Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Bark louder, little dog.

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

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Republicans do not trust women.

“Alexa, change the president.”

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

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

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

Let there be snark.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Everybody saw this coming.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

You are here: Home / Archives for 2014

Archives for 2014

Does the Secret Service Just Not Care Enough?

by | 54 Comments

This post is in: ,

secret service clowns

(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com)

The NYTimes, Paper of Record goes there:

Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland was at the grocery store the other day when he ran into an elderly black woman who expressed growing concern about President Obama’s safety. Why, she asked, wasn’t he being better protected by his Secret Service agents?

The furor that led to this week’s resignation of the director of the Secret Service resonated deeply among blacks, outraged that those supposed to be guarding the first black president were somehow falling down on the job — and suspicious even without evidence that it may be deliberate.

“It is something that is widespread in black circles,” said Representative Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, who like Mr. Cummings is an African-American Democrat who has been approached repeatedly by voters expressing such a concern. “I’ve been hearing this for some time: ‘Well, the Secret Service, they’re trying to expose the president.’ You hear a lot of that from African-Americans in particular.”

Both Mr. Cummings and Mr. Cleaver said that they did not believe the Secret Service lapses reported recently had anything to do with Mr. Obama’s race and that they had tried to dispel the notion among their constituents. But the profound doubts they have encountered emphasize the nation’s persistent racial divide and reflect an abiding fear for Mr. Obama’s security that has unnerved blacks still mindful of the assassinations of Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr…

The Secret Service did detect a spate of threats around the time Mr. Obama won the presidency and took office. But without providing numbers, the agency flatly denied reports that he had received three or four times as many as other presidents and added that they eventually subsided. “After his first election, there was a spike in his numbers,” Mr. Donovan said. “They’ve leveled out and they’ve been consistent and similar to his predecessors.”…

Mr. Cleaver said that even though “I’m as paranoid as anyone else,” he rejected the suspicion and added that its prevalence troubled him. “There’s nothing further from the truth, and it’s a little dangerous for us to allow that thinking to grow and spread,” he said. “To the degree we can dismantle it, we should. I’m going to dispel it as much as I can.”

There’s also the question of why President Obama’s avowed enemies, like Darrell Issa, have suddenly become so deeply concerned about his personal safety. Just possibly coincidentally, there’s a ‘HistorySource’ article in the same NYTimes edition:

… [President Lyndon B.] Johnson himself did not blame his predecessor’s murder on the Secret Service’s shortcomings. He venerated his own longtime agent Rufus Youngblood…

Ultimately Johnson built an excellent relationship with the Secret Service. But as early as the week after the Dallas assassination, the F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, who was an old Johnson friend and Washington neighbor, tried to sow seeds of doubt in the president’s mind about the service. Hoover was eager not only to do some damage to a bureaucratic rival, but also to distract L.B.J. from mistakes made by his own bureau that may have contributed to the assassination. With the new president secretly recording their conversation on a Dictaphone machine, Hoover told Johnson that “much to my surprise, the Secret Service do not have any armored cars.”…

Always reaching for opportunity, Hoover tried to nudge L.B.J. to take presidential protection away from the Secret Service and give it to the F.B.I…

Does the Secret Service Just Not Care Enough?Post + Comments (54)

Imagine My Surprise

by | 160 Comments

This post is in: 

Apparently some wingnut site I have never heard of is announcing that my hometown of Bethany, WV, is the site of a terrorist training camp:

terrorism

terrorism2

My family has lived here for close to fifty years and my dad was mayor (and Chief of Police. And on the VFD.) for about 25 of those years. We have a general store run by the same family for over a century, one small bar, and a Post Office (although that is scaling back to being only open for half a day because of budget cuts- thanks, Congress). We have no stoplights. The population is about 1100 in the entire region, but that is only during the school year. The rest of the time, when the students are gone, we have around 350 people. Everyone knows everyone.

There are no Muslims. I think there are several Jewish people. There aren’t even enough Catholics to warrant a church or a priest, and all they have is a home converted into a meeting house that 5-10 of them go to once a week (and it is located across the street from my house less than 45 meters away). The only people of Middle Eastern descent that lived here were Siham and Sumiya (Sumiya was the women I ran to the hospital all the time for her tumor and surgeries, while Siham was married to prominent scholar George Miller). Both have since moved- Siham to the northeast to be with her family as she was unable to take care of herself, and Sumiya has moved to California to be with another part of their family. Regardless, both were Christian and fled Syria and Lebanon decades ago.

The only thing being terrorized right now are drivers trying to avoid being run off the road by fracking trucks from Texas and Oklahoma gas companies and the local deer population because bow season just opened up on the 27th of September. In fact, I was just up at Chambers (the general store) to get a fish sandwich (they have a fish fry the first Friday of every month and every Friday during lent and make Coleman’s fish sandwiches) and it serves as a local checking station for hunters, and Harry said he checked in his first deer just this morning.

So every time you see one of these idiotic lists of terrorists in our midst, remember, they are full of shit. The only terrorist groups in West Virginia are Klan and a smattering of skinheads and neo-Nazis. Well, the Hare Krishnas did blow up Mr. Gorby’s house in 1983– my dad was the first person on the scene and helped to pull his unclothed body (they cut his gas line and he woke up and lit a cigarette on his front porch and the roof shot in the iar several hundred feet and blew all his clothes off, but he lived. They later killed him. Big explosion, though.) out of the rubble. There was a big Rolling Stone story on it but I can’t find it.

Imagine My SurprisePost + Comments (160)

Watermelon-Flavored Toothpaste? Seriously?

by | 57 Comments

This post is in: 

Maybe he didn’t mean to be racist. Maybe Boston Herald cartoonist Jerry Holbert really was just thinking about kid-flavored toothpastes when he created this cartoon:

01-boston-herald-obama-cartoon.w529.h352.2x

But this is why you need to have people of color on your staff. Someone to say hey, Boston Herald, maybe people would find that offensive. Or hey, New York Times, maybe you shouldn’t throw around the term “Angry Black Woman.” Or hey, People Magazine social media intern, maybe you should notice that Viola Davis isn’t playing a maid in How to Get Away with Murder, and so that tweet sounds really racist. Post-racial America is great, isn’t it?

Team Blackness also discusses the resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson, the Michael Dunn verdict, and why you should never turn your back on Florida cops.


Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe On Stitcher | Direct Download | RSS

Watermelon-Flavored Toothpaste? Seriously?Post + Comments (57)

Biden Keeps It Real

by | 124 Comments

This post is in: , ,

When a Harvard student introduces himself as student government VP, Biden says, “Isn’t it a bitch?”

Good old Joe. In other news, the unemployment rate dropped below six percent for the first time since the Great Recession, which was brought to you by Bush the Lesser. As Biden might say, “That’s a big fucking deal, man!”

The thread — she is open.

Biden Keeps It RealPost + Comments (124)

Best practices as a safe harbor

by | 64 Comments

This post is in: 

In Politico’s one year anniversary of the Obamacare roll-out, they asked for a bunch of very informed and interesting people plus even more hacks to give their thoughts on what’s next.  Peter Orzag is one of the former and he makes a couple of very good points concerning care coordination and then an even better point about revising how we do medical malpractice:

My final recommendation is medical malpractice reform, which was unfortunately largely ignored in the ACA. The conventional academic wisdom is that malpractice laws don’t matter much, but that’s because most studies look at the question the wrong way. The right reform should not involve arbitrary caps on liability for doctors accused of malpractice, as Republicans have often proposed. Instead, we should alter the basis for finding a doctor liable for malpractice in the first place. If my doctor can show that she was following a best-practices protocol put forward by an accredited medical organization, I should not be able to sue her. That safe haven would help encourage evidence-based medicine while also giving doctors a way to minimize their exposure to malpractice suits.

There is a lot of low hanging quality improvements still lying around in the American health system.  The mother of one of my daughter’s friends is a cardiac catherization nurse.  Central lines (catheters that go in the arm and end up near the heart) had been a high probability of serious infection procedure until best practices were widely disseminated.  Now central line hospital acquired infections have plummetted.  These best practices are not complicated (better sanititation, better site selection and quicker removal of the line once it is no longer needed) nor do they require massive costs.

One of the medical directors at my company had a long line of academic research showing that the hand-off procedures between ambulances and ERs and then the ER to the long term wards was wildly variable in quality, quantity, format and compliance.  Some hospitals had systems that everyone did but still confused the living shit out of all involved parties, while other hospitals had clear, logical, straightforward and useful protocals that weren’t followed.  These differences had significant impact on mortality and length of stay.  A new system of communication was drawn up with a variety of hospitals, nursing groups, ambulance and paramedics all giving input.  Now throughout the region there is a standard form of communication with high data density, and high compliance that (in non-published/interim results) seems to have lowered both length of stay and mortality. 

The Incidental Economist passed along a paper recently that showed ultrasounds as the first screening step for suspected kidney stones worked as well and was safer than CAT scans as the preliminary screening step.  It also happens to be cheaper.  However, this is not a universal practice for someone presenting suspected kidney stones. 

The big problem that Orzag’s proposal would indirectly attack is that US medicine is still very much a folk art wrapped up in science.  The same patient presenting the same exact set of symptoms and history to five different providers will get the same diagnosis but three or four seperate courses of actions.  National standards as a safe harbor will start pushing standardization on proven and efficient methodologies.  Doing that, in conjunction with Medicare paying less for high readmission rate hospitals and comparative effectiveness research, should lead to the US doing a bit less stupid things in medical practice, which means better outcomes and lower costs.  It is not a panacea,

Best practices as a safe harborPost + Comments (64)

Friday Morning Open Thread: Meta, Dude…

by | 61 Comments

This post is in: , ,

From the Guardian:

Banksy has struck again – but a council in the east of England has struck back, removing his artwork that it said contained “offensive and racist remarks”.

The latest mural by the controversial graffiti artist, whose real identity is not widely publicised, was painted overnight in Clacton-on-Sea, in Essex, a week ahead of a byelection in the town triggered by the decision of local Conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, to defect to the UK Independence Party (Ukip).

The work showed five grey pigeons holding up signs including one stating “go back to Africa” towards a more colourful migratory swallow. One of the pigeons’ signs read “migrants not welcome”, while another held a placard that read “keep off our worms”. Ukip argues that Britain’s immigration policies are too lax.

Nigel Brown, communications manager for Tendring district council, said it had received a complaint on Tuesday that “offensive and racist remarks” had been painted on a seafront building…

It has been suggested that the council did not realise that Banksy was responsible for the work before scrubbing it off the wall. Other pieces he has painted have been valued in six figures…

I wonder if they spotted the Monty Python call-back, though?
***********
Apart from art criticism, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up one miserable week?

Friday Morning Open Thread: Meta, Dude…Post + Comments (61)

#OccupyHongKong (#UmbrellaRevolution)

by | 11 Comments

This post is in: ,

From the NYTimes:

As the people of Hong Kong gathered over the past week in the city’s central business district staging the biggest pro-democracy protest in a Chinese-controlled area in decades, headlines around the world compared today’s movement to the 1989 student demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

While the authorities have not yet used the brutal force that the Chinese army used to suppress the 1989 protests, observers are concerned about the possibility.

The latest warning coming from Beijing has been especially reminiscent of the 1989 rhetoric, and worryingly so, analysts say. The People’s Daily, a government-controlled newspaper, said the protests are creating “chaos.” “That is a significant term in Chinese Communist Party ideology, suggesting that the situation could threaten the Party’s hold on power, and therefore that decisive action is required,” writes Al Pessin at the Voice of America. Mr. Pessin writes that the same word was used 25 years ago to describe Tiananmen Square.

The memory of Tiananmen and its historical legacy is crucial to today’s “Umbrella Revolution,” named so after the ubiquitous umbrellas that the protesters held to defend themselves from tear gas and pepper spray used by the police. Hong Kong, the only area under Chinese control with freedom of speech, commemorates the massacre with an annual vigil. As Max Fisher writes for Vox, that part of Chinese history has been so heavily censored in mainland China that many in the younger generation had never heard of it. Hong Kongers feel responsible to keep the memory alive, Mr. Fisher says, but they are also scared they could face the same repression…

In a plea for action in The Wall Street Journal, Yang Jianli and Teng Biao, former political prisoners in China, ask the world to prevent Tiananmen from happening again. Mr. Yianli and Mr. Biao ask the Obama administration to put pressure on the Chinese government to allow democratic elections in Hong Kong and “forcefully condemn” violence against demonstrators. “The United States and the international community share the responsibility to prevent another murderous attack on pro-democracy demonstrators,” they write. “While the Tiananmen Square massacre surprised the world, this time the world is on notice.”

show full post on front page

#OccupyHongKong (#UmbrellaRevolution)Post + Comments (11)