Joel Mathis

At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints. Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes. Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Similarly, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths. By emphasizing the influence

As surely as Ron Paul speaks to a real issue--the state's broad use of violence and surveillance--which the America's political leadership has failed to address, Farrakhan spoke to something real, something unsullied, which black America's political leadership failed to address, Both Paul and Farrakhan, in their glamour, inspired the young, the disaffected, the disillusioned.  To those who dimly perceived something wrong, something that could not be put on a placard, or could not move the party machine, men such as this become something more than political operators, they become symbols. Substantive charges against them, no matter the reasons, are dismissed. The movement they represent means more. But as sure as the followers of Farrakhan deserved more than UFOs, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, those of us who oppose the drug-war, who oppose the Patriot Act deserve better than Ron Paul  via theatlantic.com

...but seriously, Occupy Charlotte people , you convince exactly nobody of the rightness of your cause when you do so. That's not effective dissent; it's masturbatory radicalism: It might make you feel good, but other people think it's icky and it's completely unproductive. Yeesh.

A libertarian friend of mine is very disappointed in me for semi-endorsing Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination over Ron Paul. After all, he points out, Paul's anti-imperialistic views of the presidency—both in war-making and in executive power, generally—are closer to my own than any other GOP candidate. Heck, on those two areas, I like his views better than President Obama. So why can't I support Paul for the GOP nomination? Easy. I think he'd be a disaster for the country. Put aside his dubious explanations for the racist newsletters . Put aside the fact that he'd have nearly zero support for his agenda in Congress . Let's look at the agenda itself. (I take all the following statements from his website. ) He'd cut $1 trillion in government spending in the first year of his presidency, on the way to a balanced budget by Year Three. The debt is a problem, I agree, but I believe yanking so much money out of the economy would probably deepen our the Great Re

LA Times: Residential telephone customers can sue the government for allegedly eavesdropping on their private communications in a warrantless "dragnet of ordinary Americans," a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, however, upheld dismissal of other cases that sought to hold the telecommunications companies liable, citing Congress' decision to grant them retroactive immunity. I'm kinda-sorta OK with this outcome. The telecom companies facilitated the eavesdropping at the government's behest; targeting the companies for their participation was always a way of trying to hold somebody accountable for the government's illegal actions. I'm no fan of big corporations, but if the government that has regulatory power over you prompts you to do something illegal in the name of preventing terrorist attacks—well, I imagine that prompt would be pretty difficult to ignore. The government's respons

The New York Times' Charlie Savage is an essential reporter on issues of presidential power. He does us all a great service today by surveying the presidential candidates about their views of such power. (President Obama—who answered Savage's 2008 survey, declined to answer; so did Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann.) I'll be dipping in and out of the questions today with an observation or two. Like this one. Savage asked : "Under what circumstances, if any, is the president, when operating overseas as commander-in-chief, free to disregard treaties to which the United States is a party?" There are some bullshit evasions. (Rick Perry: “'Disregard' is a vague and subjective term.") Outside of Ron Paul—who will get his own blog post on this matter—Mitt Romney offers the most cogent answer: The president’s most important obligation is to protect the United States in a manner consistent with the Constitution and U.S. law. The president should also he

For the first time in the program’s history, tens of billions of dollars from the government’s general pool of revenue are being funneled to the Social Security trust fund to make up for the revenue lost to the tax cut. Roughly $110 billion will be automatically shifted from the Treasury to the trust fund to cover this year’s cut, according to the Social Security Board of Trustees . An additional $19 billion, it is estimated, will be necessary to pay for the two-month extension. The tax cut is supposed to be temporary. But as squabbles over this issue and the Bush tax cuts have revealed, short-term tax cuts in Washington have a way of sticking around longer than planned, especially as economic growth remains slow and lawmakers are wary of raising anyone’s tax bill. The prospect of policymakers continually turning to the payroll tax as a way of providing economic stimulus troubles experts, some lawmakers and both public trustees of the Social Security trust fund. Their concern: that So

ANTHONY MAGSAM, a Philadelphia police officer who has been at the center of a long-running Internal Affairs investigation, resigned from the force earlier this week. The Daily News first reported in August that Magsam, 30, had allegedly stolen automatic weapon parts from the department's Firearms Identification Unit while he was working in the unit in 2009. Numerous police sources with direct knowledge of the incident said Magsam had confessed when he was confronted by colleagues and returned the parts. The alleged crime was never reported to higher-ups, however. via philly.com

He hasn't. But Kevin Williamson's piece on the nexus of Wall Street and Washington is devastatingly reminiscent of Taibbi's Rolling Stone reportage , albeit from a right-of-center point of view. Here's a sample slice: When President Obama opined during his 2011 State of the Union speech that a corporate tax-rate cut might be just the thing for America after a year of record corporate profits, his left-wing base was shocked and dismayed. Heck, some conservatives were caught offguard, too. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed who was running the Obama administration: In large part, the same guys who plan to be running the next Republican administration. #ad#Barack Obama (Nasdaq: bho) has been a pretty good buy for Goldman Sachs et al. Sure, the Frank-Dodd financial-reform bill is going to be a sharp pain in Wall Street’s pinstriped posterior, and it’s going to cost some moneymen some money, but not enough that anybody’s going to be out a champagne saber. Mostly, Big Business h

The Iowa caucuses are around the corner. In this week's Scripps Howard column, Ben and I try to weigh which candidate would be best for America. My take : Asking a liberal which Republican they favor in 2012 is like choosing one's favorite flavor of arsenic: You have options, but none will go down very well. Nobody in the field seems likely to attract many Democratic votes in November. As an American, though, I want to see the GOP put its best and most-qualified candidate forward to challenge President Barack Obama. And that candidate is former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas might be appealing on civil liberties, but he also appeals too much to racists and conspiracy-mongers. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann are so retrograde on social issues they don't deserve consideration. Texas Gov. Rick Perry isn't bright, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is Newt Gingrich. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is

Sometime overnight, December 2011 became the highest-trafficked month in the history of this blog. That's even though the last week of the month has been a holiday period, in which my writing and your readership inevitably decline. I'll skip numbers: Suffice it to say the blog is still small—I'm not doing Andrew Sullivan numbers, clearly—but that it's not tiny anymore. And it continues to grow. I'll keep doing what I do in 2012: Read, try to learn, and occasionally embarrass myself with wrongheaded opining. Thanks for reading.

Big battle brewing in Illinois : Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money. The charities have served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state’s social service network for poor and neglected children. Catholic bishops say they're fighting for their religious rights. “It’s true that the church doesn’t have a First Amendment right to have a government contract,” said one official, “but it does have a First Amendment right not to be excluded from a contract based on its religious beliefs.” And if it were just about beliefs, I'd agree. But this is about practices. And the Catholic Church doesn't believe it can offer services in accordance with the rules and practices of the state that it ostensibly serves in providing adoption service

The New York Times has an interesting story this morning about how women are using the recession* to leave work, go back to school, and bulk up their credentials for the job market. Men, on the other hand, are working lousy jobs. (Probably, the story suggests, because men still feel a need to be familial breadwinners in ways that women don't.) Once the recession lifts, though, the newly educated women are going to have an advantage over their grind-it-out male counterparts for new jobs. When I lost my job, nearly two years ago, I thought ever-so-briefly about going back to school. Time off from career seemed attractive, as did the opportunity to formally upgrade my skills. It was a short consideration, though. I was stopped by two thoughts: • Debt. Going to school would've cost a lot of money I didn't have. I couldn't see adding graduate-level debt to my financial burdens unless there was a likelihood of employment— improved employment, financially—on the other si

I didn't plan to take a year-and-a-half to read "The Federalist Papers," but I got distracted along the way. But I finished them tonight on my brand-new Kindle. In fact, I read the entirety of them using the Kindle app on a variety of machines. For the record, these are the devices upon which I read the book: • An HP netbook. • An iMac desktop computer. • My iPhone. • An iPad 1. • An iPad 2. • The Kindle. Remember when we used to pick up a book and just read the book? I love today's flexibility, though, and I use it.

This year, for instance, Paul has sponsored 47 bills, including measures to withdraw from the United Nations , repeal the federal law banning guns in school zones and let private groups coin their own money . None has moved, and 32 have failed to attract a single co-sponsor. “He’s somewhat of an introvert [and] a little quirky, so he doesn’t work the legislative process like most do,” said former congressman Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), who served with Paul from 1997 to 2010 . But Wamp said Paul, as president, might succeed where Paul the legislator had not. “When you’re president, they can’t just ignore you,” Wamp said. “Because you have a mandate.” via washingtonpost.com I had a period of about four hours a few weeks ago in which I considered whether supporting Ron Paul was the right way to go: The performance of the president on civil liberties issues has frustrated me that much. But Paul has too easily lent his name—if not his mind—to racist sentiments and crank conspiracy theorizi

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity. Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan. via washingtonpost.com

At the University of Virginia, state support has dwindled in two decades from 26 percent of the operating budget to 7 percent. At the University of Michigan, it has declined from 48 percent to 17 percent. Not even the nation’s finest public university is immune. The University of California at Berkeley — birthplace of the free-speech movement, home to nine living Nobel laureates — subsists now in perpetual austerity. Star faculty take mandatory furloughs . Classes grow perceptibly larger each year. Roofs leak; e-mail crashes. One employee mows the entire campus. Wastebaskets are emptied once a week. Some professors lack telephones. Behind these indignities lie deeper problems. The state share of Berkeley’s operating budget has slipped since 1991 from 47 percent to 11 percent. Tuition has doubled in six years, and the university is admitting more students from out of state willing to pay a premium for a Berkeley degree. This year, for the first time, the university collected more mone

Somebody took part of their Christmas Day to post these comments to my blog , and I thought the were worth sharing with the wider community, without comment: Dude you and your article on gay rights is a total load of crap. The backlash against Gay Filth in AMERICA is building daily, The people of Hawaii will have a Statewide Day of Shame to show their anger and disgust for allowing civil rights to be allowed by a wacko governor in direct opposition to the 70% of voters who are opposed to the encroachment of homosexual perversion. What type of article will you write when the first homosexual military member is brought up on charges for sexually harassing a straight fellow soldier or when a straight soldier kills a homosexual that can't take no for an answer. Then we will see if you are so elated over the end of DADT

Taken at Valley Township

This inability to connect economic policy to the larger problem of joblessness is a real problem with the debate over the payroll tax cut. This disconnect explains why the unemployment insurance extension bundled with the payroll tax cut have attracted so much less attention. After all, if all that matters is the first tranche of money, the payroll tax cut will affect many more households than the UI extension. But all serious economists agree that the extension of unemployment insurance is a far more efficient fiscal support – providing about 50 to 100 percent more jobs per dollar added to the deficit. What makes unemployment insurance so much more efficient? It is laser-targeted at families in genuine distress, meaning that the recipients will spend every marginal dollar that comes in the door. This also makes the extension better targeted at alleviating actual economic misery. via epi.org Read the whole thing.