Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

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

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

The willow is too close to the house.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

We are aware of all internet traditions.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

T R E 4 5 O N

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

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Archives for November 2013

Interesting Wikileaks Development

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Assange apparently will benefit from our somewhat deference to the press:

The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials.

The officials stressed that a formal decision has not been made, and a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks remains impaneled, but they said there is little possibility of bringing a case against Assange, unless he is implicated in criminal activity other than releasing online top-secret military and diplomatic documents.

The Obama administration has charged government employees and contractors who leak classified information — such as former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning — with violations of the Espionage Act. But officials said that although Assange published classified documents, he did not leak them, something they said significantly affects their legal analysis.

Alright lawyers, what say you?

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Slouching towards Bethlehem

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If you get a chance, I highly recommend reading that Corey Robin piece on Jeffrey Goldberg that John linked to. Robin points out that while he himself is a practicing Jew, he’ll never be more than a self-hater or narcissist to Goldberg and the like because he is critical of Israel (Robin actually opposes Zionism). I see this sort of thing a lot at work. I have a resolutely non-practicing Jewish coworker who supports the Likud party and spends a lot of time on Facebook bashing what he sees as enemies of Israel. More often than not, these enemies are American Jews who criticize Israel — Peter Beinart, Noam Chomsky, Max Blumenthal, and J Street are public enemies one through four (somehow Beinart has managed to surpass Chomsky over the past year or so).

I’m often struck by the similarities in the language used by conservative Catholics and “pro-Israel” Likudnik Jews. In each case, one issue — reproductive/sexual issues in the case of Catholicism, support for right-wing policies in Israel — takes precedence over all others. In each case, anyone who disagrees with the right on these issues is cast out, labeled “cafeteria Catholic” or “self-hating Jews”. The similarities end at a certain point: Goldberg may not even vote Republican whereas his Catholic counterparts (Bill Donohue) certainly do, and more broadly, all the “pro-Israel” stuff conservatives do doesn’t win over many Jewish voters, whereas I think the “pro-life” stuff is very effective politically.

Sometimes I think this is a paradigm for what has gone wrong in American politics (maybe all of western politics). People on the right have managed to claim some weird higher ground in many areas. Austerity is morally superior to Keynesianism. Interventionism is strong, while neo-isolationsim, and even foreign policy realism, is weak.

This will eventually stop — it just doesn’t fly with teh kids — but it will have done an enormous damage when it does, and I still don’t understand the mechanism by which it has happened.

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My Internet Complaints, Chapter 1 of a Very Large Number

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In the holiday spirit of airing greivances and family feuding, I wish to lodge the following complaints:

  1. Steve Benen is a great blogger but the new MSNBC redesign is ugly, and the one-sentence RSS feed is a shit sandwich on turd bread. There’s a reason that I haven’t been posting much from Benen, and that’s because I can’t get a decent feed of what he writes.
  2. Promo popups are basura. I know you all hate our ads here but please at least give Cole some credit for not popping over a window asking you to like this blog on Facebook or to subscribe to some email list or other.
  3. Are there any local TV stations that have decent web sites? The best TV station in our market recently redesigned their site and made it worse, not better.

Please register your complaints below. Open thread.

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Who files their taxes on February 7th?

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I do my family’s federal taxes by Valentine’s Day as we have two kids in daycare, and the refund is a nice means of forced savings that pays for a couple of months of day care with psychologically bucketed “Extra” money. People who are anal retentive or OCD(ish) tend to file early as well as people who know they qualify for Earned Income Tax Credit and need the money immediately tend to file early. Individuals who know they have a complex tax situation may start the process early. But most people who know they have a relatively simple return and don’t need the money immediately don’t file their taxes in the first week of February. They instead wait until the Final 4 is over before filing.

This is important as Obamacare enrollment pace is picking up. The early anal retentives or known needers are filing for insurance but more and more people who are not chronically ill are beginning to get on board:

Covered California has some good data:

The rate of enrollment in Covered California health plans has also increased. As of Nov. 19, 79,891 Californians had selected a health plan. Compared with the first week of October, during which about 700 people a day selected a health plan, the enrollment rate nearly quadrupled by the second week of November, to about 2,700 plan selections per day.

It is looking like California is seeing a November activity rate that is at least three if not four times higher than October’s rates.

One big difference on the timing of filing for taxes and buying health insurance on line is that most people who file a tax refund expect either to break even or to get money back.  People looking to buy health insurance are expecting to spend some money.  Getting money for free is a motivator while spending money is a depressor of action.  Using this logic, we should expect to see more early Medicaid sign-ups as the cost to the individual is effectively nil while Exchange insurance costs money which will lead to delay and surge.

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Filtration

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Reddit is going nuts over this statement by David Cameron at question time last month, given in response to a question about potential terrorists being released:

The Prime Minister: We have put in place some of the toughest controls that one can possibly have within a democratic Government, and the TPIMs [Terrorist Prevention and Investigation Measures] are obviously one part of that. We have had repeated meetings of the extremism task force—it met again yesterday—setting out a whole series of steps that we will take to counter the extremist narrative, including by blocking online sites. Now that I have the opportunity, let me praise Facebook for yesterday reversing the decision it took about the showing of beheading videos online. We will take all these steps and many more to keep our country safe.

It’s the “blocking online sites” part of the response that has people tweaked, since Cameron is also a proponent of opt-out Internet filtering.

Here’s my question: what is it with the Empire and porn filtering? Australia’s ruling coalition recently tried (and quickly took back) the same kind of opt-out filter Cameron advocates, and they’ve been flirting with filtration for years.

The US is supposedly more puritanical than these places, but even the staunchest god botherers here aren’t really serious about filtering Internet porn. It’s obvious that anyone who wants to filter their Internet connection can do it quite easily: almost every commercial router sold for the home market has the ability to filter, and there are dozens of different software filters that can be purchased and installed. So why do the Tories think that government needs to get involved and spend millions on something the free market has, in its infinite wisdom, already provided?

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