but it makes for entertaining, if depressing, reading. Well, a few weeks ago George predicted about 50 bodies would be recovered from the Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Guess how many bodies have been recovered?
As for his predictions for the rest of the year … Mercifully, his track record is not so great, at least according to this list helpfully provided by the folks at Coast to Coast AM. On the other hand, timing one’s predictions can be a tricky thing, so if we experience hyper-inflation, inner city unrest or hear from a NASA whistleblower before the end of 2009, you can credit George for letting you know the news first.
Posted in Culture, Ephemera, Finance, Politics |
The news that shouldn’t be news study of the week comes courtesy of Rutgers University and the journal Politics and Policy. Researchers took a look at the academics offered spots on a number of op-ed pages including the The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The results: men wrote more than 80% of the academic op-eds at The New York Times and — drum roll, please — 97% of such op-eds at The Wall Street Journal. In a demonstration of grace, noblesse oblige and chivalry, editors at the Times and Journal would not comment on the findings.
Posted in Politics |
I decided to not write about Sue Shellenbarger’s most recent Tuesday column when I first read it. I was sure I was overreacting, my fury was so great. So I waited till today and, guess what? It’s even worse than I thought:
Lots of employers would like to be able to hire cheap, temporary teams of seasoned pros with experience managing $2 billion investment portfolios, running ad campaigns or earning Ph.D.s in neuroscience. 
But few know the secret to finding temps of that caliber: Look on playgrounds and at PTA meetings.
The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy “SWAT team.” The acronym, for “smart women with available time,” is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects.
And, in case the word “cheap” did not tip you off to what is going on here, Shellenbarger chirps on:
The University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School was able to muster an “incredibly talented” team with eight at-home mothers – including a Stanford University Ph.D. in neuroscience, a University of Virginia M.B.A., an attorney and a former news executive – by tapping female staffers’ neighborhood networks, says Mindy Storrie, Kenan-Flagler’s director of leadership.
The team taught leadership skills to 100 M.B.A. candidates last year by role-playing difficult management situations with them and critiquing their performances. The simulation training was so successful that enrollment doubled this spring and Kenan-Flagler made it mandatory for leadership training. Cost to the B-school: $21 an hour per woman.
Still don’t get it? Here’s more:
Michelle Fenton used to manage $2 billion in assets for Invesco AIM. But because the Denver executive quit her job a year ago to care for her two children, she was available to work for far less than one-tenth of her former salary to help tiny TangentWorks, a Web project-integration start-up, write a business plan. Her marketing partner on the project, which was staffed by Flexible Executives of Atlanta: Liz Ward, who used to direct the Levi Strauss, Dockers and Pillsbury brands for the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding, then ran her own successful ad consultancy for several years.
For TangentWorks, deploying those two “was like having a C-level team” – chief financial and marketing officers – “without the salaries,” says Zaina Ajakie, CEO of the three-employee firm.
Take out the word “mommy” and replace it with “retirees.” Would Shellenbarger have the nerve to write that old-timers should work cheap because they have the temerity to no longer work full-time in the American workforce? I doubt it very much.
Posted in Finance, Parenthood, Politics, Uncategorized |
A review of The Maternal is Political:
The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change Edited by Shari MacDonald Strong, foreword by Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. Seal, $15.95 paper (280p) ISBN 978-1-58005-243-6
In a raw and emotional literary anthology, 30 women express their frustrations about motherhood, their disappointment with unsupportive work environments and their deep desire for social change. In her debut effort as an anthology editor, Strong brings together voices of veteran and first-time writers in a cacophony of cries that mothering isn’t just personal, it’s political. The stories include Annie Downey, a struggling mother on welfare ; Jennifer Margulis and her husband who, unable to reconcile full-time work and parenting, quit office work and begin a home business; and Helaine Olen’s horror stories of “mean moms” in playgroups who look down on stay-at-home mothers. Anne Lamott writes of the difficulty of espousing a pro-choice position before a largely Catholic audience. This book has a liberal bent, and happy, content mothers don’t get much airtime. Young women considering motherhood may be taken aback by the rage and unchecked anger in some of the essays and the lack of solutions presented. But if shock spurs action, this anthology has done its job. (June)
Posted in Culture, Parenthood, Politics |
There are stories that remind you that the vast majority of issues American parents worry about are absolute bs in the greater scheme of things. This is one of them.
Posted in Love, Parenthood, Politics |
Now that John Edwards has withdrawn from the race for President, I’m planning on voting for Barack Obama.
Posted in Politics |
This week, AARP released a Social Security calculator, designed to demonstrate to the bevy of 50 and 60 somethings out there on the verge of retirement, that it is better to wait till age 66 to file for benefits, instead of taking a reduced monthly stipend at age 62.