Trust me, this doofus is not really representative of my home state. I love the way he points to his hand to show where Saginaw is.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sorting out the “extremists.”

“Extreme” is a funny word these days. It’s often used by mainstream news outlets to describe the tea parties and the tea-party-friendly caucus in the GOP.

For instance, when those hotheads in tricorn hats were trying to get the government to borrow slightly less than 40 cents for every dollar Washington spends, the conventional wisdom among enlightened liberals, the Obama administration, and the other usual suspects was that they were “extremists.”

Senate majority leader Harry Reid blasted said extremists as “heartless” for daring to suggest that the exploding federal debt might require cutting subsidies for “cowboy poets.”

Meanwhile, the sock-headed spokesman for the protesters wants to “overthrow the government.”

And yet, if you peruse LexisNexis, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone calling him or his more radical confreres “extremists.”

You also won’t hear them being called racists, even though the Occupy Wall Street movement is mostly white. Personally, I don’t think the racial composition of the “99 percenters” is relevant, but the fact that the tea partiers are mostly white has been cited time and again as evidence of nascent racism. After all, what other explanation could there be for a mass movement opposed to the first black president’s policies? (Never mind that the most popular tea-party politician these days is Herman Cain, who, in case you hadn’t noticed, is black.)

[Update later morning]

Protesters freak out when questioned by reporters.

It’s all about the narrative.

…have met the enemy, and it is they:

Wall Street was the enabler, but Main Street was the addict. Americans stopped saving as long as home prices rose; when home prices started to fall, they started saving again.

That is why the Wall Street protesters are foolish and petulant. American households levered a $6 trillion net inflow of foreign savings during the decade 1998 through 2007 into a bubble that benefited them far more than it did Wall Street. The impact of the bubble on the household balance sheet exceeds the growth in real-estate assets, moreover, because most small business expansion followed the housing bubble.

For fifteen years we rode a tsunami of foreign capital pouring into American markets. We didn’t save a penny. Why should we? Our home equity was our retirement account. Our smartest kids got MBAs and went to Wall Street derivatives desks. Engineering was for dummies. Home prices rose so fast that local governments swam with tax revenues and hired with abandon. Everybody went to the party. Now everybody has a hangover, especially the bankers. We thought we were geniuses because we won the lottery. Now we actually have to produce and export things, and we have to play catch-up. Our kids are competing with Asian kids who go to cram school and practice the violin in the afternoon. This isn’t going to be easy, and the sooner we decide to roll up our sleeves and get back to work instead of looking for bankers to blame, the better our chances of coming back.

They don’t want jobs. They just want paychecks.

…twisting the social contract.

No one really knows, but probably not.