David McElroy

I thought some of the signs at Tea Party rallies represented sheer ignorance, but the Occupy Wall Street protesters are giving them a run for their money. These people know their trendy brands and piercings, but they know nothing about economics.

Take this guy on the right. Please take him. Can you think of any rational argument that Wall Street is responsible for “most of the poverty and suffering on this planet”? I can’t. I can usually take the flip side of almost any argument and find an approach to make case. There’s just not a rational argument for this one.

When the federal government and the Fed poured money into Wall Street banks in the past few years, it was wrong. Those firms should have been allowed to fail. That’s what makes the market work correctly — the fact that if you perform poorly, you fail. But the politicians in DC got scared and pulled their friends out of hot water. So why aren’t the people on Wall Street protesting against the politicians and the Federal Reserve? They’re the ones with the real power.

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Do people forward you as much political “humor” as they send to me? Since I started publishing this site, I get even more of it.

Just this week, different people sent me the two graphics here. One person sent a batch of anti-Republican stickers asking if I could use them. And then I got a batch of anti-Democratic graphics from another friend, with a note saying, “I didn’t know if you could use any of these graphics on your website or not. Very good bumper stickers.”

I appreciate my friends’ good intentions. I really do. (In fact, a few of you send me things that do turn into article ideas. You know who you are. Thanks.) But politics is already vacuous enough without dumbing it down even further. This isn’t what I want to be about. I don’t want to be “room noise” or “elevator music,” to steal a couple of phrases from an obscure old song.

Simplistic sloganeering such as what you see here doesn’t help anyone. Honestly, I don’t even find it funny. I will gladly take something I disagree with and write about why I think someone is wrong. I realize that some people don’t appreciate that — as was discussed in the comments of that article — but it’s a balance I try to strike between ideas, on the one hand, and attracting new readers, on the other. But most of what I see offered as political discourse today strikes me as the equivalent of children on a playground shouting insults at one another.

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It breaks my heart that I can’t save all the cats and dogs who need homes, but it’s just a simple fact that I have no more room for additional animals. Tommy is one of the outdoor strays who I really want to find a home for, though. With cold weather coming up, I’d really like to find a home for him before winter gets here.

I don’t know where Tommy came from, but he’s been in the neighborhood for a couple of years. He was among a group of strays who a former neighbor got fixed and got shots for. She and her husband used to feed them, but they already had seven indoor cats of their own, so they couldn’t take anymore, either.

After they moved away a few months ago, I took over feeding several of them, including Tommy. (The former neighbor felt so bad about leaving them that she still brings food for me to feed them.) He’s just now getting to the point that he’ll trust me to touch him and pick him up every now and then, so he’s going to need patient humans in his new home. He’s never had consistent love and attention.

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