Dern: A Library To Drool Over, Kids Say the Darndest Things, Dalton on the Debt, New Weird Al, Jon Carroll Cat Column, Marjorie Wolfe on Wealth, Dan Grobstein File

Daniel Dern suggests a library to drool over.

I rarely quote my students because most of my tests are multiple choice. But recently, I lectured for a day on the financial crisis; then a few days later, I gave an open note essay test to see what the absorbed. Quite a lot, actually, but in one case, a student who proved, by what they wrote that they understood the subject, still made an interesting word choice:

Banks are systems in which money comes in, comes out and is given away... loans are when the bank gives you money.

That, of course, is precisely the problem we're having :-)

Richard Dalton notes:

If you have friends who are complaining about the $700 billion bailout, remind them that if we weren't engaged in a useless, unwarranted war in Iraq, we could have written a check for that amount instead of raising the national debt by that amount.

Scoot over to Itunes and buy Weird Al's new single, "Whatever You Like." It is a parody of the #1 smash hit by T.I. (which, coincidentally, is also called "Whatever You Like"). (I know about this because I am a close, personal friend of Al. That's what it says on the email)

Why do I love Jon Carroll? Allow me to demonstrate with the lede of his most recent cat column:

I had a serious debate with myself. It had two sides, like so many of your better debates. On one hand, I am the current winner of the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I am not bragging here, because modesty is, I think, one of my lifetime achievements, but you need to know this fact to understand the nature of the dilemma.

So I have a certain gravitas now, or at least I am alleged by others to have a certain gravitas. And should a man with the power to sway literally millions (if you count several people swayed thousands of times) not be out there swaying? I mean, as I write this, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stands at 3 - shouldn't I be helping with that?

On the other hand, I have a kitten. I could, of course, postpone writing kitten columns until our national emergency has subsided (which might not be for a while, shh). On the other hand, the kitten is not going to postpone becoming a cat. By the time I serve my tenure as Ernie Pyle Guy, Pancho is gonna weigh 10 pounds and be sleeping in the sun all day.

Regular contributor Marjorie Wolfe asks, Does God Want Us To Be Rich?

Dan Grobstein File

• James Fallows in his Atlantic blog recommended this. Just had a conversation with a guy here who came by my desk and saw my picture of Obama and Biden on my bulletin board. Apparently he's going to raise our taxes. I told him that under Obama's plan if you make under $250,000 your taxes won't go up. He said that businesses making that money will pay more taxes and they will hire less people. As a former employer, I told him that taxes were the least of my worries. At least they're predictable paying them means you're making money. Cost of supplies and health care are the killers. Health care costs especially are what keeps businesses from hiring more full time workers. (As I read somewhere -- a guy says the value of his house and the value of his 401k has nosedived. He'd rather have paid higher taxes).
  
  OPINION | October 8, 2008
  Op-Ed Columnist: Palin's Kind of Patriotism
  By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
  Sarah Palin defended the surge in Iraq and the $700 billion rescue plan. Yet, she said that Americans who pay taxes to support such endeavors should not be considered patriotic.