Odds and ends of links

Conservative pundit Amity Shlaes reveals that graphic novels exist and can have political messages! Though this mostly seems to be an explanation for why conservatives should buy her book to fight the tide of liberalism in comics.
•No, payday loans are not performing an indispensable service.
•It’s getting harder to rise into a higher class in America. And presence in the upper class may have more to do with chance than we think: half of all jobs, for instance, may be found through networking. Some related links here.
•Conservatives continue to insist Martin Luther King hated welfare programs. As noted at the link, he strongly supported a guaranteed basic income and “a radical redistribution of economic power.”
•New York University is really, really, really sorry that workers on its new Abu Dhabi campus suffered brutal, unfair labor conditions.
•Los Angeles is suing banks for pushing minorities toward subprime mortgages.
•Charles Pierce says the problems at the VA happened because the Iraq war was a “Ponzi scheme” and “The one thing to remember about a Ponzi scheme is that the people who get in first get paid off. They got their war. They profited from the double-entry bookkeeping they kept on the national conscience and, now, there’s a Democratic president, and a whole lot of injured veterans, who end up holding the bag.”
•Some conservatives hold up America as the realist in response to naive, peace-loving Europe. It’s a simplistic analysis. LGM adds some more.
•Various conservatives announce that it’s time to reform the movement but their don’t seem to change. Or even make sense: Anti-feminist Carrie Lukas, for instance, proclaims that day-care is bad because it reduces the value of family members baby-sitting or one parent staying home. (Lukas has previously argued that protecting pregnant women from discrimination will actually increase discrimination against pregnant women).
•A right-winger freaks out about Lena Dunham’s TV show Girls (they freak out about Dunham a lot, as noted at the link). He also complains the left has “expropriated” the word marriage.
•Failed GOP candidate Scott Fistler has found a new path (he hopes) into politics: Running as a Democrat under the name Cesar Chavez.