If you look over to the right, under the “About” label, you’ll see a link called “You need to hire these people.” You need to go click on that link.
(Note: This is a “sticky” post, meaning it stays at the top of the blog’s front page. New content is added directly underneath it.)
Media Matters has identified what it sees as a media-related issue.
That issue is this: The right-wing Web site WorldNewsDaily, affectionately known to those of us in the reality-based community as Wingnut Daily, is complaining. It is complaining because an Army major wrote an exhaustively documented monograph for his work at the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
That paper is titled “Strategic Implications of American Millennialism.” It talks about the prevalence and influence in the American military elite of dispensational pre-millennialism. This is a strand of Christian belief that holds that believing Christians will ascend bodily into heaven, immediately after which the world will be plunged into seven years of all manner of trouble, after which Jesus returns to Earth to reign for a thousand years (a millennium, whence the name).
Wingnut Daily’s Bob Unruh* is criticizing this Army major for suggesting that way too many people are setting actual military policy according to this belief.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Media Matters is right to criticize Wingnut Daily for complaining about this. But I also think Media Matters is missing the real problem here, which is that way too many people are setting actual military policy according to this belief.
As an amateur student of military history, I cannot stress enough how bad this is. I can point you to army after army after empire after empire that has decided that some sort of intangible, God-given quality was going to lead them to a military victory they otherwise had no chance of winning — and then gone and gotten slaughtered. Everyone laughs when the guy in “Gone With the Wind” brags that one Southerner can whip 10 Yankees, but when the French found out in World War I that red trousers and elán alone weren’t going to beat the Kaiser’s troops, all of a sudden it wasn’t so damn funny.
I am open to the possibility that God could come down to Earth tomorrow, hand a trumpet to David Petraeus and then we could all stand around and watch as al-Qaeda’s walls came tumbling down. Call me crazy.
But let me be clear here: Unless/until this actually happens, letting dispensational pre-millennarianism guide our military and foreign policy is dangerous magical thinking that is likely to get a lot of good people killed unnecessarily, military and civilian alike. As I type this, unlike the Hebrews of the Old Testament, we have no real indication that our commander in chief is anyone other than that tall, skinny guy currently living in the White House. And I pray to God that our military’s training, simulations, planning, logistics and everything else are structured accordingly.
*I wrote Bob Unruh, and here’s what I said: “Dear Bob: Is Joshua now a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army? Has God recently come down and personally handed a trumpet to Gen. David Petraeus, the blowing of which has caused al-Qaeda’s walls to come tumbling down? No? Then get off Maj. Brian L. Stuckert’s back. Leaving aside for the moment your gross misinterpretations of his work — I will, for the moment, give you the benefit of the doubt and not claim that you’re intentionally misrepresenting what he wrote — you need to understand that letting dispensational premillennarianism guide our military and foreign policy probably is only going to get a lot of good people — American and otherwise, soldiers and civilians alike — killed. I know you don’t want that. So, unless/until God actually shows up and hands Gen. Petraeus the aforementioned trumpet, how about you shut the hell up, mmkay? Thanks very much. Oh, tell me — how much do you get paid to make Christians look like total idiots? I hope it’s a lot. I’d hate to think your kids were going hungry while I resented you. Best, Lex”
I blogged two months ago about Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), brain damage among NFL players who have suffered concussions. Since that article, the co-chairs of the league’s committee on brain injuries have resigned (read: “resigned”) after players said they’d lost faith in the committee’s objectivity.
The committee has been in denial on this, a fact the New Yorker article touched on. That fact is examined in more detail in this article by Jeanne Marie Laskas in GQ (h/t: DivaGeek, via e-mail). As with Gladwell’s article, it’s a bit lengthy but well worth your time … and likely to prompt some serious reflection from fans about what our sports heroes endure for our entertainment.
Of special note to Panthers fans is the brief mention of former Panthers center Curtis Whitley, “just 39 when he was found facedown in the bathroom of a rented trailer in West Texas, shirtless, shoeless, wearing blue warm-up pants. [Dr. Bennet] Omalu got his brain, examined it, and found CTE.” Whitley’s case was the 17th Dr. Omalu had identified, an incredibly high number compared with what one would expect to find in a similarly sized random sample of the population at large. Whitley’s mom shows up in the article comments and leaves he e-mail address for those who’d like to pass on their condolences.
GQ emphasizes more heavily than the New Yorker the possible contribution of steroids to the problem, but neither article claims evidence of a definitive link.
Both articles also make relatively clear that if this problem is to be solved, equipment will not be the answer. The problem is not necessarily how hard your head hits something, it’s how hard your brain hits the inside of your skull and whether there is any sideways motion that can lead to tearing.
A reckoning is coming, for the NFL and perhaps for all of football, down to youth leagues. Players, their parents and fans likely will soon have some significant, and grim, new information to incorporate into their calculations of and tolerance for risk. I love this game, but not so much that I want to see people die or suffer brain damage to the point of dementia for my entertainment.
Let God sort ‘em out: A new book makes both Bill Clinton and the FBI that went after him look bad.
Release the e-mails: There’s more to know about AIG before we let it off the taxpayers’ hook, and the taxpayers deserve to know it. (More interestting but depressing details here.)
Relatedly: How ’bout we claw back some of that taxpayer money that went through AIG to Goldman Sachs at 100 cents on the dollar, thankyouverymuch?? Goldman was pretty much the only bank in such dire straits at the time that didn’t end up settling for 10 to 13 cents on the dollar from AIG, and now it wants to take that tax money and pay it out in employee bonuses. Homey don’ play dat.
Another banking shock: What determines how suitable a bank is for a federal bailout? Size? Nature of its business? Try … wait for it … political ties to the Federal Reserve. Yup, and there’s gambling going on in this casino, too. So can we just audit the damn thing already?
Decade of (self-) deception: Farewell to the ’00s, in which we begged to be suckered and found no shortage of those eager to accommodate us, from “compassionate conservatism” and Enron to Goldman Sachs and Tiger Woods. One other parallel: None of the hucksters, besides maybe Ken Lay, has been held accountable.
Democrats throwing women under the bus. Again: Tbogg on Twitter, for the win: “Bart Stupak will not be happy until he has had a close personal relationship with more vaginas than Tiger Woods.”
Boulevard of broken dreams promises: Jon Walker walks us past the mileposts of broken Obama campaign promises that constitute the current Senate version of health-care reform.
He just can’t quit you: Jon Walker, who apparently has no commitments in life besides health care reform, offers 35 ways to fix the current Senate bill. I’d say it’s unlikely at best that more than one or two will happen, and quite possibly none of them will. But if nothing else, this is a good road map of the kind of crappy legislation that comes out of unified GOP opposition and an undemocratic Senate hidebound by the filibuster.
Speaking of the filibuster, here’s some interesting background on how its use has grown of late. Memo to the mainstream media: Guilt is not equitably distributable.
Ask and ye shall receive: LA Times blogger Andrew Malcolm wants a caption for this picture. OK, here’s mine: “Andrew Malcolm is such an idiot that I could grab his head and smash it into this table like this and the experience would actually make him smarter.”
Memo to Ceci Connolly: Defining being “smart” in Washington as “disagreeing with what two-thirds of the country wants” doesn’t make you look, well, smart.
Related: Time was, and not all that long ago, a David Broder column, whether you agreed with it or not, would be undergirded by some reporting. Now, not so much. (Besides which, on the substance, what appears to be surprising him is that Congressional Democrats are opposing something that Obama himself opposed. This is wrong, or surprising, or even news, how, exactly?)
John McCain fought Teh Stoopid and Teh Stoopid won: He goes on the teevee to claim, laughably, that Ted Kennedy wouldn’t have liked that health-care reform passed on a partisan vote. He crowns that particularly serving of Teh Stoopid topped with whipped Teh Stoopid with this maraschino Teh Stoopid: “There has never been a major reform accomplished in the history of this country that wasn’t bipartisan.” Uh, John, that’s because there has never before been a major reform that one party unanimously rejected purely on partisan grounds.
Top 10 reasons to kill the Senate health-care bill, from Firedoglake, with background links on each. I don’t know whether the bill should be killed, but I do know there are a lot of things about it I absolutely do not like. (One “bug,” starting the taxes before the benefits take effect, could be sold as a way of reducing the deficit. But I’m unsure of the exact math over the long haul, and whether you choose to look at that item as a bug or a feature, I don’t think it makes much difference in the big picture.)
How I would decide on whether or not to pass the health-care bill (Senate version), if I had a vote: Which saves more lives, passing it or killing it? And by killing it, I mean, “killing it,” not, “killing it and immediately passing some fantasy better version that in the real world may or may not ever happen within my lifetime.” Anyone with a documentable answer to this question is welcome to weigh in.
Conservative of the year: Human Events picks Dick Cheney, although, as more than one pundit has pointed out, the actual, substantial policy differences between Cheney and, say, Barack Obama on foreign-policy and civil-liberties issues are much less than meets the eye.
Kentucky legislator wants to prosecute mothers of alcohol- and drug-addicted newborns: Because treating addicts like criminals instead of people with health problems has done so much to reduce addiction over the years.
Gathering storm: The “shadow pool,” the nation’s pool of homes that haven’t yet gone on the market but are about to because of delinquency/foreclosure, has increased more than 50% in just one year, to about 1.7 million. A lot of those homes are or will be vacant, which spells trouble for their neighbors, too.
Some good news for a change: Obama signed the military appropriations bill, which is good because it contained Al Franken’s amendment barring contractors from forcing employees into arbitration when they get raped. Which, in turn, is good not only for those employees but also because it gives candidates who give a damn about rape victims, be they competing in the GOP primary or in the general election, a big ol’ hammer with which to hit the 40 current incumbent Republican senators over the head.
And more good news: The signed consolidated appropriations bill DIDN’T ban federal funding for needle-exchange programs, the first such bill since 1988. Now that a smidgen of common sense has crept into the War on Some Drugs, expect the end of the world before lunchtime tomorrow.
I don’t know who Drew Westen is, and I don’t know if he’s right. But I do know that his perceptions are remarkably similar to mine.
Thumbsucker: Long journalism pieces that raise lots of Big, Serious Questions — often without offering answers, sometimes because no answers can be found — are known in the journalism biz as “thumbsuckers.” In the era of dying print and shorter attention spans, thumbsuckers are a dying breed, in part because the form is attempted far more often than it is mastered. But here’s a good one, asking whether the GOP has any relevant ideas to contribute to discussion of some of the biggest issues that face us. (My short answer: Yes, but to find them you’ll have to listen to the party members who, right now, aren’t doing most of the talking the public hears.)
Quote of the day, by Jonathan Chait of The New Republic in the thumbsucker linked above: “If government intervention appears to be the answer, [Republicans] must change the question.”
If I understand correctly — and I might not, or I might have at one point but then the bill changed — the version of the health-care bill now pending in the Senate says that you can’t use public money to pay for abortion. So if you’re getting any kind of federal subsidy on private health insurance, you have to set up a segregated account, paid for with your own money, for coverage of any abortion you or your dependent(s) might need.
This strikes me as legally/constitutionally problematic. I think it might be both a violation of the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment and a back-door way of circumventing Roe v. Wade. (I also think it creates a paper trail for the government on who has had, or thinks she might need to have, an abortion, which, from a legal standpoint, ought to be none of the government’s damn business where private insurance is concerned.) Which means it may become, intentionally or not, a vehicle for another Supreme Court challenge to Roe.
And with the current makeup of SCOTUS, I have no doubt that, all the rhetoric about “judicial restraint” notwithstanding, the conservative majority is even more eager to overturn Roe than they are to overturn the ban on corporate political contributions.
And since they basically ordered lawyers at gunpoint to bring them a vehicle for overturning that ban, I’m guessing that given the opportunity, they’d vote to overturn Roe without even hearing oral arguments if one of their number suggested that approach out loud. (I’ll bet at least three of them already have written their opinions.) It’s not like anyone could, or even would, do anything but yell.
1 bag Nacho Cheese Doritos: $4.49
1/2 bag Double-Stuffed Oreos: $2.21
4 oz. extra sharp cheddar cheese: $1.02
1 can Spaghetti-Os with meatballs: $.99
3 bottles Samuel Adams Winter Lager: $3.24
Spending a cold winter’s night enjoying beer and junk food as the Panthers salvage a little bit of pride: almost priceless.
How do you surge?: McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef talks about some of the logistics issues, primarily the strain being put on facilities at Bagram and Kandahar that were never meant to handle as much as they’re handling now, let alone what they’ll be asked to handle as the surge begins. One issue among many: sewage. Ew.
Poetry corner: “Joezymandias”
Worst ideas of the decade, per the WaPo. Ed adds Invading Iraq without a Plan, Market Worship, and Vampire Saturation. I think Vampire Saturation wasn’t an idea so much as something that just sort of happened. However, I think a Zombie Apocalypse is a fabulous idea, and I’ll keep you posted as to my progress in that regard.
Best U.S. political analysis by someone too young to remember Nixon and too drunk to make sense, from commenter R-Jud at Balloon Juice: “To answer the question, ‘Were people this stupid before Nixon?’: of course. They just didn’t have a huge, completely subservient, instantaneous multimedia complex capable of giving them airspace or feeding them the latest catchphrases. Another thought: you could say that the people cynically manipulating the crazies, as Nixon did, have died off or faded away over the last 40 years, and in their place we’ve been electing a bunch of the true-believing crazies, who’ve grown up on the Republican groupthink their entire lives. The crazy just keeps boiling down and down to its pure essence.”
Oh, is THAT all?: I blogged on the day it happened that the Supremes had refused to grant cert in Rasul et al. v. Myers et al., in which some Guantanamo detainees had sued Donald Rumsfeld and 10 military officials for having been tortured. At the time, I was hoping that SCOTUSblog, usually the go-to source for interpretation and analysis of high-court decisions, would fill in the contextual gap. As of this writing, that hasn’t happened. But the detainees’ attorneys — who, to state the obvious, have an interest — and Empire Burlesque say the Supremes, agreeing with the Obama Justice Department, which, unconscionably, agreed with the Bush Justice Department before it, have effectively decided that military detainees abroad “are not persons” and therefore “have no right not to be tortured.” Now, aren’t you glad you voted for change?
Before you praise Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., as a “fiscal conservative,” note this.
“I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier”: Way-cool video from Airventure 2009, to the tune of The Killers’ “All These Things I’ve Done” (h/t: Fred):
So when Hooper asked if I’d give him some money to get the snow off my car, I said OK.
As it turns out, I should have asked him what he was going to get the snow off the car WITH.
If you don’t want people hammering on your Nazi past, stop acting like a Nazi by putting a war criminal and an enabler/protector of child abusers on the fast track to sainthood. (Originally typed “stainthood,” which might be even more appropriate.)
The GOP’s 2010 narrative, courtesy of non-GOP Eli at Firedoglake: “Look, we were the ones who voted against giving Wall Street hundreds of billions of dollars, who voted against that tool at the Fed who doesn’t care about your job, who voted against forcing you to spend your hard-earned money on junk insurance you can’t afford to use. Obama and the Democrats are screwing you over to funnel money to corporate fatcats, and we’re trying to stop them.” I bet it works, too.
Global-warming conspiracy theorists … at the Pentagon.
The health of the commercial banking industry, as summarized by Peterr: If you’re the FDIC putting your budget together for 2010, “you don’t double your receivership budget if you think bank failures are slowing down.” Fun fact: The figure being doubled was itself almost doubled in mid-year 2009 from what it was set at at the beginning of the year, because of the growth in bank failures.
Glenn Beck, cracked: When I was a kid, Cracked was the less nuanced competitor to Mad magazine. But in the Internet age, Cracked has found its footing. Consider this unpacking of the Glenn Beck phenomenon, which includes this gem: “The difference between a Glenn Beck conspiracy and the coronation scene in Carrie is Carrie didn’t overreact as hysterically.”
Different standards: Can you imagine the media hissy fit if Democrats were to try to filibuster an Iraq-Afghanistan spending bill just to delay some other legislation that was part of the GOP agenda? But when Republicans do it to try to delay health-care legislation, it’s perfectly OK, or at least unremarkable.
Blech: I started off my Christmas break with sinuses stuffy AND running AND hurting, and a lot of chest congestion. I’ve hit the Neilmed bottle twice, and it has helped a little but not as much as I had hoped. Rather than playing in the snow with Hooper and Victoria, which is what I wanted to do, I’ve spent most of the day in bed. On the bright side, the streets appear navigable, so I should be able to run to the store tomorrow for the appropriate junk food to consume during Panthers/Vikings.
Speaking of which, I am probably deriving far more amusement than I should from the thought that the teams will be playing tomorrow night on the frozen tundra of Bank of America Stadium because the Vikes are now an indoor team. But I’m not under any illusions about who’s going to win, just as I hope John Fox is not under any illusions that Jerry Richardson is going to keep him on.
Like Willie Sutton said, you rob banks because that’s where the money is: And if you want to cut the deficit, you also go where the money is:
Health-care reform: Nate Silver has 20 questions for people who want to kill the health-care bill, and Jon Walker has 20 answers. Go read this. Seriously, right now. I’ll wait. Because this might be the best combination of comprehensive and clear that you’ll find on whether or not the current Senate bill deserves to live. Kudos to both bloggers.
Glenn Greenwald says Obama is getting the health-care bill he really wanted. I find it hard to disagree.
But it isn’t the health-care bill WE wanted: 63% of Americans say they wanted Medicare expanded to cover 55- to 64-year-olds; only 33% disagree.
It isn’t the health-care bill doctors wanted, either: UC-San Francisco physicians explain, among other things, why the patents-forever provision is such as bad idea.
Indeed, health-care reform is JUST LIKE the Holocaust: Hey, if Laura Ingraham says it, it must be true, right?
Matthew Yglesias on Time magazine’s choice of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke as Person of the Year, for the win: “[I]t demonstrates a very specific class skew — extraordinary intervention into the market place just long enough to fix the situation from the point of view of asset-owners while leaving wage-earners holding the bag. But the owners and managers and editors of Time Magazine and the companies that advertise in it probably don’t care so much about that.”
What could possibly go wrong?: Western military leaders are seeking additional support in Afghanistan from … wait for it … Russia.
But … but … but … Republicans believe global warming is a myth!: A poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds Democrats significantly more likely than Republicans to have visited a fortuneteller or to claim to have seen ghosts or talked to the dead. (Interestingly, whites, blacks and Hispanics all reported having seen ghosts at about the same rate.)
“One more such victory and we are ruined”: The Pentagon actually wins a Gitmo detainee’s habeas-corpus case … but comes out looking like dirt.
And the fun doesn’t stop with health care: John Cole of Balloon Juice observes, “The best thing about health care reform is that it is a primer for Banking and Financial Regulation. We get to look forward to watching the House bill get neutered down by the conservadems, the GOP will be aligned in unison with industry against, and then when the final bill is not up to Howard Dean’s standards, the progressives can sink it because it isn’t good enough, and noted liberals like Tom Harkin, Ron Wyden, and Russ Feingold will be labeled sellouts to the cause just like they were with health care. Also, I’m sure this will all be Rahm’s fault.”
John Cole was right: Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., indeed is getting ready to screw us over some more on bank bailouts. His 2010 re-election already is in serious jeopardy. Good.
“Howard Dean and similar-minded policymakers get treated as a passionate activists, but not as “serious” experts. … Similarly, being an activist means never receiving credit for being on the right side of an issue. By contrast, as we’ve seen time and again, being considered an “expert” allows you the opportunity to be wrong and wrong and wrong again and yet remain the more credible party in how the debate takes place on America’s op-ed pages.
I’m trying to think of a single major issue in the past decade, from fighting terrorism to torture to running the economy to health care, where the people who have been right were the ones who actually got to make policy — or, for that matter, even got consistent, prominent play in U.S. mainstream media …
… and I’m coming up dry.
I haven’t been watching the Senate debate on health-care reform tonight, so I may put a bunch of energy into this post only for it to be overtaken by events by the time I wake up in the morning. But I think Congress and we the people have arrived in the past day or so at a point we’re going to look back at 30 years from now and recognize for better or worse — quite likely worse — as historic.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, who won re-election in his last race as an independent after getting beaten in the Democratic primary, has managed to strip out of the bill the things its most fervent backers wanted most, primarily a public option and, as a fallback from that, expansion of Medicare to include some (paying) people between the ages of 55 and 64. Keep in mind that as recently as September, Lieberman was publicly supporting the Medicare expansion.
As it now stands — and, again, I realize, this could change at any time — the bill gives the powers that be in the current health-care status quo a lot of goodies. And it doesn’t come anywhere close to achieving universal health-insurance coverage.
There are other specifics I’ll get into in a second, but right now, things boil down to this: Under our current system, by every objective standard the worst in the industrialized world, roughly 45,000 Americans die every year as a direct result of lack of health insurance. Will the current bill, flawed though it might be, save enough of them to make it worth supporting? Or, put another way, how many people does it need to save before all the goodies, both up front and over time, that private health insurers and pharmaceutical companies will be getting are justified?
I don’t think there’s a right answer. For damn sure, there’s no good answer.
* * *
Just how bad has Joe Lieberman crapped all over the whole debate on health-care reform? Bad enough that right now, I think it’s time he not only gets no health care, it’s time he gets intestinal cancer in a part of the world where morphine is as yet undiscovered. I mean, really, what kind of sociopath do you have to be to disregard those 45,000 annual deaths and singlehandedly chop up a bill to create something that:
It’s as if private insurers, Big Pharma and their water-carriers on Capitol Hill are trying to see how bad they can make the bill and still get “reform” supporters to vote for it. As I noted in an earlier post, Ezra Klein of The Washington Post has suggested (and there is some evidence for this view) that Joe Lieberman has done all this simply to piss off progressives. Well, congratulations, Joe — you’ve not only pissed off progressives, you’ve also pissed off me.
It’s also as if Republicans got together and created a bill that they wanted Democrats to run on in 2010 because they knew it would do little or no good while also pissing off people all across the political spectrum, from angry defenders of the status quo to people who wanted far, far more change than this bill can offer.
But it’s Democrats, not Republicans, who are doing this. Republicans, having pledged to oppose any Democratic bill unanimously and lacking the numbers to defeat a bill on their own, have become irrelevant to the debate. This is happening because of the seriously undemocratic structure and operating rules of the Senate and because of conscious choices on the part of Lieberman and other prominent Democrats who ought to know better and whose motives must therefore be called into question. And it’s happening with the approval, if not at the order, of Barack Obama, who has been lying pretty shamelessly about what the bill will and will not do.
* * *
In addition to screwing tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Americans on the substance, this situation also creates an interesting political dilemma for Democrats. Enough progressive House Democrats have pledged to oppose any health-care reform that lacks a public option that anything that can get 60 votes in the Senate, needed to overcome a filibuster, will not pass the House if all those now on record as demanding a public option hold firm.
So it’s not just people who need health care who must choose between a crappy bill and no bill. It’s Congressional Democrats, a bunch of whom must run for re-election next year with whatever happens to this bill as the most important backdrop besides jobs and national security (two other areas where Democrats aren’t exactly shooting out the lights). What makes it really interesting is that if health-care reform is either seen as inadequate or fails entirely, the most vulnerable incumbents aren’t going to be the ones who pushed for far more sweeping changes. It’s going to be the Blue Dogs who are hewing close to Lieberman.
I don’t see 2010 being as bad for Democrats as 1994 was. But I bet the Republicans take back the Senate.
* * *
As you might imagine, there’s a significant split among people who’ve been following this issue over whether this bill is better than nothing. And generally speaking, the policy wonks argue that this bill, while bad, is better than nothing, while the political activists say this thing needs to be killed.
Blogger Jane Hamsher argues that it’s worse than nothing:
Instead [of reducing costs by allowing importation], the “bend” [a reference to the need to slow the growth of health-care costs, often called "bending the cost curve" -- Lex] comes from taxing middle class insurance benefits, which makes them worse. According to the CSM report released last week:
In reaction to the tax, many employers would reduce the scope of their health benefits. The resulting reductions in covered services and/or increases in employee cost-sharing requirements would induce workers to use fewer services. Because plan benefit values would generally increase faster than the threshold amounts for defining high-cost plans (which are indexed by the CPI plus 1 percent), over time additional plans would become subject to the excise tax, prompting those employers to scale back coverage.
The cost curve gets “bent” by making the insurance you have through your employer worse. Remember Harry and Louise? They killed health care reform during the Clinton administration by making this claim. Well, now it’s actually going to be true.
Howard Dean, the physician and former governor and presidential candidate, also says this bill must be killed. Digby agrees, saying that the bottom line is that this bill isn’t going to save any lives:
Nobody’s “getting covered” here. After all, people are already “free” to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won’t make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn’t or didn’t want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people’s money against their will, saying it’s for their own good. …
What this huge electoral mandate and congressional majority have gotten us, then, is basically a deal with the insurance industry to accept 30 million coerced customers in exchange for ending their practice of failing to cover their customers when they get sick — unless they go beyond a “reasonable cap,” of course. (And profits go up!)
Emptywheel calls it “neo-feudalism”, and my only argument is that she’s being too kind. This is nothing more or less than using government as a mechanism to transfer wealth from the middle class to corporations just as feudal peasants had to pay to the nobles — and the peasants actually got a promise of protection in return, while these corporations, which supposedly will protect us from medical bankruptcy in return, aren’t even legally required to do that:
Consider a family of four making $66,150–a family at 300% of the poverty level and therefore, hypothetically, at least, “subsidized.” That family would be expected to pay $6482.70 (in today’s dollars) for premiums–or $540 a month. But that family could be required to pay $7973 out of pocket for copays and so on. So if that family had a significant– but not catastrophic — medical event, it would be asked to pay its insurer almost 22% of its income to cover health care. Several months ago, I showed why this was a recipe for continued medical bankruptcy (though the numbers have changed somewhat). But here’s another way to think about it. Senate Democrats are requiring middle class families to give the proceeds of over a month of their work to a private corporation — one allowed to make 15% or maybe even 25% profit on the proceeds of their labor.
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.
Forget whether this will actually make health care cheaper or more available. How is this even constitutional?
I’m no closer now to knowing what we ought to do, or even what I would do were I in the Senate, than I was when I started this piece almost three hours ago. I just know that after all this time and effort, tens of millions of Americans are still going to be uninsured, and tens of thousands will still die next year because of it. And the fact that tens of millions of other Americans think this is acceptable makes me tremble for my country.
I know that in many ways, large and small, it’s still a man’s world.
I was still having a hard time landing jobs. I was being turned down for gigs I should’ve gotten, for reasons I couldn’t put a finger on.
My pay rate had hit a plateau, too. I knew I should be earning more. Others were, and I soaked up everything they could teach me, but still, there was something strange about it . . .
It wasn’t my skills, it wasn’t my work. So what were those others doing that I wasn’t?
One day, I tossed out a pen name, because I didn’t want to be associated with my current business, the one that was still struggling to grow. I picked a name that sounded to me like it might convey a good business image. Like it might command respect.
My life changed that day
Instantly, jobs became easier to get.
There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all.
Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.
And I was thankful. I finally stopped worrying about how I would feed my girls. We were warm. Well-fed. Safe. No one at school would ever tease my kids about being poor.
* * *
Understand, I hadn’t advertised more effectively or used social media — I hadn’t figured that part out yet. I was applying in the same places. I was using the same methods. Even the work was the same.
In fact, everything was the same.
Except for the name.
The answer was plain. Without really thinking much about it, I tried an experiment when I chose my new pseudonym:
I became a man (in name only)
Taking a man’s name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service.
No hassles. Higher acceptance. And gratifying respect for my talents and round-the-clock work ethic.
Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.
Maybe I’m overly cynical, but the first thing that came to my mind when I read this was, “Surely you had telephone conversations with clients. Did they not pick up on the fact that you were, like, female?”
But whether this particular story really happened is immaterial, because I saw this happen to some pretty talented women in my years in the newspaper bidness. I’m sure a lot more of it went on that I simply wasn’t perceptive enough to notice, particularly at first.
I saw enough that when I got in a position to do something about it, I did: I pushed the women who worked for me just as hard as I pushed the men who worked for me. And when I say “push,” I mean two things: “motivate/train/hold high expectations for” and “promote” (in the sense of talking them and their work up to my fellow editors when their work merited it).
I’m under no illusions that I did this as well and thoroughly as I should have. But at least I knew going into management that this was a significant blind spot in management, even at a company that worked as hard as ours did at “embracing diversity.”
I didn’t do this because I’m a saint, or even because I’m a particularly nice guy. I did it because my mother, my wife, my sister, my sisters-in-law, my daughter and my nieces are all bright, talented women who deserve to reap whatever benefits their skills, energy and persistence would otherwise entitle them to, without the market distortion of an estrogen discount.
Go read the whole thing.
A way to balance the budget?: For the second straight month, the U.S. Treasury auctioned 1-month T-bills at 0.0% interest. The national budget gets significantly smaller if you whack out interest on the national debt, y’know.
All I want for Christmas is a repeal of Gramm-Leach-Bliley.
BOHICA: As part of “paying off” its multi-billion-dollar loan from the taxpayers, technically insolvent bank holding company Citigroup gets to keep $38 billion in tax credits that regulations normally would require it to give up. That figure will easily overshadow any profit the taxpayers may get from selling Citigroup shares. Merry. Freaking. Christmas.
But maybe Christmas is coming early; or, Who are you and what have you done with Sen. Jim Bunning?: Remember those 15 questions that the Cunning Realist suggested should be asked of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke during his reconfirmation hearings? Unbelievably, a senator asked them. Even more unbelievably, the senator in question was Jim Bunning, heretofore a leading candidate for the title of Biggest Waste of Carbon in the U.S. Capitol.
You may now kiss the D.C. City Council: The District of Columbia has legalized gay marriage. Congress, per the Constitution, gets 30 legislative days to review the law once D.C.’s mayor has signed it, but the Democratic leadership will keep that puppy bottled up until the deadline has safely passed.
No room to talk: Panthers defensive backs Chris Harris and Chris Gamble need to STFU about Patriots WR Randy Moss. While they are having good years, and they did shut Moss down on Sunday, they apparently chose to ignore Wes Welker’s presence on the field. And what really matters is that yet again, the Panthers have failed to achieve consecutive winning seasons, while the Pats almost certainly are going to the playoffs.
Wardrobe police: Is Roy Williams gonna have me thrown out of North Carolina for wearing a Panthers jersey in Chapel Hill?
Shorter Janet Tavakoli: Except for Paul Volcker, the bankers don’t get it.
Brother can you spare your Visa card?: The Miami Herald, which recently laid off 199 people, is now attaching to each article a link through which people can contribute money online … to the paper, not the laid-off employees. The last time I can remember anything like this happening was when I was a kid and Ted Turner went on the air in Charlotte to ask people to send him money to keep Channel 36 on the air. (Yes, that’s Turner Broadcasting’s Ted Turner, and, yes, he repaid it.)
CBS Sports: “If any of our announcers talk about Tiger Woods, we’ll shoot this dog fire them.”
Best banking idea I’ve heard in a while: If Barney Frank has his way, only retail banks will be able to borrow from the discount window. At worst, this gets some banksters off the federal teat. It may even significantly ease the current credit crunch.
Quote of the day: “You’re either part of the solution or you’re a tool of ACORN.” — Conservative Brown, Boy Detective, by Tom Tomorrow.
Smarter Washington Post, please: The Post publishes a bunch of contextually challenged nonsense regarding the national debt. Economist Dean Baker rips them a new one. Yes, the national debt is too high and rising, but the bigger and more urgent problem is joblessness. The Post wants to scrap Social Security and Medicare but just doesn’t have the stones to say so.
Smarter Washington Post, please, cont.: Charles Lane criticizes colleague Ezra Klein’s criticism of Joe Lieberman … while also conceding that Klein’s factual claim is correct. Idiot. All you need to know about Lane is that he was Stephen Glass’s editor. All you need to know about Klein is that Joe Lieberman finds him bothersome. (But here’s useful background on the contretemps.) Also, I posted the one-word comment “FAIL” on Lane’s blog post earlier; as of 10:30 p.m., it had been deleted, which fact I shortly thereafter commented upon. We’ll see if the 2nd comment stays up.
Smarter judges, please: U.S. District Judge William Duffey tells two Muslim defendants at a sentencing, “I’ll say this, our Gods are very different.” Uh, no, infidel; Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
If you like what Joe Lieberman is doing to health-care reform, wait’ll you see what he has planned for Social Security and Medicare.
Terminated; or, Cue the Limbaugh smears in 3 … 2… 1 …: Arnold Schwarzenegger throws Sarah Palin under the (hybrid?) bus.
Jerome “Swiftboat” Corsi asks,”Could it be that President Obama intends to bankrupt the USA in order to destroy free-enterprise capitalism itself?” Sounds like fun! Let’s play! Could it be that Jerome Corsi is a paranoid psychotic? Could it be that Jerome Corsi wouldn’t recognize the destruction of free-enterprise capitalism THAT’S NOW GOING ON, LED BY INVESTMENT BANKS, if it bit him in the ass? Could it be that Jerome Corsi has a financial motivation to misrepresent what the president is trying to do? Hey, this is fun! I could do this all day!
Paying for your wars: The Greatest Generation, so revered by conservatives, had no problem with this concept; indeed, they inculcated it in their children. So why do today’s Congressional leaders have such a problem?
Why is private health insurance such a bad idea? Let me the Main Street Alliance draw you a picture:
Back from the dead and ready to incriminate?: Some 22 million White House e-mails from the first Bush 43 administration have been “found,” four years and change after they “went missing.” In a perfect world, Karl Rove will be going to prison as a result for having 1) outed undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame and 2) obstructed a criminal investigation into the outing thereof. In the world we live in, we’ll probably find out that the missing $12 trillion in U.S. wealth, much of it sucked out of the home values and retirement savings of the middle class, is now in some Nigerian barrister’s bank account.
Math: About fifteen times as many people die in the U.S. every year as a result of lack of health insurance as died in the 9/11 terror attacks.
No methaqualone for you, says the Methaqualone Nazi!: The new Republican Party-sponsored Web-link shortener, GOP.am, includes this in its terms of use: “If you use it for spamming, illegal purposes or to promote lude content, your GOP.AM URL will be disabled.” Earlier, bloggers and commenters for Balloon Juice were using the site to provide links to bondage sites. Hee.
Quite possibly, and quite simply, the greatest rock ‘n’ roll album ever recorded:
Kabuki: President Obama talked tough to the bankers today, but don’t be misled: If he 1) knew what he was doing and 2) were serious about it, a lot of the executives he’s talking to would have been jobless by now and the U.S. taxpayer would be substantially better off.
Heck of a job, Bushie: The Bush administration’s birth-control policies helped fuel a population boom in Africa, which also means a poverty boom. Nice.
Tony Blair: We were gonna remove Saddam, and if he didn’t have WMDs, then we’d come up with some other reason. No, that’s actually pretty much what he said. If we don’t put these people in prison, our grandchildren are going to be calling us “good Germans.”
Rumsfeld, 10 military officials skate on torture liability: The Supreme Court declined today to hear an appeal of an appeals-court ruling that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 10 military officials are immune from civil claims of torture filed by four now-released Guantanamo prisoners from Britain. Even the normally reliable SCOTUSBlog hasn’t elaborated on this ruling, so I’m not sure what it means, but any time the word “immunity” appears close to Rumsfeld’s name, my gorge rises. (So, yeah, in case you’re wondering, I’ve spent the last five years throwing up in my mouth a little bit.)
“The bill is a hodgepodge. And it should be.”: Physician/journalist Atul Gawande, author of this groundbreaking article on why medical costs are rising so fast, says there’s actually a century-old historical precedent for measures in the health-care reform bill to improve efficiency, and a successful precedent at that: agriculture. It’s an unexpectedly optimistic piece. Check it out.
Burn in hell, Joe Lieberman: Ezra Klein says it best: “At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.”
“You have toyed with me for the last time!”: Fully a third of Democratic voters say they’ll be less likely to turn out in 2010 if Congress doesn’t pass a public option. Also, 81% say Joe Lieberman should be punished if he filibusters health-care reform. I think Lieberman should be punished in any event, just for being an ass.
Not so fast with that cover-up, there, mate: Also related to the Iraq invasion, six top physicians in Britain have launched legal action to have the purported suicide of government bioweapons expert Dr. David Kelly re-investigated. Kelly died in 2003, supposedly a suicide, just days after he was exposed as the source of a news report that a dossier of evidence regarding Iraq’s WMD program had been “sexed up” to justify invading Iraq. The physicians credibly claim that the investigation was, in technical terms, screwed six ways to Sunday.
Not so fast, the sequel: The Russian Supreme Court has overturned the acquittals of four suspects in the 2006 slaying of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. All four were accused of being accomplices. The actual triggerman, who evidence in the trial said was paid $2 million, is believed to be still at large. (Earlier.)
What’s going on in southern Russia? In August, 20 people died in a suicide bombing, described in Russian news reports as the latest in a series of attacks in the republic of Ingushetia. Then early today in that same area, a large bomb on an above-ground natural-gas pipeline was defused. Insights, anyone?
Ho-ho-home: Authors Stephen and Tabitha King are paying $12,999* so that 150 members of the Maine National Guard, currently in training in Indiana before shipping out to Afghanistan in January, can come home for the holidays. Glad they’re getting to go home. Wish they didn’t have to go overseas.
*Because he thought $13,000 was an unlucky number. One of King’s personal assistants kicked in the remaining buck.
Maybe I’m reading too much into Newt Gingrich’s approach to health care, but you take a look first and then tell me what you think:
Yesterday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stumped for Ethan Hastert, the son of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and candidate for Illinois’ 14th congressional district. Gingrich, of course, was the architect of the Republicans’ “Contract with America” in 1994 that helped the GOP regain the majority. Now, Gingrich is apparently rallying Republicans behind a new “contract” with Americans — a pledge to take away their health care. [Note that the framing here is the American Prospect's, not mine -- Lex]
Gingrich reiterated his call for all Republicans to commit to repealing any form of a health care bill that Democrats might pass before the 2010 elections:
GINGRICH: If the left manages to drive through a bill which is opposed by 65 percent of the country on health care, our commitment should be simple — when we get a majority, we’re repealing the whole thing. (applause)
And I want every Democrat who is about to sacrifice their seat for socialized medicine to understand: after you lose your seat, you’re going to lose the socialized medicine too. [Emphasis in original -- Lex]
Watch it:
My big takeaway is this: Despite the fact that Obama won by roughly 9.5 million popular votes, despite the fact that Obama more than doubled McCain’s electoral-vote total, despite the fact that the Democrats took back control of Congress for the first time since 1994, and despite the fact that Obama and many Democratic congressional candidates campaigned in significant part on doing exactly what Congress is trying to do now, Gingrich appears to believe that their governance is illegitimate.
As I say, maybe I’m reading more into this than is actually there. But Republicans displayed pretty much the exact same attitude when Clinton was president, even conjuring up a BS impeachment, and at least in Clinton’s case they could argue that (because of Ross Perot’s ‘92 candidacy) Clinton didn’t represent a majority of Americans. Critics of Obama and Democratic health-care reform have no such grounds for this kind of attitude. Makes me wonder: If they think Obama is illegitimate, what would a Democratic candidate have to do for them to consider him legitimate?
Two other thoughts …
First, the tone of that last graf of Gingrich’s is, well, creepy. It reminds me of what Princess Isabelle told the dying Edward Longshanks in “Braveheart”: “You see? Death comes to us all. But before it comes to you, know this: your blood dies with you. A child who is not of your line grows in my belly. Your son will not sit long on the throne. I swear it.”
Second, just as a gratuitous aside, one of the reasons Dennis Hastert is no longer in Congress is because he arranged for a new highway to come close to land he owned, thus greatly increasing the value of said land. In an older and sterner age, he’d have gone to prison for that. And I’m supposed to believe Dennis’s son Ethan is any great improvement, ethics-wise? It’s possible, I guess, but I’m sure as hell not betting any part of what remains of my assets on it.
Same as it ever was: The Obama Administration is held in contempt for obstructing justice in the same way the Bushbots used to do. The courts, once again, slap a wrist but take no real action to make it stop. Maybe I’m just grumpy, but if a government prosecutor had disobeyed so clear and direct an order in MY court, his butt would’ve been in jail before lunch.
These are not grown-ups: Ben Nelson is now trashing the same Medicare-expansion proposal he, as part of the 10-senator negotiating group, helped create. He does not belong within a mile of any public office, ever.
Quote of the day, from House Appropriations Chairman David Obey: “I am damn tired of a situation in which only military families are asked to pay any price whatsoever for this war.” Yeah, I grasp the potential ramifications of that statement. Let’s HAVE that discussion.
Co-quote of the day, from Jason Linkins, on this week’s killing of al-Qaeda’s No. 3 guy, which is about the fourth time since 2001 we’ve killed al-Qaeda’s No. 3 guy: “It’s like we’ve gotten very good at killing Spinal Tap’s drummer.”
Houston has elected its first openly gay mayor, Annise Parker.
I have no idea what kind of mayor she’ll be. But this event underlines the fact that history is on the side of the gay rights movement, in the sense that those who oppose gay rights are disproportionately older and dying off at a faster rate than those who support them.
So HR 4173, which is supposed to reform finance, passed by a wide margin today. But the devil is in the details, particularly this one: certain industries that are supposedly not a threat to the larger system if they fail are exempt from regulation. Among them: hedge funds.
No. Really. Hedge funds. Like, oh, say, for example, Long Term Capital Management.
Yeah. Ain’t that cute? The same line of work that blew up the economy and created a big chunk of the current mess we’re in, and just one of which came close to doing the same damn thing a decade ago, is exempt from regulation.
It’s the banks’ world. We just live in it.
I have no idea whether sci-fi writer Peter Watts’ account of what happened to him at the U.S.-Canadian border is true.
But if it is, the Homeland Security officers involved need to do a minimum of five years. No “reprimand,” no “administrative duty,” no “suspension.” Instead, a felony record and a big chunk of their life confined to a place where anything resembling a cop is very much disliked.
If there’s any merit to the notion that the threat of imprisonment will serve as a deterrent to unlawful behavior by police, there must first be imprisonment for unlawful behavior by police.
Who will watch the watchers? In this country, it’s all of us, whether we like it or not.
Matt Taibbi looks back at the 11-month mark in Obama’s presidency and finds that what we were promised ain’t what we got.
A lot of progressives are miffed that a lot of other progressives are unhappy with Obama. Uh, guys, we’ve already tried unwaving support of the president by the party that controlled Congress. That’s exactly what got us into the mess we’re in today.
My take is that any interest group that sees its ostensible champion wavering has not just a right but a duty to scream, early and often. I say that not just because that’s what I did, but because that’s what interest groups are supposed to do. Why? Because slippery slope isn’t always a fallacy and turning up the heat on the frog in the pot of water on the stove top is sometimes more than just a metaphor.
Taibbi’s piece is particularly timely now. Consider what Obama said just a few months ago:
Insurance companies will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or lifetime, and we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses – because no one in America should go broke just because they get sick.
Now consider this:
A loophole in the Senate health care bill would let insurers place annual dollar limits on medical care for people struggling with costly illnesses such as cancer, prompting a rebuke from patient advocates.
The legislation that originally passed the Senate health committee last summer would have banned such limits, but a tweak to that provision weakened it in the bill now moving toward a Senate vote.
As currently written, the Senate Democratic health care bill would permit insurance companies to place annual limits on the dollar value of medical care, as long as those limits are not “unreasonable.” The bill does not define what level of limits would be allowable, delegating that task to administration officials.
Adding to the puzzle, the new language was quietly tucked away in a clause in the bill still captioned “No lifetime or annual limits.”
Question: During the debate on health-care reform, why is it that only the progressives have to make any concessions?
Answer: Because Obama and the party he leads believe, despite a couple of decades of experience to the contrary, that they’ll do better politically by hacking off progressives than by hacking off moderates.
Perhaps they’re right. But if they keep it up, what I think they’re going to learn is that 2010 isn’t 1992.
Unintentional political zinger of the year: Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., asked whether he would filibuster the health-care bill because of the failure of his anti-abortion amendment, answered, “I have no Plan B.”
Do scientists get tattoos? Why, yes. Yes, they do.
Obama goes all in on torture: He’s asking that a lawsuit against Bush lawyer John Yoo be dismissed. Whom Would Obama Waterboard? Guess we’ll see soon enough.
He wins the Internet: A friend’s Facebook status today: “was just accosted by an angry elf. So I cut the brake line on his sleigh.”
During a recent phone conversation with Hooper’s teacher on an unrelated subject, she told me about overhearing him tell a classmate all about the two other children Ann and I had taken in, kids who had been orphaned by 9/11. My closest actual connection to 9/11 is that my former boss in New York lost a relative. Hooper has, in fact, met my former boss — when she came down for his baptism when he was still an infant. So I have no idea where this story came from.
