Melts in your brain, not in your hard drive

Memes are ideas that people spread among each other.

Like any worm or virus in a computer, they can do incredible amounts of damage because their overt effects are so hard to detect.

Take, for example, the meme that 70% of Amerika is carrying around today that a liberal progressive actually won last November.

You might as well picked John McCain. Via Avedon, via the Suburban Guerilla, we have Dean Baker:

Word has it that President Obama intends to appoint a task force the week after next which will be charged with "reforming" Social Security. According to inside gossip, the task force will be led entirely by economists who were not able to see the $8 trillion housing bubble, the collapse of which is giving the country its sharpest downturn since the Great Depression.

This effort is bizarre for several reasons. First, the economy is sinking rapidly. While President Obama's stimulus package is a good first step towards counteracting the decline, there is probably not a single economist in the country who believes that is adequate to the task. President Obama would be advised to focus his attention on getting the economy back in order instead of attacking the country's most important social program.

The second reason why this task force is strange is that Social Security doesn't need reforming. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it can pay all scheduled benefits for the next 40 years with no changes whatsoever.

The third reason that this effort is pernicious is that this talk of reform is occurring with the baby boomers just as the cusp of retirement. Due to the reckless policies of the Rubin-Greenspan-Bush clique, this cohort has just seen their housing equity wiped out with the collapse of the housing bubble. Tens of millions of baby boomers who might have felt reasonably secure three years ago are now approaching retirement with little or no equity in their homes.

Similarly, if they had been fortunate enough to accumulate any substantial amount of savings in a 401(k) account, they just saw much of this wealth vanish with the plunge in the stock market...

And if it did need more money, they could just raise the tax. Perhaps the banksters thing they've laid enough economic Shock and Awe to blitz their agenda forward. Then maybe Lovecraft was right, and the Deep Ones really do prefer madness in their main course.

Speaking of awfully shocking, the Dark Wraith spots a note from Crooks & Liars that old DINOcratic sycophant of the $ecurity-industrial complex, Diane Feinstein, up to her old tricks again trying to kill net neutrality with an amendment in the stimulus bill.

The Wraith refers to the DINOcrats as "candy coated Republicans". The man has a way with words: "Dollars being exchanged for gold should not be of nearly as much concern as gold being exchanged for bullets."