Fact-esque

Has Goldman Gone Too Far? Buying a Couple of Elections Will Fix It

Time to spend a little time connecting dots again. Today's Dots: Goldman Sachs and the SCOTUS decision allowing unlimited corporate interference in our elections.

Friday Palin on Saturday: Teh Cuda to Headline NRA Meeting as Aide Quits

This is a natural, of course. The moose-huntin', duck-shootin', he-woman of the deep Alaska wilderness (or as HuffPost's Paul Slansky would have it, this "preternaturally ignorant, demagogic harpy whose entire platform turned out to be unearned umbrage") fits the gun-totin' brain-eaters org like a surgical glove at a procto exam.

"Governor Palin is one of the most requested speakers in America today," Wayne LaPierre, NRA's executive director, told CNN. "She's an outdoorsman, hunter and a steadfast supporter of our Second Amendment freedom. We are pleased to have a fellow NRA member speak at our 139th annual meeting in Charlotte this May."

Sarah Palin's May 14 appearance will kick off a weekend filled with Second Amendment fun. The convention will include a prayer breakfast, a sportsmen's brunch and auction, a firearms law seminar and a seminar with conservative rocker champion Ted Nugent.

Oooh! Ted Nugent! Wonder what he's going to talk about? Refitting your new Gibson as a semi-auto assault rifle?

But there are only two real questions about Sarahcuda this week: 1) How much is the NRA paying her and will it top the $100K she extorted from the TPer's; and 2) Why is Meghan Stapleton resigning? I mean, really?

What Came Out of the Kabuki Health "Summit"? Whad'ya Think Came Out of It?

Well, the much bally-hooed Kabuki Health Summit is over. I watched a little bit of it because with the Mainstream Conservative Corporate Media (M2CM) actually calling it "political theater" outright and them being wrong about almost everything, I kinda sorta thought there might really be something to it. I was wrong and for once the M2CM was right.

There was nothing to it but the Democrats' attempt to show the country that the Pubs are obstructionist assholes, which the GOP members attending promptly did their best to prove, bragging about what heroes they are for not letting Obama's socialist nightmare become law. ("Socialist nightmare" is now officially defined as anything govt does to interfere with corporate commission of blackmail, bribery, or looting of public and private money that does not currently already belong to them using any trick, deceit, lie, or unethical/illegal practice that may occur to them, and/or to any govt policy that might tend to reverse the upward flow of wealth and send it sliding back down the pyramid to the mob/hoi-polloi/pee-ons/rabble [that's us they're talking about, Slim] at the bottom of the food chain.)

Of course, the mere fact that nothing whatever of news value came from this exercise didn't stop the M2CM from pretending that something of significance went on. David Herzenhorn at the NYT, in a desperate attempt to come up with something worth reporting, decided that the summit proved that reconciliation was the only Dem option.

Wellpoint CEO Blames Doctors for 40% Rate Hike (Updated)

You would think that bringing onstage yet another health insurance company exec whose attitudes toward the poor and the sick would shame Genghis Khan might make our so-called representatives think twice about who they're getting in bed with.

Take Angela Braly, the CEO of Wellpoint, and her testimony in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee about that outrageous Anthem Blue Cross rate hike. She had no choice, she said. The doctors made her do it.

Banking and Healthcare: Reform in Name Only

"Ze Kabuki, eet kontinooze, yes?"

Oh, yes, it continues to ooze. Like pus from an infected tooth. Obama continues to make noises about banking reforms he knows the Senate won't pass while he uses a fake "summit meeting" to push the Senate healthcare bill that "reforms" the insurance industry the same way that South Dakota "reformed" the credit card industry - by giving it everything it ever wanted.

Religious Right Theocrat Moves In On TPers

There's a lot around about the clown-show that was the TeaParty convention a couple of weeks ago, like on SarahCuda's $100K speech for which she had notes written on the palm of her hand and wingnut Rep Tom Tancredo's reprehensible immigrant-bashing on opening day. But what you may not have heard (I just ran across this myself) is that the discredited and fractious far-right religious wingnuts are trying to attach themselves to the TP movement just like they attached themselves to the Movement Conservatives in the 90's.

Govt By Kabuki: Dems and Pubs Onstage Now! (2 Updates)

As both a public service and an educational experience, we present the All-New Kabuki Govt Show starring your favorite members of both corporate political parties.

In this corner President Obama and the conservaDem Senate:

Here's how it works.

Insurance Co's Aren't the Only Ones On a Death Spiral

Paul Krugman's mention of the "death spiral" health insurance co's are caught in leads to the thought that they aren't the only ones. Remember the definition?

[P]rivate health insurance only works if insurers can sell policies to both sick and healthy customers. If too many healthy people decide that they'd rather take their chances and remain uninsured, the risk pool deteriorates, forcing insurers to raise premiums. This, in turn, leads more healthy people to drop coverage, worsening the risk pool even further, and so on.

Now, what WellPoint claims is that it has been forced to raise premiums because of "challenging economic times": cash-strapped Californians have been dropping their policies or shifting into less-comprehensive plans. Those retaining coverage tend to be people with high current medical expenses. And the result, says the company, is a drastically worsening risk pool: in effect, a death spiral.

Whether this is just another insurance scam rationalization or an actual truth is beside the point. The question is, doesn't that process - creating a situation out of sheer greed that then gets out of control - sound awfully familiar? It should. It's precisely what Wall Street and the Bushies have done to the country: set in motion an economic death spiral.

More From the "I Don't Get It Crowd"

The dichotomy between what the Democrat party claims it "has to do" and what it actually ought to do to get re-elected was brought into stark relief in a poll released by Public Policy Polling, a Dem outfit. It is, as Steve Benen says, no surprise to a lot of us that they'd do a lot better backing public-option health reform than that abortion of a bill to prop up health insurance company profits.

The poll finds, for example, that 50% of respondents describe themselves as opposed to the Democratic health reform proposal, while 39% support it. But the numbers are skewed a bit -- among those who will not even consider voting Democratic in November, the opposition numbers on health care are a ridiculous 94% to 1%.

So, Benen and others are asking, why not go for what people who might actually vote for you want instead of producing bills your core constituency hates and that push away swing voters?

Friday Palin: Teh Cuda Gets Down With Downs

Well, Sarahcuda's new Fox "news" show has started out with a bang. First she called Rahm out for using the word "retarded" when referring to the Democrat party's left-wing opposition. Not that she was objecting to the characterization, mind you, but she took exception to the fact that a Democrat had used it. That's what Republicans do, so to her it was like they were, you know, poaching on the Royal Preserve.

The Obama Administration's Chief of Staff scolded participants, calling them, "F---ing retarded," according to several participants, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Just as we'd be appalled if any public figure of Rahm's stature ever used the "N-word" or other such inappropriate language, Rahm's slur on all God's children with cognitive and developmental disabilities - and the people who love them - is unacceptable, and it's heartbreaking.

How do we know this? Well, because when Rush Limbaugh sided with Rahm and used the word-that-so-offends-La Cuda a whole lot of times, she was, like, perfectly fine with it because Rush was "joking".