KTUU in Anchorage, the local NBC affilliate, is reporting that Sarah Palin is about to resign as Alaska's Governor so she can - no shit, Sherlock - run for president in 2012. (Via twolf1 at Oxdown Gazette)
Does this woman have ANY IDEA AT ALL that she's a National Joke?
Guess not. That's Sarah in this month's issue of Runner's World supremely unaware of both irony and good taste.
Bye-bye, GOP. I got Sarah's 2012 presidential campaign logo right here.
The euphoria that propped up Wall Street the last week or two that was born in the overly optimistic belief that the recession/depression had "bottomed out" and that the economy was turning around appears to have led Congressional Democrats into coming up with a health care plan based on the fairy tale that full employment is right around the corner.
To warm words from President Obama, the Democratic leaders of the Senate health committee unveiled a revised plan Thursday to provide health coverage to nearly all Americans. The plan would require most employers to offer benefits to their workers or pay fees to the government and would create a public competitor to insurance companies.
Unfortunately, the bad unemployment news this week is shooting holes in that assumption.
I won't be celebrating the 4th of July Saturday. Not even a little. After nearly 10 years of low-key Independence Days when I principally tried to forget for a day how Bush/Cheney was eviscerating one of the greatest political documents of all time and betraying the great sacrifices that led to it, I had hoped that when Bush was gone, I could once again look forward to the time that America would abandon the anti-Constitutional, autocratic track we've been going down since 9/11 gave Republicans the excuse they'd been looking for to rule with fear and return to its democratic roots.
Well, Bush is gone and a black, Democratic president is in office with a Democratic majority in Congress after campaigns that promised "change" and I don't see a safer Constitution. Instead, President Obama goes on television and gives a speech in which he basically promises to make illegal, unConstitutional laws legal. He doesn't mention just how he's going to pull off this feat in illogic, and meanwhile his Justice Dept - on his orders, can't blame Bush for this - goes right on with the same Bush policies Obama said on the campaign trail were "unacceptable".
Continue reading "The Old Gray 4th of July Ain't What It Used to Be" »
Just how bad has the health care system in this country become since it was taken over by corporatist profit-mongers? This bad:
Health insurance is supposed to offer protection — both medically and financially. But as it turns out, an estimated three-quarters of people who are pushed into personal bankruptcy by medical problems actually had insurance when they got sick or were injured.
"Insurance" that's so worthless it bankrupts you isn't insurance against anything. These people paid premiums for...nothing.
Continue reading "Obama: Rearranging the Deck Chairs After the Ship Has Sunk" »
If nothing else, it is becoming painfully obvious that the major players responsible for the economic debacle, the health insurance scam, the looming environmental disaster, and all the rest of the corporate agenda of the last 8 years have no intention of doing a damn thing different than they have been, and no apparent belief that anyone can make them.
Continue reading "Corporate Greed and Denial of Reality Are Going to Kill Us" »
That's Bob Herbert, of course, asking the fundamental question no one else is asking.
One of the great stories you’ll be hearing over the next couple of years will be about the large number of Americans who were forced out of work in this recession and remained unable to find gainful employment after the recession ended. We’re basically in denial about this.
There are now more than five unemployed workers for every job opening in the United States. The ranks of the poor are growing, welfare rolls are rising and young American men on a broad front are falling into an abyss of joblessness.
Some months ago, the Obama administration and various mainstream economists forecast a peak unemployment rate of roughly 8 percent this year. It has already reached 9.4 percent, and most analysts now expect it to hit 10 percent or higher. Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb. That’s not a recovery. That’s mumbo jumbo.
Exactly. The same mumbo-jumbo we've been hearing for the past three decades. It's trickle-down by another name, a concentration on Wall Street while Main Street gets the shaft. All that talk of a jobs program to get the economy moving vanished once Obama was actually elected and was replaced by a HUGE bankers' welfare system. Result: the economy remains in deep trouble, jobs are still being lost rather than added, and the nation is so deep in the hole it may be decades more before we dig our way out, if we ever do.
But that's us. Wall Street is in much better shape than it was and they're standing ready to go on exactly as before, raping the country and calling it "financial therapy". Herbert just called "bullshit" on the whole sick, slick mess.
You go, Bob.
The state of American journalism has been bad since newspaper editors first started going easy on Reagan because advertisers complained and Richard Viguerie plastered their offices with direct mail solicited astroturf. But since the advent of Fox and ETV, it hasn't been just sliding downhill, it has been plummeting. As this video dramatically demonstrates, it appears we are very near rock bottom. (Via Glenn Greenwald)
Both these clowns are political writers for Fred Hiatt's neocon Washington Post. Milbank used to be a genuine journalist but hasn't been since he discovered how much fun it was to make bad jokes on tv and get invited to the parties of all the fun people. Cillizza has never been much of anything but a joke himself. I subscribed to his "newsletter" for a while until its utter cluelessness began giving me a migraine.
This unfunny, painfully embarrassing excuse for "light political news" would be dismissable if it weren't precisely the sort of drek they spend their supposedly "serious" journalistic-type time doing. Why is my sinking stomach telling me I'm looking at the "News of the Future" in the flesh, so to speak? My gawd, watching them pick snot out of their noses would have more value.
I think we need to start spreading this stuff around and being as brutal as possible in slamming it. We can't let this become their comfort zone or we've had it as a democracy.
Embarrass them. Let em have it.
There has been a lot written about the Supreme Court's decision yesterday NOT to gut the Voting Rights Act - yet - by removing judicial review, most of it composed of a nearly audible sigh of relief. Even some wingnut commentators profess not to understand how the rest of the wingnut population can be so darn inconsistent in their reasoning. Ponnuru appears to just be noticing that his fellow righties now change their standard talking points and self-described "deeply held beliefs" whenever they might interfere with attacking their target du jour. Perhaps next week it will occur to him to notice that Packard hasn't made a car since 1947 and Dwight Eisenhower isn't the president any more.
Not that I don't share in the general feeling that we dodged yet another unwelcome, unConstitutional bullet from the Right-of-Idi Amin Bush SCOTUS, but there was another decision handed down yesterday that no one seems to be talking about though it has far-reaching implications for our environment: a decision that it's perfectly OK for the ACE to poison public water supplies.
It's odd what's been happening to the health care debate the last couple of weeks. Single payer opponents have actually been reduced to the desperation of telling the truth. Attacking Obama's "public option" - a terrible plan that, as lambert points out in great detail (with some help from Bill Moyers) is designed to fail - Chuck Grassley and other anti's have been very open about their concerns: people will pick the public option and then insurance companies will lose money or even *gasp* go out of business altogether.
Which is kind of the point with single payer, you know? It works because everybody belongs and the risk gets spread around. That's the benefit of social programs - they share risk. At this point in time, when we are living through the corporate destruction of our economy, I don't think "save our greedy corporate health insurance con artists at the expensem of your own health" is exactly a strong argument to be making. Basically, we don't fucking care any more, especially since we've got insurance executives, as Avedon Carol put it, defending outright fraud.
Continue reading "What Is Health Care in the US Really About? Saving the Insurance Co's" »
It's an interesting day for the New York Times Editorial Board. While it has been stumbling around the last couple of years trying to find its feet as conservatism collapsed and it was faced with a Democratic president aping Republican policies they'd been volubly against for years, it found itself sinking into a mire of irrelevance and confusion, becoming more often a local scold than the national conscience it was during Bush's first term and half of his second.
Lately there has been some attempt to regain its old stature. Unfortunately, that attempt has too often consisted of following behind blogs in opining about the previous days' events. Read it in firedoglake on Monday, TPM on Tuesday, and on the NYT ed page Wednesday, pretty much. Today they broke the mold a little by introducing a couple of important topics that haven't been heavy blog topics and have in fact been largely ignored by everybody, blogosphere and mass media alike. Neither of the issues is new and neither editorial has much of anything new to say about them, but both are important and the fact that the NYT is raising them at all might help bring them back into prominence, at least for a little while.
Continue reading "NYT Eds: Why Haven't the Dems Passed Holt's Bill? & Can We Save Our Oceans?" »
Wiley's World
Not that I believe for one moment that anything in this report will actually get through the conservative-dominated Senate between the GOP fronting for health insurance corpo's and the Democrats reliant on health insurance corpo campaign $$$, but let's just for a minute imagine what might happen if the detail-less House plan actually became manifest.
House Democrats on Friday answered President Obama’s call for a sweeping overhaul of the health care system, unveiling a bill that they said would cover 95 percent of Americans. But they said they did not know how much it would cost and had not decided how to pay for it.
***
The draft bill would require all Americans to carry health insurance. Most employers would have to provide coverage to employees or pay a fee equivalent to 8 percent of their payroll. The plan would also end many insurance company practices that deny coverage or charge higher premiums to sick people.
Uh-huh. Brilliant. The thing is, we don't have to imagine it. Massachusetts already did it. The employer (enforced) co-operation? Check. The mandated plan buying? Check. The "partnership" between govt and the industry? Check. Oh, it's all there. I was in Mass when all of this was put into operation two short years ago. Everybody - especially the doctors - was very high on it. They thought they had finally found a pretty good solution to an increasingly thorny problem. They saw light at the end of the health care tunnel.
Continue reading "Taking the Democrat Health Care Kabukie Boogie Seriously (Updated)" »
Amazing. Two Supreme Court decisions came down yesterday and they are both travesties of anything that looks remotely like justice. First, we got CJ Roberts...well, here's the opening graf of Adam Liptak's NYT article, one of the most jaw-dropping ledes I think I've ever read.
Prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a 5-to-4 decision.
The Right-wing Bush court has just thrown the Constitution out the window because - dig this - it got in the way of a state's right to be stoopid, mean, and vengeful on the wrong guy's ass and - in Alito's words - gave prisoners a new excuse "to play games with the criminal justice system.” Mind you, defendants are not even allowed to provide the tests at their own expense. It's all up to the states. Because, you know, it always has been.
The bloom is escaping the Obama rose, it seems. A new NYT/CBS poll suggests pretty strongly that while a vibrant majority still approves of Obama's trying to change things, they don't think that what he's done so far succeeds in changing much of anything.
A distinct gulf exists between Mr. Obama’s overall standing and how some of his key initiatives are viewed, with fewer than half of Americans saying they approve of how he has handled health care and the effort to save General Motors and Chrysler. A majority of people said his policies have had either no effect yet on improving the economy or had made it worse, underscoring how his political strength still rests on faith in his leadership rather than concrete results.
That last little jibe is the standard NYT attempt to ignore the Bush mess while hinting that Obama isn't a real president but some feel-good mistake on our part. Ignore it. important is that what people have told the polls is accurate: we do approve and even demand change but we're not getting it and we know it.
Continue reading "It Ain't What You Do, It's the Way That You Do It" »
I'm getting a bit confused. On hand #1 Obama says he thinks we need a "public health option" if for no other reason than to take care of the people the insurance companies don't want. On hand #2, his HHS Sec, Kathleen Sibelius, told NPR yesterday that all public health options are "off the table", that they ought to be because single payer is "a bad direction to go" and, furthermore (just in case the insurance companies Rahm wants donating to the Democrats next year had any doubts or fears) that the president - the president elected by the people who are the 60+% percent who want single payer - has no plans at all to create one. None. (Via DCblogger at corrente)
Continue reading "National Health: So Whose Side Is Obama On, Anyway?" »
This has to be one of the wicked funniest unconscious jokes of the last few years, and it is from, of course, David Brooks' unconscious which apparently works better than his conscious mind.
30 years ago this week, I graduated from Radnor High School in Pennsylvania. Today, I’m giving some remarks to the students of this year’s graduating class.
This honor has sparked a condition that is unacceptable to people in our profession: writer’s block. I have been trying to think of some wisdom I have acquired over the past three decades, and I’m drawing a blank.
Well, yeah, you would. Yah can't get beaujolais from a turnip, Dave.
With McCain in ignoble retirement, Sarah degenerating into the kind of long-running, permanent joke Jay Leno used to pray for, and Newt leaving his usual slime trail wherever he goes, the Pubs are desperately casting around for a party leader who isn't a) under indictment, b) an obvious racist boob, or c) one of the movement conservatives currently loathed by a general public suffering from their wankish, exclusively pro-corporate agenda.
There's Huckabee, but he isn't sufficiently wingnut and may be a little too fundamentalist now that the whackos of the religious Right are pulling back from politics and won't be as much (or perhaps any) help to the GOP in the next election. DeMint is only a Junior Jackass and could never attract the Big $$$. Pawlenty can't seem to escape that bridge business and in any case isn't known outside Minnesota where it is unlikely he could get elected mayor of Bimidji. He has dreams and ambition but he's such a fuckup he makes Sarah Palin look brilliantly co-ordinated by comparison. That leaves...wait for it....
While the NYT et al wax brutal tragic over broke stock brokers and even NYT business reporters facing the significant downsizing of their uppermiddleclass, white-collar lifestyles, the poor who have been taking it in the neck for 30 years so the Edmund Andrews' of the world could have speed boats and second homes and gas guzzling SUVs and health insurance, have been lost in the traces.
We've been somewhat less than sympathetic to this trend for obvious reasons. If we had been hanging on by our fingernails before, those nails are rapidly slipping off the edge and into the void below. We are losing what few struts are left to support us even as Obama's Wall Street JoyBoys want to use the deficit to convince him to destroy SocSec and kill national health, yet with all the middle class ex-BushBabies losing their homes, nobody even remembers we exist. Except Barb.
California is not the whole country even though it sometimes seems that way but because of its size and its politics, it often previews problems the whole country will face down the road. For that reason it's worth taking a look at what's happening to Workman's Comp - a standard conservative football - in a state budget-cutters have all but decimated. Costs, they claim, are rising and the insurance companies want a 24% rate hike. CA has an Insurance Commissioner and he has to decide what's up.
Ray wasn't singing about what he knew, 'cause Ray had been blind since he was a child. He hadn't seen many purple mountains. He hadn't seen many fruited plains. He was singing about what he believed to be.
Mr. President, we love America, not because of all of us have seen the beauty all the time.
But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody.
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