A Spork in the Drawer

A Clown's Corruption

RNC supremo Michael Steele may be incompetent at his job but good at using his position to line his own pockets.

Even Republicans think this is beyond the pale.

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Left Behind

More progressive than most of the US:

Mexico City has become the first city in Latin America to legalise same-sex marriage, giving gay couples more rights, including allowing them to adopt children.

The bill passed the capital's local assembly by 39 votes to 20 yesterday as supporters chanted: "Yes, we could! Yes, we could!"

However:

The conservative National Action party, led by the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, vowed to challenge the new gay marriage law in the courts.

And the Roman Catholic Church is, needless to say, opposed as well but unlike in the United States it isn't in charge of social policy.

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A Slight Exaggeration

Perhaps a bit overwrought:

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on Monday claimed that allegations of wrongdoing surrounding the community group ACORN are bigger than the Watergate scandal that brought down the President Richard Nixon.

[...]

"It's thousands of times bigger than Watergate because Watergate was only a little break-in by a couple of guys," said King. "By the time we pull ACORN out by its roots America's going to understand just how big this is."

The House Judiciary Committee member described the ACORN saga as "the largest corruption crisis in the history of America."

I trust that I don't need to document the historical inaccuracies in Mr. King's statement.

I'll grant that I'm in no way qualified to make medical diagnoses but the phrase "paranoid delusional disorder" comes to mind.

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Mea Maxima Culpa

Athenae:

So forget the hippies. This isn't about the hippies being mean and running General Betray-us ads. This is about the political conversation being so fucked up that it doesn't matter anymore that you are right, it only matters HOW you're right, and the right way to be right changes on the hour, based on whether Howard Fineman's toupee has changed from winter to summer and if your codpiece catches Tweety's fancy. Forgive us our sins if, after eight years of this shit, we start getting a little annoyed and say "blow job" on the news.

Read the whole thing.

For the record: I sincerely apologize to Our Betters for thinking that I had a right to voice my opinion.

It won't happen again.

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Victory At Last!

Activist Judge Cancels Christmas

It was a long, bloody struggle.

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The Conversation We Should Be Having

Krugman:

Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we’ve managed so far. But it wasn’t always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past — most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.

The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

Kevin Drum provides a revealing graph:

One thing this chart doesn't show is that until 1975 sixty-seven votes - a much higher hurdle - were needed for cloture and yet it was a rare thing.

The chances of reforming or eliminating the filibuster are slim to none, although Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) is considering giving it a try.

There's simply no downside for individual Senators. An old joke: When a Senator looks in the mirror he sees a president. And the filibuster gives each Senator his or her own veto that must be overridden.

So long as one party - I needn't mention any names - is ideologically rigid the Senate, and hence the entire government, is simply not going to function.

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Pecked To Death By A Thousand Beltway Ducks

Pierce:

Part The Ultimate: My new favorite futile argument for passing the current POS is that, in our politics, simply by passing the aforementioned POS, we forever will have established, banners aloft, the notion that healthcare is a right or, at least, an affirmative obligation of the national government. As a result, we will be freer to move forward as the years go by. This is a fine argument, provided that you were cryogenically frozen in 1958. Let me explain to everyone holding this particular view what is going to happen. The POS is going to pass. The Republicans are going to oppose it and run against it. The Democrats are going to look ridiculous for a year defending it, and the Democrats who most opposed it are going to look the most ridiculous, because it is going to be politically impossible for a Democrat to run against this bill. The prevailing media narrative will prevent it. Millions more American will have health insurance, but millions of Americans will be forced by law to fork over their money, during a grisly recession, to the greediest and least popular industry the country has seen since the railroads were running amok in the 1890's. These people will go broke a little more slowly, depending on how sick they get. The industry will jack up its rates until we all have to put in new attics. The subsidies will fail to keep up. And then the industry will lie about doing any of it, and the White House will send out a sternly worded letter. The industry will be stopped by the new "consumer protections" approximately as effectively as a butterfly stops a freight train. By the end of 2009, these "reforms" will be thoroughly despised by a healthy portion of the electorate. The Republicans will then use the weaknesses of the reforms to assume control of the Congress, whereupon they will leave the mandates in place, gut the regulations, and laugh their way to the bank doing it. And that is what's going to happen.

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A Bit Of Larry Sultan

1946-2009

Pictures from Home - Golf Swing, 1982-92


A 1989 Terry Gross interview with Sultan can be heard here and more images can be seen here and here.

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Overtaken By Events

This morning's P-G features an op-ed discussing medical loss ratio, a fancy term for how much your premiums your health insurer actually devotes to health coverage:

Fifteen years ago, the answer to that question was easy. Whether you got insurance from a for-profit insurer, a nonprofit insurer or Medicare, the answer would about the same: 95 percent of your premiums (or, in the case of Medicare, your tax dollars) went for health-care benefits.

Fast forward to now and things are very different.

At the largest for-profit insurance companies nationwide, an average of only 81 percent of our premiums go to health care. The percentages for the largest Pennsylvania for-profit insurers, Cigna and Aetna, are 81.5 percent and 81.9 percent. For the two largest nonprofit insurance companies in Pennsylvania, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield and Independence Blue Cross, they are 87.9 percent and 88.3 percent.

The percentage for Medicare remains unchanged: 95.

The op-ed, by Marc Stier, Pennsylvania director of Health Care For America Now, is supportive of returning to the older model:

That's why an amendment introduced by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Al Franken, D-Minn., is so important. It would require insurance companies to put 90 percent of our premium dollars into health care instead of administration, marketing or profit.

Alas:

The CBO said “jump,” and Harry Reid said “how high.” The new MLR set by the manager’s amendment are exactly the limits the CBO said they should be: 85% for the small group market and 80% for the individual market. This change was not made for policy reasons. This change was not made because it was best for the American people. This change was made purely for PR reasons, so the CBO would not make some absurd claim that all private insurance was part of the federal budget and make the CBO score look bigger.

And what's more, a subsection of the amendment "appears to give the Secretary of HHS the power to unilaterally eliminate or gut even this very low 80% MLR requirement."

So in other words, at best we can expect the status quo and there's the possibility that the medical loss ratio could get even worse.

That's not change I can believe in.

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Saturday Palate Cleanser

Going back to the 1980's and Down Under:

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Anyone Speak Palinese?

posted by gyma

Huh?

If You've Lost Tony Norman...

Wake up call:

To say I'm disappointed with Mr. Obama's passivity in the face of this threat to his presidency and the Democratic majority is putting it mildly. I'm appalled by it.

[...]

From its economic policies to Afghanistan to the health care debacle in the Senate, the administration is determined to be the opposite of what many of us believed we were voting for.

I thought when I voted for Barack Obama that he would be a president who would be willing to get his hands dirty and that we would always know where he stood.

He used to speak like someone who had a vision for the country. Now he hedges and parses his words like a lawyer for an insurance firm.

What happened to the man who showed up on the campaign trail with specific promises about how he'd represent the interests of the American people after eight years of incompetence, stupidity and war?

What happened to all those promises of transparency?

Where did the skepticism about Bush-era war policies go?

Each day brings new headlines about the Obama administration siding with its predecessor on civil liberties or our right to know embarrassing things that were done in our name.

Whether or not this is a "center-right" country, whether or not Americans like liberal policies, what is certain is that nobody likes a dissembling weakling.

If Obama thinks his current path is putting him on the way to reelection and a permanent Democratic majority he will be in for a rude surprise November. A Congress, even just one chamber, in which the Republicans have subpoena power will make the 1990's investigations of the Clinton administration look like - if you'll a excuse the expression - a tea party.

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Stupid Republicans

posted by gyma

Must one be a dumbass in order to belong to the Republican Party? 
Seems they are always hollering about making English the official
language, yet they don't understand it themselves.  This is a screen
capture from Politico (no linkee, you can find it yourself if you really want to):

WTF is up with that apostrophe at the end of 'twas? 
 

Drunk 4-Year Old Transvestite Steals Neighbors Xmas Presents

posted by gyma

For the record, I nominate this to be the best news lede ever.

The child, Hayden Wright, was found around 1:45 am Tuesday, wandering the streets of his neighborhood.  In a police reports, officers said he was wearing a little girl's dress and drinking a beer. The police report says the child had to be taken to the hospital to be treated for alcohol consumption.

Kids these days!

Noted In Passing

I'll likely be out most if not all of the day.

And now...No. 1...The larch. The. Larch.:

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PeteBlogging

posted by gyma

Pete is the Jekyll and Hyde of dogdom and here he is displaying his Hyde persona. 
But you have to watch your back when the liver treats come out because it takes
just a New York minute for his Jekyll side to appear.

Good doggie, good doggie....

Christmas Trees

posted by gyma

Here's my Christmas tree* this year...

... but if books aren't your thing, then here are several more interesting trees.  Oh, and Happy Festivus!   I don't know why I thought it was today when it's actually on the 23rd.  I've always thought it should be halfway between the beginning of Hanukkah and Christmas.

[*Not really]
 

$26.95

Funny:

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

[...]

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said. [Emphasis added]

So this flaw has been known for over a decade but since the natives are too primitive (aren't they always?) to figure it out why waste money trying to fix the problem?

Real good thinking there.

And it get worse.

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Homeland Security

[Via Greg Mitchell.]

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Purity Of Essence

Conservatives continue their sprint to the insane right:

The John Birch Society announces it is cosponsoring the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2010, to be held in Washington DC, Feb. 18-20.

JBS will have a double booth with half dedicated to offering educational and promotional materials and the other half housing a TV studio that will stream live video from the booth and broadcast onto JBS LibertyNewsNetwork.tv, a website that will feature archived JBS video and live video streams.

Once upon a time the JBS was anathema to the conservative movement. Indeed, they were booted out of the coalition by none other than William F. Buckley (an event well-documented in Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus – a book I highly recommend).

So now I imagine that as a complement to the Birthers, Deathers, Tenthers, and Teabaggers the GOP will be foursquare against sapping our precious bodily fluids.

Those Godless Commies are sneaky, y'know.

GOP Supremo Michael Steele's replacement

[Via Dave Weigel.]

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'Tis Better To Give Than To Receive

Help digby out. You know it's important.

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Not Even Trying

Josh gets mail:

I think people are pissed right now less at the fact that they didn't get what they wanted, and more at the fact that they feel like their people didn't really fight for it. Leaders don't always get what they want. But people recognize when true leaders at least give it a shot. And people judge that leadership by what they say in public and how hard they see them publicly pushing for it. Closed door negotiations don't count.

This is correct.

It's a simple fact that Democrats (and, apparently) the Obama Administration have no idea how to negotiate. For whatever reason they always start with the compromise position (in this case, a vague, negotiable "public option") so there's nowhere to go but down. Here's a hint: Always open negotiations demanding more than you know you'll get in the end ("Medicare for all" - that is, true national health care (yes, I'm aware that Obama rejected the idea of universal government coverage during the campaign)) then compromise down ("robust public option").

Like Josh's correspondent suggests, I don't mind losing (well, I do, but that's life) so long as it was a good effort. But from all appearances there was never any real effort to get more than something, anything.

Of course, this is all is moot if Obama has gotten what he wanted all along (secret PhRMA deal, anyone?). But that's a whole other kettle of fish.

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What's Up, Xmas Music (Mostly NSFW) Edition

posted by gyma

For some unknown reason, I was put in charge of providing music for our xmas lunch at work on Friday.  That was not a smart move on their part.  So here are some of my suggestions, some of which are NSFW.

• I have several Bob Rivers Christmas CDs on my iPod and Walkin' Round in Women's Underwear is one of my favorites.  Thumbs up.
• Alvin and the Chipmunks are really annoying, so it's only fitting that someone would sing a tribute to them - Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire.  Thumbs up.
• Then there's Red Peters, who substitutes hamsters for chipmunks, in this very untastefully done, Holy Shit It's Christmas.  Thumbs up, because I have no taste at all.
• This one, Walmart Christmas, really is NSFW, although it really depicts what it's like working the season at Walmart.  Thumbs up, because I really am crass.
• Denis Leary and Comedy Central collaborated in 2005 on a holiday special with the intent of putting the X back in Xmas.  They succeeded!  You can watch the special here, (warning - very politically incorrect) or just the title song, Merry F*%#ing Christmas.  Thumbs up.
• This disco album of Christmas music is full of win.  First up is Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, followed by Silver Bells.  What are you waiting for?  Get your butt off the couch right this minute and DANCE.  Thumbs up.
• When done right, O Holy Night, is a beautiful piece of music.  This version?  Not so much.  Thumbs up for the pure awfulness of it.
• And finally, here's one I actually like - Jingle Bell Rock on steel drums. Some of my favorite xmas music is raggae.  Thumbs up.

Only the last three bullets are safe for work.

HCR Madness

Marcy points out that what were left with is a regime that will force us - under penalty of the law - to hand over our money to the insurance industry:

It’s one thing to require a citizen to pay taxes–to pay into the commons. It’s another thing to require taxpayers to pay a private corporation, and to have up to 25% of that go to paying for luxuries like private jets and gyms for the company CEOs.

It’s the same kind of deal peasants made under feudalism: some proportion of their labor in exchange for protection (in this case, from bankruptcy from health problems, though the bill doesn’t actually require the private corporations to deliver that much protection).In this case, the federal government becomes an appendage to do collections for the corporations.

Further, over at the Great Orange Satan Jed makes a very important point:

Given the centrality of...subsidies to the expansion of coverage, one of the biggest questions about this reform effort is whether the subsidies are politically sustainable. Unfortunately, history suggests they may not be. While Medicare and Social Security have broad-based support because everybody benefits from them regardless of income, means-tested welfare programs -- including Medicaid and even health insurance for children -- are constantly at risk of being cut, entirely dependent on the prevailing political winds.

[...]

[B]ecause subsidies don't kick in until 2014, it's possible that in a nightmare scenario, they could be dramatically cut or even eliminated before seeing the light of day. In the absence of any systemic reform, then, we face the unpleasant possibility that with a realignment of power in Washington, DC, we could end up with a mandate -- and fewer, or even no, subsidies.

Ezra Klein argues that the individual mandate - without a public option - is necessary to hold down costs since it would broaden the insurance pool thus keeping premiums down. (This seems to assume that the insurance companies will operate in good faith.)

Honestly, I'm trying to find the pony under this heap of manure and I'm coming up blank. But this much I think is true: The Congressional Democrats and Obama have painted themselves in to one hell of a corner. If the bill fails a weakened Obama will have much more trouble getting his agenda passed and next year's midterms will be an ugly sight. And if the bill passes in its current form the shortcomings will become obvious by 2014 at the latest - after Obama is safely reelected or turned out of office - but possibly much sooner, perhaps in time for next year's midterms.

Regardless, apparently it's all Howard Dean's fault.

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Nothing Further Need Be Said

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Those Crazy Catalonians Edition of Wednesday Weirdness

posted by gyma

Somehow this Christmas tradition has escaped my notice all these many years.  How can that be?  Throughout Catalonia, it is customary for the community to display a model of the entire city of Bethlehem, not just the manger scene.  Included in this model is a Caganer, roughly translated as 'the pooper.'

The traditional Caganer looks like this...

...but sometimes a more famous person, such as George W. Bush, is used as the Caganer.  From what I've read, being made into a Caganer can denote both respect and derision, but normally not at the same time.  So when Dubya was the Caganer it was considered a sign of derision, but Obama as the Caganer is actually a sign of respect.

Go figure.

Children in the region love this idea (ever heard of the book, Everybody Poops?  Kids LOVE it.)  A highlight of the season is for kids to play a sort of Where's Waldo with the little shitter.  I might think more highly of placing nativity scenes on public property if we had our own version of the Caganer.

And for a very adult, NSFW, version of the Caganer, there's always this very strange video.

Yawn

Time magazine's annual exercise in tediousness this year gives us Helicopter Ben as the "Person of the Year." Runners up: General Stanley McChrystal, "The Chinese Worker", Nancy Pelosi, and Usain Bolt.

Better than the 2006 pick but that isn't saying much.

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ADDED: Krugman: "Be afraid, be very afraid."

Taibbi: "Well, now I’ve seen everything."

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Random Observation

Us wonks in the political Blogosphere are becoming impressively tired and bitchy. If we were as smart as we think we are we'd all simply shutdown over the holidays.

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Words Of Wisdom

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What's Up, It's Almost Xmas, Edition

posted by gyma

It's Tuesday and I'm still boycotting politics (mostly).  I'm sick and tired of the nutjobs!

• Need a laugh?  Go listen to Garfunkel & Oates sing 'Year End Letter' - their ode to those obnoxious annual xmas letters people like to send.  Thumbs up!
• Those annoying annual xmas letters are so passé.  This year, be just a little bit different and tweet your holiday letters.  For example, "@OurWitsEnd: Print this. With Tom out of work and our house near foreclosure, this is the closest to a Christmas card you'll get. Twitter's still free."  Thumbs up, for the laughs.
• If you are having trouble deciding on a gift and want to make a donation to a non-existent charity (à la George Costanza on 'Seinfeld') then Care4Less is your go-to website.  Thumbs up.
• Don't think you can get away with making a donation to a charity?  Then give cash - it's simply easier.  Thumbs down.
• These two guys are just plain silly.  Type in your favorite xmas carol and listen to the Carol of the Chins.  Thumbs up.

(Okay time to finish up the Festivus cards - time is quickly running out!)

Guess Who

posted by gyma

Well?  Any guesses?

 

Finally Called Home By 900-Foot Jesus*

Oral Roberts

*Cf.

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A Sterling Idea!

Minnesota's deeply disturbed Michele Bachmann compares teabaggers rallying against HCR to the Charge of the Light Brigade.

For those of you whose knowledge of the Crimean War is a bit rusty, the Charge of the Light Brigade refers to the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.

The Light Brigade was slaughtered.

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Hessians

[From Justin Elliot.]

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Sucker Of The Day

Joe Biden

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