Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Come on, man.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

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

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

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Archives for 2014

Thank Jebus He’s in the Senate Where Nothing Happens

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If Rand Paul were still practicing medicine he’d be malpracticing medicine:

In an interview with Fox News radio host John Gibson last week, Rand Paul argued that a ban on people traveling from west African “ought to be considered.”

“It’s not like AIDS,” he explained. “AIDS is difficult to transmit. You’re not going to go into a cocktail party and have someone cough and get AIDS. If you are in a cocktail party with someone with Ebola and they cough, you are at risk for getting Ebola.”

The Kentucky senator said that a “temporary hiatus on flights” was “only reasonable.”

Rand is so full of shit that even his daddy thinks he’s full of shit:

Ron Paul, who is a medical doctor, pointed out that an estimated 3,000 to 49,000 people died every year from influenza, but no one was considering a travel ban to stop the flu from spreading.

“So right now, I would say a travel ban is politically motivated more than something done for medical purposes,” he concluded.

What’s more, he’s so full of shit that even the credulous both-sides-do-it factchecking hack Glenn Kessler thinks he’s full of shit.

Also, too: what’s “libertarian” about restricting the precious autonomy of people who want to travel in and out of Africa?

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Supreme Court Should Go to the Dogs

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John Oliver is right. If, instead of dialog illustrated by static courtroom sketches, Supreme Court arguments were reenacted by dogs, everyone would watch them in full, at least at first:

I’m not sure I would have cast a boxer as Justice Kennedy; he seems more like a Dalmatian to me, but that’s a minor quibble. Possibly the Justices could be represented by a new species every year.

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The Nurse With The Lethal Bedside Manner

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If you’re ever sick in Italy, you may want to think twice about asking a nurse to fluff your pillow. A story recdently surfaced about Italian nurse Daniela Poggiali, who is accused of killing 38 of her patients because she found them annoying. Poggiali would inject her victims with a lethal dose of potassium chloride which is extra hard to investigate because it fades from the system after a few days. And she shows no regrets:

It is claimed that Ms Poggiali even took ghoulish selfies. The Libero Quotidiano newspaper said that Ms Poggiali photographed herself on her smartphone while standing next to one of her suspected victims, moments after he had died. “In all my professional years of seeing shocking photos, there have been few like these,” said Alessandro Mancini, the chief prosecutor of Ravenna. Colleagues said Ms Poggiali deliberately gave laxatives to patients at the end of her shift so that other nurses would have to deal with the effects.

And they say it’s the nurses that have the charming bedside manner.

Team Blackness also discussed a Ferguson, Missouri, cop that tried to get a resident fired from her job for being involved in the protests, an Iowa cop that blew out to the tires of a pregnant woman speeding to get to the hospital to deliver her baby, and more stupid words out of Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert’s mouth.

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The Nurse With The Lethal Bedside Manner

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If you’re ever sick in Italy, you may want to think twice about asking a nurse to fluff your pillow. A story recdently surfaced about Italian nurse Daniela Poggiali, who is accused of killing 38 of her patients because she found them annoying. Poggiali would inject her victims with a lethal dose of potassium chloride which is extra hard to investigate because it fades from the system after a few days. And she shows no regrets:

It is claimed that Ms Poggiali even took ghoulish selfies. The Libero Quotidiano newspaper said that Ms Poggiali photographed herself on her smartphone while standing next to one of her suspected victims, moments after he had died. “In all my professional years of seeing shocking photos, there have been few like these,” said Alessandro Mancini, the chief prosecutor of Ravenna. Colleagues said Ms Poggiali deliberately gave laxatives to patients at the end of her shift so that other nurses would have to deal with the effects.

And they say it’s the nurses that have the charming bedside manner.

Team Blackness also discussed a Ferguson, Missouri, cop that tried to get a resident fired from her job for being involved in the protests, an Iowa cop that blew out to the tires of a pregnant woman speeding to get to the hospital to deliver her baby, and more stupid words out of Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert’s mouth.

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Not gonna do it and you can’t make me

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You might have heard that Bill O’Reilly grew up in Levittown, New York, famous for creating the planned subdivision. Designers wanted Levittown to offer returning WWII veterans an affordable entry to the middle class of property-owning professionals. People with no prior experience in ownership could find a home at a low price with often intimidating details like landscaping, appliances and furniture already taken care of. Along with government policies with similar goals like the GI bill, Levittown and the communities that followed it helped to elevate millions of families that would otherwise have had no easy access to the middle class.

More to the point, it elevated white families.

In 1957, when Bill O’Reilly was 8 years old, the developer William Levitt explained [banning black homeowners from Levittown] this way to the New York Times:

The plain fact is that most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities. This attitude may be wrong morally, and some day it may change. I hope it will. But as matters now stand, it is unfair to charge an individual with the blame for creating this attitude or saddle him with the sole responsibility for correcting it.

A normal person who grew up in freaking Levittown would see that he might have had some chances in life that his black contemporaries never had. Of course saying that makes me a bad liberal, since the diversity of normal people includes more than the people with whom I hang out. Someone like the folks I know would acknowledge it, sure. To me the mental acrobatics it takes to deny that seem painful and maybe dangerous.

But conservatives are normal too. A lot of people would not at all agree with the fairly obvious point that I just brought up, and I think that this issue gets back to what I see as the deep heart of the liberal-conservative divide. Liberals want people to feel guilty about things and conservatives don’t want to. Some are sociopaths who cannot feel guilt but a lot of them just go a little nuts at the idea that they might in any way be a bad person. They’re not entirely wrong that guilt gets used sometimes recklessly and as a weapon but the absolute refusal to feel any at all has become the poisonous seed of our current national dysfunction.

Start with O’Reilly versus Stewart. Bill O’Reilly lifts his persona straight out of a three year old’s memory of John Wayne. He sees himself as not just a good guy but as some sort of moral achetype, crusading against evil and incapable of sin. Poke his pretensions and O’Reilly goes nuts, over the top, into wackadoo land.

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Jon Stewart is not a perfect guy in any respect (e.g., his interviews often kind of suck), but then he doesn’t pretend to be. When he screws up a story he admits the mistake, makes fun of himself a little and moves on. I watched when he demolished Crossfire. Stewart looked the opposite of puffed up. He seemed deflated, like he was ahsamed to even be on the stupid program. I think that was more or less his point.

The idea that Levittown, O’Reilly’s values factory that made moral paragons like spicy chili makes unappealing hot gas, only gave those fabled values to white people just short circuits O’Reilly’s brain. To process that cognitive dissonance he would have to become a person who can accept a little ‘personal responsibility’ for the unequal opportunities that America faced then and now. In other words he would have to become a little bit liberal. But he can’t, so he won’t.

And Cliven Bundy is still swallowing that damned foot.

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Referee thoughts

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Referee Thoughts

  • Great preventative preventive refereeing in the New Englands vs. New York Jets game last week. Officials for almost all sports are there to facilitate a safe and fair game according to the rules of competition. Most officials would like to do with the minimal needed involvement. Different sports have different definitions and prioritization of safety versus faireness, but that is the goal — safe and fair. In this situation, a quiet word moved a New England linebacker to a safe position before the play. Good teams want the referees to keep their guys healthy even if it minimizes foul count.
  • Entering the knock-out portion of the season. I love doing these games as there are hundreds or thousands of fans for some of the high school games, and hundreds of fans for the college games, and the players are going hard. I hate doing these games because the incentive structure changes dramatically when there is a two goal differential with thirty minutes left. In the regular season, two goals is a high hill and coaches will want to preserve their players for the next game. There is no next game, so two goals means the team that is behind goes to high variance, high risk, high contact strategies. Yesterday I had three red cards in the last thirty minutes for two hideous challenges and a coach losing his head. No coach, it was not my AR’s fault that #17 can’t run the fucking offside trap as he is two steps behind his center back and Magenta has been pounded the ball down #17’s side… it is your fault for either having him out there OR trying to trap with him out there as you’ve seen him for 25 games this season….You should know better
  • The toughest player to referee within 100 miles of my house is a 36 year old guy playing in a men’s league. He is a reasonably skilled player but a complete and utter asshole. There are some guys who are assholes on the field, but are super nice off the field, he is not one of them. He gives off the asshole vibe where if he gets within 15 feet of a group of people, they tense up. Five or six years ago, he could not control his behavior, so he was almost guaranteed a caution within the first twenty minutes of a game. Now he has just enough control where he can irritate, instigate and annoy at a level which any one act is not worth a foul, any one act is not worth a caution, but he tilts the game and makes it ugly. Most of it is that he plays at a level of physicality and aggression that is half a step above where the rest of the league wants to play, but it is not illegal most of the time. The rest of his schtick is having absolutely no self-awareness as to why the referee is trying to manage him. I was being assessed on one of his games on Saturday, and my assessor and I had no good way of working with or around him to make the game flow.
  • I learned a new phrase for diving/flopping last week — “horny lesbian” applied in a Men’s D-2 college game for the amount of grass a particular player was eating…. I was AR-2 and did not hear the expression but saw the center give the red card and then saw her turn to me as she tried to stifle a laugh. I could not contain myself in the lockerroom when I heard the entire story.
  • Things that I have learned this week from coaches and experts:  I can not give a red on a player’s first foul of the game. I can not give a yellow on the first foul of the game.  A yellow is mandatory for the first foul of the game.  I am obligated in NCAA play to give extra time to accomdate injuries (we stop the very visible clock instead), the epitome of tactical soccer for 10 year olds is to kick it really hard and let Johnny and Jose chase it down, working U-12 girls that can play intelligent tactical soccer is amazingly refreshing, a player that is 10 yards offside and 30 yards from the ball requires me to pop my flag.

Open thread until I write a post on integrated payer provider models.

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