6:00 Link Dump

Salon's "Best Non-Fiction of 2010" lists six titles only one of which I've read (The Big Short by Michael Lewis) and another I'm waiting to read (The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson) So I can't really comment much other than to say The Big Short is so character-driven that it could make a halfway decent movie and that I saw Wilkerson interviewed on Book TV this year and was interested in her subject but hope her writing isn't as boring as her personal presentation.

Anyway it's December and 'tis the season for "Best of" book lists. Book TV has several of these compiled in the "News about Books" window on the front page of its website. I've been looking through the lists all day and have found that I've read, checked out and not read, or am planning to read only a few of these selections. In addition to The Big Short and The Warmth of Other Suns I've also checked out Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition but had to return it because I was reading something else at the time. It will go back in the queue and I'll get to it eventually. Also on one of these lists (Library Journal's) I noticed The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption which I had just checked out a few days ago. Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is near the top of everyone's fiction lists. I read the first chapter of it last night and am not surprised that I already want to punch Franzen in the face along with each of his stupid neurotic yuppie characters nobody should care about.

I guess I should put together a list of books I read in 2010 just for comparison's sake. Maybe later. Meanwhile here's what I read on the internet today.

• Here is a NOLA Defender item on yesterday's Inspector General's report on New Orleans Hotels who don't pay their fair share of occupancy taxes.
  
  Here is a Times-Picayune editorial opining that they probably should do that.



• Good round-up from the New York Times of discussion about a primary challenge to Obama in 2012.
  
  New York Times analysis of the tax cut deal helps explain why there's so much of that talk today.

  The proposal does not include an extension of Mr. Obama’s signature tax cut, the Making Work Pay credit, which provided a credit of up to $400 for individuals and $800 for families of low and moderate income. Instead, the plan creates a one-year reduction in Social Security payroll taxes, which are generally levied on the first $106,800 of income. For an individual earning $110,000, that provision would reduce payroll taxes by $2,136.
  
  Although the $120 billion payroll tax reduction offers nearly twice the tax savings of the credit it replaces, it will nonetheless lead to higher tax bills for individuals with incomes below $20,000 and families that make less than $40,000. That is because their payroll tax savings are less than the $400 or $800 they will lose from the Making Work Pay credit.




• Meanwhile TNR has this "Inside the Obama White House" thing up that everybody read today but I don't think was very helpful. Did they have to call it "Loose Change"? Just.. blech.



• Also read this Matt Taibbi post which is ostensibly about the fact that David Gergen confused Taibbi with NYT's Matt Bai, but it's really about the schmaltzy-smug pseudo-centrist media creatures who feed us our lies each day.
  
  

  Bai is one of those guys -- there are hundreds of them in this business -- who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning "centrist" pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing "unrealistic" liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures. This career path is so well-worn in our business, it's like a Great Silk Road of pseudoleft punditry. First step: graduate Harvard or Columbia, buy some clothes at Urban Outfitters, shore up your socially liberal cred by marching in a gay rights rally or something, then get a job at some place like the American Prospect. Then once you're in, spend a few years writing wonky editorials gently chiding Jane Fonda liberals for failing to grasp the obvious wisdom of the WTC or whatever Bob Rubin/Pete Peterson Foundation deficit-reduction horseshit the Democratic Party chiefs happen to be pimping at the time. Once you've got that down, you just sit tight and wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to call. It won't be long.





• Senate votes to remove Judge Thomas Porteous from office
  
  

  Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the lead House impeachment manager, told senators Tuesday that Porteous had demanded payments and gifts from lawyers and bailbonds executives to help support "a lifestyle which he couldn't otherwise afford" that included frequent gambling at casinos. Schiff said Porteous so corrupted the system that in a complicated federal hospital case one of the parties felt a need to bring in a "crony" of the judge to its legal team because the other side already had hired a Porteous friend.
  
  "Everyone around the judge has fallen," Schiff said. "The bailbondsmen have gone to jail, the other state judges he helped recruit have gone to jail, the lawyers who gave him the cash lost their law licenses and (have) given up their practices. The judge is a gambler and he is betting that he can beat the system just one more time.





• Everyone was also talking about John Lennon today. Here you can watch Howard Cosell announce Lennon's death on Monday Night Football.
  
  Or you can just listen to your choice of Working Class Hero or Watching the Wheels



• Lastly, and this is a doozy, Wikileaks Reveals That Military Contractors Have Not Lost Their Taste For Prostitutes I guess only some sex scandals are relevant here though.