Bathtub instant profundity, 1

Clearing out a backlog.

1. Turns out that tax cuts don’t spur jobs development.  An economist at Berkeley finds that any job stimulus from tax cuts comes from tax cuts to the middle class and poor — in other words, the people who instantly stimulate demand by spending on needed goods and services.
2. On-line version of the Library of Congress’s exhibit, “88 Books that Shaped America.”  In case you can’t make it to D.C. soon.
3. Kennedy’s speech at Rice University, “We Choose to Go to the Moon,” was on September 12, 1962.  That was also the ninth anniversary of his marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier.  She let him go out of town to talk rockets?
4. Thomas B. Edsall makes the case that Paul Ryan’s budget, or any version of it (like the Romney plan), would be an economic disaster for the nation, in at article titled “The Ryan Sinkhole.” Why don’t the Republicans ever listen to economists?
5. Those “work requirements” that Ryan insists Obama has illegally stripped from law, to the great detriment of the work ethic in the U.S.?  Not only did Mitt Romney ask for them, when he was governor of Massachusetts, but earlier this year Ryan voted “yes” on a House bill to do exactly what Obama is trying to do.  Can’t Ryan keep his own stories straight?
6. Graphic shows that summers in the U.S. are getting warmer.  More evidence for warming denialists to deny!
7. More GOP election fraud, this time in California.
8. It is said God looks out for drunks and babies; can we make a case that our government works better with more drunks in elective office?  David Frum discusses. (I actually have some thoughts and experience in this area . . . when to find time to discuss?)  There’s a video there, but not in a format I can embed here easily — go see.
9. Jim Hightower tells a scary story of a coup d’etat within the borders of the United States, in Michigan.  Imaginary?  This is a guy who doesn’t see UFOs, who isn’t afraid of black helicopters . . .
10. New studies on colony collapse disorder affecting especially commercial beehives suggests insecticides, and substances related to insecticides, may be hammering our bees; worse, EPA has known about it, but kept quiet.  Reported readably in New Yorker, 50 years after that magazine serialized a book named Silent Spring.  Rachel Carson’s Ghost joins Santayana’s Ghost pacing America, nervously, as if to awaken us all . . .

More:

• No early voting hurting Pa? (earlyreturns.post-gazette.com)
• Tax Cuts and Jobs (stockfessor.wordpress.com)
• Paul Krugman: Ryan’s budget plan is a con game that will raise the deficit (sacbee.com)
• Does a Romney-Ryan Ticket Really Ensure a Clash of Visions? – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
• What Is Paul Ryan’s Job on the Romney Campaign? (theatlanticwire.com)
• Jim Hightower: Romney Runs away from his Running Mate (yubanet.com)