Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

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

Innocent people do not delay justice.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Finding joy where we can, and muddling through where we can’t.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

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

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

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

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

We do not need to pander to people who do not like what we stand for.

Second rate reporter says what?

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

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Archives for 2014

Open Thread: “Being Petrified Is Ridiculous”

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If you haven’t already watched this, it’s a great clip to forward to your fear-addled Facebook acquaintances and elderly relatives. It’s Shep Smith! He’s a FOXS NEWS favorite! As NYMag described the clip:

Fox News conscience Shepard Smith brought a rare moment of sanity to the network this afternoon when he shut down a colleague’s report that there was a “widespread panic across the country” over Ebola. “Oh my God, Doug, I appreciate it, but I think we both know there’s no widespread panic across the country,” Smith said. “And I think we also know that if there’s a widespread panic, it’s not based in fact and it’s not based in reason.”…

Rather than insinuate that the government is lying and President Obola is to blame, Smith went with real talk: “There is politics in the mix,” he said. “With midterm elections coming, the party in charge needs to appear to be effectively leading. The party out of power needs to show that there is a lack of leadership.” In other words, stop watching Fox News immediately…

But surely we’re still allowed to mock…

“Erick Erickson: He’s what you get if you take an influential political evangelical, boil him in a pot, skim off the tallow, mix it with a little dog pee, and apply it to your front door in the form of a giant “X” in hopes that human kindness will see it and pass your house over. And the amazing thing is: It will.” – Adam Weinstein, Kinja


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Apart from giggling at the self-serving morans, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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Here Comes the Ratfucking

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To the surprise of no one, we are now being eased into accepting that murdering Michael Brown was ok, a sort of homicidal version of both sides do it:

A stream of eyewitnesses has been testifying in secret before a grand jury considering whether to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown near the Canfield Green apartments in Ferguson.

One Canfield resident — who said he saw the killing of Brown from start to finish and talked to the grand jury recently — has given the Post-Dispatch an account with some key differences from previous public statements from other witnesses.

Among the recollections of the witness, who agreed to an interview on the condition that his name not be used, were:

• After an initial scuffle in the car, the officer did not fire until Brown turned back toward him.

• Brown put his arms out to his sides but never raised his hands high.

• Brown staggered toward Wilson despite commands to stop.

• The two were about 20 to 25 feet apart when the last shots were fired.

He would not detail what he had told the grand jury but said the members seemed fair and asked a lot of questions.

The St. Louis Dispatch, the rag that spent weeks hounding Michael Brown’s juvenile record (in conjunction with Charles Johnson, twitter “activist” when he isn’t suspended and Breitbartesque truth seeker, most recently seen threatening to dox children who may have been exposed to Ebola) while not doing a damned thing to look into the Darren Wilson’s checkered past as a LEO (that had to be done by the Washington Post because the Dispatch apparently didn’t have the resources to look in their backyard), titles this story about the new eyewitness with a radically different account than the other seven witnesses as “Witness adds new perspective to Ferguson shooting.”

With McCulloch’s cynical strategy and this new excuse, get ready for no charges and lots of subsequent protests. My bad, there will be blah people involved. These won’t be called protests, they’ll be framed as riots, and more than likely, as in Ferguson earlier this year, the ones behind most of the violence and aggression will be dressed head to toe in riot gear.

Raise your hand if you are remotely surprised.

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Whistling Past the Graveyard

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Valued commenter Loneoak has a front-page post up at TPM that shares a front-line perspective on medical crisis preparedness:

I have a perspective tying together today’s big news brouhahas. My wife is an ER nurse at a major urban hospital owned by the Hospital Corporation of America, the hospital chain once run by Rick Scott. It’s the largest for-profit medical system in the world, and is of course also notable for its ‘creative billing’ practices in the largest Medicare fraud settlement in history. Scott was booted from the CEO position following that fraud investigation, so he’s not directly responsible for current conditions in those hospitals.

But it is obvious to those who work there that the combination of lax training and toxic labor relations ‘leaders’ like him have brought to the company are emblematic of a big problem for US hospitals if a major outbreak of ebola or other infectious disease occurs. My wife’s ER has an ‘ebola cart’ with some lightweight protective gear and written instructions for putting on a PPE, but the instructions are a loose bundle of papers and the pictures don’t match the gear in the cart and has inaccuracies that put them at serious risk. It’s an object of gallows humor for the staff. That’s the totality of their training or preparedness so far. As we all now know, PPEs are not easy to put on and take off correctly. Even though nurses all have experience with standard droplet control (they see TB and HIV all the time), ebola is a special case. They have gone months and months without a nurse education director because no one wants to deal with their management and take the position. Her coworkers are clear that they will refuse to treat an ebola patient because they have woefully inadequate training in the correct procedures and lack proper gear.

And yet the head of infectious disease at this hospital went on the local news to proclaim the hospital was ready to receive ebola patients safely. They obviously didn’t bother to speak to a single nurse on the front lines. I’m not particularly panic-y about ebola, even though obviously the family members of ER personnel have a lot at stake in ebola preparedness. But I think that this situation will be the weak link in any major national response. So many of our hospitals are run by lunatics like Rick Scott who seek only the highest profit margin. They do not invest in training, they build charting mechanisms that are good for billing but not treating patients, they constantly fight with their unionized employees, they lie to the public, etc, etc. We like to imagine that competent, highly-skilled medical institutions like Emory will save us, but we have way more Dallas Presbyterians in this country than we have Emorys. You can see exactly this managerial incompetence—and toxic labor relations—woven through the statement released by the nurses at Dallas Presbyterian today. Also see the head of National Nurses United on All In With Chris Hayes for a similar perspective.

To put it bluntly: we’ve entrusted our national medical system to the managerial competence and goodwill of the Rick Scotts of the world, and that is much scarier than a podium fan.

Emphasis mine, where Loneoak nails the crux of the problem. Rapacious knaves like Scott and like-minded armies of MBAs have hollowed out our national institutions across the board. As alarming as it is to get a glimpse of the true state of our “first world” healthcare system, that just scratches the surface of the rot.

We all had a ringside seat when the geniuses who run our financial institutions were revealed to be bumbling thieves several years ago. And before that, we were treated to the sight of our political class wielding the world’s most fearsome military like a brain-damaged spider monkey with an AK-47.

One of my great-uncles, a World War II vet, public health official and endlessly curious and intelligent man, surprised my then-high school kid self by telling me that this country was on the express bus to Banana Republicanstan back when Reagan was sworn in.

By god, you were right, Uncle Billy. You were right.

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But Seriously, Folks

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FL Governor Rick Scott provided plenty of fodder for ridicule last night, first by delaying the debate with a shit-fit over a fan and then with his bizarre debate performance. But his response to a question about Stand Your Ground and whether justice was served in the Trayvon Martin case deserves closer scrutiny. You can watch how both Crist and Scott responded here.

No, Crist didn’t say outright that the verdict was a miscarriage of justice; he said he wasn’t on the jury, so he couldn’t condemn the finding. But he did say there’s something wrong with Stand Your Ground and it needs to be changed. In this state, that’s a little bit brave.

Contrast Crist’s response with Scott’s. First Scott repeatedly invoked Trayvon Martin’s parents, using their first names as if they were all in the same quilting circle. And he acknowledged that “death is a tragic death,” which is certainly a unique perspective. But he said he wouldn’t change the law.

Ol’ Charlie is a bit of a weathercock…okay, he’s a regular turbine spinning fast enough to power Miami for the next decade. But that answer alone ought to be enough to inspire any Democrat worthy of the party affiliation to climb over razor wire, swim across gator-infested canals and traverse the giant python-ridden Everglades to vote for Crist.

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Thursday Afternoon Open Thread

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Recycling an old image because I love it so:

ding-dong_mofo

That’s just so fucking Florida. True story: shortly after my snowbird in-laws moved to an Active Senior Lifestyle CommunityTM down here, they discovered a smallish gator — two or three feet long — lurking next to where they keep their trash cans.

They called the community services people, but the bubbas manning the phones just laughed when informed of the gator’s size and told them to handle it themselves since it was barely more than a lizard.

So my father-in-law and a couple of neighbors maneuvered the gator into a garbage can, slammed the lid shut, bungee-corded the can to a golf cart and transported the wee gator to a nearby swamp, where it was freed. It was a lucky critter; a trapper might have turned it into a clutch-purse.

Anyhoo, open thread.

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Fandango

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As the world now knows, Florida Governor Rick Scott is petty enough to pout in his dressing room like a diva and delay a gubernatorial debate over a small battery-powered fan installed under his opponent’s podium. That’s the story that grabbed all the headlines, and as John pointed out last night, it may cost Scott reelection.

If FanGate takes Scott down, so be it: Al Capone was ultimately jailed for tax evasion, after all. But for many of us who watched the debate live, the fan standoff wasn’t even the weirdest part. What left the mister and I shaking our heads in wonder was Scott’s constant struggle — and consistent failure — to come across as an actual human being.

Here’s an example — a two-minute clip of both candidates’ closing statements. This should be a gimme putt for any half-way competent politician: There are no gotcha questions; it’s just you making a 60-second pitch for votes. Watch how badly Scott bungles it:*

I don’t speak much Spanish at all, but even I can tell he fucks that part up too. You can go to C-SPAN and watch any random clip of Scott speaking last night, and it will be just as cringe-inducing.

Even though the circumstances of their employment indicate that they’re evil, the handlers charged with installing human-like sound bites into this alien life form for regurgitation onstage are to be pitied.

The mystery isn’t how Scott was elected in the first place; he purchased the governorship straight up for $72 million. The mystery is how he ever functioned as a CEO. I’ve been acquainted with a few of that species in my time, and though they are frequently arrogant, ruthless pricks, all displayed at least a rudimentary trace of what we call “people skills.”

Scott’s wondrous Medicare fraud skill set must have conveyed itself to higher-ups early in his career by some means other than human interaction. Let’s just hope the goddamn fan was the seventh Horcrux.

*I apologize for the laggy audio, but trust me, it was just as surreal live.

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