From today's WSJ: 

$1.2 trillion: How much Americans spend annually on goods and services they don’t absolutely need.

This Easter weekend, Americans will spend a lot of money on items such as marshmallow peeps, plush bunnies and fake hay, begging a question: How much does the U.S. economy depend on purchases of goods and services people don’t absolutely need?

As it turns out, quite a lot. A non-scientific study of Commerce Department data suggests that in February, U.S. consumers spent an annualized $1.2 trillion on non-essential stuff including pleasure boats, jewelry, booze, gambling and candy. That’s 11.2% of total consumer spending, up from 9.3% a decade earlier and only 4% in 1959, adjusted for inflation. In February, spending on non-essential stuff was up an inflation-adjusted 3.3% from a year earlier, compared to 2.4% for essential stuff such as food, housing and medicine.

I've been wondering that myself.  Especially since Tuesday, when I got this phone call:

“Could you come down here, to the office?” the man asked.  “We need to take another imprint of your credit card.”

For years – maybe a decade – I’ve rented a small storage space a kilometer or two from my house.  Everything I don’t need but can’t part with – old manuscripts, financial records, a couple of sofas, a large collection of vinyl records – got tossed into the back of the car, driven to the storage facility, and stacked tightly in a small square of windowless concrete.   I’d shove it all in, drag down the rolling metal door, and secure it all with a padlock.  The privilege of storing a lot of meaningless junk in an inaccessible place didn’t come cheap:  I was billed, monthly, on my credit card, about two hundred dollars a month.

I know, I know.  And I agree with you:  I’m a fool. 

On an intellectual level, of course, I know that every single item in that storage cell is utterly valueless, to me or anyone.  And I’m aware that federal tax regulations only require paper receipts for the past three years; that my entire music collection now fits snugly on a hard drive the size of a paperback book; that the posters and prints I enjoyed in college, twenty years ago, are so yellowed and frayed that unrolling them would turn them into dust; that, finally, I no longer need the futon because I’m in my forties, and my friends are in their forties, and futons are incompatible with forty year-old backs and necks.

But for some reason, my default behavior was, send it to storage. 

I’m not alone.  The self-storage industry in America is booming. One in ten American families, according to a recent survey, rent some kind of extra storage space.  Odd statistic that, because for the past thirty years, the average American home has gotten larger and more spacious while the average American family has been shrinking.  Apparently, we’ve been living in larger houses with fewer people, but we still don’t have enough room for our junk.

The appeal of the storage facility is that it allows you to put off making the tough decisions – do I need this “Dexy’s Midnight Runners” record? Am I ever going to ride this stationary bike again? Where did I pick up this ridiculous halogen lamp? – and instead, send everything to the limbo of the storage facility, where it waits in lonely, dusty silence to be useful again, to be remembered and needed.

But nobody needs 1996’s tax records, and certainly not for two hundred dollars a month, so when the manager of the storage facility called me about my credit card – apparently they needed to photocopy the new version of the card, with the new expiry date, because that’s how long I’d been renting from them – a halogen-bright light went off in my head.  I knew what I needed to do.

Dump it all.

“So what happens,” I asked the manager, “if I just stop paying?”

There was a pause on the other side of the line.

“Well,” he said, “then we take possession of what’s in there and we auction it off.”

I actually knew this.  There is, in fact, a reality television show about this very phenomenon – proof that there’s a reality television show about everything – and it’s a pretty interesting show.  Storage facilities like the one I rent from often have renters simply stop paying – the credit card expires or is denied, phone calls go unanswered, and so the contents are auctioned off to a bunch of professional scavengers, who bid on the entire bundle after being given a short, no-touching-allowed glimpse of the concrete box.

It’s called “Auction Hunters,” and occasionally a lucky bidder will find rare art or gold coins buried in the mound of personal junk, but mostly it’s stuff like mine: exercycles and a copy of “Come On Eileen.”

“You don’t want to do that,” the manager said.  “You don’t want strangers pawing through your special things.”

“If they were special I wouldn’t let them hang out in a small concrete box,” I said, but I knew he was right.  The proper thing to do is to drive over there, load up the back of the car, and take the stuff to some kind of charity, or, failing that, some kind of junk heap.  The thing to avoid, of course, is any kind of detour back to the house, where I’ll be tempted to sort through the pile, looking for odds and ends to save. 

“Do not go shopping through your own junk,” a friend of mine warned me when I told him the plan.  “My wife does that and it drives me crazy.  We still have the charger for a Sonicare toothbrush they haven’t made since 2003. Do yourself a favor: take it straight to the dump.”

So I’ve prepared myself for the complete emptying of my storage unit, the de-accessioning of  a lifetime’s worth of vinyl, bad art, free weights, and multi-purpose furniture.  It’s happening Saturday morning.  I’ve made up my mind.

“Okay,” the manager said when I told him I’d be by to empty out my box.  “I’ll be here.”

And I detected the slight, smug tone of a man who’s heard this before, from folks who suddenly realized that they’re throwing away good money to keep bad stuff, and who make a plan to rid themselves, once and for all, of the things they don’t need.  Still, somehow businesses like his keep making money.  Somehow, despite larger houses with fewer inhabitants, there’s something compelling about the idea of keeping everything, just in case.

I did actually love that old song, “Come On Eileen.”  And maybe I’ll start using that exercise bike.  You never know.

The Daily Caller stepped in it today.  In a fairly innocuous piece about Sarah Palin's TLC reality show, "Sarah Palin's Alaska," they reported on a story already in the news, here and here, about the state tax subsidies the show's producers received for filming in Alaska.  From today's DC:

...in a political age where it’s controversial in many circles to defend public funding of National Public Radio, critics panned Palin for supporting a measure that forced taxpayers to foot the bill for a private media project after many statements from the former governor in support of a government that only plays a limited role in the economy.

“I’d bet, like many politicians, Palin’s views on the proper role of government becomes more flexible as it comes closer to her own interests,” wrote the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney on Tuesday.

Jim Geraghty of National Review said that the reality show’s subsidy was “ridiculous” and that the policy was “problematic for a crusader for small government to end up collecting a seven-figure paycheck from an endeavor that received a seven-figure subsidy,” while Peter Suderman of the libertarian Reason Magazine cracked: “In 2008, Sarah Palin, then the Governor of Alaska, signed a special tax credit for filmmakers into law. … Who’s benefiting from that tax subsidy now? … none other than Sarah Palin.”

Palin, as she often does, responded ably to those criticisms on Facebook. From the last big paragraph:

“It’s...a false accusation to suggest that signing this bipartisan bill somehow goes against my position on the proper role of government,” she said. “I’ve said many times that government can play an appropriate role in incentivizing business, creating infrastructure, and leveling the playing field to foster competition so the market picks winners and losers, instead of bureaucrats burdening businesses and picking winners and losers.”

This actually seems like pretty small potatoes -- it's the kind of gotcha piece that every politician eventually faces.

What's striking, though, are the comments below the Daily Caller piece.  Many of them display the kind of tripwire defensiveness I've noticed a lot in die-hard Palin fans.  And Palin's Facebook response is also a little over-the-top.  There's a lot in it about "burying" her response -- in reality, it's there, unburied -- and a weird shot at Tucker Carlson --

"As I noted in my statement (which was curiously buried by The Daily Caller – whose editor-in-chief was recently called on the carpet for publicly using a degrading term to describe women. C’mon Daily Caller, we can’t afford you slipping up like this. America is counting on more professionalism than that."

Okay, full disclosure:  I like Sarah Palin.  I like her especially because of the way she totally unhinges the Left.  I don't think she'd make a good president, though.  And I'm unwilling to accept, as some Palin fans demand, that this is some kind of slur.  There are literally hundreds of people and politicians whose temperaments and judgement and values I like -- Roger Ailes, my dad, Peter Robinson, Ursula Hennessy, George Will,  just to name a few.  I'd even throw in most of the Ricochet membership.

That doesn't mean I think any of them should be president.  

The notion that because she's been on the receiving end of a lot of nasty press -- and she has -- that that somehow exonerates her from any criticism, even the small-bore penny-ante stuff about state tax subsidies for film production, is just way, way, way too hypersensitive.  It doesn't do her any good, either.  It makes her look small and prickly.  It makes her look Nixonian.  Not Reaganesque.

Sarah Palin needs to take a deep breath.  The DC piece was a fair piece of gotcha, and her response -- when she finally got to it, after lots of drama and stemwinding and self-pitying justification -- is a perfectly fair, perfectly persuasive answer.  She should have left it at that.  She'd seem a lot taller and more -- dare I say it -- presidential if she had.  I mean, seriously: as president, would she be spending all of that time and energy pushing back against every single small-potatoes piece?  This is what makes some of us think: Senator Palin, great; President Palin, not so much.

And the knee-jerk paranoid defensiveness of her fans doesn't do them any credit, either.  They don't seem like supporters.  They seem like disciples.   They need to chill.

I don't know why conservatives are always kvetching about the census.  It's uncovered some really interesting stuff.

Like this display, from Salon.  It's a list of the Top 10 Most Segregated Cities in the United States.  For the record, from Most to Least, it's:  Milwaukee, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.

In other words, Obama Country!

(Except for St. Louis.  Which makes me 90% right.  I'll take it.)

Aside from the pungent point that, typically, the Left talks one way and lives another.  And aside from the totally gratuitous low-blow that Obama was elected by racially-segregated states, what's really interesting here is that none of the top 10 Most Racially Divided Cities are in the south.  None.

(We can argue about St. Louis.  But as I said: I'll take 90% right....)

This reminds me of a piece I wrote, a few years ago, for the old Newsweek International. I can't find it online anywhere -- which may explain this -- but I'll reproduce some of it here:

I was in New York last week, for my brother’s birthday party.  It was what is known as “a big one," so I stirred myself from relaxing in Los Angeles sunshine, and headed east.

            “How was your flight?” people at the party asked.

            “Actually,” I said, “I didn’t fly.  I drove.”

            A long pause would then ensue.  Then, finally:

            “Why?”

            Which was a question, somewhere between Van’s Pig Stand in Shawnee, Oklahoma and the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee I asked myself a few times.  It was late and Interstate 40 was scarred and pocked by construction, it was raining – but in that distinctly southern way, where the raindrops simply appear in the envelope of humidity, condensing on the inside of the windshield and curling the pages of the road map – and mentally checked off the various things I was giving up by going to New York the long way. 

            I gave up the fifteen or twenty minutes of robotic typing you have to watch the airline agent do just to change your seat assignment.  I gave up the shuffling, slow-moving herd as it funnels through airport security.  I gave up the slack-jawed glassy-eyed indifference on the face of the people tasked with finding your nail scissors.  And I gave up the “snack with beverage” that somehow constitutes the bright spot of the whole cross-country airplane ordeal.

            This is a beautiful country, and I took the longest of the long ways – over two weeks to get from Los Angeles to midtown Manhattan – and the only twinge of regret I felt along the way was that however delicious a bar-b-que sandwich from Van’s is, eating one right before the six-hour stretch to Memphis is not advisable from a health and comfort perspective.   Enough said.

            Still, why?  

 One reason is that I live and work in Hollywood, and make my living producing (or trying to) television and movies that entertain (or try to) the rest of the country.  The chief peculiarity of this most peculiar business is that the more successful you are at entertaining ordinary Americans, the less likely it is that you will have to encounter them.  Having your finger on the pulse of the nation, apparently, can be done poolside in Bel Air, or cruising at 30,000 feet in a Gulfstream V.

            It’s a good idea, though, for the rest of us to get out once and a while and see the country we’re trying to amuse, and to meet the people who, in the long way around, pay the bills.  And with a bit of planning, you can eat pretty well, too.

            And that’s the real reason I decided to hit the road.  Fried chicken. 

            A few years ago, driving from Memphis to New Orleans with friends, we made a quick detour through McComb, Mississippi to have a meal at The Dinner Bell, an old boarding-house style restaurant a few minutes from the interstate.  We had heard about its convivial, friendly atmosphere – three or four large round tables, each with a lazy susan groaning with platters of southern delicacies, its simple all-you-can eat price structure, and its classic fried eggplant, okra, hush puppies, sweet potato casserole, buttery biscuits, and of course, flawless fried chicken.  But on that night three years ago, it was unexpectedly closed.  Disappointed and cranky from hunger, we ended up at a sad and sagging Taco Bell.  And so I had a mission:  eat at The Dinner Bell before I was old enough to make it medically unwise.

            Two weeks ago, I did just that.  It was, as predicted, perfection: delicious, carefully prepared southern classics in a place suffused with the kind of quiet happiness that comes from feeding people well, and being well-fed yourself.

            And a strange thing happened:  right there in the deepest part of the Deep South, in walked a young black man and a young white woman.  They sat down at two empty seats and tucked into their lunch.  Eavesdropping shamelessly, I gathered that this was a business lunch – he was her boss, and this was some kind of informal employee review taking place over the platters of eggplant and macaroni and cheese.  I readied myself, as a northern snob was taught to do, for Racial Tension.  I was in, after all, Trent Lott Country.  And here was a young black man and a young white woman out eating together just as free as you please.  I waited for something – nasty comments, bitter words, bigotry overt or otherwise.

            Of course, nothing of the kind occurred.  The neighborly, gracious atmosphere of The Dinner Bell – and in fact, everywhere else I went in the south – was totally unlike the spooky northern stereotype of Mississippi and Alabama.  Totally unlike what sophisticated northerners, in their bigoted snobbery, imagine when they hear the words “McComb, Mississippi.”  And I wondered how many interracial co-ed lunches were being eaten on that day at, say, the Four Seasons in enlightened Manhattan, or the Ivy in progressive Hollywood?

            Not many, I’d guess.  And that’s another reason for getting out of the airport and onto the open road.  It’s a good way to break down a few prejudices, and a tasty way to do it.  

It's been a few years, but I'm glad to see the census has finally caught up with me.  Here's the take-away:  the big bad south -- that troubled place people are always making troubled movies about -- is a lot less racist, in measurable, practical terms, than pretty much any city to the north.  Blue states aren't "progressive" or "open" or "tolerant."  They've just got better PR.

Until now.  Hard to argue with the census.

In every old time two-man stage act, there's the Face and the Monkey.

The Face -- Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Barack Obama -- glides serenely over the material, always looks nice, scoops up the girl at the end, and plays a lot of golf.

The Monkey -- Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Joe Biden -- has to make all of the jokes, do all of the pratfalls, and never gets the girl or a tee time.

Here's President Face handing a steaming pile of pratfall to Vice President Monkey:

"Nobody messes with Joe!"

Hilarious.  Because everybody messes with Joe.  From today's Washington Times:

As a thank-you to its most famous customer, Amtrak is renaming the train station in Wilmington, Del. after stimulus “sheriff” Vice President Joseph R. Biden — after the project received $20 million in stimulus money, and came in $5.7 million over the initial announced budget.
President Obama, soon after signing the Recovery Act in early 2009, designated Mr. Biden his “sheriff” overseeing the stimulus money, charging him with regularly checking in on governors and mayors to try to prevent waste, fraud and abuse in the $821 billion package.

Biden couldn't oversee a ham sandwich.  Now that we know exactly how the stimulus plan worked out (it was a spectacular, stinging failure) there's something blood-boiling about the smugness of Nancy Pelosi's ovation, and the vapid, empty, utterly useless crapulence that falls out of President Face's mouth.  If you click "play" again, try not to think about the $14 trillion we all owe.  That's about $45,000 per living, breathing American.

President Face glides along, untroubled, to Rio.  Vice President Monkey stays at home, looking foolish and irrelevant.

This is turning out to be a long, unfunny movie.  

Yesterday, as Libya descended further into civil war, the State of Wisconsin continued its budget chaos, the big trending topic on Twitter was the drug-fueled personal meltdown of television star Charlie Sheen.

It’s nice, isn’t it, to know that Twitter users have such a firm grasp of the important things in life?

To be fair to Sheen, he joined Twitter barely a week ago, and by this morning sported over two million followers.  And to be fair to his Twitter followers, it probably isn’t his uplifting world view that compelled them to click “follow.”

And the viewers of his sad, rambling, pre-homeless guy rants on his Ustream channel aren't there for the uplift, either.  They're there to watch a man fall apart.

Until last week -- and I'm not proud of this -- I have to admit that I found the sideshow of Charlie Sheen’s decadent, addled madness sort of funny.   The lurid stories in the celebrity tabloids and the crackpot statements he’d make to the press were amusing to someone on the sidelines like me.  But I know they were infuriating – and worse, financially disquieting -- to those people (some of whom are my close friends) who have big-time upside stakes in the continuation of the series.  That’s sort of the line we all walk here in the entertainment business – part of the time we’re insiders with some skin in the game; part of the time we’re flipping through the tabloids like everybody else, mouths agape at the  sheer trashiness of the behavior of many celebrities.

And, okay, I’ll admit it:  part of me – and, again, I’m not proud of this; I’m just being honest -- admired in an admittedly creepy and indefensible way Sheen’s sheer reckless nose-thumbing at the world, his total lack of remorse or decorum or participation in the rehab-apology-recovery-Oprah Winfrey-weepy-guesting celebrity melodrama that Hollywood loves so much.  Charlie Sheen refused to play the part of the fallen star.  He just kept on partying.  He became the Keith Richards of television.  

But then, last week, he crossed the line.  In a rambling and profane radio interview, he went on a long diatribe against the network and the studio – all of which can be forgiven – but then he did something unforgivable, which is hard to do in Hollywood.

He insulted the show-runner.  He attacked the executive producer of his show, Chuck Lorre, in a barrage of crazy-talk from which there was no going back.

He said, essentially, that the executive producer and creator of his hit series owed it all to him.  He claimed credit for the success of the show, its humor and popularity, and described Lorre’s work as so many “tin cans” that he, Sheen, had spun into “pure gold.”

That, at long last, was it.  Sheen insulted the writer, executive producer, and the man responsible for his massive paychecks.  And at that exact moment, whatever small sympathy or amusement I still had for him drained away. And yesterday, he was fired from the show.  The last time that happened in Hollywood was...well, a long time ago.

Which proves that there are some things -- not drug abuse, or violence, or destruction of hotel rooms - up with which Hollywood will not put.  

Rule one in the television business:  you do not disrespect the show-runner.  You do not insult him in any way.  The man woke up one day, put together a huge hit series, invited you into it, and delivered the success that funneled the paychecks that enabled the life you’re living now.  So, when you say his name, don’t say it.  Whisper it.  With awe.

Full disclosure: this may have something to do with the fact that on many past and (I hope) future occasions, I’ve been a show-runner myself.   I know how hard it is.  And I know Lorre’s work, too.  And they ain’t “tin cans.”

“So, let me get this straight,” a friend of mine not in the entertainment industry said when we talked about it the next day.  “Charlie Sheen wrecks a hotel room, goes on cocaine binges with porn stars, allegedly holds a knife to his wife’s throat – and you’re okay with that?  But when he insults the executive producer of his series –“

“Not okay,” I said.

“That’s amoral.”

“No,” I said.  “That’s show business.  We’re tolerant of a lot of things.   But not insurrection.”

I can think of a few despots in far-flung corners who probably wish the rest of the world worked that way, too.

This is how it begins.  In order to push back against the Republican House, the first thing the MSM needs is a target.

It's Boehner.  The great Jim Treacher points to this in the Daily Caller.  From last night's Letterman:

Jokes they never made about Nancy Pelosi, who was lionized and praised right up until the moment the voters tossed her out.  Nobody on Letterman ever made fun of her mental health.  Or her Botox.

The next three months or so are going to be All About Boehner -- his weeping, his background, his out of step politics.  But it starts with contempt.  

But we knew that, didn't we?