HARD SELL.Tony Fabrizio writes about a gap between "perception" and "reality." Those terms take me back -- as I suppose they're meant to -- to the old Rolling Stone ad campaign, targetting media buyers and meant to demonstrate that the boomers whom buyers might have written off as shiftless hippies were actually quite loaded with disposable income. (Perception was a crappy Volkswagen, Reality was a Mercedes, etc.) Fabrizio, though, has a difference dichotomy in mind:

At the national level unemployment is down to 5.6 percent from 6.3 percent one year ago. The economy is creating jobs at a steady rate and economists predict solid job creation through the end of this year...

But, despite the hard data on jobs creation, the voters aren't yet buying it. Therein lays the "gap" and the political challenge.

The signal difference between Fallon McElligott Rice's campaign and Fabrizio's is not that the former was trying to sell ad space and the latter is trying to sell Bush. It is that the Stone ads told their audience about a useful service they may have misperceived, whereas Fabrizio suggests that the voters have misperceived their own situation -- with the help of duplicitous Democrats:

The Kerry team, in contrast, is hoping it can keep as many voters as possible on board the Pessimism Express to the November elections. They can't attack the current job-growth numbers, but they clearly will try to muddy the waters by talking down the economy and talking up jobs lost since January 2001. And this makes the rhetoric over the economy a contest between job losses of the past and job growth of the future...

Put this way, it sounds as if Kerry et alia were engaged in negative advertising to wrench the buyer's loyalty from its current product of choice toward a new competitor. But negative advertising doesn't work if the consumer has no reason to be dissatisfied with the performance of his current choice. (Fabrizio should know: he worked for Bob Dole's attempt to unseat Clinton in '96.)

I think it's fair to assume that advertising would be different in general if you had to choose a deodorant every four years and stick with it. And it's just plain true that worries over employment and employability in any given community are a hell of a lot more crucial to voters than whether they'll be liking Speed Stick as much in '07 as they do in '04.

So hammering the dissonance between the national job numbers and what someone in, say, Columbus, Ohio thinks is happening to his local economy -- and himself, and his family -- doesn't necessarily mean that the Ohio native is wrong and should just trust the numbers or the experts patiently explaining them. The Economist may tell you that though job outsourcing means "individuals will be hurt in the process," still "jobs will be created that demand skills to handle the deeper incorporation of information technology, and the pay for these jobs will be high." But if you're a telemarketer with no hope of becoming a programmer or data analyst any time soon, and people are being fired all around you, you probably won't count yourself an unlettered dunce for worrying about it. And if the Wall Street Journal tells you that the Kerry campaign's claims of a decline in wages is "just the gap between wages and 'what they would have been given historical wage growth,'" your reaction to this news will be strongly affected by whether or not you see stores closing all around you, sick days cut, and prices and interest rates moving beyond your reach -- certainly more strongly than by WSJ's assurances that "the return of 'McJobs' rhetoric means that an [economic] expansion is in full swing."

Maybe we'll be rolling in dough by November, but telling people that prosperity is just around the corner isn't a winning strategy no matter how confidently you shake your slide rule as you say it.

THE KIDS AIN'T TOO BRIGHT. "'What is emerging,' writes [Kay] Hymowitz, 'is a vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and, yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry.' That's trouble, I believe, for the Democratic party..." -- James Glassman. (Coming up next: improved Crest Whitening Strips spell doom for Kerry.)

This beautiful piece of reasoning is part an article talking about how right-wing wonderful the kids are getting to be. Philosophe de biscuit-baril Reynolds offers a qualified endorsement, calling the new teen craze a "pro-gay-marriage, libertarian kind of conservatism" -- which is to say, the sort of "Eagle" conservatism Andrew Sullivan thinks is going to sweep the country right after our current batch of living, breathing conservatives gets through herding gay people into concentration camps.

Their fodder is something called the Mood of American Youth Survey -- an annual report, the San Jose Mercury News tells us, put out by the Horatio Alger Association, at whose site you can read the thing.

75% of the high-school students polled "feel hopeful and optimistic about the future." 52% say they spend between one to five hours a week on homework. (I notice, though, there is no category for "less than one hour.") 90% of them feel that "feeling personally satisfied" is "very important to success."

The one explicitly political issue, the War, finds 58% in favor. Only 21% plan on joining the military, though. (Hey -- maybe they are Republicans.)

They all love Mom and Dad lots and lots, and 49% of them -- surprise! -- are looking at "technology" as a career.

100% of them own a television.

Why don't we just lower the voting age to 13? They're obviously qualified to lead.

Now, I can understand the conservatives' desire to claim the love of the Young. I too feel that desire, particularly when I see pictures like this. But I don't go around telling people that Scarlett Johannson is going to marry me.

There are other dissonances in the rightwing youthquake thing. Glassman and Reynolds are reacting to polling data on how the young people feel. I thought the primacy of feelings was a liberal racket -- you know, the cult of self-esteem and all that.

If the American conservative movement is supposed to be something greater than a bunch of drunk fratboys punching each other in the chest and surreptitiously trying to brush up against their female R.A. -- actually that's probably as high as they're aiming, but let's keep the debate elevated for a few more minutes anyway -- why are they so interested in the hormone-driven emotions of teens? Supposing the pollsters had also asked, "Which would be more tight -- an iPod that you could plug into your eyes and it would show movies, or one that shoots webs like Spider Man?" How might the skew on that affect the 2012 Iowa Caucuses?

A more useful foreshadow of the kids' beliefs might be what they think about things like the economy, foreign policy, white-collar crime, social-security reform, environmental policy -- you already see where this is going, don't you?

I hate to play the bitter old crank here (oh, who am I kidding, it's the role that made me famous) -- but really, who cares what young people think? According to a National Geographic Society poll, among even older kids (18-24) only 13% could locate Iraq on a map. To be fair, a whopping 30% could locate New Jersey. If the 2002 Zogby survey is right, and today's college seniors are about as well-educated as high-school seniors were 50 years ago, I shudder to think where this puts today's high-schoolers.

There's a reason for that. They're children. Do you remember high school? How smart were you? No, I don't mean "How many teachers said you were smart," or "How many of your classmate found you intellectually stimulating," I mean how genuinely intelligent were you at 16? Would the current you even want to talk to the 16-year-old you?

I think the cons are betting that the kids won't get any brighter and will make all their future voting decisions based on inchoate (and easily orchestrated) feelings of rage and nationalism. They may be right. 75% of the kids are hopeful and optimistic, and they all have their own TVs.

COMRADES! IS MAKING UNFUNNY THIS SIMPSONS FOR TREASON! PLEASE NOT TO LAUGH! "I was wondering, Jonah, what you would nominate as the worst episode ever. The question came to mind last night as I watched, for the second time, the one where the family is sent to a re-education camp for being unpatriotic. I've seen several episodes with politics I disliked, but never before one that was so unrelentingly unfunny. Any others come to mind?" -- NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru. Was it less funny the first or the second time, Comrade Ponnuru? Also, please tell us which Family Guy jokes are politically incorr-- I mean, counter-reaganrevolutionary.

It gets harder for normal people to be conservative. For years the cons have been under bizarre sexual prohibitions, and now they are obliged to find The Onion unfunny and witless propaganda like this amusing.

Maybe NRO's first spin-off should be an American version of Krokidil, so true believers needn't expose themselves to socially retrograde humor.

WILD IN THE STREETS. Boy. I just thought of it as good material for some weak gags, but some people really seem to believe that evil hippies will go apeshit during the Republican Convention. Writes Michele Catalano, in a piece that really needs to be read aloud over swelling choruses of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, "I've got better things to worry about then getting hit on the head with a brick meant for Starbucks... I'll be damned if I'm going to go out at the hands of some wannabe hippie who smashes my head instead of smashing the state. But if a chain of events should occur that has that scenario playing out, my last words will be, 1968. I told you so."

The ones she should really be watching out for are the Protest Warriors, right-wing kids who relentlessly seek confrontation and coverage by major media, who promise to send hundreds of their troops to counter-demonstrate during the Convention.

These kids seem nice, but wrapped a little tight. Here we see one of their number, documenting lovingly his own fight to keep a bunch of political flyers he put up in his school from being taken down. One admires his, and his colleagues', youthful brio and romantic isolation ("keep fighting the good fight, even if it isn't the popular thing to do. You might feel alone in your struggle, but you are not..."), if not their equally youthful obnoxiousness, sophistry ("'Rednecks?' A sign can't have the word 'Arab,' which isn't a racial slur, but she can say 'rednecks'?"), and homosexual panic. But I can't imagine they'll be very happy Warriors in Manhattan; stranded for days on an island teeming with wrong-thinking blue-state citizens who will not be so eager to play verbal patty-cake with them as the saps back at their high schools, they may get testy and paranoid. It will be very hot out in the streets, and if there's ever been a situation in which a would-be Debate Club President might lose his cool, this would be it.

None of which means I don't welcome them here. It'll be lively outside MSG, but as a longtime New Yorker I've seen my share of lively, and the cops know their jobs. So come on down, kids. Just remember to hydrate.

UPDATE. Reader Myca offers this account of a Protest Warrior counterdemo. Apparently part of their schtick is videotaping the people they're protesting, which makes me wonder if they're not getting adult supervision from PW Fanboy David Horowitz, who has been known to do surveillance of his enemies in the past.

DEFINING JOURNALISM DOWN. I really do wish I were conservative sometimes, not only because the resulting reduction in brain activity might ease these horrible, horrible headaches, but also because it would increase my chances of publishing stuff that I had written while drunk or half-asleep or both, as demonstrated by this National Review Online article: A right-wing professor goes to Taxachusetts, where he finds feminist professors deconstructing Nathaniel Hawthorne. They do not share his distaste for Hester Prynne's adultery, so he makes fun of them. ("Fun" is used here in the familiar colloquial sense, not to imply that there is any actual fun to be had from the professor's account.) He runs into some Japanese people who don't say anything feminist, so he doesn't make fun of them -- actually he doesn't do much of anything with them. Then he runs into a tour guide who tells him more about the architecture of the House of the Seven Gables than he wants to know, so he calls the guide "jejune," an academic term that translates roughly as "Target store clerk insufficiently bent to my will" in Lileksese.

Imagine going on little adventures like this, making only such observations as flatter the prejudices of one's publisher, cutting and pasting them into more-or-less chronological order, submitting them to an editor with a strong stomach, and collecting for this modest effort a paycheck! No wonder they're always so cheerful over there.

FUCK YOU, EH. There is more imbecilism in this OpinionJournal thing about an American and a Canadian town than I want to spend much time addressing. I will just point out that, in comparing the "faceless bureaucracy" town of Stewart unfavorably to the "politically incorrect" town of Hyder ("politically incorrect" being, in rightwing world, a term of approbation, unless you're talking about sex or something evil like that), the authors find it necessary (in anticipation of adversarial journalistic answer, no doubt) to say that both municipalities accept beaucoup government largesse, that "in an earlier year's self-staged July 4 fireworks display, [Hyder] had accidentally burned down their fire hall with the fire engine inside," and that "The people of Hyder and Stewart are not nearly so different as they make themselves [sic] seem. They're friends, they go back and forth frequently, and they do a lot of the same kinds of work. It's not so much that they are different as individuals as that they choose to be different as communities."

In other words, they live peaceably together, though some of the people like to hang loose and some of the people like to hang tight.

Nonetheless, the OJ article seeks to show that the wild 'n' crazy free-marketeers of Hyder (and, by association, the tough-talking authors of this piece of shit) are morally superior to low-key residents of Stewart, and (by means of quotes from cowboy movies) to fan up some heat between the two apparently harmonious communities.
 
Having some Canadian ancestry and experience myself, I would imagine the good citizens of Stewart will find some quiet, polite way to express disapproval of this un-asked for incendiarism -- perhaps a gastask full of sugar -- in the unlikely event these social scientists happen back that way.

MY UNRINGING ENDORSEMENT. I have read the Democratic Party Platform, and found it full of the bland generalities and meaningless catch-phrases that have made America great. Nonetheless I am impressed with some of the concrete proposals, such as:

More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia still has nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons and enough nuclear material to produce 50,000 more. For most of these weapons and materials, cooperative security upgrades have not been completed. The world is relying on whatever measures Russia has taken on its own. At the current pace, it will take 13 years to secure potential bomb material in the former Soviet Union. We cannot wait that long. We will do it in four years.

Best of luck, President Kerry, especially after the Congress rushes for the exits when President Putin, in whose soulless, murderer’s eyes President Bush II found such deep reservoirs of fellow-feeling, turns out his pockets to dramatically indicate his complete inability to assist in this badly needed project.

But let us absent ourselves from pessimism awhile and consider some platform boilerplate that does indeed gladden the heart:

Today's tax law provides big breaks for companies that send American jobs overseas. Current "deferral" policies allow American companies to avoid paying American taxes on the income earned by their foreign subsidiaries. John Kerry and John Edwards will end deferral that encourages companies to ship jobs overseas, and they will close other loopholes to make the tax code work for the American worker…

President Bush and the Republicans in Congress have ignored the middle class since day one of this Administration. They have catered to the wealth of the richest instead of honoring the work of the rest of us. They have promised almost everything and paid for almost nothing. And the middle class is shouldering more taxes, earning less money, and bearing higher costs. The bottom line for the middle class under President Bush and the Republican Party is this: Instead of working hard to get ahead, the middle class is working hard just to get by…

First, we must restore our values to our tax code. We want a tax code that rewards work and creates wealth for more people, not a tax code that hoards wealth for those who already have it. With the middle class under assault like never before, we simply cannot afford the massive Bush tax cuts for the very wealthiest. We should set taxes for families making more than $200,000 a year at the same level as in the late 1990s, a period of great prosperity when the wealthiest Americans thrived without special treatment…

While this falls far short of the alicublog plan, which involves the entrails of priests and the necks of tyrants -- and what is this "middle class" to which the authors refer, and how may I, a humble salaryman with no hope of owning a home or car anytime soon, join it? -- it is still refreshing to hear of mainstream politicians with some hope of attaining Executive power address, however feebly, the savage inequity in relations between the haves and the have-increasingly-lesses. Saint Ralph may be more pure, but the Big Stiff and his charismatic teen sidekick have at least some shot at adjusting the machinery of power a little more in favor of us hapless unbillionaires, and in these parlous times that will have to do.

ALSO, THOMAS HARRIS IS NOT A SERIAL KILLER, AND CARL SANDBURG WAS NOT ABRAHAM LINCOLN.National Review Online advances its willful misunderstanding of simple reality a great deal with this incoherent Mark W. Davis piece:

Alfred A. Knopf... has decided that it is now acceptable to sell, as edgy entertainment, Checkpoint, a novella by Nicholson Baker that explores explicit fantasies about killing President George W. Bush...

Davis appears to have heard about a character in the book who has these fantasies. But unlike you arty-farty literary types, he considers the words "character" and "author" to be synonyms:

The author and publisher, no doubt, will argue that they are expressing an emotion, not an intention (which would be illegal). The problem is, intentions emerge out of emotions.... Checkpoint, whatever its literary conceits, will be an act of linguistic terrorism...

Sometimes you wonder whether they're dumb or malign, but here it's easy. If Davis were really as stupid as he's pretending to be, he wouldn't be able to write complete sentences.

ALICUBLOG CHARGES THE MOUND.As usual, the All-Star Game sucked -- not as much at the 2002 "fuck this, let's quit" All-Star Game, but at that one you at least got to watch the fans boo and throw things at millionaires. This year's was just tedious.

The bright note came early, though, with the shelling of the despicable Roger Clemens in the first inning. This will likely be the Rocket's last nationally-televised appearance (at least until he becomes Governor of Texas and starts running executions in prime-time, personally triggering each lethal injection by throwing a fastball at those clown-dunk-cage targets hooked up to a hypodermic), and it's nice to see him go out a goat.

As a Mets fan, of course, I already have more than one reason to dislike Clemens. I got to dislike him more when I saw him on the David Letterman show, joking about the rumors that Piazza is gay. It takes a special type of barbarism to almost kill a guy, then crack lame fag jokes about him. (Clemens also said on this occasion that he has two high-inside pitches, the second of which is thrown "so they don't think the first one's a mistake.")

I merely nodded when Clemens screwed the Yankees because, well, it was the Yankees. Still, it was piquant that "Pinstripe Pride," regarded by its acolytes of some sort of magical force, turned out to be no impediment at all to the Clemens self-actualization program; one could enjoy, in a mordant way, the image of Clemens accepting New York's delirious ovations and free cars and press panegyrics at the end of the 2003 season, with a little thought balloon drawn over his head, reading "Suckers."

I give the closing to, of all people, a New York Post reporter (but one working at that paper's relatively serious sports desk), Mike Vaccaro, who wrote brilliantly today:

Clemens, to the end, has believed he alone is entitled to invoke his will on everyone and everything around him. He has his own set of rules around the Astros, he is allowed to live his own life, be his own man, worry about the team when he feels like it. When Barry Bonds makes these demands, he is filleted from coast to coast as a me-first, ego-centric blowhard; Clemens' apologists present him as a caring family man.

FUCKING HIPPIES. Let me say on the record that I am very much against anything that screws up the trains. Can't you guys get up a nude love-in or something? Oh, and bring back Pigasus!

BTW, rncnotwelcome.org seems like it has its heart in the right place (I didn't find anything in their onsite search feature for "gelginite," and they linked, albeit indirectly, with this) but I have to say I got a few laughs out of the "City Living" section. Among the tips:

First of all, you have to remember a few things about New York delis: This is not Starbucks...

So don't throw a trashcan through the window after you get your coffee. Peace out!

PLAN B. Now that some Republicans are trying to draft Chicago Bears legend Mike Ditka as their latest "oh, why the hell not" celebrity nominee, I think it's time Democrats one-upped them by drafting well-known figures from history and literature. Using their New Age connections, and the old Catholic superstition that God speaks through priests, we can draft an all-star lineup of Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, Spider-Man, Tom Joad et alia in key "swing" states across the country.

The Jesus candidacy would require special boldness, but it is long past time that the Democrats addressed their problems with religious voters the same way that Republicans do -- by making outrageous and insupportable assertions. All we need is one liberal cleric willing to say that Jesus has spoken to him and announced his candidacy for the Pennsylvania Senate race.

Democratic lawyers will argue that Christ meets the eligibility requirement because God is "hic et ubique." Similarly, once Joad is nominated, his representatives in the Modern Language Association will argue his qualification for whatever race they want him in on the grounds that he is "there in the way guys yell when they're mad... there in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready," etc., though of course ideally they'd prefer to run him in Oklahoma.

As for the inevitable complaints that the candidates themselves are insubstantial, their supporters can always rejoin, "What else is new?"

BITS 'N' PIECES. The Ole Perfesser, tirelessly on Michael Moore firewatch, approving quotes a reader who describes flag-burners as Moore's "target audience." Fahrenheit 911 has so far grossed over $60 million dollars -- representing at minimum six million paid admissions. Must not then the streets of our Republic be ablaze with flaming stars and stripes? And yet no coverage by the media! Another conspiracy for the Perfesser to smack down!

Bigot Valkyrie Maggie Gallagher finds a child raised by a same-sex couple who opposes same-sex marriage. Fine. My mother and father got married because of societal pressures, and it was a terrible mistake, leading to untold misery for them and their two children. There. Consider Gallagher countered. If she comes up with another one, I'll knock on a few doors in my apartment building and see and raise her.

OpinionJournal complains that the City of Boston will require its cabbies to accept payment vouchers in lieu of cash from attendees of the Democratic National Convention. My heart bleeds. According to the commie rag New York Post, "Thousands of commuters who take NJ Transit trains directly to Manhattan will be forced to go to Hoboken and transfer to PATH trains during the GOP convention, officials said yesterday. The plan would be to divert NJ Transit's 11,000 daily commuters who usually take the Midtown Direct service into Penn Station and have them transfer at Hoboken." This is not to mention the insane nuisance the Convention will create for everyone trying to walk or do business in the area, including stores that will experience "street closures and security so tight it will choke off the foot traffic that most businesses rely on."

With all this bullshit on tap, is it any wonder I took solace in an opening-night showing of Anchorman? It was stupid as shit -- no, stupider -- and very funny.

SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT. Spurred by lawsuits by the ACLU, CNN, and others, the State of Florida has removed one of the novelty items from its electoral trick-bag:

Florida elections officials said Saturday that they would not use a disputed list that was intended to keep felons from voting, acknowledging a flaw that could have allowed Hispanic felons to cast ballots in November.

The problem could have been significant in Florida, which President Bush won by just 537 votes in 2000. The state has a sizable Cuban population, and Hispanics in Florida have tended to vote Republican more than Hispanics nationally. The [felons] list had about 28,000 Democrats and around 9,500 Republicans, with most of the rest unaffiliated.

The next time someone asks you why Democrats keep belly-aching about the 2000 election, feel free to mention this.

UNIFIED THEORY OF LILEKS. They call it the "Eureka Moment" -- the epiphanic insight that takes the intellectual odds 'n' sods one has been glumly trying to piece together and instantly pulls them into a nice, tight bow.

I had mine during today's Bleat, In Which Father Lileks Again Contemplates Children at Play

Then they watched "Barbie Swan Lake," a computer-animated movie that’s all the rage in the tot set. Kelsey Grammer is the bad guy, and his motivation is simple and utterly Blofeldian -- he wants to take over the world. Why? Like that's ever worked. And if you could take over the world, what the hell would you do with it? I know, I know: if you’ve secured control of one hemisphere through necromancy, you’re always going to wonder whether the other hemisphere will challenge your rule, so might as well go for the gold. But it would be easier to just rule a small part and guard your power so you could repel any attempts to puncture your domain.

See also, North Korea.

Even now, to contemplate this fragment stirs my laughter -- but it is Olympian laughter, the laughter of the Gods! Much like the laughter, at the end of Peckinpaugh's Convoy, of Dirty Lyle -- who laughed to see the Rubber Duck resurface at his own funeral, because he knew then that there is no death!

Today's Bleat by itself didn't bring me to clarity -- many Lileks playdates, many trips to Target, many italicized toddler drolleries, led to this Moment. But it was the straw that both stirred the drink and broke the camel's back.

Reading the passage for the first time, I was put in mind of friends who are parents and devote large blocks of their time to their children. As they are intelligent, sensitive people (yeah, I do know a few), they fully enter their children's worlds and follow the simple logic, uninformed by brutal adult experience, of their games. It can be charming to observe -- but only because you know they will come back from such adventures whole and sane.

Not everyone can, apparently. Think how many hours Lileks has spent engaged in this sort of conversation with Gnat:

If you have five Hello Kittys, you’re sad because you don’t have six. And that’s not right.

I have nine Kittys.

Okay, you have nine Kittys, and you’re sad because you don’t have ten. But some kids don’t have any.

Can I have ten Kittys for my birthday?

And so it goes...

Some adults can come out of these mind-warping sessions and, after a faceful of cold water or a snootful of rye, fully rejoin the grown-up world. But Lileks' boundless devotion has drawn him in too deep for that.

Now, whenever he tells his readers that Kim Il Jung has been explained by Barbie, I will be inclined to sympathies rather than rage. I always half-knew that it was some psychological malady of the less offensive type -- not the pure evil that works through such earthly forms as Jonah Goldberg -- that animated his ravings. Now I am sure of it.

As soon as I figure out what's wrong with the rest of these assholes, I can close down this weblog.

THE COMIC BOOK GUY'S DAY JOB: "In this and other ways, Spider-Man stands athwart a very influential liberal conception of the self: as being utterly autonomous, floating free from any antecedent obligations."

Are you the author of Hi and Lois? Because you are making me laugh.

CBG's secret identity, Thomas Hibbs, also thinks Spider Man 2 is "is about ordinary working-class life in contemporary America." That will be a shock to John Sayles.

FASTER, SLAVES! KEEP THOSE NUMBERS MOVING! Arnold Kling trumpets "The Good News About Productivity" and wonders aloud why we don't hear more about it before answering himself: because the media distorts the truth to elect Democrats ("the current Administration is unpopular with the media").

Maybe there's another reason. Some of us think of productivity as a completely positive, Jetsonian boon, whereby you just push a button and Rosie the Robot cleans your house, manages your database, monitors workflow etc., all to the greater glory of the national bottom line (a phenomenon also known as "The Economy as Corporate Identity Commercial").

But productivity is also something squeezed out of the hide of workers. From the International Labor Organization:

U.S. productivity grew in 2002, surpassing both Europe and Japan in annual output per worker for the first sustained period since World War II and further widening the productivity gap with the rest of the world.

But while productivity growth is up, job creation has not kept pace, the ILO finds in the third edition of Key Indicators of the Labor Market (KILM). The employment-to-population ratio in the U.S., which measures the proportion of people in the population who are working, declined 1.6 percent (from 64.3 to 62.7 percent) between 1999-2002. During the same period, the employment-to-population ratio increased slightly in the European Union (from 56.1 to 56.7 percent)...

Lawrence Jeff Johnson, chief of the employment trends team responsible for the comparative study released in September, told ILO Focus that "Americans are producing more with fewer workers in the labor market." At the same time, he explained, "labor market flexibility in the United States may be one of the factors allowing employers to adjust more quickly to changing economic conditions by shedding or adding jobs."

ILO also notes that "Americans worked more hours annually than many of their European counterparts, averaging 1,825 hours in 2002. In contrast, Germans worked 1,444 hours; the French 1,545 hours."

This may give you goose-pimples if you think of the U.S. economy as a machine, not as the product of workers who are now running up enormous personal debts to afford the homes, cars, and families that were, once upon a time, within easy reach for nearly anyone willing to work 40 hours a week.

Our Fed chief, by the way, is phlegmatic about this debt -- he recently "pointed out that U.S. households own more than $14 trillion in real estate assets — almost twice the amount they own in mutual funds and directly hold in stocks." Good news from someone's perspective, I guess -- creditors can credit the inflated values of these holdings (as debt, or as repossessed properties) on their balance sheets. In the long run, we are all dead, wot? (Or, as they play it Chicago-school, I got mine, don't worry about yours.)

HOW TO TELL YOU'RE WINNING. What bring tears to your eyes faster -- Lileks' Grandpa Simpson impersonation, or Tacitus' Farewell Address? My favorite piece of talking statuary is "feeling a profound disgust with humanity online." Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that he is not describing a new Sartrean Sims module, I take this to be another complaint about incivility online.

Yes, some of the conservative brethren have been talking about how rough the playground has become, particularly since liberals began to fight back. "Jane Galt" even says she's "ashamed" of liberals backing Fahrenheit 911 because the film has "no counterpart on the right" -- which is rather like the British complaining that those blasted American Revolutionaries keep breaking formation. (At the same time, she doesn't care that "Bush manipulated our fears of something bad happening to get us to support his policies" because "that's the definition of politics." No way you can lose with arguments like these!)

How well, though, do I remember those heady days when the greatest honor these patriots could bestow upon one another was the title "politically incorrect." No cows were sacred, no screed was too intemperate, and Fisking was the fashion!

Now we're all asked to be quiet and reasonable. Well, if you wrote the rules, I suppose it's only natural that you would imagine yourself able to rewrite them in the middle of the game. But if history teaches us anything, it's that no matter how sincere her protestations to the contrary, Lucy will always yank the ball away. Which is why it's time to stop trying to kick the ball and to start (or continue) kicking Lucy's ass.

KUDOS to Sasha, proprietress of a conservatarian group site, on this post:

The rest of the gang here can keep you up to speed on piddling matters like Iraqi sovereignty, the Canadian elections, Britain's almost-war with Iran, and Wimbledon. I shall be blogging important stuff, like the various recipes I've found on the web for ancho pork chops, ancho barbecue sauce, ancho beef stew, ancho potato chips, ancho cornbread, ancho pancakes, and even ancho brownies...

How I wish I had the self-discipline required to make such a pledge. We'd all be so much better off.

A LITTLE RAY OF SUNSHINE. I must admit I was a little worried when I read in the New York Post this morning that Gephardt was going to be Kerry's choice. Not that the the Post is in any way a reliable source of actual news, but they are pretty good at gossip, and this seemed like the kind of backstage-whisper type of revelation at which they could excel.

The one hopeful sign was that there was no Deborah Orin story on page two, telling us how the French-looking, waffling Kerry had once again destroyed any chance he might have had in hell of beating the heroic, popular Bush. The omission of this evergreen, rare with any Post Kerry story, was a strong sign that someone at the Post was hedging his bets.

It all turned out to be bullshit, of course. And though the mudpies will fly soon enough, I am battle-weary enough to take this as a good thing for the Democrats. Edwards is good-looking and well-spoken. And he has the right kind of sense of humor. In his Letterman appearance last spring, when he said he'd lay out his platform right then "if I wasn't rip-stinkin' drunk," he demonstrated a talent for absurdism -- the one kind of humor that most violently throws most politicians.

That will come if handy against the holy warriors of the right, as they inevitably become more unintentionally absurd themselves. Take as a case in point today's National Review Online on the New York Times: "Each day, more and more it seems, the Old Gray Lady transmogrifies into America's al-Jazeera." Kerry might wobble his wattles over such an egregious overstatement, but maybe Edwards is capable of giving it the kind of "who are you kidding with that shit" response to which voters might respond -- for which, in fact, they may actually be longing.

Not bad for a Monday (I mean Tuesday -- oh hey! Better and better!)

THE GLORIOUS FOURTH. You all know the primary text by Mr. Jefferson and his editors, so let me here offer a concordance by Mr. Young:

Got people here down on their knees and prayin'
Hawks and doves are circlin' in the rain
Got rock 'n' roll, got country music playin'
If you hate us, you just don't know what you're sayin'

Ready to go, willing to stay and pay (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!)
So my sweet love can dance another free day (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!)

The holiday will find me playing this album, and maybe walking out to take in our local celebration -- Hungry March Band's parade from Union and Metropolitan to the afterparty -- but mostly quietly enjoying the blessings of liberty, an inheritance bought by blood and courage that must never be surrendered.