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Morning Jolt February 6, 2014 Priorities USA: Eh, You Know, We Never Really Cared about Midterm Elections. The Democrats prioritize:
Democratic donors will still give big money, and the attack ads will still fill the airwaves. But for at least one group of Democrats, 2014's best-case scenario is continuing the status quo. A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats, and Alleviates a Lot of Other Problems The editors of the New York Times yesterday: "The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of full-time workers by 2.5 million over the next decade. That is mostly a good thing, a liberating result of the law." This is about 90 percent nonsense, a testament to how rapidly and thoroughly a dedicated partisan can convince themselves that a bad result of a law they support is really a good result in disguise. The ten percent that might not be nonsense is that it's possible to imagine a scenario very different from our current circumstances, where people shifting from full-time to part-time, or leaving the workforce entirely, would be a good thing. If we had a booming economy, with the vast majority of American workers feeling like they could make a good living and achieve their dreams, it wouldn't be a problem for people to choose to work part-time. If a wife who just gave birth wanted to take a few years off to raise her child and be a stay-at-home mom, or to work fewer hours in her child's formative years, terrific! (Dads, too!) If somebody on the tail end of his career wants to downshift to part-time, and get a head start on enjoying those golden years, wonderful. In an economy that had a voracious thirst for workers, re-entry into the workforce and a return to full-time work would be easy. But the economy we have today and can see for the foreseeable future is nothing like that happy vision at all. The plight of the long-term unemployed over the past five years suggests that losing your job can be a career death sentence. And when we have a plummeting workforce-participation rate -- people retiring earlier than they planned because they can't find a job, staying in school longer, longer stretches on unemployment, etc. — this is terrible. It's rather surprising that the Times didn't even acknowledge that fewer people working fewer hours is very bad for income-tax revenue. Dear International Olympic Committee: You Had ONE JOB! When Charles Lane wrote this piece calling for an end to the Olympic tradition last month, it seemed hyperbolic: "Any benefits have to be weighed against the Olympics' costs, which are political, financial, moral and — for athletes ravaged by steroid abuse — human. . . . Supporters speak of the Olympics as a 'movement,' as if the Games were some sort of insurgent force for good, not the leviathan they are. What we really need is a movement to get rid of them." I know you're wondering how the IOC picked that city, but they had to; Mogadishu, Somalia, was already booked those weeks. Russia was an astonishingly bad choice to host the games for so many different reasons: Putin's authoritarian tendencies, the country's ludicrous anti-gay law, and the massive threat of terrorism are three big reasons. But recent days have shown us so much more. For starters, some of the basic structures and facilities aren't finished yet:
Wait, there's more! "The Olympic Village in Sochi still looks very much like a work-in-progress. Sidewalks are half built; wiring is still unfinished; and piles of trash are collecting within a short distance from the Olympic Park. Of the nine media hotels planned for the Games, only six have been built with a last minute sprint to get the others finished before the Olympics officially commence." Or how about the brutal approach to stray dogs? "The city of Sochi has hired a pest-control company to kill homeless animals by the hundreds, all in an effort to clean up the streets in advance of the Winter Games." And apparently "hacking" is now an Olympic sport this year:
But the story of the Sochi Olympics is one that must be seen, not told. From various reporters' Twitter feeds, we can see what we're missing by not shelling out to go. For starters, don't drink the water in the Sochi hotels! Or use it on your face! Reporters are all abuzz about the all-natural honey: Vladimir Putin bugged the breakfast table. I thought Russians were supposed to be good engineers: A New York Daily News correspondent laments that their hotel rooms have no chairs… … I think I found them in the bathrooms. Fred Thompson was right in The Hunt for Red October. Russians really do never take a dump without a plan, or it appears, a planning committee, present. ADDENDA: Our Charlie Cooke noted that Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis is touting her support for "open carry" of firearms and has "dropped from her website all mention of abortion, the very thing that made her famous; started to describe herself as 'pro-life' in the vain hope that voters might not notice; and, worried at how she might be portrayed, started walking around campaign events carrying a shotgun and talking likeYosemite Sam." Just make sure all of her Manhattan, San Francisco, and D.C. donors know this! To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com
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