Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Good lord, these people are nuts.

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

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

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

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

White supremacy is terrorism.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

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I’m Not Ready for Hillary

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And I am really not ready for Lanny Davis:

Last week, on Dec. 4, I helped organize a Ready for Hillary fundraiser in Montgomery County, Md., in the immediate suburbs of Washington, D.C. The organization, an independent grassroots committee, has been at work for the past year gathering millions of names and small donations in support of Hillary Rodham Clinton for president — that is, just in case she decides to run in 2016.

When I began working on this event, I was not sure many prominent statewide or local elected officials would be willing to sign up on the invitation as members of the host committee, especially because the outgoing Maryland governor, Martin O’Malley, has made it apparent that he is running for president.

But what happened surprised me. Many of the major Maryland statewide elected officials signed up, including the attorney general, state treasurer and state Senate president. Early in the week at a Baltimore event, so did Maryland’s two popular U.S. senators: Barbara Mikulski and Benjamin Cardin. In Montgomery County, also leading the host committee were the current popular and recently reelected African-American county executive, Ike Leggett; the revered former county executive Sidney Kramer; and six out of seven members of the county council, including the incoming council president.

The guest of honor was the congressman representing the location of the fundraiser (Potomac), Rep. John Delaney. The congressman offered three facts about Clinton — the reasons she should be our next president.

Read between the lines- this is not so much just Hillary boosterism as it is an attempt to strangle an O’Malley run in the crib- “We’re in your back yard, bitch.” Which is yet another reason I am not ready for Hillary. I’m not ready for the re-emergence of uber scumbags like Davis, Penn, and the rest of that wretched hive of scum and villainy. I’m not willing to embrace the PUMA crowd and I am not ready to look past their racist bullshit in 2008. I’m not ready to forgive and forget, I’m not ready to deal with four-eight years of serial obfuscation and triangulation and overall hawkishness, etc.

And this doesn’t even get into the fact that on every issue in which Obama has not been as good as I wanted, Hillary will be far, far worse. Has she even spoken out about the torture report since it was released? You’d think she’d have some feelings about it, considering she voted for the war, was in the Senate while it and the torture were happening, and she was on the Armed Services Committee.

I’m just not ready for it. We just spent eight years fighting to undo much of the damage from the last Clinton administration. I’ll vote for her in the general if she is the nominee. But I’m not going to be enthusiastic about it.

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In the Afterlife (Open Thread)

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I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I can understand why people take comfort in the idea, both for the pleasure of imagining a vile shit-stain like Dick Cheney getting jabbed in the sack with a pitchfork while roasting in hell for all eternity as well as for the more benign solace of believing that a deceased loved one isn’t truly gone forever.

But surely the most powerful impulse of all to believe is our own mortality. Like Bill Nye said the other day, “Despite our best efforts we’re all going to die, and I think that makes all of us a little nutty.” Yep.

My grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher, and I was compelled to go to church every Sunday until I flatly refused upon reaching my teenage years. Granddaddy was an old-fashioned hellfire-and-brimstone preacher (a persona that was jarringly at odds with his non-pulpit manner, which was typically humorous, kind and indulgent, at least toward grandchildren).

His sermons often included lurid details about the torments that awaited those who refused to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. The descriptions of the heaven that awaited the saved were less vivid, and my grandmother inadvertently put one of the first cracks in my Christian belief system when she told me that heaven would be like an endless church service.

“Fuck that ‘sit-down, shut-up and no-playing-rock-paper-scissors-with-your-sister’ noise,” I thought, though possibly in less salty terms since I was around nine years old at the time. “I’ll throw my lot in with the damned.”

Anyway, I’m here to tell you, there ARE atheists in foxholes because I’ve been one, albeit not in a literal foxhole, but in a couple of life-or-death situations. So I don’t think much about the afterlife I don’t believe in. But a couple of days ago, I caught the tail end of the 1999 film “American Beauty,” in which Kevin Spacey narrates his character’s afterlife experience:

I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn’t a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time…

For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars… And yellow leaves, from the maple trees that lined our streets… Or my grandmother’s hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper… And the first time I saw my cousin Tony’s brand new Firebird…. And Janie… And Janie… And Carolyn.

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me… but it’s hard to stay mad when there is so much beauty in the world.

Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst…

And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid life…

You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry… you will someday.

That vision of the afterlife appeals to me: the opportunity to revisit the beauty you perceived in the world even if most of your life was squandered on petty bullshit, squalid longings and tragic misunderstandings. What beautiful thing would you focus on?

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PPACA and the Continuing Resolution

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The continuing resolution that needs to be passed sometime soon to keep the government open will deal with PPACA.  There are currently two big things not included in the resolution.  One may prompt a veto threat (I assess that at 10% probability) and the other has been baked into the cake for over a year now.

The big new thing that is not in the continuing resolution at this time is an appropriation to fund the risk corridors.  The Hill explains:

The language, buried deep in the 1,603-page bill, is a victory for conservative opponents of the healthcare law. It would prevent new government funds from flowing to ObamaCare’s so-called risk corridors, a three-year program established to subsidize insurer losses in order to keep premiums stable.

A commonly used tool in public policy, risk corridors have become a political football since Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) highlighted the ObamaCare provision as a “bailout” in November of last year. Since then, activists with Heritage Action and other groups have repeatedly sought to kill the payments in major fiscal negotiations.

The “cromnibus” spending bill would allow the government to continue collecting payments from insurers that post better-than-expected results under ObamaCare and passing them to companies that do worse. But it would not permit the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to make additional funds available for insurers that are struggling.

Risk corridors are used to create incentives for insurers to participate in fuzzily defined markets.  Insurers that price in a way that attracts only healthy populations send money to insurers who have to cover the sicker parts of the population.  Medicare Part D has permanant two-way risk corridors.  PPACA had temporary three year risk corridors authorized but the money was not appropriated to pay for them past the FY2014.  The Congressional Research Service issued an opinion that the PPACA language  was too fuzzy and did not explicitly appropriate  money to go back out.

What are the work-arounds?

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Thursday Morning Open Thread

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Disclaimer: I think Elizabeth Warren is awesome. Her election as my Senator was one of the few political bright spots of the past few years for me, and I’m looking forward to her using her expertise on financial matters to fight the banksters and their enablers for many, many more years.

I also think that if MoveOn.org really wants to improve the odds of electing a progressive president in 2016, they should stop cranking out emails encouraging 81.3% of the respondents to wish for something that’s not gonna happen, and concentrate their efforts on finding and supporting other fighting progressive Democratic politicians who are actually interested in running. Because if the sole, single, solitary progressive still standing is eligible for Social Security, us poor Dems are in even worse straits than I thought.

Speaking of which, Dr. Howard “Fifty-States-Strategy” Dean just threw down a gauntlet, or threw in his cards. Per Politico, “I’m Ready for Hillary“:

Hillary Clinton is by far the most qualified person in the United States to serve as President. If she runs, I will support her…

One of the most important reasons I am supporting her is because Secretary Clinton understands the institutional requirements of the Supreme Court. More than 73 percent of Americans think the Supreme Court is no longer a fair arbitrator and is influenced by political considerations. I am one of those 73 percent. This Court has repeatedly made decisions that have harmed our country for the sake of extending a political and ideological agenda that is far outside the mainstream of American traditions—on issues like campaign finance, voting rights, the rights of women, and religious freedom…

Finally, although the statistics suggest the economy is improving, over 60% of Americans aren’t feeling good about their own situation. Nearly all of the gains in the past fifteen years have bypassed the vast majority of Americans, while the holdings of the top 20% have increased dramatically. This is a fundamental disparity that will be the greatest challenge our next President must tackle—how to reestablish a commitment to all of us to restore the opportunity to live and achieve the American Dream.

Hillary Clinton will not shrink from this challenge. In the coming months, I expect her to lay out her plans to attack income inequality and help rebuild the middle class. She knows how to sell a broad range of Americans on these policies, and has shown how to stand up against extremist economic policies.

America needs a President who will focus on the next hundred years, not one who hopes to turn the clock back by a hundred years. I am sure I will have disagreements with her as she focuses on getting Americans back to work and rebuilding an America that works for all of us. I value and respect her enough that whatever differences may exist will be minimal compared to the tasks we really need to do for the good of restoring our country. We need a mature, seasoned, thoughtful leader at a time when maturity and thoughtfulness are increasingly rare commodities in Washington, D.C…

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Apart from getting out the earplugs (and maybe the disposable plastic ponchos), what’s on the agenda for the day?

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Before we go patting Mark Udall and Diane Feinstein on the back…

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Remember that they knew all of the stuff in the torture report for years, and they did and said NOTHING.  Feinstein was in the “gang of eight,” as the Chair of the Ranking Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence since 2009.  She’s known all or most of this stuff since then.  A couple other notable members of that group are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

As for Udall, he has been on the Senate floor today as a couple of earlier posts by John and Anne Laurie pointed out. But he’s been on the SSCI for at least the last two years, and was very involved in the research on the torture report.

It’s good that an executive summary of the report has seen the light of day. It’s important for us to know what’s being done in our names, and I seriously doubt we’d have gotten actual information from the Republicans after they take over late next month.  It would be very nice for the Politicians who oversaw torture programs and the lawyers who twisted the law to claim it was legal to be punished, but I’m not holding my breath. The prime difference between Charles Graner and Dick Cheney is rank, after all.

Having said that, why, if this report shocks the consciences of those who’ve read it, are we only seeing the exec summary, and why only now? Udall waits until now when there’s no risk to him doing this. Well, better late than never for your ideals, I suppose, even if it’s to demand a couple of people resign and not, as he said he would, to enter the text of the report into the Record. Feinstein is as safe as a Democratic Senator can get. She could have read the actual contents of the entire report into the Congressional Record at will at any time and nobody could have stopped her and there would’ve been no cost to her at the ballot box in 2018.

Everything I’ve just said above applies to the other Democrats who’ve served on the SSCI in particular and to a lesser extent on the House Committee on Intelligence since 2001.  We still don’t have effective oversight of the CIA or the NSA or the rest of the Intelligence community because our representatives in Congress are complicit in keeping these secret.  If Congressional oversight is the mechanism by which we exercise control over our government, we are being sadly failed by the people that we’ve sent up there to provide that oversight. And the Republicans are every bit as complicit, but being Republicans, it was absolutely predictable that they’d actively work against the interests of the general public on issues like this, and the few who aren’t are notable for that.

And lastly, look in the mirror. After 9/11, the vast majority of the American public was demanding that the government do whatever had to be done to keep another mass-casualty attack from taking place. A lot of people who otherwise counted themselves as liberals supported the Bush administration in their taking a free hand to do whatever the hell they wanted in those early years.  And while Liberals began to peel off of that support within a couple of years, it wasn’t even as Iraq dragged on, and Abu Ghraib first exposed some of the ugliness did the majority of our country begin to express doubts and question what we were doing there. And in fact, it wasn’t until after Hurricane Katrina landed on our own shores and we witnessed the full extent of their incompetence and mendacity where they couldn’t hide it that the majority of the American public finally began to admit that Bush and Cheney and their minions had lied us into an unwinnable war on the other side of the world.  And our Congress, including the heroes of many people here, supported them for much of their agenda.  The USA PATRIOT Act passed a Democratic-held Senate, and a Democratic-held Senate gave retroactive immunity to the NSA and private corporations that assisted them later on.  These were our elected representatives that did these things or allowed them to happen.  They are our will made whole, and their acts and things, dark and light, are ours.  Before we spend too much time wallowing in the outrage bath, we would do well by our children and our ancestors to remember that.

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Serial Asshole

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Remember that Harvard Business School jackass we talked about last night who was spending his time and the school’s resources to harass a small business owner. The story gets better and better- after getting a negative reaction from the entire world, he posted an apology on his web page and then emailed an apology to Ran Duan. And then this happened:

According to emails provided to Boston.com by Sichuan Garden’s Ran Duan, Edelman sent three messages to the restaurant’s Yahoo! account on Wednesday afternoon.

First came an email that included an apology.

About an hour later, an email that included an apparent racial slur.

“You may have won the battle, Duan, but at least we can agree your menu is a little less slanty-eyed.

“Thank you.”

Fifteen minutes later, a final email explaining that the seemingly racist email had been sent accidentially in an effort by Edelman “to make light of the situation to a small group of students.”

edelman-folo-2
edelman-folo-3

So basically, he was sitting around with another group of budding young sociopaths and decided to make a racist joke about the email he wanted to send, and ended up accidentally sending it. Then, in his apology for the racial slur, he tries to blame Duan for not informing him how the website works.

In addition, this is not the first restaurant he has hassled in this way. This guy should probably spend less time emailing restaurants in the next few days and a little more time polishing up his vita.

*** Update ***

Boston.com has retracted the story.

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Fables of the Reconstruction: Tom Petty Edition

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It’s been a while I know, and in the meantime real life has been so agonizingly real that the problems of three (or more) little kitchen appliances don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

But it’s getting on for evening, and in our house the sun has definitely passed over the yardarm, so perhaps a little renovation schadenfreude might suit y’all just fine.

So here’s the current look:

IMG_1986

 

Those of you familiar with the renovation rhythm will recognize this phase.  We’re really in the end game.  The cabinets are in and … wait for it … almost all the trim has been fitted.  The appliances (all but one)  have been placed — not hooked up, mostly — but placed.  The painters are doing their thing, the electrician is scheduled and … you get the drill.

And yet, inevitably, what I blithely label an ending is not a matter of the number of actual days the different crafts have to do to complete the project.  It is, of course, the number of weeks it will take to get the guys in for the day here and the day there to do all the bits and pieces.

We’ve already been hammered by that.  The key, as everyone who’s done this kind of thing knows deep in the bone, is that first stumble off the neat center line of the project.  Or, to put it into the SNAFU military frame familiar to many here, every renovation reaffirms the eternal truth: no plan survives first contact with the enemy.   This particular enemy is, of course, the effrontery of wood and stone and flooring and all the other bits that don’t miraculously assemble themselves.

As late as November 5th or so, everyone involved thought we had a reasonable shot at a working kitchen by Thanksgiving.  Now, today, we got a sink plumbed, with the dispose-all to be hooked up Friday — maybe.  As for the rest…

It’ll come.  It all will happen.  We’ll likely have ovens on Friday.  The stove will take longer, as we have a little code problem that will take a bit of carpentry to fix (don’t ask).  And….

Never mind.  Everyone who’s entered renovation hell knows this story, and it’s never an interesting one, no matter how often it gets retold.  This job will likely be actually done, no one coming back, everything in and working, by sometime in January.  Could be February — wouldn’t surprise me.  It’s a minimum of a 50% schedule fail on a four month job.  Par for the course.

When it’s all finished, we’ll be able as a family to do what we truly love:   cook and cook and cook and cook for friends and friends and friends and friends.  If in the meantime y’all get a bit of vicarious pleasure at knowing that the eternal verities of construction remain true…so much the better.

Last — and I mean last:  we’ve been pretty good this going-on-for-half-a-year at cooking interesting, enjoyable meals on a hot plate, an electric frying pan, and a gas grill. But we’ve been beaten down.  Tonight was supposed to be spatchcocked chicken roasted on the grill, but it’s pissing down with a steady, penetrating drizzle and it’s cold and it’s late, and f**k it sideways.  We give up:  pizza is on its way.

And I’m not ashamed.

So there.

And really last (no I’m not joking) — the obligatory soundtrack to a post about attending on the arrival of Godot’s scullion:

The thread, it is open.  Talk about whatever, and especially the worst construction traumas you chose to share.

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