Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

When the time comes to make an endorsement, the pain of NYT editors will be palpable as they reluctantly whisper “Biden.”

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

The words do not have to be perfect.

There’s always a light at the end of the frog.

Republicans would impeach Biden if he bit into a whole Kit Kat rather than breaking the sections apart.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Another missed opportunity for Jamie Dimon to just shut the fuck up.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

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Archives for December 2011

Naomi Wolf’s “Rebuttal” is Pure Nonsense

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The sound of journalistic credibility gasping its last breath.

NLN Naomi WolfNaomi Wolf’s rebuttal to the criticism she has garnered in response to her rant in the Guardian last week is non-responsive, and frankly, bizarre. She writes specifically in response to Josh Holland of Alternet, but Holland’s criticism mirrors my criticism, as well as karoli (Crooks and Liars), Scott Lemieux (Lawyers, Guns, and Money), Corey Robin (Al Jazeera English), and Will Wilkinson (The Economist) among others.

Josh Holland’s article “Naomi Wolf’s Response to my Critique Largely Evades the Issues at Hand,” is a must read. Holland writes,

It’s disappointing that Naomi Wolf’s response to my criticism of her November 25 Guardian column – and earlier blog-post — doesn’t address the many misstatements of fact, logical leaps and baseless assertions which I highlighted.

Wolf instead spends much time on a general discussion of heightened federal surveillance and the increased coordination between federal and local law enforcement agencies, which she says I am naïve not to acknowledge, and devotes an enormous amount of space to establishing that federal law enforcement agencies have had some sort of role in at least monitoring the Occupy Movement and offering some guidance to local law enforcement agencies.

Holland’s assessment is spot on. Wolf’s article rambles on for eight pages, and ultimately, doesn’t say anything relevant.

Wolf leads off by criticizing a claim that neither Holland nor any of her critics has never made: that DHS had no involvement with the crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street locations:

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We’re not at the end of the beginning, but perhaps the beginning of the end

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Something huge happened today.  The kind of thing that changes the nature of the economy, and Americans’ relationship with their government, and with the corporations that seem to rule so much of our world.

Today is the day that a significant part of the Affordable Care Act took effect.   Today is the day that companies that sell and provide health insurance have to start spending 80% to 85% of their income from insurance premiums actually delivering the services for which they charge their customers.  Overhead like office space and supplies, marketing expenses, salaries, and yes, profits have to come out of the remaining 15-20%.  The rule is called the the medical loss ratio, and in an important decision recently by the Department of Health and Human Services, the insurance companies cannot count the sales commissions that they give out to the people who sell you your insurance plan against the medical loss ratio.

The MLR can ONLY be allowed expenses, which must be actual costs of coverable medical expenses.  This is huge.  This means no more nonsense like refusing your mother’s cancer treatment because she forgot about that prescription skin cream she had for acne when she was fifteen when she was filling out the application.  Hell, the insurance companies are going to be scrambling to pay for coverable things because any part of that 80-85% they don’t spend on allowables will have to be refunded to the policy holders.

Simply put, this is the end of the beginning of the long track to single payer health care.

So, can private health insurance companies manage to make a profit when they actually have to spend premium receipts taking care of their customers’ health needs as promised?  Not a chance-and they know it. Indeed, we are already seeing the parent companies who own these insurance operations fleeing into other types of investments. They know what we should all know – we are now on an inescapable path to a single-payer system for most Americans and thank goodness for it.

Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice — Martin Luther King

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We’re all sensitive people with so much to give

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I’ve had a lot of interesting email from readers the last couple days. A reader who is a psychologist wrote in to tell me that I was wrong to say that establishment media’s desire to fuck the middle class over was un-malignant tough love, that it was more likely pure assholery and that I shouldn’t sugarcoat it. I found her arguments pretty convincing.

Another reader wrote in to describe TNC and Sully’s break-up-to-make-up (which I’ve seen people talking about in the comments) as “white man tell black man to stfu”. I’m not sure there is a such a racially loaded angle there, it seems more “Very Serious Person tells second second-tier opinionator to respect his authoritah” (serious question, though: are there are any black Very Serious People and, if not, is their non-existence axiomatic or just empirical).

But there’s not doubt that all this “while I may not 100% agree that I am genetically inferior/we should nuke Iran/the middle-class needs to starve for a while, I still feel that my esteemed colleague is a wise, decent, brilliant person and he makes many wonderful points about why perhaps I am genetically inferior/we should nuke Iran/the middle-class needs to starve for a while” stuff is toxic. It alienates almost everyone, except the tote-bag types who feel privileged to listen to such erudite, civilized discourse, and, more importantly, it will never address the desires of people outside the Atlantic/TNR/PBS bubble.

Establishment media would have us all believe that reasonable people can disagree, that we should all channel our inner Tip O’Neil/Ronald Reagan and vote for Bloomberg/Bayh. That’s just not how things work. The greatest achievement in American politics of the last 50 years was, by any measure, the Civil Rights Act. A war-mongering, womanizing political genius pushed it through, a lot of good people got murdered fighting to get it through, and it created at least 40+ years of southern support for the party that opposed it.

That’s nothing like Gail Collins and David Brooks gushing about each other’s wits or TNC and Sully winning each other’s grudging admiration. People are often assholes and they should treat each accordingly.

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The High Price of a Quick Buck

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This should surprise absolutely no one:

After Scott Ely and his father talked with salesmen from an energy company about signing the lease allowing gas drilling on their land in northeastern Pennsylvania, he said he felt certain it required the company to leave the property as good as new.

So Mr. Ely said he was surprised several years later when the drilling company, Cabot Oil and Gas, informed them that rather than draining and hauling away the toxic drilling sludge stored in large waste ponds on the property, it would leave the waste, cover it with dirt and seed the area with grass. He knew that waste pond liners can leak, seeping contaminated waste.

“I guess our terms should have been clearer” about requiring the company to remove the waste pits after drilling, said Mr. Ely, of Dimock, Pa., who sued Cabot after his drinking water from a separate property was contaminated. “We learned that the hard way.”

***

In Pennsylvania, Colorado and West Virginia, some landowners have had to spend hundreds of dollars a month to buy bottled water or maintain large tanks, known as water buffaloes, for drinking water in their front yards. They said they learned only after the fact that the leases did not require gas companies to pay for replacement drinking water if their wells were contaminated, and despite state regulations, not all costs were covered.

Thousands of landowners in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Texas have joined class action lawsuits claiming that they were paid less than they expected because gas companies deducted costs like hauling chemicals to the well site or transporting the gas to market.

Some industry officials say the criticism of their business practices is misguided. Asked about the waste pits on Mr. Ely’s land in Pennsylvania, for example, George Stark, a Cabot spokesman, said the company’s cleanup measures met or exceeded state requirements. And the door-to-door salesmen, commonly known as landmen, who pitch the leases on behalf of the drilling companies also dismiss similar complaints from landowners, and say they do not mislead anyone.

I just love that response- “We meet or exceed state requirements.” Given what Corbett is doing to regulations in PA (gutting them in some cases, simply waiving them in others, and then putting energy executives in charge of environmental permitting), in a couple of months drillers in PA will exceed state requirements if they hold you down and shoot the waste water down your throat like the UC Davis cops and pepper spray.

This is particularly vexing that this is happening to folks in WV and the rest of Appalachia. For christ sakes, how many centuries of predatory companies and resource extraction do we have to live through before people get a fucking clue? Stop signing your rights away for a few dollars because a gas and oil conglomerate in Kansas doesn’t give a shit what you use for drinking water for the next 40 years anymore than Massey energy gives a shit if your kids are swimming in coal sludge. Just makes me want to scream.

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Making Sure I Got This Right

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Newt makes up all sorts of bullshit and lives in some sort of bizarre fantasy world where you can go on vacation with food stamps, and the media lavishes him with praise and calls him an “ideas guy.”

Obama thinks things through, knows what he is talking about, and tells you the truth, and the media deride him as boring and professorial and lacking passion.

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I could not foresee this thing happening to you

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Heh.

[T]he Gingrich team was supposed to provide New Hampshire officials with a list of 40 committee volunteers who would represent the campaign as Republican National Convention delegates — but Gingrich’s staff couldn’t track down 40 willing supporters. Instead, they submitted a hand-scrawled, typo-ridden list of 27 people.

The question remains whether his weak campaign, his past or his crazy behavior will do the Gingrich campaign in. I stand by my prediction that Newtmentum! will throw an axle some time around Hannukah.

Then again, for Newt to collapse someone has to win. Until last week I still felt 100% that Romney would robot-walk his way to the prize, but there might be too much blood in the water now. Without inevitability on his side Romney just looks kind of pathetic and desperate. Mockery and pity have started to leak into even mainstream narratives about him, and those are death to a campaign.

I will not pretend to know what will happen when Newt implodes and leaves the race with a gaping hole. Maybe Santorum will be all over it. Or maybe (frightening as it might be) the GOP may give a second look to someone like Huntsman who can feed himself without help.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong and Newt will take it all the way. If so then keep in mind that Obama plays politics like a bullfight, gently leading his opponents in circles until they tire out and self-destruct. The last person he wants to face is someone with an even keel and a moderate streak like Huntsman or Romney. The opponent he really wants is an excitable firebrand with an easily pricked ego and moderate to low self-control. There are worse options for his team than Newton Leroy Gingrich.

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