Atrios pegged it: “Assholes. Move back to the suburbs.”

Because for more than two years, the 32-story Symphony House, the new kid on the block, has been embroiled in a pitched battle with the venerable Jamaican Jerk Hut, the popular eatery two blocks away that has been a South Street mainstay for more than 20 years.

Some Symphony House residents want to pull the plug on the Jerk Hut’s live reggae music, which it offers to customers on the lot next to the restaurant on weekends in spring and summer months.

That the city Zoning Board of Adjustment in July ruled in the Jerk Hut’s favor hasn’t stopped Symphony House from filing an appeal with Common Pleas Court.

Which means thousands of dollars more in attorneys’ fees out of owner Lisa Wilson’s pocket.

“This has been killing our business,” laments Wilson, whose outdoor operation, which accounts for 70 percent of business, was forced to go dark in 2009 while she waited for the Zoning Board’s decision.

“They’re hoping to get us to go away,” sighs Wilson, who concedes it might just happen. “I hate to say it, but I can’t continue to fight with these people.”

via Annette John-Hall: Jamaican Jerk Hut vs. Symphony House | Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/07/2011.

The city is loud and interesting and unique and crowded and diverse and it has value. If you move downtown in the 6th largest city in America, for the summer months and on holiday weekends and the like: you are going to see/hear people celebrate, perform or express themselves. If you don’t like that, move to the suburbs.

Kevin Drum on the relation of executive pay to actual executive performance vs. the industry standards:

This, to me, has always been the smoking gun in conversations about executive pay. If corporate executives are really being paid for performance, they should be paid richly if their performance is significantly better than the competition and less if their performance is worse. They shouldn’t be paid richly if their performance merely matches the overall growth rate of their industry or the economy as a whole. For the most part, though, that’s exactly how they’ve been paid ever since the early 80s. Merely average performance drives outlandish pay increases, and the penalty for poor performance is almost nonexistent. Corporate executives, as a group, are wildly risk averse, and over the past few decades have mostly been paid simply for going along for the ride when the economy is doing well.

via Pay for Non-Performance | Mother Jones.

Unlike union laborers, teachers and federal employees, no one will ever challenge the pay, bonus and benefits packages awarded the captains of industry, because they “create jobs” (even when they slash jobs with massive layoffs to maintain revenue numbers).

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”

– Stephen Colbert

via Suburban Guerrilla » Blog Archive » Quote of the day.

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s penned an impassioned rebuke of Sarah Palin’s attempt to compare herself to a young Ronald Reagan and denigrate George H.W. Bush as a “blue blood”. Really Scarborough is attempting to elevate two of his favorite fellow GOPers.

Palin is not a stupid woman. But like the current president, she still does not know what she does not know. And she does know how to make millions of dollars, even if she embarrasses herself while doing it.

That reality hardly makes Palin unique, but this is one Republican who would prefer that the former half-term governor promote her reality shows and hawk her books without demeaning the reputations of Presidents Reagan and Bush. These great men dedicated their lives to public service and are too good to be fodder for her gaudy circus sideshow.

If Republicans want to embrace Palin as a cultural icon whose anti-intellectualism fulfills a base political need, then have at it. I suppose it’s cheaper than therapy.

But if the party of Ronald Reagan, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio wants to return to the White House anytime soon, it’s time that Republican leaders started standing up and speaking the truth to Palin.

via GOP should take on Palin – POLITICO.com Print View.

Scarborough is actually equating Obama and Palin’s intellectual rigor.

like the current president, she does not know what she does not know.

Scarborough’s peddling of Obama as arrogant and empty suit meme. He is equating perceived missteps that have arisen under Obama’s governance during two wars and the worst economic climate since the depression to the vapidness of Sarah Palin’s political side show as she appears on reality shows and retweets Jim DeMint’s nonsense.

The bait and switch occurs where the single term president, George H.W. Bush is replaced with Republicans Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio as party vanguards. Rubio and Ryan are Scarborough’s guys, standard bearers of his personal conservative vision. Look for Scarborough to uphold them as “common sense” “states rights” “small government” conservatives (whatever that means) from here on out. Scarborough is more about them than he is not about Sarah Palin.

Except it does. I adamantly agree with Atrios‘s criticism of the premise of this NY Times article: Columbia Drug Case Isn’t Notable, Except for Address – NYTimes.com. Yes, if the people were just dealing drugs in the surrounding Harlem neighborhoods and they were from Harlem, the case wouldn’t be notable. Except they were dealing drugs on an Ivy League campus, so THAT makes it notable.

It is notable, it isn’t unheard of (even at the best schools) and it is some sh*t that has and will occur when you throw thousands of people aged 18 and 22 into co-educational, loosely supervised academic environment: some will use illegal drugs, and they will probably try and get it from their classmates.

63-33.

Road is open to passing repeal of DADT.

55-41.

It isn’t the president that isn’t sufficiently liberal, it’s the filibuster that is insufficiently progressive.

on to DADT.

It seems most people do not want to tax people for making a lot of money as much as they want to tax people who they think didn’t earn it and no segment of the top 1% of earners is more frowned upon than the “Wall Street” banker.

In a Bloomberg poll, 88% of respondents said that Wall Street bonuses should either be banned outright or taxed at 50%.

via Wall Street bonus datapoint of the day | Analysis & Opinion |.

17% of those polled wanted bonuses taxed at 50%. 71% wanted them banned. Goes to show that it’s a much tougher road uphill to make the case that US CEOs of public companies are being overpaid and the way executive compensation can be challenged.

As for other money issues in public opinion, Derek Thompson flags the Washington Post poll on the Obama tax compromise:

According to a Washington Post poll, two in three Americans support the tax deal, including 75 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats and Independents. But when you break down support for each provision, you see something very strange indeed: Americans support extended unemployment benefits most of them won’t receive, and shrinking an estate tax most of them won’t have to pay; but they do not support the plan to cut payroll taxes for almost all working Americans. (Huh?)

[…]

Totally mystifying. Unemployment benefits are fine stimulus policy, but fewer than a tenth of the population will benefit from this extension. A minuscule number of Americans were in danger of dying with enough wealth to trigger the old estate tax. On the other hand, a payroll tax cut would save a $50K earner about a thousand dollars and a $100K earner about two thousand dollars. This is a huge tax cut. Americans like tax cuts. Do Americans really think this is a bad idea?

via The Claim: Obama’s Middle Class Stimulus Actually an Unpopular, GOP Trojan Horse That Rips Off the Poor – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic.

As far as who benefits from unemployment benefits, the reality is with u3+u6 around 20% many people know someone who is unemployed or underemployed. Respondents know these situations with income upheaval can be scary and for a lot of folks can be literally be pushed to the brink of poverty. Unless they are conservatives, they probably are okay with the idea of extending unemployment benefits because they would rather not have the tough times created by this downturn push more folks into poverty.

I don’t know if people think it’s a “bad idea” to get a payroll tax holiday. I think people think getting a payroll tax holiday in this economy is not the best idea with all the scare mongering about the deficit. It’s a tax holiday for people who are working and can put food on the table, roofs over their heads and gifts under their trees.

As far as the estate tax, I think that it goes back to my prior point about Wall Street bonuses. The American people, in general, don’t have it out against rich people and actually are fond of a lot of rich people, the idea of being rich and the slim but ever marketed chance that we may be rich (Buffet, Gates, Jobs, Oprah, people on MTV cribs, CEOs glamorized on Undercover Bosses, etc). I think American people have it out for rich people they believe to be overpaid, incompetent or negligent and don’t deserve to be rich (John Thain, executives of Bear Sterns, Lehman Bros.) or people who outright broke the law to get rich (Madoffs, Kenny Lays, Blankenship). It’s why the implausible “bonus clawback” idea was so popular.

I would bet it’s how people empathize with the who gets what that moves those polls when it comes to tax cuts, social benefits and other federal expenditure.

That was the cold callous efficacy of the Reagan welfare queen demagoguery used to begin dismantling our social support systems for the poor: it’s not that welfare is bad, it’s just that some people on it are really bad.

A statesperson is a diplomat that understands that power and brute force are not the same thing.

He quickly developed a reputation for writing brash but influential memos, earning the nickname “the Bulldozer.” In November 1967, Mr. Holbrooke drafted one such document, a 17-page paper for President Lyndon B. Johnson in the name of Nicholas Katzenbach, then the undersecretary of state, that argued that North Vietnam was winning the battle for public opinion in the United States.

“Hanoi uses time the way the Russians used terrain before Napoleon’s advance on Moscow, always retreating, losing every battle, but eventually creating conditions in which the enemy can no longer function,” he wrote. “For Napoleon it was his long supply lines and the cold Russian winter; Hanoi hopes that for us it will be the mounting dissension, impatience, and frustration caused by a protracted war without fronts or other visible signs of success; a growing need to choose between guns and butter; and an increasing American repugnance at finding, for the first time, their own country cast as ‘the heavy.’ ”

via Richard Holbrooke dies: Veteran U.S. diplomat brokered Dayton peace accords.