My Saturday and Sunday mornings have been completely discombobulated.  From 7-9, I religiously watched "Up with Chris Hayes," but now Hayes has been given an evening series, and after two weeks of "Best of..." the show has returned with a new host, Steve Kornacki.  Yesterday's program wasn't good, and Kornacki, perhaps nervous, didn't show much personality.  I'm more encouraged today when the theme so far has been "The Austerity Trap," the prompt for which was Obama's discouraging budget, especially his endorsement of a "chained CPI" to calculate social security benefits.  The chained CPI would reduce social security enhancements to seniors, veterans, the disabled.  First, social security benefits aren't part of the federal budget; they have their own funding and accounting.  More seriously, however, the President's budget buys into what has become the common wisdom since the crash of 2008: that the problem is deficit and debt rather than an anemic economy and a virtual absence of government stimulus (to use a word that is anathema to many) to create jobs.  As Keynes long ago pointed, the government needs to spend (and even incur debt) when the economy is struggling; it pays down the debt when the economy is strong.  You fix the roof when the sun is shining, not when it's storming. 

Ten words/expressions that need to be retired from the English language:

• entitlements for social insurance.  It was President Reagan who first popularized the word in its current, pejorative sense, and ever since, even Democrats, have used the word for what even Reagan had previously called the "social safety net."  In theory, 'entitlement' ought to be neutral, but "to have a sense of entitlement" or "to feel entitled" brings with it an unearned sense of resentment.
• accidental racist.  If LL Cool J wanted some publicity for the album he's going to "drop" soon, he's certainly getting it.  The song is too silly to merit the attention, but, if we could take it seriously, the premise and the examples are clearly offensive.
• assessment.  The bane of modern education, 'assessment' sounds logical enough.  But as it's implemented, with its narrow focus on reading and math, its assumption that standardized test scores measure something other than how well one takes standardized tests, its emphasis on conformity and consequent squelching of creativity, its incentives to ignore disadvantaged and disabled students, and its punitive consequences, assessment only narrows what education ought to be.
• rubric.  Just reduce everything to a one-size-fits-all numeric scale and grading will suddenly seem uniform and objective.  Now that Harvard and MIT (oy!) have collaborated on a software program to grade essays, creative teaching seems even more superfluous than ever.
• thinking outside the box.  And where exactly would that be? 
• (not) in someone's wheelhouse.  Popularized, I guess, by "American Idol," I hear this expression all the time now.  Does anyone even know what a wheelhouse is?
• awesome/amazing.  These seem to have become the only two positive adjectives that Americans know.  Perhaps, though, we're better off than the Brits, who seem to have only 'brilliant' as a compliment.
• anyways.  'Anyway' is bad enough as an all-purpose transition, but adding the -s makes it sound particularly hick-y.
• shut the front door!  As a euphemism, this one is inane at every level.
• unconditional love.  Is this a synonym for masochism?

Yesterday, I had more pageviews in Russia than in the U.S.  And I now have a faithful follower in Latvia, and another in Germany.  Cue music from "It's a Small World."