Freak solar events, craters where cities used to be, bellicose civilizations hurling objects at the speed of light, what is it with wingers and apocalyptic fantasies?
Answer: we’d never have to see Luke Russert Jr. on tvPost + Comments (164)
by DougJ| 164 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Freak solar events, craters where cities used to be, bellicose civilizations hurling objects at the speed of light, what is it with wingers and apocalyptic fantasies?
Answer: we’d never have to see Luke Russert Jr. on tvPost + Comments (164)
by DougJ| 151 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Media
I’ve never read much of Ezra Klein’s stuff in the past, even though it’s been highly praised elsewhere. But there’s no question that yesterday’s opinion piece and today’s online chat are by far the most knowledgeable discussions of health care I’ve ever read in an American newspaper. Read the whole thing, but here’s a sample:
Ezra Klein: No. We don’t have the best health care in the world. Not on any broad measure or metric. We don’t have the most cost effective health care in the world. We don’t have the best outcomes in the world. We can’t even manage to give everyone access to health care.
That said, there are certain diseases, like breast cancer, that we are uniquely good at treating. But then we lag on diseases like diabetes. It’s a mixed bag. And it’s a mixed bag that we are spending twice as much as most other countries on. So it’s important to say this clearly: We have a very, even uniquely, bad health-care system. Not for every individual. But in the aggregate. As a country, we spend far too much and get much too little.
[….]Charlottesville, Va.: Peggy Noonan had a column over the weekend listing three points that damage support of health-care reform. The first one seemed a bit odd — that doctors sometimes undercharge patients who are strapped financially. Is there any evidence out there supporting or debunking this? Any comments on the article overall?
Common Sense May Sink ObamaCare (Wall Street Journal, July 25)
Ezra Klein: Didn’t see her article, but it’s actually the opposite: Doctors overcharge patients who are strapped financially.
This is actually sort of intuitive. A piece of fruit at a good grocery store is pretty cheap. A piece of fruit at a corner bodega is often not. That’s because Safeway negotiate large discounts on behalf of their customers while the bodega doesn’t. Similarly, people with insurance — be it Medicare or a large employer’s plan — have negotiated discounts. But people with bad insurance, or no insurance, don’t. And so they end up paying a lot more.
I’ve taken a lot of shit here for supposedly overestimating the effect the punditocracy has on our government. But I sincerely believe that if Klein had had an public opinion page gig for the past 17 years and David Broder hadn’t, this country would be in a different place. Even though that means Klein would have started when he was eight.
This post is in: Lies, Damned Lies, and Sarah Palin, Clown Shoes
Pareene at <A HREF=”http://gawker.com/5324026/sarah-palins-gradual-descent-into-incoherency”>Gawker</A> has a rather interesting (okay, fairly hilarious) essay, including a number of videos, concerning Sarah Palin’s Gradual Descent into Incoherency:
What was your favorite line from Sarah Palin’s second resignation speech? Was it:
“So, how ’bout in honor of the American soldier, ya quite makin’ things up?”
Or maybe this amazing bit:
“Let me tell you, Alaskans really need to stick together on this with new leadership in this area especially, encouraging new leadership… got to stiffen your spine to do what’s right for Alaska when the pressure mounts, because you’re going to see anti-hunting, anti-second amendment circuses from Hollywood and here’s how they do it. They use these delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets, they use Alaska as a fundraising tool for their anti-second amendment causes.”
Actually, this is our favorite line:
“In the winter time it’s the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs?”
It’s like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged.
And she wrote this speech! In advance, on paper! What does any of it mean? It is amazing. Twenty years ago she could competently descibe a dog race, three years ago she could articulate a position on the abortion issue, and this weekend she composed a resignation speech by throwing culture war stock phrases into a hat and dumping it upside down on a copy of The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
My Favorite Monday Sentence (Palin edition)Post + Comments (117)
by DougJ| 120 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
A birfer BJ commenter calling himself Details about Ben Smith links back to a crazy birfer website. It’s good stuff:
1. He only “produced” it to FactCheck, and the same page where they have pictures of the cert – pictures that they later compressed and removed EXIF data from – contains the blatant lie that Hawaii verified where Obama was born.
A couple other questions: are there a lot of birfers in the Politico comments? Has Drudge gotten on the birfer bandwagon?
by John Cole| 80 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, The Wingularity
This is great. Mike Stark tracks down Republicans in DC and asks them about the birther issue:
The reason Republicans in DC are running from some guy on the street asking them whether or not Obama is an American citizen is because they have spent the last thirty years cultivating a base of insane crazy people, and while they may escape a reporter from FDL, they can’t escape the base.
by DougJ| 87 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Is it just me or does head-birfer Orley Taitz sound eerily like Arianna Huffington? (She comes on at 7:34 of the audio.)
I didn’t get through that much of the program, but Ben Smith does a pretty good job of explaining the entire conspiracy.
Another question: is the birfer stuff any crazier than the Clinton body count stuff? I tend to think it may be less crazy. I also vaguely recall the WSJ publishing some pretty nutty Mena stuff. Have things actually improved?
by DougJ| 55 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Actually, not really. Just a question on how to make them go away.
I have two predictions:
1) Someone like Ross Douthat will say that birferism is somehow liberals’ fault, the same way it was liberals’ fault for killing the George Tiller by supporting reproductive rights.
2) Birther opposition will be used as a sign of credibility by wingnuts when the next whacky rumor crops up, e.g. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I speak as someone who strongly opposed the birthers when I say that the footage of Obama fathering an alien baby looks very real to me.”