Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
This post is in: Military
@Any_Everyman @theonlyadult I deleted that Tweet bc I'm not sure how that was tweeted by me. Bergdahl was NOT a POW. He deserted. traitor
— KimInNC (@kimpar_NC) June 4, 2014
In other Bergdahl news:
The hometown of U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl has canceled a rally planned for later this month celebrating his release from five years of Taliban captivity, a municipal official told Reuters on Wednesday, amid allegations that he was a deserter.
Stay classy, wingnuts.
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Foreign Affairs
William Wan and Simon Denyer, in the Washington Post:
BEIJING — It was a quiet day in Tiananmen Square. Even as tens of thousands gathered in Hong Kong and global headlines marked the 25th anniversary of China’s brutal crackdown on student protesters, there was no trace of remembrance at the site of their killing…
The only sign of that day’s lingering effects: swarms of police patrolling the square and stationed every few hundred feet on the roads leading to it.
For weeks, as the anniversary approached, security in Beijing grew tighter. Foreign journalists were called in and warned. Officials mobilized tens of thousands of informants to look for suspicious activity, according to state media. Authorities jailed or forced out of the city dissidents most likely to criticize the government. By Wednesday, the heart of the capital was in lockdown.
This year, the repressive tactics ahead of the Tiananmen anniversary began earlier and were more extensive, a sign that the Communist Party views the historical event as an enduring threat.
The hushed interviews at the square Wednesday revealed just how effectively the party has quashed public memory of a crackdown that killed hundreds, if not thousands. Many claimed to have no remembrance of the massacre or appeared too afraid to respond…
The Washington Post also has a sidebar on some of the prominent figures from the Tiananmen protest. The NYTimes profiles a “leader” from the other side of the barricades:
… There was no public mention then — and there have been very few mentions since — of the head of the official student union of Peking University at that time. His name is Xiao Jianhua. Mr. Xiao never opposed the government, and the events of June 1989 did not make him one of China’s “most wanted.” Instead, they catapulted him into the ranks of its most wealthy…
The rewards were immediate. Just after he graduated, Mr. Xiao stepped into the world of business with direct financial support from Peking University, one of China’s most prestigious institutes. In the quarter-century since, he became the prototype of the politically connected financier. He has assiduously courted the party elite, including the family of its current president, Xi Jinping, becoming something of a banker for the ruling class and a billionaire in his own right…
ABC News remembers perhaps the most memorable, yet anonymous, figure from the original protests:
…[L]ittle is known about the man who blocked the path of a column tanks in Tiananmen Square in Beijing 25 years ago, on June 5, 1989.
Over the years he has come to be known as the “Tank Man,” the “Unknown Rebel,” or the “Unknown Protester.”
Some reports have identified the man as Wang Weilin, but his true identity has not been confirmed. The South Korean news agency Yonhap reported in 2006 that Wang Weilin was an alias and that he had escaped the massacre in Tiananmen Square and has made his way to Taiwan via Hong Kong…
Perhaps he was among the crowds here:
This post is in: Open Threads, Assholes, General Stupidity
God save us, Ross Douthat has appointed “left-wing gadfly Fredrik De Boer” as spokesman for us libtards on the topic of “The Left and Masculinity.” Douthat analyzes a post in which FdB muses about the UCSB shooter’s twisted notions of masculine entitlement and calls for the overthrow of “traditional masculinity.”
Predictably, it’s that last part that shrivels Douthat’s raisins:
I mean, I understand his point insofar as ”the celebration of violence, sexual entitlement, throbbing misogyny, and a fake self-confidence” are problems that have always particularly infected the male half of humanity, and the sexism inherent in traditional gender hierarchies has allowed men to get away with violent, entitled, hateful behavior on an often-epic scale. But he’s making an argument about “traditional masculinity” as something distinct from “sexism,” as a cultural problem unto itself — an unworkable model for male aspiration, a life-ruining ideal, that straitjackets today’s young men with its toxic, sex-and-violence-saturated demands.
Douthat is confused by FdB’s separation of “traditional masculinity” and “sexism,” but I think it correlates roughly with “privilege” and “racism,” which are two distinct and yet interconnected phenomena. FdB specifically addresses what it is about “traditional masculinity” that makes it a model worth rejecting and describes what will replace it:
It won’t be anti-confidence or anti-leadership or anti-toughness. It won’t be anti-sex … But it will reject utterly the strangled, stupid, pathetic association between male strength and the capacity for violence. It will stop associating a man’s value with the number of women he has sex with.
You can quibble with FdB’s definition of traditional masculinity, but he’s defined his perception of it pretty clearly. That seems to sail right over Douthat’s chapeau for some reason.
Douthat then goes on to cite vintage matinee idols and fictional characters whom he believes embody the best in traditional masculinity and implies that modern developments like feminism and free love are more to blame for the warped values and behavior of the MRA and PUA types than vestiges of The Patriarchy. We would expect no less from the man who once distained the favors of Chunky Reese Witherspoon.
Anyway, the whole thing makes my lady-brain hurt. The end.
by David Anderson| 65 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, C.R.E.A.M., Politics, hoocoodanode
Kevin Drum is playing around with Sarah Kliff’s piece on how doctors donate to political parties:
As high earners, you’d think that doctors would be more likely to contribute money to Republicans than Democrats. But it turns out that isn’t true. A new analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine shows that merely well-off doctors—your allergists, your pediatricians, your pulmonologists—favor Democrats. It’s only when you get into the territory of medical royalty—your surgeons, your urologists, your radiologists—that political contributions start to heavily favor Republicans. Even within one of the best paid professions in the country, there’s a class divide, with the haves favoring Republicans and the have-nots favoring Democrats. That’s fairly remarkable.
I think a sub-component of this split is practice composition. The basic providers (primary care physicians, pediatrics, cardiology etc) have been under significant pressure in the past fifteen years to move away from the solo or small group practice model towards an employment model. The NIH has shown this shift:
The percentage of physicians in groups of more than fifty increased from 30.9 percent in 2009 to 35.6 percent in 2011. This shift occurred across all specialty categories, both sexes, and all age groups, although it was more prominent among physicians under age forty than those age sixty or older….
The New York Times in 2010 noted this pattern as well:
As recently as 2005, more than two-thirds of medical practices were physician-owned — a share that had been relatively constant for many years, the Medical Group Management Association says. But within three years, that share dropped below 50 percent, and analysts say the slide has continued…
The move towards Accountable Care Organizations, coordinated care and bundled payments in PPACA has pushed the generalists and PCPS towards more risk bearing and more capital intensity. The private practices with only a handful of docs usually don’t have the money to upgrade electronic medical records or participate in the risk of patient population management. So the smaller practices are being bought out by either large hospital based physician groups or banding together to form regional co-ops. From here, the shift from being owner to employee is rapid, and class interest comes into play. The high end specialists have not had that degree of pressure yet, so the combination of being very high income, typically older than average and still working as owners may be coming into play here.
Practice composition and partisan contributionsPost + Comments (65)
This post is in: Open Threads
Open thread.
ETA: I will be visiting NYC this summer for my sister’s big fat gay wedding, and even though I’ll be hideously pressed for time throughout my trip, I’m going to try to find time to swing by a cemetery in the Bronx to leave flowers for La Lupe. Always been a big fan.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 108 Comments
This post is in: Teabagger Stupidity
They’re still counting the votes Mississippi’s $12 million Republican Senate primary, but it looks like there’s going to be a runoff election between Cochran and McDaniel. Here’s what’s at stake:
“They really want a McDaniel win because they want a head on the mantel,” party strategist Ford O’Connell said. Tea party groups “need to be able to raise money” to stay afloat, he added, “and to raise money, you have to show results.”
Here’s hoping for a McDaniel win to keep those grifters in the green.
Four Eyes and a Whole Bunch of TeanderthalsPost + Comments (108)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 149 Comments
This post is in: Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?
Benen’s recounting of McCain’s flipping and flopping on the Bergdahl release is a thing to behold and worthy of a full read. Our former POW would-be President is all over the map on a daily basis.
This behavior is similar to a dog being trained with an invisible fence. The hot dog on just the other side is so goddam tempting, but as soon as our pup approaches the flags and hears the beep, he knows that he’ll be hurting if he crosses the line.
If you buy that tortured analogy, the hot dog in this case is Obama’s impeachment for not consulting Congress (or whatever, you fill in that blank). The beep is the fact that it’s political poison to advocate leaving POWs behind. That’s why these guys are all acting like six-month-old carpet-pissing mutts.