So I'm cruising the Right-wing nutbag sites, and I come across good 'ol dependable Michelle Malkin.

Who can forget goofy Michelle and that insipid YouTube video she did, dressed up in her cheerleader outfit. I'm sure that was a bonanza for pedophiles.

But I digress.

Malkin's got all kinds of freedom of speech violation crap on her site, even something defending Michael Savage in his quest to have his name removed from Great Britain's banned list.

So anyway, I was going to post a comment on her site, when I see that all commenters have to abide by her terms of service. What could these be, I ask as I click the link.

Well, get a load of this, from the Queen of Free Speech:

I may allow as much or as little opportunity for registration as I choose, in my absolute discretion, and I may close particular comment threads or discontinue my general policy of allowing comments at any time. By registering to post comments, you warrant that you are at least 18 years old and that you are solely responsible for your account's activity.

I reserve the right to delete your comments or revoke your registration for any reason whatsoever. Rarely will I do so simply because I disagree with you. I will, however, usually do so if you post something that is, in my opinion, (a) off-topic; (b) libelous, defamatory, abusive, harassing, threatening, profane, pornographic, offensive, false, misleading, or which otherwise violates or encourages others to violate these terms of use or any law, including intellectual property laws; or (c) "spam," i.e., an attempt to advertise, solicit, or otherwise promote goods and services. I may exercise these rights myself and I may delegate them to employees and/or contractors.

... In short, you're my guest here. I welcome your participation, but if you abuse my hospitality, don't be surprised if you are shown the door.

That's what I love about these Right-wing free speech champions. They want everyone else to allow unbridled comment, but they don't do it themselves. For example, you'll hear Savage whining on and on on his radio program about how Britain has denied him his free speech rights (which is ridiculous because now he's heard in the UK. when he wasn't before he was banned. So they've actually increased his freedom of speech) but he'll cut off a caller he doesn't like.

Hypocrites, all of them.

Keep the faith.

Step right up and get your health care or your health care protest. 

2 min video (war of the worlds)  (1)


On the evening of October 30 1938, many homes were listening to their radios, some for entertainment and many looking for news from Europe about what Hitler and the Germans were threatening to do. On the NBC Network they were listening to the "Chase and Sanborn Hour", hosted by Don Ameche and featuring comic ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and singer Nelson Eddy, three of the most popular figures in broadcasting. About 15 minutes into the Chase and Sanborn program the first comic sketch ended and a musical number began, and many listeners began tuning around the dial at that point channel surfing for news.

Many of those surfers came across the CBS channel and what they heard startled them,there were  strange and scary things happening. The reporter they heard was out of breath and describing a strange object that had fallen from the sky in a farmers field called Grovers Mill. Strange noise was emanating from the inside the meteorite,the top begins to unscrew, revealing itself as a rocket machine, and onlookers catch a glimpse of a tentacled, pulsating, barely mobile Martian before it incinerates the crowd with "Heat-Rays." The reporters shouts about incoming flames are cut off in mid-sentence,the studio cuts in and says communication from the field has been lost.

This broadcast continues for the next 45 minutes without commercial break,and tells of an alien attack, with heat beams and poison green gas,destruction and death. Serious stuff, except that this is all a play ,a dramatization of the H.G.Wells story, War of the Worlds (2) as it was being presented on Mercury Theater Hour, in news flash fashion. Despite advertisement of its broadcast in the previous days paper,and disclaimers at it,s beginning and end, many who joined in never heard these warnings and took it as real. Panic ensued in many places. While War of the Worlds was in progress, some residents in northeastern cities went to ask neighbors what was happening (many homes still did not have telephones). As the story was repeated, rumors began and caused some panic.

Several people reportedly rushed to the "scene" of the events in New Jersey to see the unfolding events, including a few geologists from Princeton University who went looking for the "meteorite" that had fallen near their school. Some people, who had brought firearms, reportedly mistook a farmer's water tower for a Martian Tripod and shot at it.

Initially Grover's Mill was deserted, but crowds developed. Eventually police were sent to control the crowds. To people arriving later in the evening, the scene really did look like the events being narrated, with panicked crowds and flashing police lights streaming across the masses.

 Some people called CBS, newspapers or the police in confusion over the realism of the news bulletins. There were instances of panic throughout the US as a result of the broadcast, especially in New York and New Jersey.

Seattle CBS affiliate stations KIRO and KVI broadcast Orson Welles' radio drama. While this broadcast was heard around the country, it made a deep impact in Concrete, Washington. At the point where the Martian invaders were invading towns and the countryside with flashes of light and poison gases, a power failure plunged almost the entire town of 1,000 into darkness. Some listeners fainted while others grabbed their families to head into the mountains. Others headed for the hills to guard their moonshine stills. One was said to have jumped up out of his chair and, in bare feet, run two miles to the center of town. Some men grabbed their guns, and one Catholic businessman got his wife into the car, drove to the nearest service station and demanded gasoline. Without paying the attendant, he rushed to Bellingham, Washington (50 miles away) to see his priest for a last-minute absolution of sins. He reportedly told the gas-station attendant that paying for the gas "[wouldn't] make any difference, everyone is going to die!"

Because phone lines as well as electricity were out, residents were unable to call neighbors, family or friends to calm their fears. Of course, the real story was not as fantastic as the radio drama: all that had occurred was that the Superior Portland cement company's sub-station suffered a short-circuit with a flash of brilliant light, and the town's lights went dark. The more conservative radio-listeners in Concrete (who had been listening to Charlie McCarthy on another station), calmed neighbors by assuring that they hadn't heard about any "disaster". Reporters heard soon after of the coincidental blackout of Concrete and sent the story over the newswire and soon the town of Concrete was known worldwide.

Edgar Bergen and Don Ameche, who were continuing their Chase & Sanborn Hour broadcast on NBC, are often credited with "saving the world". It is said many listeners were reassured by hearing their tones on a neighboring station.

That same year In a prophetic column in the New York Tribune, Dorothy Thompson foresaw that the broadcast revealed the way politicians could use the power of mass communications to create theatrical illusions, to manipulate the public.

"All unwittingly, Mr. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater of the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time," she wrote. "They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create a nation-wide panic.

"They have demonstrated more potently than any argument, demonstrated beyond a question of a doubt, the appalling dangers and enormous effectiveness of popular and theatrical demagoguery...

"Hitler managed to scare all of Europe to its knees a month ago, but he at least had an army and an air force to back up his shrieking words.

"But Mr. Welles scared thousands into demoralization with nothing at all." WOW (3)

I know this was long and I hope it was interesting to you, but it was also to make a point, that  Dorothy  Thompson words  " "But Mr. Welles scared thousands into demoralization with nothing at all" could apply just as well if applied to Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck. Using nothing but fiction they are creating panic in the unaware and it is showing up as anger across the land, and in the town halls.Rush and Beck no more believe what they are saying than they believe in Martians, but it has sucked in an unwary audience and frightens them,that means cash and notoriety for these dramatists. It is immoral but it works,every interview that I have seen of the angry people at town halls they sooner or later repeat the words of these men,that is where they get their thoughts and information.

If this is true then much of the anger we see has been agitated by these men and the Fox broadcasting network in particular? Reciprocating with anger against the common citizens like ourselves will help to do nothing but  stoke the fires of rage. The anger should be reserved for the broadcast manipulators and networks, directed at exposing them as liars and fakes anyway we can.By writing their sponsors and calmly saying that what these men and their networks are saying is unappreciated. This works as we see in the case of sponsors pulling their ads on Glen Beck. I say again , "this works". We must beware the hate baiters who are itching for violence, just waiting for one finger to be laid upon them,any excuse will do. Be the calming voice.

Edgar Bergen and Don Ameche, who were continuing their Chase & Sanborn Hour broadcast on NBC, are often credited with "saving the world". It is said many listeners were reassured by hearing their tones on a neighboring station."

 Here is a link to many of the Mercury Theater great broadcasts Mercury Theater Online

Ref links :

(1) War of the Worlds clip

(2) Wiki (war of the worlds)

(3) Wow (about.com)

(4) Bonus ( test reel footage 1949)

 

Cnn ran a BBC report on an MP who, upon attending a constituent's wedding at the London Muslim Center, was told he and his wife would have to be separated for the service.  The MP decided not to attend, Breitbart embedded it, and a story on the complex issue of multicultural pluralism becomes a story of...

(Selected from a total of 21 comments)

Trent   August 15th, 2009 - 9:23 am

This is the result of the lies told to Whites by primarily J3ws that everyone is the same. This is used to lull Whites to sleep about massive non-White immigration. Funny that these non-Whites don't want to go to other non-White countries.

Craig Allen   August 15th, 2009 - 11:11 am

cecil91 says, "the lefty Brits expect"

Apparently it hasn't dawned on you that the errant founding fathers of these United States made muslims a protected class in this nation!

Protected by the contstitution.

And NOW, the likes of Sotomeyer can look the other way when they enforce sharia law, since it is a practice of their religion. Thus, sharia law, and it's enforcement, is protected, by the United Snakes constitution.

Check and Mate!

Satan loves the constitution of the United Snakes, and he knows how to use it!

Adam   August 15th, 2009 - 6:44 pm

More disturbing is why this Scottish fool is a Member of Parliament for Canning Town - which is about 350 miles from Scotland.

The Scottish have effectively executed a complete takedown of the United Kingdom. Revenge perhaps for their subjugation.

I'd like to see the Farming Minister and his wife in Burkas sooner rather than later. They asked for it by letting in all those deranged Muslims.

Norm   August 15th, 2009 - 7:43 pm

Wait till numb nuts finds out that by leaving early he subjected himself to Islamic Law and is now legally married to the bint himself.

SenatorMark4   August 15th, 2009 - 10:17 am

At least this MP showed that he has some small beliefs. The issue is whether or not he would support the separation of children in the schools when that inevitably arises. These believers do not understand democracy or the rights of man and believe that however their mullah interprets the "Word of God" can be IMPOSED on everyone as soon as they are in the majority in any area. If not the majority, bomb the majority until they tire of your whining and decide that knuckling under is safer than standing up. Somebody should propose a law that every public meeting involving muslim issues be segregated and FORCE a court review if it passes. That will finally force our leaders to fall off the fence and we'll finally know what they believe...freedom or their phoney-baloney jobs.

cecil91   August 15th, 2009 - 10:22 am

Yes, whatever did the lefty Brits expect? For decades they have been intent on changing the culture of their once great country with mass immigration from Muslim countries. You did it to yourselves, now live with it.

Harry   August 15th, 2009 - 10:35 am

This is very old. It's a 7th century religion being practiced in the 21st century.

www.breitbart.tv/british-mp-walks-out-of-islamic-wedding-that-segregated-men-and-women/

1. Sharing an seventy-something-year-old, framed, calligraphied quote:
"Always begin somewhere. You can't build a reputation on what you intended to do." - Henry Ford

2. New Yorker cartoon from the 80's by BCE. In a psychiatrist's office, a patient is lying on the couch, his face shows surprise.. Adjacent sits his psychiatrist, who says to his patient:
"Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Next!"

3. Context: advising a friend and new political candidate not to be baited by a
petit-tigre-sans-dents, political kingmaker's shot-across-the-bow:
"We know he thinks his (expletive deleted) doesn't stink;
 we just have to stay upwind of it, eh?"

Watching the so-called "tea party movement" melt down used to get my political dander up...but now, it's so ridiculous, that i wonder if it isn't a plan by Glenn Beck, Fox News, etc. to destroy the GOP.  It really is starting to look that way.

Currently, Glenn Beck is under alleged "socialist and marxist attacks".  But wait a moment -- isn't he being "selected out of the economy" through the same so-called libertarian free market principles that he espouses so much?

Of course he is.

But it gets better:  I have a friend who is a staunch objectivist, who does label himself "libertarian", and is also an atheist.  He just posted this link onto his facebook page:

http://www.keepglennbeck.com

Which is some slap-dash website in Tennessee, apparently put up at the spur of the moment to "counter" the call to get Beck off the air.

Alas, the gentleman missed an opportunity to show he could criticize some of Glenn Beck's followers.  Because, link on that page, you will find this video:

http://tinyurl.com/brannonhowse

...which is simply another amusing example of bibul-thumpin' red-baiting, with the added twist that the guy is calling for revolution in the U.S to establish a Christian state.

So I guess Democracy is perfectly fine by these yahoos, except when they loose -- then the vacuumheads like this one "Brannon Howse" start oozing evangelical extremism, red baiting and race baiting.

But I think we are seeing this desperate talk from this vociferous minority because that's all they have left.

It's all about the "ground game", as TPM put it on the front page a few days ago.

Very little media coverage has been devoted to explaining the content of the bill which has passed out of the house, probably much like a bill which will be passed out of the senate.

The media coverage, including, sadly, here at TPM has been about the "ground game".  I am unable to recall any post here at TPM which has explained what is contained in the prevailing health insurance reform proposal, though there have been many recounting the lies and gaffs of those intent on nothing more than defeating Obama.

Hardly Polk Award worthy coverage of the matter, I am sad to say.

I have to take issue with some of the discussion about what the Internet is doing to the music scene. First, Bill Wasik declares himself depressed about "the ecstatic surf from new band to new band, from track to track, from style to style, that serves as the predominant mode of indie-rock fandom today." In the past, he maintains, overnight sensations had "almost always been manufactured by radio, or by big record labels, or by the interplay between the two"; now it's fans on the Web who are responsible. Then Amanda Marcotte observes that there's nothing new about flash-in-the-pans. I have to agree on that one: Blues Magoos, anybody? And Nicholas Carr points out that the goal of the major labels "was not to encourage one hit wonders but rather to sustain elephantine franchises like, say, ELO, Yes, and the Eagles." Having endured one too many ELO concerts in my rock-critic years, I can vouch for that as well. But then he goes on: 

The problem with the Web, as I see it, is that it imposes, with its imperialistic iron fist, the "ecstatic surfing" behavior on everything and to the exclusion of other modes of experience (not just for how we listen to music, but for how we interact with all media once they've been digitized). In the pre-Web world, we not only enjoyed the thrill of the overnight sensation - the 45 that became the center of your waking hours for a week only to be replaced by the new song - but also the deeper thrill of the favorite band in whose work we deeply immersed ourselves, often following its progression over many records and many years.... It's the deep, attentive engagement that the Web is draining away, as we fill our iTunes library with tens of thousands of "tracks" at little or no cost. What the Web tells us, over and over again, is that breadth destroys depth. Just hit Shuffle.

To which I have to say, with all due respect, bollocks.
First off, anyone who can coin (or quote) a phrase like "ecstatic surf" and then declare the practice wrong seems a bit conflicted, to say the least. Could Bill and Nick be victims of Catholic school, perhaps? But more importantly, the idea that breadth inevitably destroys depth on the Web strikes me as plainly wrong -- and music makes a good case in point. 

Yes, the Web does make it easier, and a whole lot cheaper, to move from band to band and track to track (though it's worth pointing out that the shuffle function was present on CD changers long before anyone had iTunes). And yes, it no doubt encourages the sort of one-upsmanship that drives bloggers to fall all over themselves touting the next new thing. But to conclude that the Web somehow discourages fans from delving deeper into the music they really like is to take a rather large leap. Much of the information I've seen -- not to mention most of the conversations I've had with people in the music world -- suggests that the opposite is true. 
For example, a 2007 study commissioned by the government ministry Industry Canada foundthat "among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing." In other words, rather than simply load up their hard drives with free downloads, Canadians tend to sample music on the P2P sites and then go buy the albums (not just the singles) they like. Possibly this is a peculiarity of Canadians; I can't say for sure. But a recent study of young people in Britain suggests otherwise. This survey, conducted for UK Rights, an industry consortium, found that while respondents had on average more than 8,000 songs on their hard drives, many of them downloaded for free, they also owned 100 CDs -- and that most of those were purchased rather than ripped from friends' collections. If people are willing to pay for physical copies of albums they've already downloaded for free, can you really say that no one is deeply engaged with music any more?
These findings were certainly borne out by conversations I had last spring with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Reznor is probably the most Web-savvy musician around, and while he's not happy that so many fans want to download his music for free, he certainly hasn't found them all deserting him for next week's sensation. Quite the opposite. Over the past couple of years, he's built NIN.com into one of the most comprehensive collections of music, video, and memorabilia on the Web -- most of it supplied and curated by fans. After he posted multi-track versions of his songs online, fans responded by putting up more than 11,000 remixes (as of last April). And when he offered a limited-edition CD of his most recent album -- a work that was already available for free on the same site -- fans bought all 250,000 copies at $10 apiece. That's $2.5 million that says the Web is actually drawing people in deeper. 
Like many others, I've found a lot of provocative ideas in Wasik's book, as I had earlier in Carr's essay in The Atlantic (when I wasn't being distracted by the hyperlinks). But I think some of their arguments are starting to run away with themselves. Breadth? The Web certainly gives us that. Depth? That too. I see nothing to suggest they're mutually exclusive. 

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, Inc., is attempting to back up from his op-ed piece on health care reform in the Wall Street Journal from August 11.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.htm

As you can read, Mackey is against the idea of a government-run health care plan for all Americans. He believes we are already on the verge of bankruptcy (No...really.) and that Medicare is running out of money. A single-payer system for America would only increase the debt Americans are dealing with already and wouldn't be as effective as the reforms he proposes such as repealing state laws that prevent health insurers from competing across state lines and tort reform for doctors to prevent people from recovering big damages for malpractice. He suggests that we adopt, among other ideas, the type of insurance that Whole Foods offers its own employees.

In response to an e-mail I sent declaring that I would be boycotting Whole Foods because of Mackey's opposition to single-payer health care, or at the very least, the public option, I received the following e-mail from the Customer Service division of Whole Foods Market, Inc.:

"To our customers,

As you are aware, John Mackey wrote an Op/Ed piece that was published in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week on health care reform, one of the biggest and most emotional issues facing our country. John's intent was to express his personal opinions -- not those of Whole Food Market team members or our company as a whole. Still, it's very clear that John's piece offended some of our customers, other members of the communities we serve and some of our team members as well. 
That was not John's intention - in fact, John does not mention the President at all in his piece. John has posted the unedited piece to his blog where people can read it as it was intended.

We offer you our sincere apology.

We'd like to clarify a few things that have been misinterpreted:
 
John's Op/Ed piece was written in favor of health care reform.
In response to President Obama's invitation to all Americans to put forward constructive ideas for reforming our health care system, John was asked to write an Op/Ed piece and he gave his personal opinion. John titled the piece "Health Care Reform," but an editor at the Journal rewrote the headline to call it "Whole Foods Alternative to Obamacare," which led to antagonistic feelings by many.
 
Whole Foods Market has no official position on the issue.
That said, we have attempted to be part of the solution in health care reform for many years by providing innovative health care options to our team members. We believe that our high deductible medical insurance plan coupled with a company-funded HSA is an excellent way to empower team members to make their own health care choices.
 
John wanted to share our experience with others through his Op/Ed piece.
He believes that the specific ideas he put forward would improve access and cost of health care for more people. Because our plan has held down overall costs (relative to other plans), Whole Foods Market has been able to pay 100 percent of the premiums for our full-time team members -- about 89% of our workforce. (Part-timers are eligible for the insurance plan too and pay the premium themselves.) Our team members vote on our plan every three years to make sure they continue to have a voice in our benefits.
 
Whole Foods Market has a 30-year track record of caring about our customers, team members and communities. From local loan programs to salary caps, from donations to non-profits to funding the Whole Planet Foundation, our innovative programs are created and designed by team members who care about their fellow citizens.

We all know there are many opinions on the health care debate, including inside our own company.  As we, as a nation, continue to sort through this together, we are hopeful that both sides can do so in a civil manner that will lead to positive change for all concerned, and we thank you for sharing your opinions with us.

 

Mackey's blog contains the same piece as published in the WSJ with an different headline and the alteration of a paragraph and a few words, but essentially the same piece. Nowhere, in either version, does one find any support for a national health care service. Instead, it reflects the touting of Mackey's company's superior health plan for its employees and the idea that if only people would eat better foods (HEY! I RUN A WHOLE FOODS STORE!) and manage their own health better, we wouldn't need anything as expensive and silly as single-payer health care.

Read it all for yourselves. I see nothing in Mackey's "real article" to change my opinion. Boycotting Whole Foods isn't a hardship on myself, since I am one of those people who refer to it as "Whole Paycheck" because of its exhorbitant prices. I belong to a community food co-op, so my orientation is to buy local anyway. Boycotting Whole Foods is my political obligation. I want single-payer health care in the United States, and I'll fight opposition on all fronts...even on the level of yuppie food stores.

Remember Y2K?  The whole country was going to be plunged into barbarism because of a simple computer glitch.  Millions of ordinary Americans stockpiled water and food in their basements and stayed home on New Year's Eve shaking in fear.

It was December 1999 and there were four days left in the year.  Phone calls from journalists just wouldn't stop and they all wanted to know the same thing.  "Would hate groups attempt to terrorize communities on Y2K?" 

It was during a time when the Aryan Nations was attempting to establish a white nationalist homeland in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming- an idea they labeled the Northwest Imperative.  I was part of a coalition confronting organized bigotry in the Pacific Northwest.  Another faction of white nationalists calling themselves militias were also active in the region threatening public officials, environmental activists, and anyone else they deemed as second class citizens.  

Earlier in the year (ten years ago today) on August 10th an Aryan Nations member by the name of Buford Furrow Jr. had gone on a shooting spree in Southern California wounding five individuals, including three young children, at a local Jewish community center.   Furrow went on to murder a Filipino postal worker before turning himself into authorities. 

Every time the phone rang I took a deep breath, a sip of coffee, and said "'hate groups' will be doing exactly what I'm planning on doing New Year's Eve."  "What's that?" the journalist would ask going for the bait.  I would quickly reply "staying at home, feet on the sofa, popping buttered popcorn, and watching Lawrence Welk." While not a suitable quote, I wanted to share with journalists that the majority of the white nationalist's in the United States could care less about Y2K.  They were more interested in 2050.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau at the time, 2050 was the year when there would be no clear racial majority in the United States.  The media (out of ignorance) and white nationalists (for propaganda value) liked to phrase 2050 as the period when "whites will be the minority in the U.S." as if somehow on January 1, 2050 every minority community will somehow suddenly unify and decide to persecute those considered white. 

The big story had nothing to do with Y2K.  The real news item was that a shift was occurring.  A shit that was taking the movement from the idea of "white supremacy" (i.e. whites are superior and therefore should be in charge) to "white nationalism" (i.e. whites are being victimized and need to create their own nation where they could be in charge).  In the world view of white nationalists the U.S. was once theirs but no longer.  Buchanan recently expressed the sentiment on MSNBC thus:

"This has been a country built basically by white folks in this country who are 90 percent of the entire nation-in 1960, when I was growing up, Rachel-and the other 10 percent were African-American who had been discriminated against. That's why."

It is this belief that has been the lynchpin of many recent debates including the Sotomayor confirmation hearings.  During the past month the blogosphere and broadcast news has been filled with discussions regarding the rise of the Birthers - a growing group of individuals allegedly concerned about President Obama's place of birth.  In actuality, the Birthers should be described as a political formation with the goal of convincing other whites that Obama is an "other" (i.e. not white) and therefore not American.

The recent disruptions at local town hall meetings discussing the Obama administration's health care proposal has less to do with health care than who gets access (people of color need not apply).  It's not surprising that many of the comments made by those disrupting these public events quickly turned to anti-immigrant rants and conspiracies about whites facing martial law. Again underlying the protests was not opposition to health care but the belief that "white America" is under attack.

What to do about 2050 has created some divisions within the white nationalist movement on how best to proceed towards the goal of creating an all-white nation.  Some argue that terror is the answer represented in the actions of Holocaust Memorial murderer James W. Von Brunn and anti-immigrant activist and killer Shawna Forde who held that killing religious and racial minorities was the answer. 

Other white nationalist's like Jared Taylor believe that the definition of whiteness should be expanded to include Jews and Catholics (or at least work with them as short term allies) while also attacking the concept of citizenship as established by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. 

Regardless of their strategic decisions, by far the best weapon of the white nationalist movement has been the unwillingness of liberals, conservatives, progressives and their respective institutions to reject the advances of white nationalism.  Unlike Y2K the shift from white supremacy to white nationalism was successful. White nationalism is now mainstream, not because of its success as a movement, but due to our willingness to remain silent.

Our health system's failure creates an annual  101,000 more deaths than if we had a health system like , say, Australia.

In today's FT Nicholas Timmins (no link at the FT's request-but go to FT.com and search for Global Insight/Nicholas Timmins) quotes  a study by-among others- Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine showing that for deaths under the age of 75 from diseases that are treatable  the US has the worst record among the top 19 industrialized counries. And if we performed as well as not only Australia but also France and Japan we'd have  101,000 fewer deaths per year.

And of course in many of those 19 countries-the UK for example-if you don't like the National Health Service you can go to a private physician whose rates will be much lower than those here since the NHS is not mandatory. It's a public option.holding down the rates of those private physicians.

Not an accident. Nye Bevan designed it that way - see Michael Foot's Biography of Bevan.Bevan's approach , unlike our's at present, was to produce the bill first and argue about it later.Pretty much in line with the poker mantra " You can't beat something with nothing".Faced with a clear understanding of what would happen if they sat on their hands the British medical establishment presented sensible compromises to Bevan which he took to Parliament.

And it works. It's worked for me. It's worked for various members of my family who've lived in the UK for the last 20 years.It worked least well for the first ten of those years when Margaret Thatcher attempted to destroy it by creating the long waiting lists which she then pointed to as evidence of its failings- and which have been essentially eliminated by the Blair/Brown Labour Party.But live on among the right wing here.

 

But unfortunately the Democrats gave us...

Barack "ShamWow" Obama.

"If you don't believe in second chances, you don't believe in second downs."

This was lifted straight from the comment section of a web article about Michael Vick going to Philadelphia - I wish I could take credit for such a pithy, right on the money phrase, but to who ever wrote this originally, all I can say is "thank you".

I actually had another post, a more congratulatory one, that compared Vick to Ray Lewis, who went from a murder trial, where he wasn't found guilty of murder but was shown to have legions of questionable associates, to Super Bowl MVP - because in America, we are supposed to believe in second chances.

We are supposed to be able to put the past behind us, especially when the crime in question DID NOT go unpunished.

But yesterday, I know my blood pressure went off the charts when I read the comment by Jeff Lurie, the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, regarding his meeting with Michael Vick before he signed off on his contract.

"I needed to see a lot of self-hatred in order to approve this," Lurie said.

Excerpted from "With Eagles, Vick gets second chance"
ESPN Online

Self hatred?

Are you serious, Jeff Lurie?

The quote above, the one that I started this post with, Jeff Lurie, is for you. "If you don't believe in second chances, Jeff Lurie, you don't believe in second downs."

More importantly, sportswriters at ESPN and SI, why aren't you calling the Eagles front office in droves to see just what generated this kind of attitude from a team owner?

What the hell kind of statement is "I needed to see a lot of self-hatred"? Why does Vick, who is nothing more than a very good football player who has had off the field legal problems, need to hate himself before you can sign him to potentially quarterback your team, should injury befall McNabb, your starter, and Kolb your backup?

Any grade school teacher will tell you that they teach children to despise the bad acts they may commit, not themselves.

Does Michael Vick have to jump off the Empire State Building and rise again from the dead in order to move on from the sordid segment of his life that he just finished paying almost two years of his life for?

Will you pay him in crumpled up dollar bills every week to prove your point, Mr. Lurie?

Your coach Andy Reid can't keep his heroin and meth addicted thug sons out of jail for more than ten minutes at a time, an OFF THE FIELD distraction that has to have affected his decisionmaking.

Your fans are so nasty and rowdy during your home games that the Philadelphia police have a jail IN THE STADIUM.

In a redemptive society, where we believe that HUMAN BEINGS have the capacity to change, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE SO YOUNG, to write off an entire person means you don't really believe in whatever religion you claim to espouse, Mr. Lurie.

Pretending to possess a choir boy level of sanctimony in a business where you pay grown men to knock the snot out of their opponents every forty five seconds is beyond hypocrisy.

But more than that, what I want to know is why Michael Vick has to play the role of the sub-human negro in order to MAKE YOU RICHER.

In order to help your team get over the hump to GET TO THE SUPER BOWL.

Will you refuse to accept the Lombardi Trophy if Philadelphia can somehow make it through the playoffs this year and notch a victory in the big game if Michael Vick's hands touch the ball during regulation play?

I won't hold my breath for your answer, Jeff Lurie.

But I will be watching you in your owners box when Vick scores his first touchdown for your team.

I am not endorsing or advocating a boycott of Whole Foods.  I am not participating in a boycott of Whole Foods.  I like their store brand milk.  It is the only place hereabouts where one can, on occaision, obtain El Rey milk chocolate.  Most important, it is the only local supplier of the brand of cat food that my aging cats will a) eat and b) not puke up all over the damn place. 

I am, however, for the foreseeable future, determined to cut back drastically on the ridiculous amount of money I've been spending there weekly over the last couple of years.  And, yes, it is because I am immortally pissed at the company's founder and CEO.   

Here's why. 

If Mackey had said this stuff back in January, it might have been different because, iIn January, the possibility of having a reasoned debate on healthcare reform had not yet been totally blown to smitherfuckingreens by the people on his side of the fight. 

Had he said this stuff then, it would have helped if he'd said "okay, I know my customers will disagree with me, but I want to humbly share a few thoughts on health care." And it would have helped if he'd said it in a forum other than the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.  Had he done that, I would likely have said--as, indeed, I was almost inclined to say when this thing first broke--"okay, he's a libertarian moron, I knew that.  Not an uncommon phenomon among people in the organic food biz, so get over it."   

However, he didn't say it in January, he didn't say it in a guest editorial in the New York Times and he started the whole thing off with a snide quote about socialism from Margaret Thatcher. Then he then moved directly into deficit fearmongering based upon the fundementally dishonest assumption that the deficits we're running now will be recurring rather than being caused by the dip in tax revenues caused by, and the stimulus package necessited by, the recession his Randian co-religionists caused.  

The WSJ news operation is a respectable and respected edifice of journalism.  The editorial page is a stinking, fetid cesspit of mendacity and vitriol annexed to that edifice.  It is one of the most important vectors for the pandemic of lies and dogmatic nonsense that has been poisoning our discourse for the last twenty years.  To go there, of all places, to say things that your liberal customers will disagree with is a lot like the message Reagan sent when he went to Philidelphia, Mississippi to give a speech on states rights.  

Beyond even that, however, I think many of us who are focusing our ire on Mackey are doing so as part of the process of facing up to the ugly reality created by our opponents on the right.  We realize that, on this issue at least, the possibility of rational discourse between left and right no longer exists.  We wanted a rational debate.  We elected a president who campaigned on the principle that we had to start having rational policy debates again.  We fervantly supported him in no small part because we agreed with him on that point. 

And for all that, on this issue, the possibility of rational discourse  is dead, dead, dead.  And no matter how much our tsk-tsking Broderized MSM craves to blame it on both sides, it was the Republicans and their libertarian and corporate allies who killed it.  They made a calculated, decision to kill rational debate on this subject, by any means necessary, solely to serve and perpetuate their own narrow political and economic interests. 

They declared war when we were offering them an olive branch in the rhetorical wars of the last two decades and they announced the start of the war with the rhetorical equivilent of a barrage of poison gas shells that has never ceased.  A barrage that has, if anything, only increased in intensity and fury and toxicity.  They keep lobbing more and more shells into the that hovering cloud of toxic rhetoric they've unleashed over No Man's Land not least because they want to ensure that no one else on their side of the wire can cross over to ours to discuss the resumption of rational discourse. 

At this point, here and now, the reality of the situation is that it is no longer possible for the Right to reinitate rational discussion on health care merely by talking to our side in a rational fashion.  At this point, if Mackey, or anyone else on the other side of the health care fight, wants to have a rational discussion with us, it is incumbent upon them to first denounce the maniacs on their side who are so gleefully poisoning our nation's discourse.  If they want to have a rational discussion with us, they must first tell the people on their own side to cut this shit out.  

Mackey didn't do any of those things.  All he did was utter a few rational, if wrong-headed, thoughts while firing off his own personal barrage of rhetorical mustard gas shells. 

Back after the George W. Bush anti-enforcement SEC closed its file on its investgation of Mackey's comments (under a screen name) about a competitor on Yahoo stock discussion boards, Mackey did a long post on the WF blog.  Here were some of the things he said he had "learned:"

MISTAKE IN JUDGMENT, NOT ETHICS: My mistake here was one of judgment--not ethics. I didn't realize posting under a screen name in an online community such as Yahoo! would be so controversial and would cause so many people to be upset. That was a mistake in judgment on my part and one that I deeply regret because it caused so much negative media attention about me and Whole Foods Market.

BECOMING A PUBLIC FIGURE: Perhaps part of the problem here is that when I first started participating in these Yahoo! online communities back in 1998, Whole Foods Market was only 15 percent as large as we are today. . . I wasn't a public figure and had no desire to become one. However, as Whole Foods Market continued to grow and as we opened large and exciting new stores around the United States, both the company and I became better and better known. At some point in the past 10 years I went from being a relatively unknown person to becoming a public figure. I regret not having the wisdom to recognize this fact until very recently.

***

KEY LEARNINGS: I've learned many things from these events. The primary lesson I've learned is that because of Whole Foods Market's success, I have become a public figure. My personal and work lives are now closely connected--and impact one another. Anything I say or do is now at risk of showing up on the front page of a national daily newspaper and therefore, I need to be much more conscious about the implications of everything that I say or do in all situations.

The price of continuing to be the CEO of a large publicly traded corporation is pouring yourself a big cup of STFU whenever you are tempted to say something that will piss off your customers. It's not a free speech issue, it's a matter of personal choice.  Would I rather have the freedom to say things that will piss off my customers, or would I rather serve my shareholder's interests and, in return, continue to earn huge amounts of money and exercise great power?  Cake.  Eat it.  Pick one.    

Mackey purported to have learned that lesson. 

Whole Foods' entire business model consists of serving an extremely liberal--compared to the demographic of grocery customers in general--customer base. Beyond its product line, Whole Foods deliberately cultvates customers who are politically active and engaged in issues, engaging in many "feel good" activities specifically designed to make shopping at Whole Foods feel ethical and, dare I say it, politically correct.

And yet, despite the lessons he claims to have learned from his misadventures on the Yahoo stock board posting, he went out of his way say stuff that seemed calculated with malice aforethought to offend and anger his company's customers at a time of high emotion. 

And he did it in the one forum short of the New York Post or Fox News most perfectly calculated to enhance their rage.  

However sincere he may, himself, be, he has publicly and wholeheartedly allied himself with people who, in a very real sense, have declared war on democracy itself.  He has said nothing about the continual barrage of lies with which his allies are poisoning our civic culture.  Instead, he added to the pollution  He chose, even went far out of his way, to piss me and the rest of his customers off. 

Well, fuck him.  I am still free to decide how I spend my money and I decline to reward him for spitting in my face.  If the collective effect of similar decisions brings hardship to his suppliers who may agree with me, well, then I'd say they need to let John know he's created a problem. 

Cake.  Eat it.  Even CEO's can can pick one, and only one, John.   

From time to time I get thinking about the villains of cinema or literature - and recently there are a few more top-dawg contenders...Anton Chigurth (Bardem) in No Country for Old Men, and of course Daniel Painvew (Lewis) in There Will Be Blood.  Chistopher Walken gave a command performance years ago as Brad Whitewood Sr. in At Close Range.  Very believable ex-con habitual criminal with no scruples whatsoever. 

But if I had to choose the greatest (which has to translate to "my favorite") villain of all time it would be Captain Ronald Merrick, played by Tim Pigott-Smith, in the PBS mini-series "The Jewel in the Crown." (1984).  I don't want to go into too much detail becuase Paul Scott's novel, on which the miniseries is based, used Merrick as the fulcrum of his critique of the British Raj, and too much character info would be a spoiler.  You can rent the mini series on DVD - its quite long but as I missed a few episodes when it was aired on PBS, the 15 hour/4 disk set was a god send.  The character is complex - very believable - pitiful and repullsive at once. 

So who's your favorite villain?

I've now gotten round to reading John Mackey's op-ed in the WSJ on health care reform, the one that had me boycotting Whole Foods and all that. Here are some thoughts.

There are two big philosophical issues that underlie his piece and I'll comment mostly on these. The first serious point is this. Mackey write:

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges.

This suggests a dichotomy between things provided by "voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges" and things doled out in rations by the government like cups of rice for the government storehouse. But almost everything we need and consume comes to us under conditions that are intermediate between these extremes. As things stand in the US, food and shelter are not traded solely through voluntary market exchanges. Government subsidies affect what farmers grow; foreign policy affects what is imported and exported, as do currency and trade politics; the government's control and maintenance of roads and airspace affects what gets sent where; government-backed scientific research affects agricultural technology and husbandry; the military's development of the internet, of course, has affected everything; zoning laws, often made on political grounds, affect the availability and nature of housing; and so on. One way or another, then, government, policy and politics are pretty well intertwined with the market in food and housing.

Nor is the current ubiquitous provision of health care via insurance, whether government-backed or for profit, a pure voluntary market exchange. With respect to the provision of insurance itself, as Mackey notes, there are all sorts of regulations in place. Furthermore, something like 80% of the insurance market is "heavily concentrated," that is, close to being monopolistic. Those who get their insurance through their employers usually have a single plan, or a choice of plans from a single provider, pre-chosen for them. Those why buy insurance in the individual market have few and unsatisfactory choices.

With respect to the relation between patients and health care providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.), things are complicated. In theory, this is supposed to be a voluntary market exchange and its terms should be quite independently of whether the users happen to have agreements with third parties for reimbursement through insurance. (And of course, when insurers fail to pay, the health care providers certainly don't forget who actually is responsible for payment - the patient.) But in practice, things are quite different. Providers often bill insurers directly. This is, of course, often a great service to patients since medical billing is a field in which, literally, you can now get a  higher degree. But the service also creates a situation in which it often seems as if the patient in not financially interested. Thus, doctors frequently order unnecessary tests without asking the patient first if they want to pay for it. Their reasoning is, undoubtedly, "why do you care? your insurance will pay anyway". But whether or not the patient has insurance should not, in a pure market exchange between provider and patient, be any of their business. Nor is the patient well-placed to complain about unnecessary tests since the patient may never even see the bill, or it may be mixed in in some very complicated way, with a whole lot of other billing. So, if nothing else, the behavior of providers is greatly affected by their knowledge of the theoretically-irrelevant factor that the patient has a side agreement with a third party. It's as if a teenager were to go to a car dealer and had to disclose ahead of time that their absent parent would foot the bill, whatever it is. This surely undermines the teen's role as a party to a voluntary market exchange. What we often find now in health care is an almost institutionalized version of this situation.

So, to sum up this point: Rather than imposing an artificial dichotomy onto a fluid and messy situation that does not really fit, we should be asking where, from the point of view of social policy and overall well-being, we want to be on the continuum between lining up at the government storehouse and bargaining in a state of nature. All the proposals on the table lie in this intermediate area.

The second major point I take exception to in Mackey's piece is this. He writes:

we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.

If this just means that some of the things it is in our power to do or refrain from doing can affect our health, it is true but irrelevant. If it means, as it surely must for the logic of his piece to make any sense, that it is in our power to prevent ourselves from getting sick and hence, if anyone does get sick, it is his or her fault, it is so obviously false as to be laughable.

We cannot divide our ailments into the willfully self-caused, like those that result from smoking, and those that drop on us from above, like a girder falling from a crane.  Many people, for example, in poor areas, may suffer from the results of bad nutrition but live without any access to affordable and healthy food, a fact that is at least partly the result of urban planning decisions, zoning laws, policing and education resources, and so on. Governments can regulate, or not, the toxins poured into our soil, air and water. We can set up, or not, needle exchanges for intravenous drgu users, a policy question that routinely gets decided on grounds that have nothing to do with public health considerations. Until government and the body politic have done everything they can to allow people to be healthy, they bear some responsibility for our ill-health.

I close with two smaller points. First, waiting lists. 1.8 million in the UK, Mackey tells us. That statistic means nothing, by itself. First, we need to know what the average wait time is. But then, we also have to compute the average wait time in the US for comparison. We may not have 'waiting lists' but anyone knows that if you call a specialist, you might not get an appointment for six months. In Massachussetts, the average wait time for a new patient to see a primary care doctor is 50 days. How do we compute the average wait time in the US? If we simply take all patients who are seen and divide that into the total number of days they have to wait to be seen, we omit one of the most salient facts: that millions of people don't have to wait at all - because they have no doctors to wait for! Somehow, all the people who have no access to medical care need to be factored in, or the comparison of wait times will tell us nothing. (Obvious, right? If doctors just cut their patient-lists in half, the average wati time should be cut in half. But you'd have all those people with no doctor to go to.) I don't have any idea how they should be factored in to computing the average wait time in the US, but the point is obvious: better to wait than to die.

Finally, just a quick response to the quote from Margaret Thatcher that Mackey begins his piece with:

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.

Maybe so. But it takes a lot longer than it does to run out of your own money!

Cross-posted at my blog: Blogical Investigations

Click here for more info.

ex animo

davidfarrar

P. McGinness - a blogger on my site asked me the following about President Obama and the Democratic Party's Health Care reform claims:

How do you set aside one fifth of the current budget? $630 billion can't just show up even over ten years. What program is being cut? What tax is being levied? You just take it as fact $630 will magically be deposited in a set aside fund. The only way to reduce physician cost is to not pay them for services rendered. What load of road apples that whole statement is full of it.

As I've said previously, up front costs WILL increase.  In the long run however they should decrease.  Why you ask?  Think of it like a small leak on your roof.  If we do nothing, that small leak will become a huge hole over 10 years, that will eventually start dripping down onto your ceiling, which in turn cause a weakness in your ceiling.  If nothing is done to stop it, that ceiling will eventually cave into your living room damaging not only your roof, your ceiling and your carpet, it could conceivably ruin furniture, flooring foundation, etc, etc...

If we do what Republicans prefer to do by giving tax breaks to homeowners and businesses, and if they WISH to do so, they can have that leak fixed with a temporary patch of shingles or tar.  That temporary patch will also end up seeping water through the roof, down onto your ceiling and again eventually end up falling through to your living room and carpet.

President Obama and the Democrats on the other hand want to FIX that roof completely.  One leak means others will come.  Repair the whole roof, which may cost you $5000 today but it will last for another 20 years saving you tons of money over time.  Fixing it today would cost you, averaged out, $200-250 a year for 15-20 years.

If you just ignore the leak or patch it, it could end up costing you 4 times that amount, or more, in 3 years or less.

Health care costs are skyrocketing, if they are allowed to continue the way they today, you and I will be paying half our salary for that same care in less than 10 years.  Statistics prove this.

Just as some believe that Social Security, Medicare and our energy system needs to be revamped, so does our health care system.  Yes, there will be people that pay a little more up front, maybe even work a little longer; but in the long run - most Americans will benefit from that revamping that is done now.

If that roof leak idea doesnt convince you to support health care reform, ask yourself why you are willing to donate money to a baseball or football field, or why you would donate money to help send a kid to soccer or cheer leading camp; but you can't find it in your heart to donate a little more (up front) so that every American can get health care without going bankrupt and losing their home and ending up on welfare -- which we end up paying in the long run.  Some people may even walk away from paying a dime -- leaving the rest of us to foot the bill.  How do you feel about that?

Yes McGinness, I think you CAN find $630 billion over 10 years without raising everybody's taxes.  Just imagine having preventive care for everyone.  A person that never had care, suddenly gets a checkup.  It's found that they have beginning stages of cancer of the prostate.  They are given radiation treatments for a few weeks - cured for another 10-20 years.  Now imagine that same person getting no preventive check up, waits 3 years and ends up with cancer of prostate that is spreading into the pelvic area and stomach.  Now that patients requires Chemo, Radiation, maybe a bone marrow transplant, hospital stays, etc.. -- costing thousands of dollars, only to end up dying in 3 years.

Who pays for that care?  We do.  You are just being ignorant or arrogant -- if you cannot see the savings.

Answer one, some, or all of the following four questions, but only insofar as they are morally worthy of answering. (Two points off for answering a bad question)

 

1. Is access to health care a right ?
- And if so, whose duty is it to provide health care to those who cannot afford it? (What about duties towards the poor in third-world countries?)
- If not, is it still a supererogatory (good, but not required), virtuous act to provide it? And in that case, should the government force people to be virtuous by taxing them?

2. Should rich people be allowed to buy health care superior to that provided to those who cannot afford better?

3. Is there such a thing as a morally reprehensible opinion (eg. 'Poor people don't deserve health care they can't afford', 'Obama is a Nazi')?
- Are we morally responsible for our beliefs?
- Or is it only acting on such a belief that would be reprehensible?
- Or is it the consequences of uttering that opinion that make it reprehensible?
- Or is it the character that the opinion expresses that would be reprehensible?
- What is the appropriate reaction to immoral opinions?

4. What is the ethical justification for 'soaking the rich' (eg. having a higher marginal tax rate on incomes 10x the median income)?
- Is it because it makes them only slightly worse off while making others much better off?
- Is it because it does not make them worse off at all, but actually provides social goods they benefit from disproportionately (eg. an educated, healthy work force, better business-friendly infrastructure)?
- Or is it not justified at all? And in that case, is it unjustified because the rich will stop producing, harming the economy? Or because higher (proportional) taxes on some is unfair?

 

Optional: watch this video, and listen to this track as you think through your answers. (Report if you chose the option - N.B. no bonus points for choosing it)

Extra Credit: Ask a better question than those offered in the quiz

(The answers will be corrected by a bi-partisan death panel of respected judges comprised of Sarah Palin, Fred Hiatt, Dick Armey and John Mackey.)

Likud and Netanyahu have not the slightest intention of co-operating or allowing the establishment of an autonomous Palestinian state. The manifesto of the ultra right-wing Likud party expressly requires movement towards a 'Greater Israel' from Eilat to the Syrian border by the expedient of 'transferring' all Muslims and Christians out of Israel/ Palestine to neighboring countries such as Jordan and Egypt.

Meanwhile little Ehud Barack struts and frets his hour upon the stage. This Barack is quite a warmonger. He wants to attack Lebanon unless he is allowed to determine the composition of the Lebanese parliament. He threatens to attack Iran unless they immediately stop copying Israel in an attempt to build nuclear weapons. Israel has already between 200 and 500 warheads, enough to wipe out the whole of the Gulf and beyond. And he tells Syria that unless they run their country the way he, Barack, wants, they will be targeted by the IAF. Quite a threatening posture for one small politician, who apparently wants to rule the Middle East.

Why is the sea King of a hundred streams?

Because it lies below them.

Therefore it is the King of a hundred streams.

 

If the Sage would guide the people, he must serve with humility

If he would lead them, he must follow behind.

In this way when the Sage rules, the people will not feel oppressed.

When he stands before them, they will not be harmed.

The whole world will support him and will not tire of him.

 

Because he does not compete

He does not meet competition.

 

Tao Te Ching (Ch-66)

 

If a married man's girl friend is a mistress,

What do you call a married woman's boyfriend?

 

Dickday (Ch-1)

 

 

I hate graphs usually.  Here are some I came across after careful and intense research. The first graph tells you something about your current occupational situation.

The second graph tells you something about your current situation; your place in the universe at this exact moment.

The third graph tells you something about your neighbors down the street and what they may be up to:

see more Funny Graphs
see more Funny Graphs
see more Funny Graphs

I catch CSPAN more than I should really. But the entertainment value during the day beats the hell out of cable news, game shows and the seventy fifth airing of Ferris Bueller in the last month.

At any rate, before I was so rudely interrupted, when Congress is in session and there is actually something happening on 'The Floor'....well that is the worst time to watch.  To be fair, and people around here seem to forget it, there were some really neat votes that took place this year, especially under Grandma Pelosi--my heroine.  When the votes were close it was fun to watch, and when the normal vote of 260 to 165 came down with 8 repubs out to lunch as well as two dems who could not figure out how to push the damn button in time...well that is fun to watch.

But the best daytime CSPAN experience is when our reps are giving grand speeches.  Because when you look around the great arenas of pure democracy, nobody is there except staff, a few tourists and the poor guy who has to sit behind the great big desk and call out some parliamental protocol from time to time in order to convince the cameramen that he is still awake.

Now when repubs give these grand speeches, they usually have these cheap easels.  When I say cheap, I do not mean the cost since the repub signed some purchase order presented by his no good brother-in-law.  I mean in this high tech age, you see this stupid cheap looking easel behind the speaking reub that I could put together with a large kite and string.  And the repub has a pointer in his hand made out of fake wood and will point to a series of graphs that make as much sense as the three I have noted supra.

Basically the point is either:

Therefore, within two fiscal years, the nation will be filing for bankruptcy;  or

And that is why my friends we are all going to hell in a handbasket.

The point never matters anyway.

Back to the pointer though.  Inevitably, the idiot repub will turn around with his pointer and the second or third meaningless chart will fall to the floor as three staff people gasp and four others rush over to put the damn thing back on the cheap easel.

And I will tell you what.  CSPAN should get an Emmy every year for shear determination because the cameraperson never laughs.  I have come to the conclusion that half the time the camera is operated remotely and behind some sound proof booth, the operator is spitting his coffee all over the floor.

Okie dokie. Enough of that!!!!!!!

I did come across an article that rather disturbed me. (As if most articles do not disturb me):

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes. On his blog, Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the numbers "truly amazing." Despite a rising stock market, largely growing employment and a historic housing boom things were not nearly so rosy for the rest of U.S. workers. This trend, according to Saez, only accelerated during the George W. Bush's tenure as President:

"...while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth."  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/14/income-inequality-is-at-a_n_259516.html

 

And the accompanying graph caused me great consternation:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/even-more-gilded/

You see this is not one of those 'cut graphs'. A cut graph is one of those where the left column goes from 9,000 to 9,500.   You can make a minor fluctuation look ominous when it is not in fact indicative of any omens whatsoever.

 

This graph goes from 0% to 6%. 

 

And I think that it should be shoved up the 'booty' of  every conservative corporate politician in the entire country everytime he or she tells you that the 'liberal' press is attempting to foment class warfare in this country.

 

Because you see, class warfare is a fact; its battles are being fought every single day on the streets of this country. 

 

AND GUESS WHO WINS THAT BATTLE EVERY SINGLE TIME?

I should be sleeping.  Yet things are on my mind, and tossing while turning doesn't help.  If he was awake I'd be talking to the man who loves me.  If he was here - or there, but awake.  Much of what's bothering me revolves around his absence; but that's none of your business and not the point of this particular rant.  Or non-rant since I don't do them well.  Consider it a thought in the middle of the night.  Just a moment in time ... okay!  Relax, will ya?  I'm getting to it.  Patience, people!

I'm just so tired of the shit.  I'm just so tired of the shit.  For emphasis:  I'm just so tired of the shit.

And just for good measure, I'd like to see all the Republicans who aren't willing to come up with an idea of their own to just go fuck themselves.  Right now.  Do not pass "Go", do not collect $200.00.  You had over eight years to do something, anything.  You suck.

People who are on Medicare and crying foul: get a grip, will you?  It's a government run, "socialist" program.  Want to give it up?  Crickets.  Goddamn crickets.  My 78-year-old mother would like to tear what's left of your hair out.  Stand still, bastards.

Can't even bother to consider single-payer because it's too expensive??  Screw you and the horse you rode in on.  Think about the money that could be saved, the hours that are now spent pouring over private insurance paperwork.  Ask a doctor with a private practice.  Ask a hospital.  Ask any freaking body with a clue - the easiest paperwork with the most immediate results is Medicare Insurance.

Let's not forget the "death panel".  During Medicare reform in 2003, many of the same who declare that end-of-life decisions now mean that Granny will be slipped some pills were all for a "living will".  Fuck them.  They were all about money - even then.  The only reason they thought it was a fantastic idea was because it would save Medicare (government) money.  If they've decided that they don't want prolonged care ... yeah!!  Now?  Death Panel = Obama will kill anyone over 65.  Please tell me that means I can kill those Republicans if I'm on the panel.  I have a list.  They're not all old, and they're not all dying.  Yet.

I need sleep, and need to be at work at eight in the morning.  I'm also uninsured.  My small business employer offers no healthcare - but better wages than most.  Enough to pay for my own?  No.  I don't blame my employer.  I just don't understand why the fuck I pay taxes and still can't be covered by the very plan that every provider prefers, and everyone close to 65 waits to receive.

Forgive me.  I'm sorry for being politically incorrect.  Did I mention fuck that, too?

I'm just so tired of the shit.

John F. Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy. Malik el Shabazz (Malcolm X). Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nixon wasn't murdered. Neither was Reagan, although somebody tried. Gerald Ford had a gun pointed at him but Squeaky never got off a shot. Nobody took any pot shots at Bush Sr. or Bush Jr. Cheney still lives his evil existence. The talking heads at Fake Noise are still busy lying and distorting and faking their way through one broadcast after another, spewing hate and misinformation like sewage from a drainpipe, and that bloated oaf, Limbaugh, is still farting into his microphone.

No. These Republican assholes are alive. Four of the greatest men who ever lived are dead. And, we have these ignorant, stupid, vile human beings showing up at town hall meetings with nazi symbols and signs and posters calling for the death of President Obama.

I've lived to see four of the greatest men of any generation murdered. Unless we Americans stand up to this rampant racist facism that has taken over our country, we may all be witnesses to another murder. Or more murders. It's time for people to stand up to these evil people and evil forces in our midst.

I, for one, am not going to stand by idly if I see someone carrying a hate sign. I'll go to jail first.

I am watching this Net roots session rebroadcast on C-SPAN. I believe this one of seven in a series. Enjoy!

I just got through skimming the latest Bill Moyers Journal and once again
I think he and his panel of scholars miss the boat by a few.

A wise man once said to me "Don't listen to that someone is saying. Listen
to what he/she is trying to tell you." And beneath all the din of "Death Panels"
and health rationing lies the real message. Listen closely and you will hear
"That G*d D*mn N**** ain't gonna tell me what to do. " "That d*mn N**** ain't
my president" "Then d*mn yankies ain't gonna shove this down my throat."
and on and on.

That my friends is the real message. But they can't say that because if they
did it would be obvious to anyone within earshot that all they are is more KKK
and white supremacist radicals. And may even attract the attention of the Feds
or some other agency. And worst of all...nobody would listen to them.

And the Limbaugh and O'Riley and Beck can't say it either because their shows
would be toast if they did. So they build up this straw man to hide their racist
beliefs behind but make no mistake that straw man is black.

C

This scary lady?

This scary Mob?

Your mother, the mobster?

Or a family man with children?

          ex animo

          davidfarrar

If you have read a few of my past posts, you would might discern that I have been generally hopeful for the future of race relations in general and specifically in relations between West Virginians and the rest of the outside world.

(All right, cut it out with the Deliverance crap, please)

I was out with the boys this evening, and I learned a couple of things:

1)  There is a direct corelation between dollars spent on media message and the number of Rebel flags flying around on pickup trucks with gun racks, etc. Attitudes included.

2)  It is amazing how even some of these same fellows will start questioning themselves fundamentally after you explain how

a) "Good" insurance (Property and casualty liability, life insurance for example) is like a lubricant for the economy in that it allows people to take the risks of everyday life without having to worry about losing everything if one screws up, and,

b)  How "bad" insurance, like the health insurance industry, is basically a big ass leech in the middle of a money stream of most healthcare expenditures in this country between state/federal governments (VA, workers comp, workers conp, medicare, etc, etc,) to the actual provider of the healthcare service.

Even my "birther"/"deather" Fox devotee friend Bud, the one with the Medicare kidney, was asking intelligent questions and seemed dumbfounded at the results.  

These guys are already hearing from GP doctors about how they aren't making big money. My friends want to know where the f@#k the money is going. I want to keep them out of their pickup trucks.  

I don't know what to think except that we have to keep educating.

 

Everyone. Everywhere.    

 

 

 

It's almost too good to be true.

Our favorite self-promoter and radio blowhard, Michael Savage, made a "commitment" on his radio program this evening that will no doubt spur some to run to their email programs.

Savage said that "soon after" his name is removed from the United Kingdom's "banned" list and his name is cleared, he will leave radio.

"And you'll never hear from me again. I will disappear," he said.

I can sense many of you looking up the email address of the British Home Office right now.

To recap, back in May it was revealed that Savage was one of 16 people included on a "name and shame" list published by the British Home Office. The list is a subset of a larger list comprised of people who will not be allowed to enter the UK.

Savage feigned outrage, saying he had been defamed because his made-up radio name was included on a list of terrorists, murderers and at least one religious fruitcake.

He wasted no time in suing the former Home Secretary, the foolish foolish Jacqui Smith, and the British government.

Savage's lawyers recently reportedly received a letter from the government lawyers, saying they will consider removing his name from the list if he repudiates statements such as those calling for the execution of millions of Muslims.

Now, Savage says that when his name is removed, he'll ride off into the sunset.

Uh huh.

Call me cynical, but I ain't buying it.

You have to understand one thing about The Savage: He craves the attention. He goes on and on about how he didn't need all the publicity generated by his being banned, but he put the lie to that statement himself when he hired a British PR firm that vowed to keep him in the papers daily.

Does that sound like a guy who doesn't want the publicity?

So I find it hard to believe that this Father of All Narcissists will be able to walk away from the microphone. And didn't he just sign a multi year contract with his syndicator in November?

My guess is that Savage either simply ignores his promise to leave if he's removed from the list or make up some cockamamie reason to stay on.

Either way, we'll be hearing that blowhard till he drops behind the mic.

Keep the faith.

I just received this by email, in response to a note I sent yesterday on the Whole Foods website...

 

1) So reassuring to know that the opinion of Whole Foods as a whole was not expressed in the Op-Ed! It's just the opinion of the leader of the company, the guy every employee looks to for guidance, the one person most identified with the corporation in the eyes of most Americans.

2) No mention of Lanny Davis's contributions.

3) Did Mackey and corporate communications actually think his piece would run with the title "Health Care Reform???"

 

To our customers,

 

As you are aware, John Mackey wrote an Op/Ed piece that was published in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week on health care reform, one of the biggest and most emotional issues facing our country. John's intent was to express his personal opinions -- not those of Whole Food Market team members or our company as a whole. Still, it's very clear that John's piece offended some of our customers, other members of the communities we serve and some of our team members as well.
 
We offer you our sincere apology.

We'd like to clarify a few things that have been misinterpreted:
 
John's Op/Ed piece was written in favor of health care reform.
In response to President Obama's invitation to all Americans to put forward constructive ideas for reforming our health care system, John was asked to write an Op/Ed piece and he gave his personal opinion. John titled the piece "Health Care Reform," but an editor at the Journal rewrote the headline to call it "Whole Foods Alternative to Obamacare," which led to antagonistic feelings by many. That was not John's intention - in fact, John does not mention the President at all in his piece. John has posted the unedited piece to his blog where people can read it as it was intended.
 
Whole Foods Market has no official position on the issue.
That said, we have attempted to be part of the solution in health care reform for many years by providing innovative health care options to our team members. We believe that our high deductible medical insurance plan coupled with a company-funded HSA is an excellent way to empower team members to make their own health care choices.
 
John wanted to share our experience with others through his Op/Ed piece.
He believes that the specific ideas he put forward would improve access and cost of health care for more people. Because our plan has held down overall costs (relative to other plans), Whole Foods Market has been able to pay 100 percent of the premiums for our full-time team members -- about 89% of our workforce. (Part-timers are eligible for the insurance plan too and pay the premium themselves.) Our team members vote on our plan every three years to make sure they continue to have a voice in our benefits.
 
Whole Foods Market has a 30-year track record of caring about our customers, team members and communities. From local loan programs to salary caps, from donations to non-profits to funding the Whole Planet Foundation, our innovative programs are created and designed by team members who care about their fellow citizens.

We all know there are many opinions on the health care debate, including inside our own company.  As we, as a nation, continue to sort through this together, we are hopeful that both sides can do so in a civil manner that will lead to positive change for all concerned, and we thank you for sharing your opinions with us.

 

Kind regards,

 

Customer Communications Team

Whole Foods Market World Headquarters

550 Bowie Street

Austin, Texas 78703

 

Give me a break. The left (myself included) spend weeks in shock at the tactics of the radical right trying to hijack the health-care debate and succeeding. And we complain bitterly about it.

Now, a CEO puts forth concrete proposals for health care reform alternatives, and instead of trying to elevate the discourse by engaging in a critique of the opinion piece from a policy point of view, the progressive blogosphere goes into full-bore echo chamber mode and attacks this man for having the temerity to carefully express his ideas in a national newspaper.

We get the government, the politicians and the debate that we deserve in a democracy. And right now, what we deserve is right-wing demagogues making up crap about death panels. And we only have ourselves to blame.

And they are happening every day in hospitals.

Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five
weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility
featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment
use less-sophisticated information technology
than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress
the importance of sterility when its trash is
picked up once daily, and only after flowing
onto the floor of a patient's room? Considering
the importance of a patient's frame of mind to
recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and
uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre
scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a
five-week stay brings an endless string of new
personnel assigned to a patient's care? Why, in
other words, has this technologically advanced
hospital missed out on the revolution in quality
control and customer service that has swept all
other consumer-facing industries in the past two
generations?

I'm a businessman, and in no sense a health-care
expert. But the persistence of bad industry
practices-from long lines at the doctor's office
to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of
preventable deaths-seems beyond all normal
logic, and must have an underlying cause. There
needs to be a business reason why an industry,
year in and year out, would be able to get away
with poor customer service, unaffordable prices,
and uneven results-a reason my father and so
many others are unnecessarily killed.

Like every grieving family member, I looked for
someone to blame for my father's death. But my
dad's doctors weren't incompetent-on the
contrary, his hospital physicians were smart,
thoughtful, and hard-working. Nor is he dead
because of indifferent nursing-without
exception, his nurses were dedicated and
compassionate. Nor from financial limitations-he
was a Medicare patient, and the issue of expense
was never once raised. There were no greedy
pharmaceutical companies, evil health insurers,
or other popular villains in his particular
tragedy.

Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for
villains-for someone to blame-has distracted us
and our political leaders from addressing the
fundamental causes of our nation's health-care
crisis. All of the actors in health care-from
doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical
companies-work in a heavily regulated, massively
subsidized industry full of structural
distortions. They all want to serve patients
well. But they also all behave rationally in
response to the economic incentives those
distortions create. Accidentally, but
relentlessly, America has built a health-care
system with incentives that inexorably generate
terrible and perverse results. Incentives that
emphasize health care over any other aspect of
health and well-being. That emphasize treatment
over prevention. That disguise true costs. That
favor complexity, and discourage transparent
competition based on price or quality. That
result in a generational pyramid scheme rather
than sustainable financing. And that-most
important-remove consumers from our
irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of
value.

These are the real tragedies of our healthcare system and they
are all perfectly preventable.

C

When we did our Faxapoloosa during the Health Care Rally, I sent several cc:'s of my Rep letters to the White House via fax. I've also contacted the White House about health care reform online at their website. Not sure what prompted the response, but lo and behold, today I received a letter (on really nice stationery, too, LOL!). Okay, so it's a form letter, but still.....it made me feel good. I'm sure a number of you have received the same, but if not, I'd like to post it here.

August 6, 2009

Ms. <LisB>

yada yada

Pelham, NY

Dear Elisabeth:

Thank you for contacting me. I appreciate knowing your thoughts on health care reform.

There is a broad consensus among the American people on the need for affordable, high-quality health care. The rising cost of health care is the most pressing financial challenge for families and for our Nation, and controlling this cost is essential to bringing down the Federal deficits we inherited. Now is the time to move forward, and I am committed to getting health care reform done this year.

Since I took office, we have done more to advance the cause of health care reform that we have in the previous decade. In February, I signed H.R. 2, providing coverage for millions of children through the Children's Health Insurance Program. I also signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to make key investments in computerized medical records and expanded preventative services. I encourage you to read more about my plans at: www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/health_care.

Looking forward, we will take additional steps to lower costs, expand coverage, and improve the quality of health care. My 2010 Budget makes a major down payment on health care reform, funded by implementing efficiencies in Government health care spending and restoring a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code. There are tough choices to be made, and I will bring business and workers, health care providers and patients, and Democrats and Republicans together to create a system that delivers better care and puts the Nation on a much sounder long-term fiscal path.

I share the sense of urgency that Americans like you have voiced. I watched as my ailing mother struggled with stacks of insurance forms in the last moments of her life. This is not who we are as a Nation; together, we will fix it.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama

Iowa Democrat Tom Fiegen will run against Grassley next year.  He sounds like a true Dem, too. More about him here.  Personally, I plan to support him with my $ from afar.

Do you Iowans have an opinion about him?

Conservatives seem to be expressing two fears about health care reform:

1.  The government will intrude into the patient-doctor relationship, interfering with things like end-of-life decisions.

2.  The government will NOT intrude into the patient-doctor relationship, allowing things like legal abortions.

The first fear is especially peculiar, because it was conservatives who wanted the federal government to intrude into the end-of-life decisions of the Schiavo family.

The lesson I draw from this is that conservatives don't want the government intruding into your decisions as long as you make the decisions that conservatives approve of.  If you make any other decision, well then the government will have to step in.

In which case, it's your own fault for not being more moral and sensible.

Politico is reporting that Dick Armey is leaving the Law Firm DLA Piper. Rachel Maddow is going to have field day with this one on her show. She has been focusing in like a laser on Freedom Works ran out of this operation and its role in healthcare town hall melees..

Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Oversight Failures and Failure to Prosecute Crimes?  Rove get's significant share of the blame.

 

Federal Oversight employees have been living in hell for nearly a decade.  Just try to do your job, when doing your job gets in the way of the greedy, the partisan, and the corrupt who finance political campaigns of those who are supposed to be representing the American voters and tax payers, but who would rather curry favor with their campaign funders. 

 

Keep in mind that even if the oversight agents, inspectors, investigators in the field are not being sabotaged by appointed and/or corrupted managers, as they attempt to do their jobs and complete their agency missions, having no one willing to PROSECUTE in the agency IG's and OIG's as well as the Justice Department in general, pretty much blocks any oversight enforcement.  And truth be told, we have lots of proof ethical federal oversight employees have been sabotaged all across the federal government and suffered vast retribution just for trying to do their jobs.  (Anyone out there monitoring the growing number of whistleblower complaints?)  It's been a bad decade.

 

The lack of anyone willing to prosecute, preceded by the harassment of investigators and auditors so they can not properly investigate and prepare their initial cases, has been the bane of most oversight employees for the past 8 years.  It has nearly brought our government to its knees. 

 

There are signs that some clean up and clean out of that which has brought about this troubling environment is starting.   But it is going to be a nasty job, as some of those appointed by the last administration with marching orders to politicize and manipulate oversight to be sure it would not inconvenience or endanger certain greedy corporations and individuals, who were friendly with the Bush/Cheney administration, made end runs for regular Civil Service Jobs before the changeover to the Obama administration was complete. 

 

So, these same folks who brought you corrupted and failed oversight agencies, IG's, OIG's, Attorney General, and Office of the U.S. Attorney's, (Remember Alberto Gonzales, Paul J. McNulty, and some others before him?)  When Justice Dept. fails, no agency or individual oversight agent, inspector or investigator can successfully do his or her job. 

 

Here are some recent revelations regarding Mr. Rove's contributions to these problems. 

-GFS

 

 

Rove "Driving Force" Behind US Attorney Firings

Thursday 13 August 2009

 

Link:  http://www.truthout.org/081309R

 

 

Miers Told House Panel of 'Agitated' Rove
Bush White House Counsel Said Adviser Called U.S. Attorney a 'Serious Problem'

 

Link:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/11/AR2009081102104.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

 

 

 

Probe shows Rove played key role in firing U.S. attorneys

Link:  http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/73463.html

 

OK does Michael Vick deserve a second chance or is what he did so awful the Eagles should not have signed him?

And why did Charles Wiener and Leonard Mayer charge Worldnet ATT dialup service on the BMIS Amex account? I asked a purported former BMIS IT employee and he said he remembered some talk about dialup service. He also said Wiener and Mayer had no reason to transmit anything between the office and home.  

The Amex bills show a $21.95 charge for Worldnet ATT service on Wiener's account in Janaury 2008 but not July and August.   

Mayer's account shows the Worldnet ATT charge in January and July.

I have no idea when the two of them signed up for the service.  

Wiener is Bernie's nephew and was BMIS director of administration. What the hell did Wiener do all day? He moved from Dix Hills to Centerport and he needed dialup service? Broadband was available on Long Island in 1998. His wife is a lawyer.

 Leonard Mayer is one-half of Mayer & Schweitzer which had a number of FINRA violations, according to FINRA's BrokerCheck. I think, but I'm not sure, that Charles Schwab bought M&S in the early '90s which makes me wonder what kind of outfit Schwab is. It apparently tolerated M&S's shady practices.  

Someone told me that Merrill Lynch bought M&S for $500 million but I can't find any record of it. Sounds fishy to me.

Lennie Mayer joined BMIS in 2001, according to his FINRA file. Mayer lives on Sutton Place so he has some big bucks. I was told Mayer was as computer literate as Bernie.

There could be a perfectly reasonable explanantion as to why Wiener and Mayer both had Worldnet ATT dialup service. Maybe it is a coincidence that no one seems to know what both of them did all day.  

On the other hand, transmitting data via dialup leaves less of a trail than broadband.

Hmm... 

 

Obama says insurance companies holding U.S. hostage

Get It Yet?  Americans Being Taken to the Cleaners by Big Corporations and Banks, and It's Legal.... In Europe!

It just keeps getting worse.  Any day, check the articles popping in mainstream media as well as the Internet about financial intrigue and crime.  Missing money, (bailout or not), missing estates, missing retirement accounts, you name it, it's been happening.  As the operations of the ruthless and greedy, (in this wild-west economic time we are in),  break out of the shadows, we all wonder, how could this have happened? After all, we have laws to protect people in the U.S. don't we? 

Below, with the permission of the author,  is the introductory article written by Shelley A. Stark, about an secret banking institution called Hidden Treuhand, and a recent follow up article regarding the same.

   Since the preliminary article in August of 2008, Ms. Stark's book has been published and is now available.  Copies have been going fast.  Last night Amazon had only three left.  If you delay, you'll have to wait for the next printing.

 This book will open your eyes to the drama that has been going on out of sight and frankly for most American's below our radar.  Ignorance is NOT bliss!  It is a must read for everyone, but in particular federal oversight employees, ALL federal oversight employees.  -GFS

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Halliburton's Hidden Treuhand

Monday 11 August 2008

by: Shelley Stark, t r u t h o u t | Report

Vanity Fair reported shipments of over $12 billion in cash to Iraq. $9 billion of the cash is gone and unaccounted for. (Photo: The Village Voice)

Halliburton takes advantage of a European loophole that lets corporations hide beneficiaries and assets.

    Little is known of a customary European legal practice that offers corporations and individuals an opportunity to profit from assets while maintaining complete anonymity of the beneficiary's identity. This practice is referred to as "Hidden Treuhand" in the English language. The practice of Hidden Treuhand submits to legal local customs in Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg and Switzerland, but due to globalization, has moved beyond European borders via corporations and individuals, who put it to personal use.

    The practice of Hidden Treuhand is relevant and unregulated. More and more, the relevant practice of Treuhand is used in hiding an asset owner's identity from the outside world. Assets, whether they are corporate shares or fixed assets, can be owned in secret. The personal income derived from these assets can also be kept secret from tax authorities. An example of how Hidden Treuhand facilitates tax evasion is part of the latest scandal where thousands of Germans evaded tax through the services of the LGT Treuhand Bank in Liechtenstein, using a combination of Treuhand and foundations to hide true owner identity of bank accounts.

    Hidden Treuhands in Europe impact the lives of American citizens. Hidden Treuhands enable even American corporations to hide the identity of beneficiaries, assets and income. Halliburton has a Hidden Treuhand embedded in its Austrian subsidiary. It prevents transparency regarding corporate activities.

    The lack of transparency creates special advantages for some, and consequences for others such as governments, competitors, stockholders and citizens. For example, a beneficiary can evade personal income tax, because the income derived from a hidden asset is not linked to the beneficiary. There is another advantage to Hidden Treuhands that borrows from the concept of a "trust." The "trust" concept allows for dividends to be removed. Money transferred to a subsidiary may be considered a dividend. By using a network of subsidiaries, favorable tax laws and banking secrecy, CEOs and insiders can profit without transparency. The Hidden Treuhand is an important aspect of what makes globalization so attractive to American and European corporations.

    Given these attributes, it is alarming when a Hidden Treuhand is discovered in a subsidiary that is fully owned by Halliburton USA. Halliburton's Hidden Treuhand is evident in the firm's corporate records. Halliburton International GmbH was created in Austria in June of 1992, although another subsidiary, at the same address, was in existence in Austria since 1958. The new subsidiary, Halliburton International GmbH, has no apparent reasons for existing other than to house a Hidden Treuhand in its corporate structure, receive dividends from other subsidiaries and acquire other subsidiaries. This firm has no employees. It creates no income. Another company, Halliburton Company Austria GmbH, at the same address, could have equally performed whatever function this subsidiary has, but it has no Hidden Treuhand. The obvious conclusion is Halliburton USA needed a subsidiary with a Hidden Treuhand.

    The Hidden Treuhand easily accomplishes tax evasion because dividends transferred to a subsidiary with a Hidden Treuhand can be anonymously distributed or used to purchase other holdings. For example, Halliburton International GmbH has acquired acquisitions in Russia and Kazakhstan that later disappear from the corporate records.

    Halliburton attracts a certain limelight in connection with any Treuhand activities because of its link to a highly controversial war and Vice President Dick Cheney's earlier association with Halliburton. We would have expected all ties to his former employer to be have been severed when he took office to avoid a conflict of interest. The impenetrability of the Hidden Treuhand makes it impossible to know who else is involved beyond the CEOs listed on Halliburton International GmbH historic corporate data.

    Dick Cheney claims to no longer own stock in Halliburton, but he was its chairman and CEO for five years, and either hired or promoted many of the executives now running Halliburton, or formerly involved with the subsidiary with the Hidden Treuhand in Austria. It is highly unlikely the chief executive officer, Dick Cheney, would be unaware of the Austrian subsidiary's existence, originally headed by the executive vice president and chief legal officer, Lester L. Coleman, of Halliburton International USA. But it is an absolute certainty Lester L. Coleman and all the other CEOs listed on Halliburton International GmbH corporate historic records do know of the subsidiaries existence and its Hidden Treuhand. It was the intention of these CEOs to set up a secret subsidiary in 1992 with a Hidden Treuhand embedded.

    Perhaps more importantly, Halliburton's CEOs, listed in the corporate historic records of Halliburton International GmbH in Austria, should know Hidden Treuhands could be used to undermine American security by providing a means for financing terrorists. Currently, one of the strongest arguments the US and the OECD are using against banks, lawyers and Treuhand activities in Europe to combat tax evasion and money laundering is how these activities can be used to fund terrorism. The Iraq War is one portion of the overall strategy of the 'War on Terror' that also includes preventing any funding for terrorism. It takes little imagination to see the huge potential Treuhands facilitate: creating a means for terrorists and criminal organizations to conceal their true identities and motives and yet work openly in the capitalist system.

    Halliburton's CEOs must be aware of the potential misuse of Hidden Treuhands, as they have not been particularly open about their own use of Hidden Treuhands to date. Halliburton simultaneously contracts to fight a "war on terror," while utilizing the same nontransparent mechanisms concerned authorities seek to prevent access to by terrorists. Faced with a conflict of interest, Halliburton CEOs demonstrate with their silence a willingness to protect their own interests, and doing so while we are at war with an enemy that works in the shadows.

    The noncompetitive contract awarded Halliburton was orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney and backed by the Bush administration. This contract has afforded an estimated US$1.4 trillion to US$3 trillion of US taxpayer money to flow through the coffers of Halliburton, virtually unmonitored and fraught with accounting irregularities. The receiver of much of this US taxpayer money is Halliburton USA, its affiliates and subsidiaries. One of the subsidiaries, the Austrian subsidiary, is capable of dispersing any money sent to it to unknown persons, without a hint of transparency.

    The Hidden Treuhand is more than just a means of profiting without transparency; it is a national security threat, whether wielded by al-Qaeda or Halliburton. If Americans were brought into a war based on a profit motive while we were supposed to be focused on alleviating the threat of terrorism, it could amount to treason. This risk should be given some credence and investigated. For this reason, Halliburton's corporate records were given to the US Internal Revenue Service. Maybe they will find something illegal, tax evasion for example, or maybe they will come back and say they found nothing illegal: The Hidden Treuhand is just a little bit naughty.

    There is no transparency to a Hidden Treuhand, and, therefore, no means to identify the real benefactors. But the most important factor concerning a Treuhand contract is this: If a Treuhand contract is embedded in the corporate structure, then its sole purpose is to prevent the public from knowing the identity of the real stockholders. Who is calling the shots and who is benefiting is kept secret.

    The "True Hands," the true benefactors' identity, is hidden from public knowledge; they remain anonymous and nameless in transactions, and that is the sole incentive for creating a Hidden Treuhand.

    --------

    Shelley Stark is the author of  "The Hidden Treuhand: How Corporations and Individuals Hide Assets and Money," now available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com.

 

 

In the Age of Stealth Wealth - Bank Secrecy is Alive and Well!

Written by Shelley Stark author of: 'Hidden Treuhand: How Corporations and Individuals Hide Assets and Money' 

"Bank Secrecy Bites the Dust in Europe"- Newsweek. "Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria Loosen Secrecy Rules" - Bloomberg. "Tax Havens Give in to EU Pressure" - Spiegel ONLINE.

Has banking secrecy finally come to an end? This is what newspapers are unanimously saying. Is it true or should these headlines be punctuated with a question mark? Well, once again Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and Belgium too are in the spotlight for their bank secrecy rules. There have been strong words emanating from the international community in the past and they produced little, or we would not be entertaining headlines such as these today. 

Changes to bank secrecy have come along way since the day of the anonymous savings book ('Sparbuch' in the German language). On January 1st 1994 some provisions concerning banking secrecy were partly amended in response to concerns of money laundering, but these provisions were largely undertaken on a voluntary basis by each bank. Up until this time, one could simply show up at the bank with $10 or $10 million dollars, and put it in anonymous savings account.  It was anonymous because you didn't have to show any identification. The bank account was identified by a secret password, which the owner of the account assigned to the savings book and was subsequently registered in the bank. To get the money, you would have to show up at the bank with the savings book and give the secret password. This means in reality, to make a pay-off as seen in spy-thrillers, nobody needed to run around with suitcases of money. One could simply make a pay-off by handing over the savings book with the password and the recipient could visit his money at leisure. The new account holder could change the password to afford more security, but as longs as he had the savings book and the password, the money was safe and the old owner could not obtain these funds. Of course, this also meant if the savings book was lost or the password forgotten, then no one could access the money. The password account is much like its Swiss cousin the numbered account. The concept of the number and the password account originated when Hitler sought to stem the flow of money seeking a safe haven in Switzerland and in Austria. The capital exodus began due to inflation, but later due to Nazi persecution of Jewish citizens, it was feared that Hitler would try to force the Swiss to reveal Jewish accounts. By giving out numbers, the Swiss bank could claim not to know whom the account belonged to. In Austria, the practice became passwords. 

In 1995, Austria became a member of the European Union. Many of the earlier voluntary duties became law so that by November 1st 2000 the ability to open anonymous accounts was finally ended and no payments or withdrawals could be made to existing accounts unless the bank identified the identity of the savings account holder and money laundering was finally rendered a criminal offence. Tax evasion on the other hand, the concealing of income and not falsifying any documents, is merely a civil offense, not unlike a traffic violation. In addition, as of January 1st 2000 any cash transaction over €15,000 with a customer that didn't have an ongoing relationship with the bank or was wired to the bank from offshore, needed to register their identity with the bank. These changes were brought about as the result of a European Council Directive to prevent the financial system from being used to launder money.  As a result of these amendments to the banking law, the European Commission withdrew its complaints against the Republic of Austria.                                           

The story regarding Switzerland and Liechtenstein is slightly rockier. German federal investigators paid €5 million to a former bank employee of the Liechtenstein Große Treuhand bank (LGT). The employee, Heinrich Kieber, is alleged to have removed the secret bank data from the LGT bank, thus kicking off a row over tax evasion in the EU. Before the dust settled, U.S. investigators charged Switzerland's UBS bank for deliberately encouraging American citizens to engage in tax fraud activities. The Swiss have always attracted a certain limelight regarding chocolate, cheese, cuckoo clocks, and banking secrecy - a financial business model that attracts an estimated $1.84 trillion in assets of which about €450 billion belong to private customers. In Switzerland, the hoopla began when the bank was found to have offered tax evasion tactics to Americans that were invented by auditors at KPMG, who only managed to avoid criminal prosecution when they paid up $456 million in fines and penalties. The UBS bank was ordered to pay $780 million, and then they did the unthinkable, they handed over the names of 300 customers after the U.S. government produced strong evidence of tax evasion. The U.S. authorities are still seeking the names of an estimated 52,000 Americans with secretive UBS accounts.

According to mainstream press, these events are what have sparked the U.S., British, and German push for an 'end' of banking secrecy and prompted bankers from Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein to hoist their skirts and run for cover. Baa-humbug!

Firstly, tax evasion is not a criminal offense in any of these countries currently being hounded for their bank secrecy laws and for the most part bank secrecy is federal and constitutional law in these countries.

Basically the international community has pushed these European tax havens to accept Article 26 of the OECD Model Tax Convention on Income and Capital. Article 26 creates an obligation to exchange information, but the contracting state is not at liberty to engage on a "fishing expedition". The contracting country must firstly show evidence of tax evasion, can only request information that is relevant to the tax affairs of a given taxpayer, must demonstrate the foreseeable relevance of the requested information, and prove to have pursued all domestic means to access such information. As of yet, it is unclear just how much tax evasion evidence even need be presented.

Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland were opposed to the current version of Article 26, last updated on July 17, 2008, but since March 2009 each of these countries has notified the OECD that they are withdrawing their reservation to Article 26. They now believe that bank secrecy is not incompatible with the requirements of Article 26. And with little wonder, because the particulars of Article 26 are easily circumvented with a legal phenomenon called 'Hidden Treuhand'.

Hidden Treuhand is a customary practice in Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and even Germany. Due to globalization, it has transcended its national borders to impact industry, commerce, and banking worldwide. It is key to creating shell companies, foundations, and bank accounts where the real owner identity is hidden and cannot be exposed by any legal means. A Hidden Treuhand creates conditions where a lawyer conducts the duties required of him on behalf and in the interest of the client, but all business actions appear to be in the name of the lawyer. The real beneficial owner remains unknown. This construct can be liberally applied to stock in corporations, foundations, real estate, patent and copyrights, financial instruments such as derivatives and bonds, and of course, cash.

In 2000, some aspects of banking secrecy came to an end, but the Hidden Treuhand is frequently used to close the gap that those transparency laws were supposed to fill. In essence, the Hidden Treuhand is somewhat like a hidden trust, but legally it and the environment in which it functions, can achieve far more than is presently realized. Hidden Treuhand hides the beneficial owner of any asset and that includes bank accounts. Hidden Treuhand, when combined with banking secrecy, hides profits beyond the reach of tax investigations and governments. It's like missile shield for money - nothing gets past this protective barrier.

Article 26 of the OECD MODEL TAX CONVENTION ON INCOME AND CAPITAL concerns the exchange of information between Contracting States. Hidden Treuhand is the creation of customary practice, but it is not regulated and there are no laws in existence that could be equated as regulatory. The following Hidden Treuhand provisions are quoted from law books referring to customary practice and illustrate how each of the OECD provisions is rendered mute. Compare the inherent capabilities of Hidden Treuhand with text of Article 26 where it states that none of the following provisions shall be construed so as to impose the obligation to:

OECD: to carry out administrative measures at variance with the laws and administrative practice of that or of the other Contracting State;

Hidden Treuhand: "What makes a Treuhand contract so special and unique under Austrian Law is that there is no special law regulating Treuhand contracts...there is no regulation of Treuhand contracts under Austrian Civil Law, and there are not any laws that could be equated as regulatory." 

OECD: to supply information which is not obtainable under the laws or in the normal course of the administration of that or of the other Contracting State;

Hidden Treuhand: "It is not to be expressed that any direct legal relationship or connection exists between the businessmen and the lawyer. In fact, the lawyer would be guilty of misconduct should the lawyer reveal that a legal relationship (power of attorney) exists between himself and the client".  

OECD: to supply information which would disclose any trade, business, industrial commercial or professional secret or trade process, or information the disclosure of which would be contrary to public policy (ordre public).

Hidden Treuhand: "When using a Hidden Treuhand, trustees are referred to as a Straw Man. A trustee functions like a Straw Man and acts in the name of the client who remains undeclared in the background. The relationship between the businessman and the lawyer is secret, which often includes even knowledge of a 'power of attorney' existing between the lawyer and the businessman"

When it comes to Hidden Treuhand, lawyers exploit attorney client privilege and claim it their legal duty to deny information and to keep all matters pertaining to their client confidential. No one, no court or authority, no government, can force an attorney to reveal any secrets concerning his client. And what of banking or bank accounts?  

The EU and international money laundering laws have striven to eliminate any criminal elements from the banking system, but Hidden Treuhand works within the law and in the banking system. Hidden Treuhand bank accounts are not made public because only the trustee is entitled to use the account, and there is no legal relationship between the client and the bank account. A lawyer lets the bank know that an account is a trust account, but does not have to disclose the name of the beneficiary. A Treuhand account means a banking relationship exists between the bank and the trustee and the bank is not entitled to know whom the lawyer represents anymore than anyone else.

"According to leading banks, designating an account as a Treuhand account alters nothing. The true account beneficiary remains a secret because only the trustee is authorized to use the account and there is no legal relationship between the client and the 'special account'. The clients' identity is not exposed when making bank transactions because it is the trustee's responsibility to make money transfers from this 'special lawyer trust account' (Anderkonto)".

As result of the crackdown against tax havens, more clients will have to resort to Hidden Treuhand and lawyers services. Already Liechtenstein has sold its Treuhand services to a separate company, quite possible even to itself via Hidden Treuhand. Their business model will no doubt resemble the Austrian one where the registration of foundations and Hidden Treuhand is separate from bank institutions. If foreign tax authorities manage the first hurdle and can provide strong evidence of tax evasion and seek further information regarding bank accounts they will firstly have to petition the cooperation of the Ministry of Finance. The ministry will ask the banks, but to what end? The bank cannot tell them what they do not know.  

So much for the grandiose announcement heralding the end of bank secrecy and tax havens!

Many large-cap US corporations have headquarters or subsidiaries based in tax havens. For example: McDonalds recently moved to Switzerland. Moreover, it is possible for a hedge fund to own an offshore bank. For example: the highly secretive hedge fund Cerberus owns Bawag, an Austrian bank, as well as a majority shareholder stake in Chrysler and GMAC. If questioned, would Bawag reveal information regarding any accounts held by a stakeholder of Cerberus?

Just how big is the offshore banking industry? The OECD estimates that assets held by the offshore banking industry might be as high as $11.5 trillion. Little wonder U.S. banks are having trouble lending money and no big surprise the European legal community claims to have no objection to Article 26.

Bank secrecy is alive and well! No question mark necessary. It just got a bit more expensive and devious. It is high time someone made the announcement: we have officially entered the 'Age of Stealth Wealth'!

To learn more about Hidden Treuhand and what role it is playing in the financial crisis, bank secrecy, bailouts, globalization, the privatization of Iraq, and your financial security, please read: Hidden Treuhand: How Corporations and Individuals Hide Assets and Money

 

 

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold," wrote W. B. Yeats in 1920.  And this is what is happening in America now--fragmentation. Walter Cronkite has died, and with him has passed the American experience of exuberant, consensual nationhood.  We are at risk of devolving  into a collection of defensive interest groups.

            Diehards on the right shout down liberals on the left. Zealots on the left  deride extremists on the right.  Our great 233-year experiment in democracy falters, clutching at the wounds inflicted by overblown market projectiles and overheated passions. The center cannot hold. Former agreements on who we are and what we stand for disintegrate into political posturing and contentious mockery. Bickering is the order of the day. Our town halls have become a free-for-all.

            Citizens refuse to engage in constructive dialogue with persons of opposite persuasion.  In lieu of communicating, opponents of this, that, or the other seek out comrades who will reinforce what they have already decided is true.  Together they pile onto any wandering participant who strays from the other camp.  Effective exchange of ideas is stifled in a din of media noise and sound-bited superfluity. Ideological labels stiffen to rigidity while tempers flare, and civility lies forlorn upon the battleground of errant words. All is vanity.  Mobbery slashes with daggers of mockery the sinews of civility into death panels.  Is this how the civil war started?  God forbid we should go through that again.

            Like urban gangs, we cultivate identities rooted inf aggression, while yet the detritus of  fallen citizenship lies strewn beneath their feet.

            Free market deregulants don't realize that even their own leaders have thrust socialism upon them. "Too big to fail" status bequeaths corporate welfare upon  swashbuckling brokers whose playing fast and loose with other people's money constricts their leveraged escapades into unexpectedly dire straits. Disaster befalls us all as a result. Black swans flap slowly their wagering wings across dark pools of smoke and mirror-like rallies of recovery. Fat tails, rat-like, drag beastly burdensome assets down along the swooning market indices, while contrarian birds of prey spy out carrion from their barren perches upon rocks of exchange-traded risk. HFT whirs beneath the wheezing  gasps clueless regulators, while flash traders flaunt their exposures for all the world to not see.

            On the other side of town, bleeding hearts wear their ire upon their sleeves, so that other like-wounded  wobbling troopers might spot their shared derision, then anoint their fragilities with comments of blistering intensity and dazzling verbosity. Having unwittingly allowed a sandy foundation to be laid of zero-down mortgaged-backed bait-and-switch adjustable-rate usury toxic chaos, the save-the-world crowd had not anticipated that their avaricious nemeses across the wall of streets would then slap up such an elaborately sliced-and-diced, derivativated, credit-default-swap-protected, overinflated house of cards on the as-it-turns-out frail  footing of egalitarian housing policy. 

             Now as we attempt to enter discussions about public health and insurance options the jack of clubs emerges from his collapsed house, cackling with derision as the queen of hearts cries in her beer, and the patient kings and queens of civilized leadership are rudely trumped by a pack of jokers gone ballistic. God help us.

            Yeats was right.  Things fall apart.

            But there is still hope.  If we can get people talking respectfully to each other again, there's a chance we can pull a semblance of nationhood out of this present mess, and maybe even manage to get everybody and their brother/sister covered for major medical under the new public option or the old private one.

            So be courteous, no matter what happens. Speak unto others as you would have them speak unto you, and maybe we'll get through this without tearing the republic apart.

As the Republicans and their corporate buddies have rolled out a slight twist on the now age-old "Bitch Slap the Democrats" routine on healthcare, our friends the DC Dems once again find themselves standing there, mouths agape at the atrocious behavior, lies, and simply outrageous tactics just as paralyzed as the proverbial deer caught in the headlights.  One has to wonder if those DC Dems ever tire of being beaten up like that?  Does it ever cross their minds in advance of these predictable political temper tantrums and bully tactics of the right wing that they might prepare for and counter what they know is going to come their way?  Do you think perhaps we are nearing the point where the DC Dems might just get a clue and fight back before it is too late and the well of public debate has been so poisoned they will never be able to reverse the damage done? 

Yes, yes I know the DC Dems are explaining until they are blue in the face and they are trying to counter the deliberate lies and the idiocy taking place in the town halls.  Yes I'm fully aware that the "reasonable" and "sensible" and "pragmatic" people who are our leaders are now out there trying to get the word out about healthcare reform.  And yes, I know they've somehow gotten some pharma interests and others to pony up for an expensive ad campaign.  In short, I am well aware that the Democrats are now "responding" to the Republican assault and I repeat the predictable Republican assault.  But why did they wait when they had to have known what was coming?

What is suprising to me as, I think, with most observers is how it appears the Democrats were taken almost completely unawares by this "sudden" Republican offensive against healthcare reform.  I find that impression and the weak, choppy Democratic response really unacceptable.  The DC Dems may never tire of having the right wing spit in their faces, they may never tire of being humiliated and made to look like impotent, weaklings with neither the ability nor inclincation to defend themselves or their posititions.  But ya know what?  Me and lots of other Democrats are sick and tired of this predictable and now all too famliar scenario because it doesn't end well.

The DC Dems started off with the Quixotic and strategically foolish goal they always start off with: an effort to ensure whatever emerges from the Congress has bipartisan support.  Can we just drop that naive, thoroughly unproductive and far too politically costly strategy at long last?  It never works on any legislation that is truly important unless Democrats completely or almost completely cave in to every demand the right wingers make and by so doing the product is often not even worth having because it's so watered down.  And so it went with healthcare all year long.  Only now, as the Republican hyenas are circling for the kill and laughing their vile, ugly heads off at their prey, the perenially clueless DC Dems, who are just starting to realize the only way to go is to push through a healthcare reform bill without Republican votes.

Unfortunately for the nation, it is now so late in the game that many of the Republican aims are already achieved. The Republicans seek to delay, to sidetrack, to misinform, and to defeat healthcare reform first, because their masters foam at the mouth at the thought their profiteering on the health of the American people might be somehow restrained and second, because they believe by beating healthcare they can cripple the Obama Presidency perhaps fatally.  The pusilanimous Democrats (including the White House) in their unendingly obsequious way, took single payer off the table before the game even began and capitulated numerous desirable features of healthcare reform in advance to assuage the right and their special interest allies, sweeten the deal if you will, to entice them to vote in favor of healthcare reform.  At great political cost and at the cost of making it much less effective, this approach hampered the economic stimulus bill earlier in the year.  As local governments make cutbacks and layoffs we can see how costly this game of assuaging the right really is.  It threatens now to completely undo any hope for healthcare reform.  Indeed, the President uses the phrase health insurance reform more often now than not because of how far the effort has already been set back.  It remains to be seen whether Obama can recapture the momentum and pull some sort of reform out of his hat before the end of the year.  The longer the fight goes on, the less likely it is we will end up with that result.

For decades now the Republicans have adopted this tactic of extreme, implaccable and, if necessary, irresponsible and right wing fringe opposition and far more often than not the Democrats have rewarded that behavior lavishly.  The Democratic response to the bully boy tactics is viewed by Republicans (rightly) as weakness they can exploit so it only encourages them to keep it up.  Once they realized that bullying worked against the Democrats, the Republicans have been using it whenever they can and, far more often than not, meeting with tremendous success.  Despite years and years of experience with this, the DC Democrats insist on going through the same process of giving the opposition the benefit of the doubt, going out of their way to accomodate, and then being caught by surprise when the Republicans respond with delay and obstruction in committee and lies, malicious attacks and outrageous false accusations on the floor and in every venue of public debate. 

In the main, the DC Democrats, as we all know, reel with incredulity that Republicans would resort to such gutter tactics even though it has been going on for many years.  Anyone remember 2004?  How about 1988?  The DC Dems, in fine academic and highbrow fashion, deplore the distortions and lies.  They strongly disapprove of the Republican tactics of course.  They provide voluminous excuses and refutations to counter the odious misinformation campaign.  They talk and they talk and they talk.  They bore the nation to death "proving" they are right and how much smarter and better behaved they are than those mean old Repubwicans!  And in the eyes of the average American they look weak.  They look like they are afraid to defend their position.  They appear to all the world to be unable, if not unwilling, to effectively stand up for what it is they say they believe in.  They demonstrate, with their lame and ineffective responses to the attacks on them and their positions that they will refuse to fight back even for themselves, and even on issues they claim to believe are vitally important to the future of the nation!  To the delight of their opponents and right on schedule, they can be counted on to signal to the American people that they are weak, calculating politicians who are not to be trusted.  And yes, this happens even though the nation perceives the Republicans to be completely out of line, extremist, dishonest, and untrustworthy.  They don't care what people think of them as long as the main focus is on the Democrats and that it is negative.  The smear works and makes the otherwise much more appealing Democrats look as filthy and dirty as the Republicans already are.  The Republicans understand that the only way to level the playing field for them is to make the Democrats seem as corrupt, venal, and self serving as they themselves are.  Their tactical objective is only to make sure that people don't trust the Democrats or the Democratic program.  The don't give a rats ass what people think of them or their party in the context of achieving their immediate goal of defeating, in this case, healthcare reform.  All they need to do to "win" on the issue is to raise enough doubts about the Democrats and their intentions to scare the "moderate" Democrats (DINOs) back into submission so they kill the bill or modify it to the point of being ineffective.  It appears that is, once again in process though (thankfully) their success is not yet assured.

What the DC Dems don't do in the face of this predictable Repubilcan behavior is stand up to the lying bullies.  What they don't do is resolve to quit enabling these irresponsible and malevolent people from preventing our country from moving ahead.  What they don't do is finally take a stand and fight these jerks and give as good as they get.  No.  Instead, the Democrats insist on doing as they have always done as though they were in a genteel debating match as opposed to a knock down drag out fight in the middle of the street with the whole world watching.  The DC Democrats, in all their nerdy superiority and with all the enormous brainpower and vast ability they have, insist on following the same failed strategy they always take.  Rarely does this strategy prevail for Democrats on the issues most critical in moving the nation forward into the future.  Even in the rare case when it does work they emerge covered in the slime the Republicans heaped on them and looking worse than ever.  Yet they insist on responding in the same old ineffective manner that has lost the day so many times before.

When oh when will those oh-so-smart DC Democrats understand that being ladies and gentlemen during a fight while being ridiculed, spit upon, kicked and punched and scratched and impugned to the point where you've almost lost is just plain stupid and won't work?  When will they realize they need to call those liars what they are?  Liars!  When will they realize that no bipartisan comity has existed on Capitol Hill since at least 1980 and it isn't ever going to be coming back no matter how many Republican asses they kiss or how many of them they bow down to?  When will they realize that they can no longer play the game of pleasing the corporate interests and throwing an occasional bone to the people is a strategy that has seriously damaged our country, decimated the middle class, and virtually destroyed the stability of blue collar America?

I have a suggestion for the smart DC Dems: you can't serve two masters so quit trying!  You claim you are on the side of the people yet your every compromise only benefits the same interests the Repubilcans defend because of your split loyalty and your devotion to the corporate interests that are and have been so openly hostile to the interests of the average American.  If you are going to represent the people then do so proudly and openly and without hesitation from now on.  You will have to disappoint and piss off the corporate interests you are in bed with in order to do that.  If you are going to represent the people then fight for them, don't deceive us by claiming you will fight when your record proves you have no stomach for fighting and instead prefer to negotiate compromises that curry favor for yourselves with the special interests but erode the safety and security of our jobs, our famlies and our communities.  I and many like me are tired of hearing that "if we only elect even more Democrats next time around then we can finally do what we've promised."  If you really do believe in the things you say you believe in then quit apologizing for them and stand up for those things.  It is far better to go down fighting for what is right once in a while than it is to consistently humiliate and dishonor yourself and your constituents by submitting to bad compromises and then still getting beaten in the end.  Their is honor in having courage from time to time and having the courage of your convictions.  You may not always win, but you at least will have the respect of those for whom you say you are fighting. 

If reforming the healthcare system of this nation is not worth going all out for in the face of the ugly tactics and inexcusably dishonest behavior of the right then what issue would be worth fighting for?  What issue would the DC Dems be willing to draw the line in the sand over and declare this far and no farther or else?  What will it take for the DC Democrats to have enough balls to finally determine that no matter how undesirable it can be, they will go to the mat and mercilessly attack the opposition until they either submit or are completely wiped out just as the opposition has so often done to them when given the opportunity?  I have been waiting decades for the answer and still don't know it but anxiously await the day when they finally dispense with their strategy of trying to accomodate evil and start fighting for what they and we all know is right.  I can't think of a better issue upon which to begin than the health of our people.

While the MSM was lapping up GOP smears about "death panels", no one thought of asking AARP about it. Surely, an organization dedicated to advocating for the elderly would be opposed to anything that might harm their constituents, right?

I found this helpful page, where they warned people about myths and fearmongering:

Myth: Health care reform means the government can make life-and-death decisions for you.

Fact: Health care reform will NOT give the government the power to make life-and-death decisions for anyone regardless of their age. Those decisions will be made by individuals, their doctor and their family.

Fact: No one, including the government or your insurance company, will be given power to make life-and-death decisions for you.

Bottom Line: Health care reform isn't about putting the government in charge of difficult end of life decisions. It's about giving individuals and families the option to talk with their doctors in advance about difficult choices every family faces when loved ones near the end of their lives.

AARP also has a site they are pushing, www.healthactionnow.org. It does a good job of debunking many of the GOP lies and smears. Check it out.

(( I hope the author can delete these things!  ))

Happy days.
    McTesting

I republican walks into a bar and orders a beer and pays for it. While
drinking it down...slowly..the bartender says "Ya know...I don't get
very many republicans in here." Where in the republican replies
"Well at 20 dollars a glass for warm flat beer, I guess not."

The bartender says "I don't see why you should complain. After all it
was your legislation that allows me to charge 20 dollars a glass for
warm flat beer." "But" asks the republican, "how do you stay in business
with such a lousy product." "Well I get a lot of libertarians in here for
happy hour and they think it is their constitutional right to be able to
pay 20 bucks for warm flat beer." says the bar keep.

"I guess you don't get any democrats then" says the republican. "Well no
we don't." says the bar keep. "They gather at my place up the street and
drink stale lattes."

"How much do you charge for those" asks the republican. "20 dollars" replies
the bark keep.

C

 

When John Kerry's patriotism was attacked, we said, "Oh, nobody's gonna believe that."

When they said Obama isn't an American citizen, we said, "Oh, nobody's gonna believe that."

Well, in a rational world, that may have been true.

But what some Democrats are missing is the extent to which people are under stress and believe themselves to be oppressed by a mysterious "They."

Progressive people seem to make a distinction between the public and private sector. Regular people, not so much. It's not the government who routinely sneaks false charges onto our phone bills. But the corporation who owns the phone company does. It's not the government that seduces us into buying credit cards and then jacks up the interest rates. But the politically-connected credit card companies sure do. We are surrounded by corrupt institutions, constantly preying on us. And whatever "reform" the government enacts always seems bought and paid for by all these other powerful institutions. This is the environment in which we live. The "government" just seems like a corrupt extension of the real power structure. So it's easy to believe that there's a death panel that is going to deny us care when we are old. They deny us care now, when we are not old. So why wouldn't they cut us off for good when we are old? 

Life has been getting harder in the United States of America. Yes, you and I know it is because of a war on the middle class, started in the Reagan administration.

But we, the people who are under attack don't see the government as a knight in shining armor that is going to save us. One of the biggest burdens people have, especially people who are self-employed, is the huge, unfair amount we pay in taxes. The government doesn't seem to give a shit when a person who makes $33,000 a year cannot cough up the $10,000 the government claims is its cut. In an environment like this, when people are besieged on all sides, it is easy to believe that They are out to get us.  And They is all those insiders who seem to know how to make the system work for them - and against us. They are the bankers who are given trillions when they screw up on Wall Street. They are owners of giant corporations who manipulate the laws to enrich themselves. They are the corporations themselves, who put us on hold for hours at a time when we call to complain about how we are treated. They are the insurance companies that turn us down for coverage because of some pre-existing condition. And They are the government bureaucrats who have sold out to these money interests.

This is why the Democrats cannot seem to mount a populist movement. The Party of the People is out of touch with the people. Democrats understand that the government is a well-meaning check on corporate greed - the billions of dollars in campaign contributions that fund the system not withstanding. Democrats understand that the government is trying its best in difficult times, under severe financial restraints. Democrats understand that the government was hijacked by the Republicans and turned into an arm of corporate America.

But us poor dumbfucks out here, all we understand is that there seems to be one giant conspiracy afoot to impoverish and enslave us. Government, corporations, institutions, the news media - they all seem to be in on it.

So when we hear that there are going to be death panels that will refuse us medical treatment at the end of our lives and dress it up in a fancy word like euthanasia, that sounds all-too plausible. The fact that it is false does not matter. They said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That was false, but it didn't stop them from going ahead with their trillion dollar war. If They're not gonna screw us one way, They're sure as hell gonna screw us some other way. That's the world we live in.

Is it irony or tragedy that Republicans seem to understand - and manipulate - this feeling better than Democrats? I don't know. You tell me.

But it would be nice if Democrats weren't always dumbfounded when they hear that people don't trust the government. There are some very, very good reasons why we don't see the government as being on our side.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's Libertarian assy-ness has finally peeved enough of his shoppers that they're organizing boycotts against him and refusing to shop at his stores. If it goes on for awhile, Mackey will definitely feel the effects of misunderstanding the cooperative nature of the "free" market, or at least of going on and on about it by pumping a health care philosophy best described as selfishness writ large.  

But Mackey's already taking it in the (figurative and stock market) shorts today, as the price of his company's stock has dropped by almost a dollar since the open. Ah, the pinch one feels when individuals of all political stripes see opportunity and go for it regardless of political fealty or brand loyalty, exercising the "Liberty" in Libertarian! Apparently, when the first bell rang this morning, the tune was "Short WFMI" and traders listened.  

What would happen if Mackey's fellow capitalists shorted his stock way down over the next few days? Would Mackey have to appeal to (gasp!) SEC regulators to halt trading? "Dear SEC, all my rugged individualist, free-thinking friends have turned against me, and when I ask them to stop shorting my stock, they say I ought to understand it's nothing personal. Please help!"  

Mr. Mackey may end up combing the shelves of his stores in search of humble pie.

From the NYT:
Winning a Promotion

"Mr. Foggo's success in Frankfurt, including his work on the prisons, won him a promotion back in Washington. In November 2004, he was named the C.I.A.'s executive director, in effect its day-to-day administrative chief."

[Then he begins a mini-putsch, a reflection of the larger behavior within the Bush Administration; see also Rove and the U.S. Attorney firing scandal, or, closer to home, the Valerie Plame scandal, for examples]

"Mr. Foggo soon became embroiled in agency infighting.... Mr. Foggo... almost immediately began firing top C.I.A. officials..."

[Never forget that The Torture Bureaucracy will always have fascist aspects]

"I needed something done by someone I trusted in private industry," Mr. Foggo said."

Remember all those toxic loans that the banks have on their books ?
They're still here.

More than 150 publicly traded U.S.
lenders own nonperforming loans that
equal 5 percent or more of their
holdings, a level that former
regulators say can wipe out a
bank's equity and threaten its
survival.

The number of banks exceeding the
threshold more than doubled in the
year through June, according to data
compiled by Bloomberg, as real estate
and credit-card defaults surged.
Almost 300 reported 3 percent or more
of their loans were nonperforming, a
term for commercial and consumer debt
that has stopped collecting interest
or will no longer be paid in full.

Yes. Amid all the party noise about health care drowning
out their their bad jokes. These uninvited guests are still
with us and may force about 150 party goers to leave
the fun prematurely.

C

Question: Will EVERYONE be covered for EVERY condition in EVERY circumstance under Obama's proposed health plan? Answer: NO. So somewhere, someone, is going to decide who is eligible for treatment, and what treatments are allowed. There will be some criteria to decide how to spend the money, on what, on whom. What are the criteria?  Will age be considered? Obama himself hinted at this when he said it might not make sense to give pacemakers to old people, to just give them pain medication. So there is your death panel, it's time to stop pretending that it doesn't exist because the people see through that lie. You can argue that insurance companies do that now, but I can choose to change my insurance anytime, i have to wait 4 years to change the government. 

Yesterday I posted a short entry regarding Britain's Defense of the National Health Service on Twitter.  I promised  to post anything interesting I found...a daunting task given how fast the scene changes.  I don't think I'll become a tweetertwit.  I'll leave that for Senator Crabgrassley.  But being a man of my word, mainly, here's a digest of things from ten minutes of Tweeter on We Love the NHS

• bursaar RT: @JanisSharp: #welovethenhs Because when I see a doctor the first question is "What's wrong?" Not "Do you have insurance?"   half a minute ago from TwitterFox

• hohenja An American's Experience of Britain's Healthcare System http://snipurl.com/pt0lb  (via @PotentialandExp) #welovethenhs (via @Glinner) 2 minutes ago from Tweet

The link is very interesting, and about as objective as anything I've seen.  The comparison of experiences is superb.  Here's an observation on delays with which I can relate:

    There are delays -- there are delays -- but to be honest I have experienced delays just as bad here in the US.  In the UK, I might have to wait weeks or months to see a specialist if my case was not urgent, and that was frustrating.  Here in the US, when I was in excruciating pain last year (so bad that I lost control of my bodily functions when the pain hit), I was referred to a breast surgeon by the ER doctor (7 hour wait in ER) -- but the trouble is that we had to call five medical centers before we could find a surgeon who could see me any sooner six weeks, and even then it was only because they had a surprise cancellation.  And the last time I needed to take E2 to the allergist here in the US, the earliest they could fit me in was two months later.  There are delays in both systems.  And by contrast, you can get very speedy service in the US... and you can get it in the UK too.  When I needed to see my GP in the UK, I rarely had to wait until even the next day.  When I thought I'd found a lump in my breast, I saw the doctor the next day and was sent to a specialist within the week.

(note--I don't twitter and the annotations and abbreviations are outside my normal range of experience.  I might misattribute something.)

• lydiareyes7 Amazed at some of the rubbish being talked about the NHS, but not surprised at the US reaction to a little social justice #WeLoveTheNHS

• sanabituranima RT @mtg101 When I was two years old I had double-breasted pneumonia and would have died if it weren't for the NHS. #WeLoveTheNHS   3 minutes ago from web

• heidavey #welovetheNHS @NoToNHS18 you are an idiot. Of you get preventative medicine through the NHS   3 minutes ago from TwitterGadget

    (The NoToNHS's, regardless of the number following, are bot posts from one person.  He seems to be one of a very few attacking the NHS--if not the only one)

• SanjayJussun Life saving treatment for a serious lung disease on the NHS for the first two years of my life is enough for me to see why #welovetheNHS   5 minutes ago from web

• ClicksBlueJeans The NHS isn't a left, right, democrat, republican, labour or tory issue - It's a HUMANE issue! 20% of US with NO cover! #welovethenhs   6 minutes ago from web

• gooddayppl RT @alexstevenson2: Daniel Hannan should be expelled from not only his party but his country he has betrayed #welovetheNHS   6 minutes ago from web

Daniel Hannan is a Conservative (Tory) MP who advocated dumping the NHS.  He remarks were condemned by the Tory Leader, David Cameron.   A tweet a little earlier (microseconds, I suppose) linked to the BBC story:

    But Mr Cameron, who has sought to portray the Conservatives as the party of the NHS, and has said health spending will be protected from cuts under a Tory government, said the health service was a "great national institution".

    "The Conservative Party stands four square behind the NHS," he told BBC News in his Oxfordshire constituency.

    "We are the party of the NHS, we back it, we are going to expand it, we have ring-fenced it and said that it will get more money under a Conservative government, and it is our number one mission to improve it."

Wouldn't be fun to have a Conservative Party which advocated more support for health care, not less?  There's Conservatism I could almost believe in.

• cynan_sez US health system ranked worse than Colombia, Morocco, Chile & Costa Rica. #welovetheNHS At least its #1 most expensive! http://is.gd/2gLro   6 minutes ago from TwitterFox

He's quoting the World Health Organization as presented at Geographic.Org.

• tonytrainor In the UK, even penguins get free healthcare: http://tinyurl.com/nfe4cv #welovetheNHS   6 minutes ago from web  Funny BEEB story behind the tinyurl.

• alexgrey RT @peterwhitehead Listen up America - the NHS is so good at keeping us Brits alive lots of us have to go to Switz to die... #welovethenhs   8 minutes ago from TweetDeck 
  

My choice for the best one liner in eight minutes.

• Eavesdm dad got the best posible care at Ospadail nan Eilean and we've not had to sell the house to pay for it #welovetheNHS Hope he can have more   9 minutes ago from TweetDeck

• problem_chimp father in law completely incurably paralysed, given all manner of drugs and robotics to improve quality of life, not famous. #welovetheNHS 9 minutes ago from TweetDeck

• jamesfoxdavies British Ambassador to Washington Times on NHS http://bit.ly/qKkpO #welovethenhs   9 minutes ago from web 
  

Davies draws attention to a Letter to the Editor of the Washington Times.  To save you the trouble of clicking through to it and rewarding the Times' advertisors.  Here it is:

    Your editorial ("The Brits' bad example," Opinion, Aug. 7) and other commentary ("Going British is bad for your health," Letters, Tuesday) paint a distorted and caricatured picture of Britain's health system.
    
    It is not for a Brit to say what kind of health care system the United States should have. That's a matter rightly being debated by Americans across the country. And as they debate, your readers might like to know why the National Health Service remains so popular in Britain.

    The NHS provides a high and rising standard of health care to all Britons, on an equal basis, at less than half the per-capita cost of the U.S. system. Surveys have shown that the NHS is thought of as good or excellent by the vast majority of those who use it. Two years ago, a U.S. research group, the Commonwealth Fund, ranked British health care the best of six large countries studied, based on patient and physician surveys.
   
    Medical treatment provided by our NHS is delivered on the basis of clinical need, not age. There is no ban on anyone of any age receiving any treatment. And it is untrue that bureaucrats make decisions on medical issues.
   
    The question of whether to prescribe certain drugs or recommend surgery in each case is rightly a decision for doctors and medical professionals, decided on a case-by-case basis in discussion with the patient and his or her family, looking at all the available evidence.
   
    British health outcomes are not to be sneezed at, either. Average life expectancy in Britain is 79.2 years (78 years for the U.S.), according to the World Health Organization.
   
    DOMINICK CHILCOTT
   
    Deputy head of mission
   
    British Embassy to the United States

• redteddy23 Two years ago I suffered serious burns and received amazing treatment from the local NHS. State healthcare just works. #welovetheNHS   9 minutes ago from TwitterFox

• bibbleco RT @cpev: Ok, gloves off Fox News is an enemy of the people http://snurl.com/pvp2j <-- Seriously F*CK Fox news, lies lies lies #welovetheNHS   10 minutes ago from web

• ClicksBlueJeans The cost of US vs UK healthcare: http://is.gd/2gO0A #welovethenhs   10 minutes ago from web 
  

The URL takes one to a diggit link, and a statistical comparison much in favor of the British System.  The link made my firefox a little unhappy, but no harm done.

So there's ten minutes of accumulated Tweets--it only took me two hours to record them.  I think it will take another half hour to format this, if I'm lucky.  This will teach me to make a promise to TPM Gary.  But seriously, folks, there are interesting links to good information about health care in the UK, and it is refreshing to see how they whack Fox News.  If you visit to watch the tweets and see anything interesting, add it to the comments thread.

This is normally not a phrase I use, even with the most annoying members of my family, but I think that for Dick Cheney, it is very clear that his complaints about George W. Bush remove any doubt about the fact, and furthermore it places his comments about the repudiation of his Manichean, and quite frankly delusional, view of the world by the voters in the proper context.

We need to call him a bitch, because to call him anything else grants him a credibility and gravitas that he simply does not deserve.*

The man, who has an uninterrupted record of failure in his life, recommending that Ford dump Rockefeller as VP, moving to contractors in the military, invading Iraq, etc., is now saying that George W. Bush was not hard line enough for him:

"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice. He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming. It was clear that Cheney's doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times -- never apologize, never explain -- and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."

Truth be told, I really think that this is really all about two words, "Scooter Libby," and Cheney is upset, because he believes that without a full pardon, Libby may some day roll over on his flabby, lily-white ass.

He knows that Omertà means less in politics than it does in the Mafia, which means that it means nothing at all, and it terrifies him.

*Yes, I understand that the social dynamics of the situation, where in order to diminish a man you essentially call him a woman, and in order to diminish a woman, you essentially call her a man,† but you go to war with Dick Cheney with the societal norms you have---not the societal norms you might want or wish to have at a later time.
†See Clinton, Hillary and Pelosi, Nancy.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Given the amount of gnashing of teeth concerning John's piece in the WSJ. Plus, the several diaries either condemning him or saying progressives should back off because we are once again eating our own. I have decided rather than just rant I thought I would address John's ideas point by point. I do this hoping everybody realizes these are my opinions and mine alone. They do not represent the opinion of all liberals, moderates and I would guess not conservatives. Therefore I fully expect and hope the comments are your take on his ideas. Next I am not going to defend or condemn the Whole Foods boycott here. So here goes.
1) Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. This I agree with. If a corporate citizen gets a break why shouldn't the individual. The other approach might be to take away the corporate break to help pay for the uninsured. Just a thought.

2) Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. This was a McCain idea, as well. The issue here is the risk pool. Allowing this type of portability more than likely will lead to insurers offering cheaper policies to low risk individuals and dropping all together those with high risk. End result  we have done nothing for those that truly need insurance.  Health Policy News

The fact is, such a change may end up benefiting only those who are young, fit, and healthy - people who are low-risk in the eyes of insurers, and who can have their pick of policies. Anyone who is moderate or high risk will eventually find that getting affordable insurance, or perhaps even any insurance at all, becomes much harder.

This may seem counter-intuitive. After all, surely opening up the market will mean everyone has a better shot at getting affordable insurance. The problem is, however, to an insurance company risk is still risk. The perceived risk of an individual who is fifty years old, overweight, and a smoker won't decrease just because that individual can buy insurance anywhere in the country.

And if an insurance company can offer cheap premiums to entice low-risk people from all over the country, they're that much less likely to continue offering any type of insurance to higher-risk individuals.

3) Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. Seriously?To my thinking this will only increase insurance company cherry picking and throwing more people into financial trouble. 

4) Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Sorry this a just a fallacy. Malpractice insurance settlement etc add less than 1% to the cost of healthcare. While any lowering of costs is a good thing I rather doubt this 1% will be passed back. 

5) Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. Couldn't agree more. But what he fails to address is that even by doing so are we enabled to negotiate these costs? If so how does one negotiate when you have a heart attack and it's either have the surgery now or die? 

6) Enact Medicare reform. "We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility." I've include everything John wrote here, because he has offered up no concrete proposal. I'm just don't see how what he suggests saves or funds Medicare more so than what is being suggested already.

7) Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.  Now this is where it all falls apart for me. This is trickle down at it's finest. Does John seriously think that by increasing charitable deductions it is going to improve healthcare for the uninsured. This is Freidman at his worst. Now that said as an individual John does practice what he preaches, but he assumes (and we know what that does) that others will act as charitably or responsibly. If he really believes this maybe he should start a non profit health insurance company that is funded by tax deductible donations as well as very low premiums and proof his theory.

That's it, have at it.

Why do we often hate the people that we vote for? Why does a person who seems spineless end up in a position of authority? Why do our choices, come election night, often seem to be false ones? Why is election turnout often low in the United States? Why is primary turnout, where often the real choices are made, even lower?


I'm often annoyed when people cite Wikipedia--hard to explain why, it's just that I often like to go to the original sources coupled with some kind of mental hangup--but I really enjoyed reading this entry entitled Voter Turnout.

The one part of the article breaks it down this way:

The basic formula for determining whether someone will vote is

PB + D > C

Here, P is the probability that an individual's vote will affect the outcome of an election, and B is the perceived benefit of that person's favored political party or candidate being elected. D originally stood for democracy or civic duty, but today represents any social or personal gratification an individual gets from voting. C is the time, effort, and financial cost involved in voting. Since P is virtually zero in most elections, PB is also near zero, and D is thus the most important element in motivating people to vote. For a person to vote, these factors must outweigh C.

Read more »

We've been skimming over the HJC document dump on the US Attorney firings, and Rove-Harriet Statements. We've noticed that some of the public discussion on various factoids seem, in our view, sort of trivial, but interesting.

We've stumped on a few things, but thought we'd ask a general question:

Read more »

The scene is Mr. Huph's office at Insuricare. Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible, is being reprimanded because his customers have the uncanny ability to navigate the bureaucracy that exists to deny them coverage.

Bob: Are you saying we shouldn't help our customers?

Mr. Huph: The law requires that I answer no.

Bob: We're supposed to help people.

Mr. Huph: We're supposed to help OUR people, starting with our stockholders, Bob. Who's helping them out, huh?

Insurance exists for one purpose - to make money, and insurance can't make money if it pays out more in claims than it receives in revenue. Therefore insurance companies create structures and policies to limit their liabilities by denying coverage.

It doesn't matter what kind of insurance we're talking about. They all operate in the same manner. I've written about health insurance many times, but this summer I have had a similar experience with my home warranty company.

In early May, my air conditioner began to leak water. I called my warranty company and they sent out a repairman, who failed to correctly diagnose the problem. A second one came out and found the problem but didn't have the authorization to repair it. Another two visits were required before authorization was given to replace the evaporator coil. The repairmen damaged the first evaporator coil installing it, requiring a second coil to replace the first one. Then they failed to properly charge it with coolant, requiring yet another visit. In all, we had no air conditioning for 22 days in May and June.

The air conditioner still isn't working right. It runs all day to maintain a temperature of 80 degrees, when it is only 90 degrees outside. What is more, my electricity usage has almost doubled since the repair. I called them out again yesterday and they informed me that there is nothing more they can do, because the warranty company will only replace the defective equipment. If, because of changes in technology, the new equipment requires extra equipment (in the form of valves or electronics) to make it work efficiently with the old equipment, I will have to pay for those modifications. As long as the system no longer leaks water and is blowing out some cool air, their responsibilities have been met.

The home warranty company, like Mr. Huph's health insurance company, is in the business of denying coverage for any reason allowable by law. They all work this way, so there is no free market pressure to provide better coverage. And that is why the entire insurance industry doesn't, cannot, and never will work except as a massive profit engine for their stockholders.   

The chosen terminology for the Washington Post article about Cheney's upcoming goddamned fucking lies/memoir is very interesting. From the Think Progress post that so succinctly condenses the WaPo article:

In "informal conversations" with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues as he prepares his memoir, former Vice President Dick Cheney has "opened a second front" against his "White House partner of eight years, George W. Bush." Cheney felt "that Bush had gone soft on him" in the second term, one participant said. "Or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice."

Hmm. My inner psychologist's gay-dar is ringing like a dinner bell...It sounds like Little Georgie and Uncle Dick had a rather special sort of relationship. If we can trust these words to be Cheney's own, it would appear that Dick perhaps thought of himself as the Top Man in a latter-day Spartan mentored sort of war training for his young protege. Those Greeks...

Not that there's anything wrong with sweaty wrestling before a roaring fire in order to determine whose war policy will win out.

ha ha

Now that Britain has betrayed them on Health Care.

And will John Mackey be consulted?

Yep, in a CBC poll, Canadians voted for Tommy Douglas as the Greatest Canadian of all time. Tommy Douglas is the man who brought Canada universal health care, labor rights, and a host of other progressive (and compassionate) legislation resulting in better lives for Canadians.  Not a sports figure, not a celebrity, not a flash politician.  A hard-working progressive who lived his values and made a better world for his compatriots.

Now I live in Canada a few months of the year in a rural area where health care is far from perfect.  In rural Canada, it is hard to provide enough doctors and nurses, hard to keep hospitals staffed, and sometimes just hard to get to the place where the health care is provided.  And people do complain about that.  But if you ask them would they give up their universal health care for the US system of private insurance, they look at you with pity or as if you are crazy. 

You see, they don't pay anything for health care here (apart, of course, from taxes), and that includes senior residence living and home health nurses.

As I said, it's not perfect.  But it provides something that is crucial in their lives.  The people I live among all summer long are rural working poor.  They are fishermen and farmers in a failing economy.  They have to go on unemployment during the winter months.  They are self-sufficient, hard-working people, who have very little money.  They work hard, they re-purpose and re-cycle, they make use of the natural resources that are available to feed themselves and shelter themselves.  And yet they don't worry about whether their children will get help if they get sick; they don't worry about what will happen to them when they get old; they don't worry about having to choose among rent, food, and medicine.  There is a basic sense of justice, fairness, and security:  ALL Canadians deserve and get basic medical care. 

I think that it is for making possible  that sense of security and fairness that Tommy Douglas is so beloved.   

It is with no small sense of irony that I write this post. After all, I'm a guy who just wrote a satirical piece about killing the elderly. Nonetheless, my own examination of fraudulent health care reform claims can't be compared with Ann Coulter riffing about killing Rahm Emanuel's brother. Or Glenn Beck joking about how he'd poison Nancy Pelosi. Or Beck joking about killing many other people. Or Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Lou Dobbs, or the hundreds of copy-cat angry right-wing death porn stars out there "joking" about murder daily. Because the "jokes" about killing liberals and the "wacky fun" of demonizing liberals and blaming them for every ill on the planet are coming fast and furious, 24/7.

Yes, folks, we are right in the middle of a Right-Wing Death Porn shitstorm. With the amount of Death Porn floating about, I believe I should be able to watch Bisexual Interracial Amputee Friday's on TNT. Because the standards are just out the window at this point. Think about it, people like Ann Coulter are going on Extreme Right-Wing TV Shows and joking about killing liberals - even though right-wing extremists have just recently gone out and killed based on their hate of liberals.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm very hesitant to call for anyone to be called off the air. After all, the ability of soulless douchebags to rise in the media industry is part of what makes America great. Right? But I must say I am heartened to see advertisers jump off Beck's bandwagon. Do Geico and other companies really need to be associated with someone who daily promotes civil war and civil unrest?

I also must say I am heartened by CNN looking to smarten up the debate some by axing know-nothing radio hosts:

CNN/U.S. president Jon Klein asked his show producers to avoid booking talk radio hosts. "Complex issues require world class reporting," Klein is quoted as saying, adding that talk radio hosts too often add to the noise, and that what they say is "all too predictable."

I'll overlook Klein's world-class hypocrisy in not firing Dobbs - an all-too predictable radio host - because I'm willing to take whatever we can get. Because as I see it, there will be soulless hate-mongers in our media forever. It's just gotten a bit frightening that they've gone so high-profile.

A well-armed nation is in serious economic turmoil. People are looking to freak out. Hate has become the nation's only renewable resource. And it's not like it's happening in a void. Have you noticed that right-wingers don't say jack anymore about the DHS report that warned of extreme right-wing violence? Because they know that it has and will happen again. They just keep stoking the fires, regardless. Paychecks override morality for many. And Right-Wing Death Porn pays the bills.

David Neiwert has done a lot of work on Eliminationism, and is worth a read on the subject. The simple fact is that there will always be Coulters, Becks, Hannitys and O'Reillys out there. Part of being a free nation rests on not allowing them to destroy the fabric of the nation. But it would be a lot easier if a few more big-media executives would stop supporting the Right-Wing Death Porn Machine.

-WKW

Crossposted at William K Wolfrum Chronicles

By Raquel Brown, TMC Mediawire Blogger

Our team's at Netroots Nation this week, so the Mulch is a little shorter than usual. We'll be back in full form next Friday! In the meantime, enjoy our latest roundup of environmental news.

Read more »

I'm trying to think of how to boil down the argument for health care reform in as few words as possible, in a way that is still convincing and substantive. Something that can be coyp and pasted in, say, a comment board when the wingnuts trot out their usual arguments (I use that word generously for what consists of a variety of grunts, mention of "illeglals", sneering, and talk of "big government") Democrats need to counter their crude messages, which as stupid as they are, are short and easy to remember (and beloved by simpletons in the mainstream media).

How about something like this? Please suggest, refine or make your own pitches.

• If you lose your job, say good bye to coverage.
• And if you get really sick, you will lose your job, and then your coverage.
• That sounds like no coverage at all.
• Even worse, your salary if you do have coverage is much lower than it would be if your company wasn't paying ballooning premiums.
  
• And of course the individual market is a huge ripoff, complete with riders and underwriting and huge premiums. It's basically meant for very wealthy and very healthy people. If you have a preexisting illness, forget it.
• That's why these folks end up in the ER for routine stuff and guess who pays for that? Everyone with higher hospital fees and higher premiums.
• Our health care system fails people, and it fails business.

I've been a salesman my whole life, like my father and his father before him. Started out selling Christmas cards in August at the age of 8 from an ad I saw in a comic book on miserably hot summer days in my Sunday best so I could buy a cheesy drum set which I never learned how to play. Housewives thought I was cute and invited me in after I recited my speech and gave me lemonade while they poured over my catalog and picked out sparkly cards with wintry scenes, the baby Jesus, or snowmen on them for $2.50 per 50 cards.  

I know congressmen and senators must have a little salesmen in them too. Selling themselves to voters at election time is part of the job. So why aren't they selling HR 3200? Instead of focusing on and carping about stupid  Republican criticisms (it's socialism! death panels!) they should concentrate on what the bill actually does.

The way HR 3200 works:
 

• Health Insurance: It promotes real free markets and does away with the government protected rackets we have now. Insurance companies will have to compete in the exchange with each other and the public plan instead of the virtual monopolies they are in most states today. Insurance companies will have access to 50 million new customers who aren't insured today. Their operating costs will be lower because a lot the denial of care bureaucracy they have now won't be necessary because those practices will in fact be illegal.They can transfer a lot of those actuaries everybody hates into sales jobs where they can make people happy selling better cheaper insurance.
  

• Drugs: Whether through rebates like the Baucus/Obamo plan or direct government negotiation we save money. $80 billion over 10 years in the former or as Waxman and Pelosi say $120 to $140 billion by direct government negotiation.If you have a Republican House rep tell him to reject the Baucus/Obama $80 billion deal with the drug companies.Republicans love opposing anything Obama does. So ask him to support direct government negotiations of drug prices with big pharma. Canadians get much better prices than we do by doing that and they only have 30 million strong buying power. We have 330 million people. It'll cost the taxpayer, insurance companies and the consumer of the drugs much less that way. Seniors will applaud you.
  

• Electronic records: This is a no brainer. Even Newt Gingrich says Fed Ex keeps better track of packages than we do of health care records. He and Hillary agreed on a one page standardized form to fill out a few years ago. The VA's VistA open source record keeping system is the best in the world. They've been perfecting it since 1972. It's used by HI and WVA for their public hospitals and Germany, Finland, India, Malaysia and Jordan have adopted it. 4 or 5 more countries a week come over to check it out. There's  already $20 billion in the stimulus bill for health care IT under the Hitech Act. It should all go into putting VistA in every medical and insurance office in the country. It will lower costs for insurance companies, cut out many of the 200,000 medical mistakes that kill Americans each year, doctors will love it.
  

• Best Medical Practices: This is a bit more complicated to explain but basically we'll reward best practices that result in best medical outcomes for patients. Sometimes that means very expensive breast cancer drugs or heart bypass operations. But in other cases sometimes that means catching conditions like diabetes before they require amputations, cancers before they've metastasized. heart disease before it requires that bypass. We'll give bonuses to doctors who keep their patients in good health and heal them instead of paying fee for service for as much as they can order. The beauty of the IT system we'll develop with VistA is that your doctor can look up what works best for people across the country just like you.  60 year old white male of German/Irish descent with stage 1 colon cancer? Sedentary lifestyle? 20 lbs over optimum weight with 12% body fat? Smoker-non smoker?  Drinker-nondrinker? Your doctor can bring up the stats country wide and figure out what's worked and what doesn't whether she's a kid fresh out of med school in East Jesus KS being paid a bonus to help pay off her school loans for locating to East Jesus for a few years like the Blue Dogs want or a twenty year expert at the top of her field working on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Is that new drug really better? How about that new surgical procedure or that spiffy new smart bomb guidance system cancer zapper? If it is she can prescribe it, if it's not she doesn't have to, but she'll have to show you those stats and let you decide. That's better and cheaper care for everybody.
  

• Benefits for Business: GM and Chrysler were canaries in the coal mine. Their legacy health care costs (paying for their retirees health insurance) bankrupted them. Our businesses simply can't compete with the Asians and Europeans on world markets paying the health care costs we are now. It's pricing our manufacturers and workers out of business. That's a big reason why GM builds more cars in Ontario than they do in Michigan these days. HR 3200 will  cut those job and profit killing costs and we'll see many more new businesses open up and our big companies will thrive too. There will be no more job lock for folks who have existing conditions or love ones who do.

• Cost: The CBO says HR 3200 is deficit neutral. The cost is $1.042 trillion over 10 years. Most of it is paid for by the savings above. The rest, $239 billion over 10 years will be paid for by the expiring Bush tax cuts (make sure you mention Bush because indies and even many Repubs hate Bush now). It does not add to the US debt.

• Bottom Line: The CBO predicts under HR 3200 by 2019 97% of Americans will have health insurance. Of that number 96% will be covered by for-profit private insurance and 4% will be in the public plan. It won't drive private insurance out of business. If you like the plan you have you can keep it (or in most cases you boss can keep it.) But chances are you and your boss aren't stupid and won't choose to keep the crappy expensive plan with few safeguards and ever rising prices you have now. If you want to it's grandfathered in. Most likely you'll both probably decide to buy a new plan, probably from the same agent and company that's better and cheaper.

HR 3200 operates on real free market principles and opens up the currently government protected rackets in insurance, hospital chains, drugs and doctors to more competition. It mandates protections for consumers, you can't get booted off the rolls if you get sick, your premiums will stop skyrocketing, if you change jobs or start a business you'll still be able to buy insurance because your pre-existing conditions won't exclude you. Your doctor will be able to look up your medical records even if you've lived in 20 different towns over the last twenty years. That means if you had an allergic reaction to a drug when you were 5 it'll still be in there. It also means Rush Limbaugh won't be able to go doctor shopping for his Oxycontin.

Now put on a clean shirt, comb your hair and get yourself to a town hall meeting and bring these points up. It's not like your life doesn't depend on it or anything.

Pardon your protest but you're an idiot.

Yes, I don't like the government running things either. I also hate rations of any sort. Yes, you're grandma is very nice and don't need killin. No I'm not sure you know what socialized anything means or the difference between democratic and republican forms of government. No you're wrong I also like to keep as much of my money as possible. I also don't like taxes. No, I really don't care what you do with your family's uterus.

I suppose your points may be valid in some other context but my friend, you are completely missing the point. You may not have to worry about healthcare soon because there will be no insurance you or your employer can afford. Do you realize that self pay health insurance premiums have risen over 90% in a generation. Has your salary adjusted up too? Didn't think so. Have you noticed that the problem seems to be getting worse everywhere.

Michigan
Nevada
Florida
Maine
Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina and Texas

This looks pretty damn systemic to me. Seems like something individual states cannot solve. Yup, I would almost think that what you need here are broad, sweeping guidelines across state borders to control this insurance tailspin. This even kinda sounds like something that might be suited for the Federal Guvmint to deal with, at least the constitution seems to says so.
 
You see, your points don't really matter unless you can actually get healthcare. So first things first. Instead of endlessly going on about patriotic fantasies, please solve this REAL problem first. Then we'll be happy to talk about how you would like to meet your maker.

There is an aspect to ObamaCare that is so shocking that it will not be exposed on CNN or MSNBC, and so truthful that it will not be shown on Fox News.

Under ALL current health care reform proposals being worked on, NONE provide health care for your pets.  The left has launched a massive propaganda campaign to convince you that health care reform is needed to allow everyone access to affordable health care, but, apparently, the Obama administration fails to realize that pets are people, too!!!  How can one man be so heartless as to want to let animals die?


Meet Shadow and Oliver. They are brothers. They are Siamese. Siamese twins, that is. Attached at the shoulder from birth, these cats, who desperately want to live separate lives, will never be able to afford freedom giving surgery if Obama gets his way.


The fear you see in Mazzy's eyes is real. She has just been told that it is her American duty to have an ovariohysterectomy. Under Obama's plan, she will not be able to afford a doctor to do it. She must be forced to either be unpatriotic, or to have a dangerous back alley operation.


This kitten was born with a very rare disease called Kermititis. This illness is rapidly transforming a once cute and cuddly family pet into a scaly monstrosity. With no treatment options in the looming government health care plan, this kitten will most certainly die.

As citizens of this once great nation, we cannot let liberals destroy the most innocent of the innocent. If you love God and America, you must seize whatever opportunity you can to stop Obama and to save the lives of our most beloved family members.

This week's game was a lot of fun, with no mention of Nazism at all!  My older, Republican buddies repeated one of the same talking points from the week before which is that Michelle Obama has 22 personal assist while "no one else ever had more than three."  The article I read called them "household staff" and said the Bush household had 17 such workers.   Since the reporting on these kinds of things can be so bad, I'm not sure what to believe.  I mentioned the details of the article I read to the group and had to fend off a few heated comments in response.

Anyway, I was prepared for discussion this week because last week one of the gentlemen sent me one of those viral e-mails with all the erroneous claims about health-care, and I took the time to debunk each and every claim (thanks to the internet and a posting by lisB here at TPM) in a return e-mail.  There was a brief, very civil discussion about that, and I made some comments on how they could read the stuff if they really wanted to.  There is a technical barrier because at least some of these guys don't have browsers that can actually open the large document which is the health care bill (thanks AOL!).  The others haven't actually read it, which is understandable because it is pretty dry (IMO).

I've mentioned before that one of the guys is a bit more vocal and emotional about anything anti-Obama.  This week I learned that his son's company, in which his son has part ownership, went public with an IPO.  You might have heard of this company called Emdeon.  They handled about half of all the health care related electronic transactions in this country last year, which is way up in the billions.  Now I have no reason to believe that Emdeon is anything but legitimate and law-abiding, but the thing I took away is the interest this gentlman has in maintaining the status quo. 

I asked a few questions about Emdeon, and "jeff" colored the discussion somewhat by how burdened Emdeon was with government regulation, citing a recent audit request where the company was asked to provide a dump of transactions to the federal government.  "I told my boy, 'don't worry, no one can audit 400 billion transactions.'"  Now, I don't know why "jeff" would tell his boy "don't worry", as if there was something to worry about, but it struck me as odd.  Conservative mainstream thinking assumes large-scale fraud is everywhere, so I think these folks assume the worst about everyone.

My acquaintances, who repeat Glenn Beck verbatim at times, are anything but the fringe of the Republican party.  I am left to think "is the fringe really the fringe?"  More and more, I'm thinking no.  These guys aren't whack-jobs.  The brain-washing of Americans is affecting more people than I want to admit, and it clearly affects everyone that I know who still calls himself a Republican.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2310264/posts

I found this website while looking for town halls in my area as I want to show support for health care reform.  I believe that these protests are not legitimate grassroots efforts, but to actually find proof of this on my own was a surprise.  Just looking at some of the quotes people chose to list after their usernames was interesting and a bit scary.  I am attempting to believe that cooler heads will prevail in regards to this issue.

Taken from a comment elsewhere regarding the "progressive" boycott against
Whole Fields for Mackey speaking his mind:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Intimidating with a massive boycott is much the same as shouting people down.
You want to put the hurt to Mackey for stating his point of view because it didn't agree with yours. All sorts of excuses why that's okay - he tried to use his brand, he's anti-union,  whatever.

The point is, he said X which is not quite the same as Republican Y, and definitely
not the same as Death Panels and Euthanasia Z.

But to left-wing nutcakes, all ist egal. "He must be punished. He's not single payer,
he's not public option. The rich bastard is worried about costs and not us little
guys in the street without health care."

See what a tough company like Wal-Mart tells you - they're not going to be
writing Op-Eds, thats for sure, especially after watching Mackey have his neck
lopped off. Not to mention companies involved in the health care mess.

You *COULD* try telling Mackey why you disagree in intelligent terms,
coordinate people to *PERSUADE* him to your side of the argument,
since if he's writing Op-Eds, he *MIGHT* be in partial listening mode,
especially if 5000 of his closest friends and customers wrote him in
*SOMEWHAT* polite language with *COHERENT* arguments for specific
details - something that Obama and others have yet to effectively do.
Now, Mackey may not buy it, but he might buy *PART* of the logic
and then promote the parts that he finds make sense - maybe even
writing a followup to WSJ.

But one of the reasons Mackey went from liberal to libertarian is because
he found he was getting shit for trying to do something positive with
health food, that it was always that he didn't do enough for his employees
or customers, that there was no winning. Reinforcing that experience
will not bring any change.

I personally think that universal health coverage is good for employers,
letting them focus on an aspect of business most are not good with,
and freeing good workers to move around to where they're best used
and best equipped, not just being stuck with where they have insurance.
Plus people who have good insurance waste less crucial energy worrying
about that part when they are sick, letting them focus on the illness
and getting better. (I.e. mental health and comfort is an important part
of health)

And if progressives were in the mood to boycott someone, how come it
hasn't been an advertiser on Fox News? How come Rahm tells progressives
to STFU and they say "please sir, may I have another?" How come people
are acting like there's an actual bill with agreed upon content? Something's
weird in the whole scene. They say you can catch more flies with honey,
but everyone knows a flies are more attracted to a bowl of shit.

 Did you know that "RuneScape" is one of the top five terms searched for on YouTube? As such, we like to check out the latest films made by the many RuneScape Gold movie boffins out there. They're so good, in fact, that we've teamed up with one of RuneScape's most talented machinima (films made with game engines) masterminds, TehNoobShow, to launch a competition to seek out the most entertaining player-made RuneScape video known to humankind. The rules are simple: create an original video short (around two minutes) that's both entertaining and creative, in the RuneScape game.

The competition launches today, and you have until the closing date of 25th August to submit your videos on the YouTube website. When the entries are in, Andrew, Mark Gerhard and some video-hungry members of the Community Management team will then shortlist five finalists. Those five videos will then feature in a RuneScape weekly poll, allowing the community to choose their favorite.

The video with the most votes will be declared the winner and will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Jagex Games Studio, from wherever they are in the world, and, once here, they will get to meet the developers and creative types that bring Runescape to life. We'll then send them off with an armful of signed Jagex goodies. The four runners-up will bag some membership, autographed t-shirts, mugs, mouse mats, mice and other stuff.

Please note that all videos must be made within RuneScape (live action isn't machinima), and must be submitted via YouTube. We cannot accept entries sent to the Postbag or Gallery email. For a full list of rules and conditions, and to see an example video from TehNoobShow

 

The Tao of heaven is to take from those who have too much

       And give to those who do not have enough.

Man's way is different.

He takes from those who do not have enough

        To give to those who already have too much.

What man has more than enough and gives it to the world?

Only the man of Tao.

 

                                (Tao Te Ching C-77)

 

Even someone as ill educated, ill slated as a national leader and ill suited for any decent debate can come up with garbage that can actually be translated into real issues. It was certainly accidental since she has no real purpose in life except to make money as fast as possible. 

Former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin defended her claim that the Democratic health care proposal would create "death panels" and attacked President Obama in a long statement Wednesday night.

Yesterday President Obama responded to my statement that Democratic health care proposals would lead to rationed care; that the sick, the elderly, and the disabled would suffer the most under such rationing; and that under such a system these "unproductive" members of society could face the prospect of government bureaucrats determining whether they deserve health care. [...]

Now this is all a lie of course. But it brings up a real issue concerning the value of human life in general as well as the specific value of a human life.

Before I discuss the opinions of the experts we must admit that we as a society make this value judgment every day.

I never forgot when I was confronted with the fact that although some 58,000 of our soldiers died in a war longer than a full decade; we had been losing that number every year on our highways when our population was half what it is now.

Our fight against those pursuing some theory of 'international communism' made our leaders compute how much a human life was worth.

Those that understood the value of trade and industry in this country made a value judgment concerning annual deaths on our highways.

Hell, the onset of blackberries and cell phones proves that any tech change can result in deaths.  All deaths related to these objects had already been put into corporate as well as governmental calculations.

The need to evaluate the economic value of human life is important in various areas of public policy, and arises in the determination of damages in wrongful death and personal injury cases. Here are some highlights of the issues to be considered in determining the economic value of human life. The economic value of human life involves the length of life, and the net economic contribution that a person could be expected to make during his or her lifetime. Both of these areas involve issues that can be established through expert testimony.

Total net economic value involves the life expectancy, the value of the person's earnings and other economic contributions, and the valuation of the present value of a stream of future uncertain monetary amounts. http://www.behan.ws/lifevalue.htm

Actuaries come into play here. Economists also arrive at the scene. Accountants are not that far behind. Medical testimony may come to bear upon these issues.  But where might you find a group that includes these experts besides HHS for instance?  Why our friendly health insurance companies just as surely as the same group of experts  receive salaries from life insurance companies.

Now arriving at this 'human value' is not easy and the... calculation can often be controversial. After 9/11, attorney Kenneth Feinberg had the unenviable job of determining the compensation packages for families of victims based on how much the deceased would have made in their lifetimes. But it's a widely accepted metric for assessing the economic value of a life. Everyday policy decisions also put a price tag on human life. If a city is deciding whether to install a traffic light at a particular intersection, for example, it will weigh the number of lives saved against the cost of installation. Or take something more controversial: the decision to send American troops to Iraq without fully protective armor. It's not that the armor didn't exist, says Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton University. It's that in a cost-benefit analysis, the increased risk of death did not outweigh the increased cost.

There are other ways to calculate a life's worth: Look at how much people get paid to do dangerous jobs like mining or construction. Examine how much people will pay for live-saving treatments like kidney dialysis--it costs about $70,000 a year--and extrapolate. Or simply survey people: How much would they be willing to spend to extend their life by a year

So what is the value of a life? Somewhere around $5 million. It's an extremely general estimate, but it's based on a vast literature of cost-benefit analysis of the various types described above. One study published in 2004 and using labor data from 1997 puts the value of an average life at $4.7 million. Other studies by the same author, Vanderbilt University's Kip Viscusi, put it anywhere from $4 million to $10 million. Estimates based on revealed preference studies, in which Americans analyze costs and benefits in the context of their own lives, put the value of a year of life at between $100,000 and $300,000, according to Peter Neumann of the Tufts Medical Center.  http://www.slate.com/id/2224790/pagenum/all/#p2

It is just that something is missing in all of this. I mean supposedly in civil suits, when that uncle you never liked dies in a Viagra experiment where he became conflagrated with a wild goat, you must give the jury some sort of standard, a formula for arriving at the economic loss involved. And since you are the sole surviving relative, hey go for all the gusto you can. So the loss might be presented as a formula:

NFW:  Neutralized Funds Worth:  Kind of a formula for how much was in the bank at the time of decedent's death plus value of all assets including real and personal property less taxes  and other debts due.

FYI:  Foreseeable Yearly Income

YES:  Years Estimated for Survival: How long might the decedent might have survived based upon testimony concerning dietary habits, danger of his occupation, previous illnesses, handicaps ...

URA:  Unpredictable Rates of Approximation:  What might have happened to diminishe the final figures like earthquakes or floods or increases in cable rates.

COLON:   Cost of Living Ordinarily Needed: How much would  the decedent have spent over the years, from the date of actual  death through the estimated time of death.

This is otherwise known as the Plaintiff's equation:

NFW; FYI, YES URA COLON

But these types of formulas fail to grasp some other variables, some really not that tangible as well as those that are extremely tangible.  A great philosopher once said:

The Vice-Presidency is not worth a bucket of piss.

If he had only said: There will one day be a Vice-President who will not be worth a bucket of piss; thereby predicting a dick cheney.

But is it really true that dick cheney is worth a bucket of piss.

One might calculate his current value based upon NFW; FYI, YES URA COLON.

Fine, but the figure you are left with, must undergo further reductions.

I mean if you take my NFW; FYI, YES URA COLON  you would end up with a figure based upon estimated inflation rates and such of about minus fifty thousand dollars.

But dick cheney's NFW; FYI, YES URA COLON would equal about two billion dollars if you count all the off shore accounts and corporate shares etc...

We should deduct from this other variables:

Failures of leadership resulting in needless economic loss to the country.

Unreasonable transgressions against Humankind

Knowing lies leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people

Unforgivable destruction of democratically derived rights

So the new formula would look something like this:

NFW; FYI, YES URA COLON - FUK U

Or

$2,000,000,000 less $1,000,000,000,000

So dick cheney is really 'worth' about negative Nine Hundred Ninety-Eight Billion Dollars.

Worth is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

The recent "debate" on health care is driving me nuts, every day there are people going around spreading false information and make false arguments.  They know they are lying and they know what they are doing and they just keep on doing it. So much of the media either let them get away with it or treat them like they actually believe what they are saying.  There is no debating with these people on those topics, if you treat it like a real debate you are going to lose no matter what.  The reason why is because they aren't trying to win a debate on healthcare against you, they are trying to make sure the audience doesn't think you won, because if you don't win they win.  If you never saw Thank_You_for_Smoking I would recommend it.   Heres part of the movie where tobacco lobbyist is talking to his son about how to debate. 
Joey Naylor: ...so what happens when you're wrong? 
Nick Naylor: Whoa, Joey I'm never wrong. 
Joey Naylor: But you can't always be right... 
Nick Naylor: Well, if it's your job to be right, then you're never wrong. 
Joey Naylor: But what if you are wrong? 
Nick Naylor: OK, let's say that you're defending chocolate, and I'm defending vanilla. Now if I were to say to you: 'Vanilla is the best flavour ice-cream', you'd say... 
Joey Naylor: No, chocolate is. 
Nick Naylor: Exactly, but you can't win that argument... so, I'll ask you: so you think chocolate is the end all and the all of ice-cream, do you? 
Joey Naylor: It's the best ice-cream, I wouldn't order any other. 
Nick Naylor: Oh! So it's all chocolate for you is it? 
Joey Naylor: Yes, chocolate is all I need. 
Nick Naylor: Well, I need more than chocolate, and for that matter I need more than vanilla. I believe that we need freedom. And choice when it comes to our ice-cream, and that Joey Naylor, that is the defintion of liberty. 
Joey Naylor: But that's not what we're talking about 
Nick Naylor: Ah! But that's what I'm talking about. 
Joey Naylor: ...but you didn't prove that vanilla was the best... 
Nick Naylor: I didn't have to. I proved that you're wrong, and if you're wrong I'm right. 
Joey Naylor: But you still didn't convince me 
Nick Naylor: It's that I'm not after you. I'm after them. 
[points into the crowd] 
Whenever someone debates one of these loons on TV they must go in with the mind set that the person they will be debating will behave like this and they need to not fall for the trap. They can't let them sucker them into some debate on "death panels" or any other made up distraction because if your spending your time debating on worthless crap like that then your already losing.  Call it out for the lie it is and call out the person spreading it then demand the debate get back on topic and that you won't waste anymore time on their distraction. 

I've seen lots of comments as to the mental stability of those who oppose health-care reform, so I'd like to throw out someone who has studied the issue, and remains opposed .I'm not opposed to reforming the system in concept, but I haven't seen a suggestion that contains realistic or implementable programs. This is why:

 

America is too big. There are more than 300 million people in the United States.  If we do it on a state level, then we're leaving people at the mercy of the state governments, and you can ask Californians how well that's working for them. Or Floridians or Coloradans or any state that's caught in massive shortfalls when up against mandated budget locks. So it has to be national. But expanding any program to include everyone means an increase in bureaucracy that would have to at least eat up any real savings, if not more.

 

But the largeness of American causes other problems. Sarah Pain was over the edge with death panels but you do have to assume that there would have to be some rationing of services. I'm not as concerned with big ones as I am with the small ones. What are we going to cover and what are we not going to cover, and how are we going to decide? IVF? My sister-in-law just had a preventative double mastectomy (there is cancer in her family history, but not in her at the moment)--would we want her reconstructive surgery covered - do we all want to pay for that? What about therapy? What about Xanax or sleeping pills? If we're all paying for it, shouldn't we all have a say in how the money is spent? Do we want to have tax dollars spent on Terry Shavios when it could go to vaccinations? Are we going to start having referendums on what procedures are allowed? If we're saying healthcare is an inalienable right, then shouldn't everyone have access to the most advanced treatments possible, regardless of cost? My father had an experimental radiation treatment for his cancer - it didn't buy him a day, but it bought him hope. In a system supported by the government, shouldn't that be available to everyone? All government programs involve prioritizing. With a free market, there are choices between providers, between programs.

 

And along the lines of cost, how do we pay for it? We've heard the commentary about every industrialized nation having government healthcare, but we leave out that every other industrialized nation has a higher tax rate than we do. Maybe you think we pay too little in taxes, but if you do, you're in the minority. Even Canada has a tax rate about 6% higher and a 5% national sales tax (that's why the Blue Jays and Raptors have such ah hard time keeping players). Everyone pays more. But we don't hear that argument about healthcare in the US. We hear about the rich paying more. I find that idea distasteful - if this is a national priority, then it ought to be paid for by everyone. Make the tax hikes progressive if you want to, but make them universal. If we all benefit, we all pay.

 

And that is the heart of the problem. There may be 40 million people without insurance, but that means there are 270 million who have it. Everyone may bitch about their insurance, but they also bitch about their gas bill and the cost of bread. There is not a national mandate for this, beyond everyone wanting their own bills to be cheaper. And for every horror story out there, there are some good ones as well. Of course, I'm biased. I have twin boys who were born 10 weeks early. They were in the NICU for six weeks. The bill was $250,000. You know what I paid? $200. My wife gets a monthly shot of Lupron to help ease some of the pain of her endometriosis. The shot cost $500. It cost me 10 bucks. When my dad was dying insurance paid for in-home care, a private nurse, hell, even one of those chair-lift things so he could get to his own room. He got hurt in the Bahamas (where there is national health care) and the bill was $16,000.

 

Healthcare reform may be necessary. But until we're willing to ask all the questions about it - until we're willing to address all the concerns and all the consequences, forseen and otherwise, we need to hold off. Tweak what we have, but keep the fundamental system in place. 

In the first photo above,Craig Anthony Miller, 59, angrily confronted Mr. Specter over the way the meeting was being run. The senator's staff had limited the questioning by handing out cards to the first 30 people in line. Mr. Miller shouted at Mr. Specter that, "One day, God is going to stand before you and he's going to judge you!" Look at the face,I believe the face more than the words.

"And God said to Cain, why has your countenance (face) fallen, if you do well, will you not be accepted?" Look at the face,I believe the face more than the words.

In the bottom photo I dont see a tyrant, granny killer,I see a dad, a husband, a decent man.

So, what's the right name for the boycott campaign against this insufferable chain that we now know is run by a tone deaf moron?  I came up with Hole Foods, but I'm not terribly invested in it.  Of course the real effort should be to place unbearable pressure on our peers to avoid setting foot in this place for the foreseeable future, if ever.  
I would love to see the first clip on CNN showing empty aisles in the local Hole Foods store this weekend.  I would also love to see this spawn a counter campaign by the wingnuts, deathers, and tea baggers to support this place.  Imagine the yuppie holdouts waiting in line with the mouth breathers.  A concerted campaign here might even distract the MSM from the nauseating coverage of the town halls.  Let's see the  press start writing and broadcasting stories about the left boycotting the store and the right standing up for merits of buying arugula from a genuine union buster.  

Okay.  

That's it.  

Emergency.  Sound the five alarm idiot bell.

The Republican party is off the reservation.  They are now the official pace car of the lunatic fringe.   

They are not the right wing.  They are the something is seriously wrong wing. 

And I'm not just talking about Senator Chuck Grassley.  

I'm talking about the whole lot.  De Mint. Inhofe. Shelby.  Bachmann. Cantor. McConnell. Boehner.  Cornyn.  Bond.  Coburn. Graham.  Gingrich.  Kristol. Krauthammer.  Jindal. Palin. Beck.  Limbaugh.  

Collectively, they couldn't mount a brain wave if they tried.  

The entire party is an intelligence-free zone and we are lucky--lucky I tell you--that they're no longer leading this nation.  But they're still very capable of doing damage. 

Get out of the way of their crazy bus--they've thrown it into reverse, floored it and are about to side-swipe the age of enlightenment on a maddening turbo-powered race back to the dark ages.  

Have fun, guys.

Don't let the door of the 21st century hit you on the way out.   

Leading conservative economist Bruce Bartlett writes that the Obama-hating town-hall mobs have it wrong--the person they should be angry with left the White House seven months ago.

Where is the evidence that everything would be better if Republicans were in charge? Does anyone believe the economy would be growing faster or that unemployment would be lower today if John McCain had won the election? I know of no economist who holds that view. The economy is like an ocean liner that turns only very slowly. The gross domestic product and the level of employment would be pretty much the same today under any conceivable set of policies enacted since Barack Obama's inauguration.

Until conservatives once again hold Republicans to the same standard they hold Democrats, they will have no credibility and deserve no respect.

This is really a rare occassion.  A conservative Republican speaking the truth about the George W. Bush administration.

In January, the Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit this year of $1.2 trillion before Obama took office, with no estimate for actions he might take. To a large extent, the CBO's estimate simply represented the $482 billion deficit projected by the Bush administration in last summer's budget review, plus the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, which George W. Bush rammed through Congress in September over strenuous conservative objections. Thus the vast bulk of this year's currently estimated $1.8 trillion deficit was determined by Bush's policies, not Obama's.

I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush.

More truth? Wow, I'm impressed with this man. Even the media lately has siding with Republicans, implying that it is Obama's fault that we have an estimated deficit of $1.8 trillion because of his policies over the past 6 months -- ignoring the previous 8 years the Republicans (for the most part) and Bush were in charge. 

Republicans have been claiming that President Obama can't be blaming Bush anymore, that this is 'HIS' economy now.  WRONG --- and Barlett apparently agrees.

As for the current trash talk at town halls across America -- I'm betting nearly three quarters of those complaining didn't vote Democratic and I'm also betting that most of the other's anger...stems from either a loss of job or fear of losing one.  They all just experienced the worst recession we've had in decades.  The  health care reform issue has just increased the anxiety that we all have.  It's a bit scary not knowing exactly what is being planned, even I have expressed some of my concerns in the past.

In my case however, I fear even more so, is a time where I could find myself not being able to afford health care because it's gotten way too expensive for me to afford.

So hats off to Mr. Bruce Bartlett -- for being an honest man about the Bush administration.

Today, on Talk of the Nation, they had a fair and balanced discussion of the "passionate" debate at the town halls that featured, as guests people reperesenting both sides of the issue.  On one hand, they had a lady who was firmly in the "well, gee, I don't know about this bill or anything, but it's all getting kind of raucus and it seems like Obama's trying to do too much too fast," camp and, in the studio, a Republican robot programmed with the Luntz talking points who was very concerned that these noble protesters voices were being denigrated by the elite press.  Didn't really hear from that guest who was actually for reform. 

There's been a lot of bleeting in the MSM over the town hall ragers.  A lot of careful avoidance of how willfully stupid they're being and how impossible it is to have a debate with people whose response to being told easily verifiable actual facts is "I DON'T BELIEVE YOU, SO THERE!"  There's a lot of concern over how hurt and angry they alll are along with a remarkable obtuseness over how much of the rage is the result of seemingly seeing their long-time nightmare of brown people taking over the country coming true right before their horrified eyes.  There've been a lot of pious invocations of democracy and there's been a lot of touching concern for the fact that they're Americans too and they deserve to be heard. 

I've been listening to all that and I hope you don't mind, but I kind of feel the need to point out a glaringly obvious point that seems to be eluding you and certain members of Congress. 

THEY'RE A MINORITY AND THEY LOST THE LAST FRAKKING ELECTION IN WHICH HEALTHCARE REFORM WAS A MAJOR ISSUE!!!!!!!!!

Even if the people who want healthcare reform are a minority too, they're a bigger minority than the people shouting about the crazy, made-up fearfacts. 

Yeah, the scared angry people's voices count.  But don't ours? 

I know they're better TV.  That's what the corporations pumping the gasoline onto the fire were counting on.  But again, echoing though it does Nixon's pathetic, mendacious invocation of "the great silent majority," I have to ask, why do their voices count for more than ours?  What is different about this minority that makes you so much more solicitious of their viewpoint than you've been of any other minority in recent history, like, say, just for example, those of us who thought getting into the Iraq War was a bad idea back in 2002 and 2003?

Just wondering.   

Some might want to call it "collateral damage" in the state's fiscal fiasco. Meanwhile Schwarzenegger "vows to boost patient protections.." I guess children don't qualify to be protected in the governor's health scheme?

You would think someone building up a successful Green business from scratch, promoting vegetarian living, healthy foods, bringing it to new neighborhoods across the country would be something of a Progressive hero.

You'd be wrong.

Even before today, John Mackey had fallen out of favor with many progressives because as he notes, "he used to be a "democratic socialist" in college, but when he began a business and barely made money while being accused by workers of not paying them enough and customers of charging too high prices, he began to take a more capitalistic worldview and discovered the works of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Friedman."

Well, today, Mackey has earned the scorn and ire of the Progressosphere by doing the one thing that leftists cannot tolerate - he expressed his opinion. Not just any opinion - one that disagreed with the common agreed upon wisdom of the left, which is that we need to reform health insurance this year or else, though we don't know exactly what's going to be in it but it won't be single payer or have a public option and Big Pharma contributions will be capped so the industry doesn't suffer too much and whatever else gets watered down in bill writing and in committee and in reconciliation.

You might think that Progressives would be so irate with Obama and Blue Dogs and Rahm Emanuel, who keeps telling them to STFU every few weeks, picketing outside the White House and Congress. But no, we're supposed to boycott an ovo-vegetarian organic food-growing businessman/entrepreneur who brought health food to your neighborhood. (Who has the conch? Kill the Pig! Kill the Pig!)

Mackey is being pilloried for having such "right wing talking points" as "make personal insurance deductible like corporate is", "allow insurance competition across state lines", "take personal responsibility through healthy eating and exercise so you have less chance of getting sick", and "with boomers retiring and fewer paying into the system, we can't afford to keep adding expensive entitlements".

The cheap bastard then goes on to describe his attitude towards insurance - 100% coverage for employees with a high $2500 deductible that Whole Foods provides $1800 yearly for that can be rolled over if unused. It's a wonder the fruit shake makers haven't walked off the job already. And here:

[In 2006 Mackey announced] he would reduce his own salary to $1 a year, donate his stock portfolio to charity and set up a $100,000 emergency fund for staff facing personal problems. ... While CEO of Whole Foods Market in 2008, he earned a total compensation of just $33,831, which included a base salary of $1, and a cash bonus of $33,830.

Another reason progressives are mad at Whole Foods is they've discovered that organic foods are expensive. Who'da thunk it? Having heard once that "the best things in life are free", there's some confusion as to whether a whole grain muffin with organic carrot and radish is *not* one of the best things in life, or they're being overcharged. (After overdosing on a dozen or more Orange-Mango Zooms, I have to vote for the latter - only a good 3 shots of vodka would have improved the experience).

Anyway, not much else to say, I'm just gobsmacked. It's worth perusing the Mackie bio at Wikipedia just for his past - it's short, about 20 seconds, but a few gems, like:

    Whole Foods Market is one of only two Fortune 500 companies listed among the 25 Best Companies to Work For in 2005, a fact which Mackey ascribes to his pro-employee philosophy. He supports non-adversarial unions and advocates their legalization in the U.S. "It's illegal in the United States for there to be company unions -- special unions which are formed and controlled by the employees and managers of the company to represent their interests and collectively bargain on their behalf. These type of unions are legal in many countries such as Japan, but are illegal in the United States. Instead the law requires that all unions be outside unions. I believe this law should be repealed and that company unions should be as legal as any other kind of voluntary association."

Summon up all your outrage, and join the left's version of Town Hall protests, where we tea bag our own.

But it's also rather horrifying to see Progressives try to destroy someone economically for expressing their opinion on a matter that he has no control over. Someone even compared it to Rosa Parks. But what can Mackey do? He's not on Obama's team. He's not a Republican politician or someone with big connections. Pretty much the most he can do is say, "I apologize for expressing my opinion, I won't do it again" and it affects the progress of health reform not one iota. Corporates do this all the time - they don't "censor speech", they just de-employ the person who still supposedly has free (but slightly more impoverished) speech. But meanwhile the villagers are gathering their torches, insistent that this is how free speech is conveyed in more progressive quarters, when Quasimodo has the nerve to say, "But Master...." And when you see Quasi swinging from the belfry, ask not who he tolls for - he tolls for thee.

Just listened to an extended session on Public Radio International's The World:

The World's Lisa Mullins talked with a French and a German journalist covering the U.S. healthcare reform debate from Washington to hear what they make of the vitriolic debate in town halls and in the media as legislators and the Obama administration try to communicate with Americans about what reform means.

UK prime minister Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah have joined a Twitter campaign to defend Britain's National Health Service, which has been under fire in the US. Read more

From Britain's Guardian newspaper: 'Evil and Orwellian' - America's right turns its fire on NHS

From the Washington Post: Health-Reform Rhetoric Gets Personal for Britons

The transcript isn't up yet, but the segment is available as a MP3 file.

Anyhow.  I went to the appropriate Twitter discussion (are those called twits?) and there's a vigorous defense of the National Health System...punctuated by the same kind of trolls we bear around here from time to time.

The BEEB has the story.  More than  a million followers, and thousands of entries.  Since I started this brief post 631 more tweets have been added.  More will be added while I proofread this.  But I'm not going  to try to keep up.  I'll  leave you to do that.   Get this out to as many people as you can. 

Mr. President, it's time for a major debate between you and the leadership of the House and Senate and members of the committees for Health Care Reform.  It's time to challenge them to say the things they've been saying about what is in the health care bill and what is not -- Face to Face.

It's time these liars come Face to Face with the Nation and you.  Let them tell you to 'your face' that you are planning on killing grandma with this bill, that you are creating "Death Panels", and that you want government to decide what gets done and what doesn't and by what doctors.  Let them say these things to you -- on live television with you all gathered around table debating this issue.  Perhaps you can offer up a debate commentator that will at least time the issue.

I would challenge specific people in Congress, like Senator Chuck Grassley and Representative John Boehner and others that are spewing lies at their town hall meetings

Former Vice President Richard Cheney is working on his memoirs and assuring its success with a good deal of news making prior to its publication. Thursday's Washington Post article by Barton Gellman adds to the breathless anticipation of Cheney's potential reading public by promising revelations of previously unreported opinions and events. Here's a Hit Tip to journalist Mark Knoller, who posted several insightful tweets about the article, along with a generous suggestion to "buy the paper" to read the story.

The Cheney piece heads the current list of "most viewed political articles" on the WaPo website. And I read it immediately, too. Headlined, "Cheney uncloaks his frustration with Bush," it reveals more little juicy tidbits guaranteed to keep us all panting to read the published tome from cover to cover. One of the most interesting to me was this aspect of Cheney's frustration with Bush, whom he evidently thinks "went soft." To quote:

Cheney's disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.

"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice. He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming. It was clear that Cheney's doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times -- never apologize, never explain -- and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."

. . . The former vice president remains convinced of mortal dangers that few other leaders, in his view, face squarely. That fixed belief does much to explain the conduct that so many critics find baffling. He gives no weight, close associates said, to his low approval ratings, to the tradition of statesmanlike White House exits or to the grumbling of Republicans about his effect on the party brand.

Cheney's intrigue -- What is it that keeps us all fascinated with this man, who guarded his privacy so jealously until now? As a retired psychotherapist, I am interested in his psychological make-up, particularly his apparently persistent paranoia. Others have their own reasons. But there is no doubt that his book will jump to the top of the charts when it comes out, which will please his daughter Liz, at whose suggestion Cheney is writing the book, despite past disdain for officials who wrote "tell all" books upon leaving office. It appears that he is not "frozen in place" on this issue.

Richard Cheney appears to have acquired fixed beliefs that are frozen in place, however. The first is in the concept of the "unitary" presidency, born after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. And the second is in a very dark world with enemies waiting to pounce and destroy him and the nation. With a model like that, is it any wonder that there is such fear mongering and craziness associated with Republican opposition to everything Obama.

My Blogs: My general purpose/southwest focus blog is at Southwest Progressive. My creative website is at Making Good Mondays. And Carol Gee - Online Universe is the all-in-one home page for all my websites. See also Behind the Links.

Technorati tags: news news and politics politics republicans cheney

I have been frustrated for days by the discussion cum argument that took place in a blog by oleeb dealing with authoritarian personalities. I doubt anyone else really either paid much attention at the time or gave it thought afterwards, but this is a topic that appeals to me on a deep level.

I went ahead and I read Dr. Altemeyer's The Authoritarians over the weekend. I won't go into detailed criticism over the whole book, but I do want to address his premise. Dr. Altemeyer makes plain in his book that he is analyzing right wing authoritarian personality. He states that this personality is a risk factor in the corruption of democracy. He believes that left wing authoritarians exist, but in such small numbers as to be negligible. He stakes his ethos upon these claims, using his decades of research to bear as an authority on this subject.

In my opinion (with only a few years of authority to bear and lacking any clinical trials), I believe that Dr. Altemeyer is only identifying a small, albeit intensely visible piece of a puzzle. I think that the visibility of this reactionary and submissive subset of society blinds us from an overall perspective. The reason why Right Wing Authoritarians (henceforth referred to as RWA) can sway the direction of our democracy so well is because they are a catalyst. While their opinions and beliefs can be narrow, superstitious, wilfully ignorant, and submissive, they represent the majority of Americans. Their actions preserve the status quo.

If you can bear with me, I am going to address the first 10 questions in Dr. Altemeyer's RWA personality test. I will often rephrase the question with a noun substitution or a grammar shift to redistribute emphasis. My hope is by the end of the exercise, a few readers will continue on to my conclusion and enter into a fruitful discussion.

___ 1. The established authorities generally turn out to be right about things, while the radicals
and protestors are usually just "loud mouths" showing off their ignorance.

1. Experts generally turn out to be right about their conclusions, while the naysayers are usually contradictory without basis.

Dr. Altemeyers first question is specific to the right wing by the use of established and radical.

___ 2. Women should have to promise to obey their husbands when they get married.

2. Women should shave their legs and armpits when exposing these areas in public.

The issue of sexism and misogyny is conveniently ignored by Dr. Altemeyer in favor of isolating the "Promise-Keeper" contingent.

___ 3. Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy
the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.

3. Our country desperately needs a charismatic leader who will expose and punish corruption and lay out a bold vision for the people to rally around.

___ 4. Gays and lesbians are just as healthy and moral as anybody else.

This one is genuinely good, imo.

___ 5. It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and
religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create
doubt in people's minds

5. It is always better to trust experts in government, churches, academia, and labratories than to listen to skeptics who doubt everything.

___ 6. Atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions are no doubt every
bit as good and virtuous as those who attend church regularly.

6. Communists and Islamic fundamentalists are no doubt every bit as good and virtuous as American citizens.

___ 7. The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional
values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas.

7. Substitute progressive for traditional. Substitute ignorance for bad ideas.

___ 8. There is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps.

8. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a local militia.

___ 9. Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this
upsets many people.

9. Our country needs individuals who will tell the truth, no matter what the cost.

___ 10. Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at
our moral fiber and traditional beliefs.

Substitute corruption for perversions and get rid of traditional beliefs.

I rephrased every question but numbers 4, 7, and 8 in order to replace right wing jargon with a less reflexive language. Numbers 7 and 8 I flipped because I have read number 7 at this site and other blogs, and number 8 brings in gun control vice sexuality. Question number 4 is a question everyone should ask themselves and then can replace with any group of people they see fit until they say NO. Replace gays and lesbians with pedophiles and murderers, and I believe everyone but the true antisocial or psychotic would strongly disagree.

Dr. Altemeyer has successfully narrowed his personality studies to a category of individuals who I describe as reactionary idealists. But what about the category of individuals who are apathetic observors? Those individuals who would never even get past the first question on the test without dismissing it as boring or a trap? These individuals are as submissive as the RWA, but do so because politics is "all lies," and cops are "just doing their job," and the President is "just as crooked as the next guy."

I commend Dr. Altemeyer's work inasmuch as it identifies paramaters of thought indicative of individual and group right wing authoritarianism. Is that the true threat to democracy? I don't think so.I believe the reactionary idealist is a symptom of an overall problem, and that is our general amnesia of and blindness to our actual national values. The RWA reactionary idealist may erect a singularly bizarre set of tropes, but nearly everyone else is just as guilty of creating egregores and distractions in order to avoid the obvious truth that the United States of America is a wholesale distributor of violence and exploitation. We have perpetrated countless atrocities directly or by proxy in order to benefit a few elite families. We live our lives under the constant scrutiny and advice of experts, work more hours for less pay, eat less nutritious food and accept an increasingly hostile body of laws and surveillance... it's not that RWAs are submissive, it's that they make a collective problem obvious by their shenanigans.

So the issue right now regarding health care goes beyond the mere question of right versus privilege, or individual versus universal. It is the fact that the cost of this health care is being borne on the backs of the third world. And every union we've helped bust, every coup we've funded and supported, every dictator who has been our friend before becoming our enemy, and every elected leader who fell by the hands of a soldier trained by our professionals underwrites the privilege/right of health care itself. Because our nation is fundamentally broken and we are doing almost nothing to fix it outside of demanding more benefits.

Because it is not about where we are going, it is where we are now. And I know that I am not afraid of a vocal contigent of deluded tea baggers. I am afraid of the next justified war against a comparitively defenseless nation. I am afraid that even if MLK himself were President he would be convinced to bomb Iran in order to secure the long term prestige of his party. And I am afraid that deep down we will tacitly allow the destruction to continue if it means that our families can maintain a safe and comfortable lifestyle.

Kate Bigam is the Press Secretary at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. This piece was originally posted on the RACblog.

Congress is officially on recess, but it won't be an easy vacation - for them or for us. As Members of congress gauge their constituents' views on a range of issues, from health care reform to climate change, we at the RAC are hard at work ensuring that you have the tools you need to make your voice heard.

If you've been following the news, you know that health care reform is the hot-button issue of the moment. Today, we're excited to increase the volume of our support for universal health care by launching JewsForHealthCareReform.org, a website that provides supporters of universal health care with the resources and tools necessary to add their voices to the growing chorus of people of faith speaking out for reform. The site includes fact sheets on the health care system, Jewish texts on health care mandates, and action alerts containing pre-written letters to Congress contact in support of reform.

Read more »

I am baffled.

Maybe it's because I can remember things that happened more than five minutes ago.  Maybe it's because I remember when my country rushed into a war of choice in Iraq.  Maybe it's because I remember attending massive protests in major metropolitan cities with hardly a mention in any newspaper or on any television program or in any other outlet that exists as a part of the ostensibly liberal media establishment.  Maybe it's because I remember seeing pictures and reading accounts, all distributed on the Internet, of protest marches that were at least as big, if not bigger, also with no mention in any major media outlet.  Maybe it's because I remember protestors being cordoned off in "free speech zones" during public appearances by George Bush, sometimes miles out of the watchful eye of television cameras.

Read more »

Last night, Ann Coulter was a guest on Hannity.  During her appearance, in typical Coulter fashion, she made the over-the-top claim that she was just fine with "death panels", which in her interpretation sound more like execution panels, so long as she was a panel member.  Oh, and she apparently has a list of people she'd like to kill, Zeke Emanuel being among them.  Watch:

Read more »

Cutting costs should begin with educated Americans choosing to obey reality and die when their time comes. Hospice is great for that, and so are advance directives.
How much money goes to terminal and permanently unconscious patients' care- care of which they are personally unaware ?
This gets covered by Medicare and Medicaid, and certainly makes up a big chunk of medical billing.
Why are these Christian freaks so afraid of meeting their maker?

If it wasn't for the memo leaked to the Huffington Post, and made public today (top story in TPM), we wouldn't know about the secret White House/Pharmaceutical industry deal whereby the former agreed to not import drugs from Canada.
Unless...the White House had complied with the request of the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought every record possible of the meetings between the White House and the pharmaceutical industry (and coal industry).
The White House released the names, but not the records asked, in the form of audio, video, photos, etc.
Some hard-core White House loyalists in this and other progressive boards reacted with anger at the request, arguing that not everything should be made public. 

For eight long years, while George W. Bush undermined and ignored the US Constitution, the American Left rent its garments and bewailed every insult to that sacred document, but not all constitutions are created equal, and when Manuel Zelaya effectively abrogated the Constitution of Honduras by leading a mob to seize a pile of ballots for his quasi-referendum which the Supreme Court, Congress, Attorney General, and Federal Election Commission of Honduras had declared illegal, then the acting government of Honduras became whatever mob Zelaya could whistle up, and since he controlled the National Police and ignored court orders and legislation at his pleasure, it's hard to see how any Honduran institution except the army could have removed him from the Presidential Palace in Tegucigalpa, but...

For the American Left, he was still the "democratically elected President of Honduras," even when Honduras had ceased to be a democracy where anything as refined as an election actually mattered, and now it was nothing but a mob and an army.

It looks like French President Nicolas Sarkozy is likely to win a second term. This isn't really because he's a great president, the French don't even think he's a good president but he's still better than the alternative:

Barring scandal or economic collapse, he seems likely to win. The forecast is premature, but it can be made because he faces no real opposition and he wields direct or indirect power over much of the media.

The Socialists, who ruled for much of the 1980s and 90s, have sunk into a coma. Despite Sarkozy's poor ratings, the polls show that the majority do not believe that the leftwing party would do a better job at running the country. According to Bernard Henri-Lévy, the grandee penseur, the party is already dead. Manuel Valls, one of its young Turks, wants to change its name. The party's most plausible présidentiable is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a baron whom Sarkozy deftly exiled to Washington as head of the International Monetary Fund. Sarkozy's recruitment of leftwing luminaries to his government may turn out to have been the coup de grace for the Socialists.

Too bad Manuel Valls was caught on tape talking about how the city of Évry didn't have enough white people.

Anyway, this is interesting and lately the state of the G.O.P. has largely been forgotten with healthcare taking a front and center stage. I wonder if the reverse is what's happening here. Even if President Obama fails in healthcare is the G.O.P. in a mess similar to the leftwing in France? Probably. Obama fails on healthcare the G.O.P. still has an abyssmal record and Obama couldn't do what FDR, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Carter and Clinton couldn't do. That still doesn't look so bad.

Also, isn't it interesting that one of the most viable Republican candidates for president was promptly incorporated into the Obama Administraton like Strauss-Kahn and shipped off to China? Presidential minds may think alike sometimes.

Here's the White House website for countering misinformation about health care reform. It's a good, well-organized, concise resource for anyone who need the facts. Please email this to everone you know and ask them to do the same.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Reality-Check/

The slow heat of August is upon us, but there is much to work on in Washington. The Obama Administration recently announced long-overdue plans to overhaul the deeply flawed U.S. immigration detention system. This is great news, but we also need legislative action that mandates fair treatment and due process - in other words, basic rights - for those who find themselves detained in U.S. immigration jails after fleeing to this country in search of protection from political, religious or other persecution. 

Two new bills have been introduced in the Senate that would take a huge step in the right direction. These bills - the Secure and Safe Detention and Asylum Act and the Protect Citizens and Residents from Unlawful Detention Act - would provide much-needed safeguards to detained asylum seekers and immigrants. The measures would:

-Provide asylum seekers with access to immigration court custody determinations,
-Increase oversight of immigration detention,
-Put detention standards into regulations, and
-Promote cost-saving alternatives to detention.

Human Rights First released a report in April 2009 that found that the United States had detained thousands of asylum seekers in jails and jail-like facilities for months and sometimes years, often without basic safeguards like hearings to assess the need for continued detention, and at a cost to taxpayers of over $300 million since 2003. This cannot go on.

Unfortunately, bills that relate to immigrants can meet with vigorous resistance, no matter how crucial the proposals, and the anti-immigrant vitriol that is rampant at townhall protests this month will only add to it. Write your Senators. Convince them to make the right decision to co-sponsor these bills that promise much-needed detention reform - send your letter now!

Public support for immigration detention reform is critical if we are to ensure - at last - that refugees arriving at our shores find protection, and not prison.

Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was recently confirmed with a vote of 69 to 31. Chief Justice John Roberts was confirmed by a vote of 78 to 22.

Both votes were mostly along party lines, but each featured drastically different rationales for not supporting the nominee despite ideological differences. I cannot find a single democratic senator who voted no because of something Roberts said, either during the hearings or as a matter of public record, though some cited a number of his specific rulings. Not a single one said the fact that he was a white guy was a hindrance to their voting yes. By way of contrast, the republican opposition to Sotomayor, almost to a man, mentioned her "Wise Latina" comments as evidence of her "Judicial Activism" yet not a single one cited her actual rulings. 

I am surprised nine GOP senators voted in favor of her nomination given the GOP's performance so far in the health care and stimulus debates. Even Lindsey Graham was quoted as saying:

Read more »

In a sign of increased hostility toward a settlement freeze and the Obama push for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Israeli and US right wingers are teaming up. This Sunday, at the Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem a dinner is being held to showcase support for the settlements in general, and specifically, for building at the Shepherd Hotel. The choice of venue is not random and is meant to be provocative. As part of the Obama effort to restart the peace process, the administration has pushed forcefully for a settlement freeze, including in East Jerusalem, and has specifically voiced its opposition to the Shepherd Hotel building project. But, as Haaretz reports, and with particular reference to the Shepherd Hotel, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu remarked: "Israel will not agree to edicts of this kind in East Jerusalem."

So, the response from the right in Israel and the US is to raise the stakes and hold a party at the primary site of contention. Among the numerous Israeli, Jewish and Republican activists planning on attending the dinner is the 'guest of honor' and former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Mike Huckabee. Huckabee is a former Arkansas Governor and a leading contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nod. Aside from headlining this event, Huckabee, currently a Fox News show host, will also visit various settlements and illegal outposts. Huckabee's excursion is bankrolled by Ateret Cohanim, which directs an East Jerusalem religious-Zionist Yeshiva and actively promotes and encourages Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. As Israel National News elaborates, Ateret Cohanim just prevailed in a legal fight to allow for the building of 20 apartments on the site of the Shepherd Hotel. This legal decision sparked the current back and forth between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations over East Jerusalem.

According to Dov Hikind, a New York state assemblyman and well known advocate and supporter of the settlements, who is traveling with Huckabee in Israel, "This is an opportunity to shine the spotlight on Obama's policy in Jerusalem, which has just been a horror." In the Jerusalem Post, Hikind detailed the reasoning behind Huckabee's visit:

"Huckabee's arrival is significant because, this is a guy who's a major figure in America, and in my opinion will be a presidential candidate again," Hikind said. "To have a guy like him, you know, from Arkansas, come at this particular time, and say the kinds of things he's going to say, it's going to send a very strong message to the Israeli people and to the American administration."

 In a Ma'ariv article by Eli Bardenstein, Hikind elaborated on the game plan:

"We are planning to sleep in the settlements and visit the region. I believe that there will also be those who will buy houses in the settlements in lieu of buying houses in Florida. This is a very clear message to Obama, who is leading a policy whereby there are areas in Israel that should be clean of Jews. We want to show that many in America are opposed to his pressure on the Israeli government on the subject of settlements."

As apparent, the Huckabee and Hikind visit is part of a larger, coordinated effort to showcase support for the settlement enterprise. Included among the initiatives are the organization of thousands of visits by Americans to both legal and illegal settlements, the synchronization of Jewish and non-Jewish support for the settler movement and the active push for Americans to purchase houses in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. According to Chabad, November is the target date to bring thousands of American Jews to the West Bank as part of a timely push against the US administration.

While this visit and the party at the Shepherd Hotel will surely garner media coverage and send a message; it is not a message that will be received with open arms in the US. Most Americans do not support the settlements. As World Public Opinion reported in an April poll of Americans:

Opposition to settlements is found among majorities of Republicans (65%), Democrats (83%) and independents (74%)

Last week, in a precursor to the Hikind and Huckabee fete at the Shepherd Hotel, Virginia Representative Eric Cantor led a group of Republican congressmen to Israel. In a further sign that Middle East politics does not stop at the water's edge, and that it is fair game to openly criticize US foreign policy while traveling abroad, Cantor clearly stated his opposition to Obama's efforts:

We are concerned about what the White House has been signaling of late in their desire to push through in terms of a Middle East peace plan.... That's very troubling.

Huckabee, Cantor, Hikind, who's next? The rightwing in Israel and the US are making their position clear: there is no need for a settlement freeze. This point could not be farther from the truth as the vast majority of Americans attest. Though the Obama administration has pointedly stated its opposition to expanding the settlements, it has been talking with the Netanyahu government about ways to reconcile this issue. Possible points of compromise include a moratorium, a cessation, or a full on freeze in certain areas, among other possibilities. Plainly, it is too early to tell how these ongoing US-Israeli talks will conclude. But, for a sign of where the US would like to go, just follow the Road Map.

In another sign of a concerted effort to showcase support for the settler movement, a recent poll was commissioned by the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) of self-identified Jewish Democrats. From Eric Fingerhut at the JTA:

A TVC meeting is just about the last place you'd go if you were looking to find Jewish Democrats. According to its Web site, the TVC represents 43,000 evangelical churches...

This poll revealed that 92% think Obama is doing a good job as president and 58% think he is "doing a good job of promoting peace in the Middle East." Clearly, Jewish Democrats think Obama is doing a good job in the Middle East, no matter how Dick Morris and Eileen McGann portray the numbers.

Without a doubt, the settlement enterprise in East Jerusalem and the West Bank erodes any hope for a contiguous Palestinian state and simultaneously minimizes the long term viability of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Let's hope Obama has the stomach to take on the vested interests of the settler enterprise, he does after all have the majority of Americans, be they Democrats, Republicans or independents in his corner.

This post was originally published on the Mideast Peace Pulse.

Notice how too many headlines these days, even the ones trying to set the record straight, talk about "death."

It's time to change the subject and the point of view. It's time to talk about LIFE and the importance of health insurance reform to all our lives.

Let's talk about how many lives will be saved through health insurance reform.
Let's talk about how many lives will be extended because people get preventive care rather than ER care.
Let's talk about how many lives will be improved because people will get proper care.

The talk about cost savings is important, but it's time to translate that into lives saved and lives improved.

This is not a trivial matter.

Christy Hardin Smith reported in an April post that "20,000 Americans Die Each Year Due To Lack Of Healthcare." She pointed to the Frontline documentary "Sick Around America" with this fact:

"According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, around 20,000 Americans die each year because they can't get the healthcare they need."

A report by Families USA, the national organization for health care consumers, documents that 8 people die each day in California because they don't have health insurance. They also report that each week 4 people die in West Virginia and 2 people in Ohio die because they lack health insurance.

In addition to saving thousands of lives each year, health insurance reform is about making millions of people's lives better and more productive. The American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine (ACP-ASIM) has been studying the impact of the lack of health insurance on people's lives. As early as 2000, they reported that "people without health insurance tend to live sicker and die younger than people with insurance."
"Two-thirds of the long-term uninsured who described their own health as "poor" and half of those who described their health as only "fair" said they had not sought medical care that they needed."

Another report and accompanying video by the nonpartisan Institute of Medicine (IOM) on the consequences of not having health insurance confirms that the 46 million uninsured Americans "are more likely to be diagnosed with later stage breast, colorectal or other cancers. As a result they are more likely to suffer worse outcomes or die."
"If you are an adult with hypertension that is poorly managed or undiagnosed and you lack insurance, you are 65% more likely to have a stroke and 25% more likely to die than someone who has insurance."

Their research also highlights that those who have insurance are being affected as well. In communities with high levels of uninsured people the health care for all is less available and less satisfactory.

In testimony to Congress in 2004, the American College of Physicians described in detail their findings of a literature review of over 1,000 documents from the last 10 years linking health insurance coverage with the utilization of health care services and individual health outcomes. The cost of the uninsured to all Americans is enormous [emphasis added]:

Estimates of the direct costs of the uninsured found in the literature include:

• The uninsured receive as much as $98 billion in medical care, $35 billion of which is considered uncompensated, a year.
• Total government spending in the name of the uninsured is about $30 billion a year.
• Hospitals provide about $24 billion worth of uncompensated care a year.
• Physicians spend about $5.1 billion a year caring for those who cannot pay their bills.
• Employers and managed care companies spend $1.5-$3 billion through higher rates to cover part of the amount hospitals spend caring for the uninsured.

Over the ten-year budget horizon of the government that is approximately $600 billion of uncompensated costs that are socialized (spread out to all) by the current system. And those numbers, like the cost of insurance keep rising. The APC testimony continued:

Although the indirect costs associated with lack of insurance are more difficult to calculate, a discussion of the consequences of not extending coverage to the uninsured would be incomplete without their consideration. Inadequate preventive care and delayed treatment among the uninsured yields substantial societal costs in terms of reduced life expectancy, lower workforce productivity, diminished educational attainment, imperiled public health, and the financial burden shouldered by uninsured individuals and communities. Making preventive medicine and existing treatment therapies available to uninsured persons will not only increase overall access to health care but may also substantially contribute to a reduction in the total burden of illness facing the United States.

So enough with the talk of death. Health insurance reform is a vital step toward saving the lives of thousands of Americans of every age every year and toward improving the lives not just of the 46 million uninsured, but of all Americans for decades to come.

The Republican Party has ceased to exist and has been replaced by a new pseudo-political organization that relies on spreading fear, relying on ignorance, and most of all creating hate.

So I call them FIH. Maybe they will come up with some eye-catching logo that they can wear as the break up town hall meetings and threating the lives of anyone who doesn't agree with their madness.

After all, it did kind of work once before.  Just look up the NAZI party.

Harry Turtledove writes alternative history novels that are always entertaining. Watching the disruption of Town Hall meetings and noting the death threats some Democratic members of Congress received, my own version of altered history story came to mind. Suppose that during the GW Bush Presidency it had been decided that since government intervention was bad. Medicare and Medicaid would be dropped. Suppose that ACORN was as influential as the insurance and BigPharma backed anti-health care organizatons. Imagine that Black radio stations were telling their listeners to get in the face of the GOP legislators supporting the change in health care. Black radio hosts would  charge that the GOP was trying to kill Grandma and Grandpa, Black activists would be enraged..

Would MSM characterize those Black protestors as grass-roots people with legitimate concerns about the impact on their health care, or would the protestors be dismissed as unpatriotic people who shout down other citizens trying to have a civil discourse? If Black militias were forming, how much time would MSM devote to educating the country about the threat?

If an African-American man arrived outside a GW Bush town hall with a visible weapon would the Secret Service have allowed him to remain, even if the state law said the act was legal?

I'll let you write your own stories.

Talk about lowering the bar.  After all, this could never be taken out of context, right?  I can see it now... Glenn Beck said that "Even David Frum thinks"

If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic--if he were those things, somebody should shoot him.

Uh, is it all of them at once? Because, you know, a lot of people thought your old boss and Cheney were hell-bent on number three, and I still don't think that is an appropriate response.  (Impeachment, criminal prosecution, and incarceration were completely satisfactory.).  More distressingly, a lot of people believe this to be the case for the current president. 
Heckuva job, David.  

THE DEFENDANT:  I had a glass of wine at dinner the night before last. (8/11/09, Frank DiPascali in response to a question from Judge Sullivan.)

MR. MUKASEY: He sat in our office a couple nights ago explaining to his family the possibilities and the consequences. (8/11/09, Marc Mukasey telling Judge Sullivan that Frank DiPascali would never do anything to hurt his family.) 
 

I hear Frank DiPascali's victims are about to blow their tops over the rock star status the Feds awarded DiPascali. According to the court transcript of his plea hearing on Tuesday, DiPascali and his family have continued to live the good  life they were living before he was exposed as one of the biggest con artists in American history.

(The transcript can be read here in PDF format or here in Word.)

Not only that, the Feds agreed to to let DiPascali remain free on bail until at least May 2010 and probably longer.

The Feds can thank Judge Richard Sullivan for saving their sorry asses. If DiPascali had been let out on bail under the terms proposed by the Feds, Lev Dassin's life would have become one long misery.

Bail was set at $2.5 million and guaranteed by three unnamed "financially responsible" individuals. The only collateral was DiPascali's sister's condo, the value of which was set at $400k.

Joanne DiPascali bought the condo in 2007 for $425k so it is probably not worth that much now. More importantly, it doesn't look like she has a mortgage. Gee, I wonder where Ms. DiPascali came up with $425k in cash. Just how much does she make working at JPMorgan Chase?

And just who are these three financially sound individuals who are willing to stick their neck out for Frank DiPascali, an unrepentant liar and a lifelong scam artist?

For the last nine months, DiPascali has been free to go wherever and with whoever he pleases. No ankle bracelet, no house arrest. His bank accounts have not been seized and he is still living on a 7-acre estate in Bridgewater NJ.

DiPascali still has his 60-foot Viking boat as far as I know. Since Frank is such a standup guy, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he let the Feds use it this summer.

Not only has Frank DiPascali been free as a bird, he has been allowed to spend as much money as he wants to maintain his family's luxurious lifestyle. Muskasy mentioned that DiPascali helped his daughter, Dorothy, move to Brooklyn on Monday since she is starting Brooklyn Law School. DiPascali apparently is paying her tuition.

Mukasey is the one who brought up DiPascali's "poor" children by name so I guess they are fair game now. I've known all along that Dorothy DiPascali went to Boston University and spent a semester or two in Paris. Not cheap. 

I also know Frank Dipascali III attends Villanova.

Two of the DiPascali sons, Greg and Mike, are still in high school and I have no doubt their father plans to send them to expensive private schools. I have no doubt, either, the Feds would agree to let DiPascali put away tuition for his children's education.

The DiPascali children drive BMWs and other expensive cars.  Mrs. DiPascali has never worked. The family spent their summers on a 60-foot fishing boat, complete with captain.

In February 2008, DiPascali bought a $430k condo in Montgomery County in PA so his father had a nice place to live. No word on when that property is being forfeited.

Half of the DiPascali family is on Facebook and they don't appear to be at all embarrassed by Frank's despicable conduct. Maybe they aren't.   

Who cares about Frank DiPascali's family? He ruined their happy little lives, not the investors. They can get jobs and take out student loans like a lot of other people.

Frank DiPascali didn't get caught up in something he didn't know how to get out of. He's a pathological liar who hid income and lied on a resume so he could become a member of the local school board.  

Bernie didn't talk so Frank could. These two scumbags are still working as a team. I know Frank is still lying because he lied about not knowing Bernie's family knew about the fraud.

The Feds are so wrapped up in what Frank is telling them, I don't think they are giving enough attention to how crooked the rest of the business was. Plenty of other people are ready to talk if someone will listen.  

I suspect part of the problem is that the Feds, or at least some of them, identify with Frank DiPascali more than they do with the victims.

Another part of the problem is that Marc Mukasey wants his client to get a really sweet deal so the big crooks with big bucks will call him when they got caught. Getting a deal for Frank DiPascali which allows him to roam around free as a bird for two years after being exposed as a partner in a multi-billion dollar fraud spanning thirty years would sure impress me if I was a crook.

Thank goodness Judge Sullivan has common sense.

(On a different note, part of the proposed bail agreement specifically allows Frank DiPascali to travel to the Eastern District of NY (Howard Beach etc). I wonder if Frank regaled the Feds with tales of his mafia connections and offered to help them track down some mobsters. I hope the Feds didn't fall for that line of crap.)