Here’s a topic — Who’s the first Christie ex-employee who’s going to spill?
Archives for 2014
Update on the Awful Kellers
The New York Times has yet to correct Bill Keller’s misleading lede of his shitty column about Lisa Adams:
Lisa Bonchek Adams has spent the last seven years in a fierce and very public cage fight with death.
Her blog was started in 2009. Her metastases were discovered in 2012.
After the Guardian pulled the even more awful piece by Mrs Keller, and after public editor Margaret Sullivan pointed out the inaccuracy above, I thought we’d see another correction by the Times. Nope. Apparently, former Times editor Keller will continue to regale us with his 1980s understanding of breast cancer, his petty insecurity over a blog that didn’t kowtow to media gatekeepers, and his grotesque lack of basic humanity.
How Not to Do It
We’re having a bit of a dust up over the new Rochester Mayor, Lovely Ann Warren. Lovely is a protege of the awful David Gantt, and she apparently learned a few bad habits from him. Lovely went around civil service rules to hire her uncle to head the first-ever security detail for a mayor here, based on some threats she received. Then, her uncle was stopped while driving her, doing 97 in a 65 zone, but for some reason wasn’t ticketed.
This raised a number of questions, all neatly summarized by local TV reporter Rachel Barnhart. The word in Rochester is that if you want to know what’s happening in this town, just follow Rachel on Twitter. Anyone living in Rochester knows that Rachel is like a fucking bulldog when she gets on something, and she’s definitely all over this story.
Yesterday, Lovely held a hastily-arranged press conference. Rochester isn’t a very big media market, so if there were a dozen reporters and photographers at that conference, it was a full house. Rachel was one of them, and Warren refused to take her questions. Here’s Rachel’s report on that shit show, where Lovely spent time dickering about how fast her uncle was really going, and it includes possibly the worst picture of Lovely that I’ve ever seen. When asked why she wouldn’t take Rachel’s questions, Lovely’s answer was “I’m the mayor”. Here’s Rachel’s response this morning, proving once again that local reporters just don’t take shit the way the DC press corpse does:
I'm the reporter. #ROC
— Rachel Barnhart (@rachbarnhart) January 14, 2014
A couple of hours after the press event, the city council announced that they’re starting an ethics investigation. That must be some kind of record: in office for 13 days, and now the subject of an ethics investigation. It’s going to be an interesting year for Ms Warren.
Tuesday Morning Open Thread
(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com)
Well, the spending bill has been unveiled, and to call it a dog’s breakfast would be a slur on the gustatory fastidiousness of the average street cur. Per the Washington Post:
Congressional negotiators unveiled a $1.1 trillion funding bill late Monday that would ease sharp spending cuts known as the sequester while providing fresh cash for new priorities, including President Obama’s push to expand early-childhood education.
The 1,582-page bill would fully restore cuts to Head Start, partially restore cuts to medical research and job training programs, and finance new programs to combat sexual assault in the military. It would also give all federal workers a 1 percent raise…
The White House and leaders of both parties praised the measure, which would fund federal agencies for the remainder of the fiscal year and end the lingering threat of a government shutdown when the current funding bill expires at midnight Wednesday….
The measure would continue a ban on transferring terrorism detainees at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to sites in the United States. It would also withhold additional funding for the government of Afghanistan until the country agrees to a new bilateral security agreement. And the measure would ban foreign aid for Libya until Secretary of State John F. Kerry “confirms Libyan cooperation” with ongoing investigations into the Sept. 11, 2012, attack at the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi.
The measure would also provide new congressional backing for Obama’s strategy of continuing aid to Egypt, despite a law that forbids U.S. military aid to governments that have taken power by military coup, as Egypt’s interim military-backed government did in July.
Several issues regarding gun control are also included in the bill. The legislation restricts the Justice and Homeland Security departments from establishing programs similar to the “Fast and Furious” gun-tracking effort. In response to allegations that the administration has been stockpiling ammunition for use by federal agents, the measure also requires Homeland Security to provide detailed reports on its purchase and use of ammunition….
Further details at the link, and additional notes on ‘winners and losers’ from Ed O’Keefe here.
The NYTimes chooses to look on the bright side:
… The hefty bill, filed in the House on Monday night, neutralized almost all of the 134 policy provisions that House Republicans had hoped to include, with negotiators opting for cooperation over confrontation after the 16-day government shutdown in October…
The compromises may be difficult to accept for conservative Republicans, many of whom campaigned in 2010 vowing never to vote on a phone-book-size bill they have not had time to read. And because many of them will balk, the bill will have to have bipartisan support to pass.
Republican and Democratic leaders said they believed they would easily get majorities in the House and Senate, but not without loud protests from both the right and the left.
Politico‘s conclusion:
… What’s most telling is to compare the numbers now with spending levels six years ago for fiscal 2008 — the last full budget cycle under Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush.
Total discretionary spending for 2008 was $1.176 trillion, more than half of which, or $642.1 billion, was designated for the Pentagon and military operations — in Iraq then as well as Afghanistan.
That left $534.4 billion among the 11 other appropriations bills, almost exactly what will be the case now in the 2014 omnibus. The big difference is inflation. And when the Bush dollars are adjusted upward to reflect changes in the cost of living since 2008, it shows that Obama will be left with about 10 percent, or $53 billion, less than his predecessor.
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And it’ll all have to be done again, come September! Apart from reminding ourselves that half a loaf is supposed to be better than no bread, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Monday Night Open Thread: Who Doesn’t Like John Hodgman?
Well, in the New Yorker, he’s gonna (further) disarm you with Dowton Abbey — and cats!:
Look, I never want to tell stories about my children, because it always seems a little lazy. Children tend to be sort of dumb, and, in the end, the stories are always the same: children say hilarious things, and I am old and dying.
So when I tell you these stories about my children let’s just pretend they are about my cats.
So my cats and I were watching “Downton Abbey” last year. (I have two cats, one girl cat, who is twelve—in cat years, obviously—and a boy cat, who is seven.) And at one point my younger cat turned to me and said, “What is that human woman trying to say to that other man?”
And I said, “That is Mary Crawley. She is trying to tell Matthew that she is in love with him.”
And my younger cat thought about it and said, “Well, that is a very hard thing to do.” And then he said, “You have to pick just the right time.”
Then my older cat turned to him and said, “WILL YOU BE QUIET, PLEASE?”…
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So, what’s on the agenda this evening that isn’t maddening and/or depressing?
Monday Night Open Thread: Who <em>Doesn’t</em> Like John Hodgman?Post + Comments (72)
Unoriginal thoughts on December enrollment
Just a couple of quick thoughts on December enrollment figures as HHS has released their detailed data dump. The New York Times has some nice graphics and breakdowns:
- Pace is about 70% of projection
- People are buying decent to good coverage. 1% Catastrophic, 20% Bronze, 60% Silver
- Lots of subsidies, so the right audience is getting online
- As good or better age mix compared to Massachusetts at similar points
This is part of an e-mail I got from a cousin who makes in the high teens to low twenties right now:
I did get through the process, but the premiums were much higher than I anticipated, so i decided to hold off and get enrolled for the March deadline. My catastrophe policy can carry me through a few more months while I finish paying off the new transmission I had to buy in July (ouch!). Without those payments, though, I should be able to swing the insurance premiums.
Higher than anticipated for her zip code, age and silver cost sharing assistance plan was $84 per month after subsidy. Her catastrophic plan is $54 a month for a $10,000 deductible.
The Massachusetts experience was that the reasonably young, healthy and flat broke waited until they absolutely had to until they committed. My cousin fits into all of those categories.
Unoriginal thoughts on December enrollmentPost + Comments (36)
Remembering Aaron Swartz
Via David Sirota, at PandoDaily:
… Called “The Internet’s Own Boy,” the film follows Knappenberger’s recent New York Times op-doc about the NSA. It comes out amid three related political developments: 1) the White House may be trying to resurrect SOPA 2) there is a new bipartisan push for an investigation into the Obama administration’s prosecution of Swartz and 3) Washington is debating the prospect of reforming the NSA.
The movie will be officially released at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20th, in conjunction with the new organizing effort around the upcoming National Day of Action against the NSA on February 11th…
And here’s Lawrence Lessig, in the Atlantic, explaining “Why We’re Marching Across New Hampshire to Honor Aaron Swartz“:
A year ago [Saturday], Aaron Swartz left. He had wound us all up, pointed us in a million directions, we were all working as hard as we could, moving things forward. And then he was gone…
… On Saturday, we begin a walk across the state of New Hampshire to launch a campaign to bring about an end to the system of corruption that we believe infects D.C. This is the New Hampshire Rebellion.
Fifteen years after New Hampshire’s Doris Haddock (aka “Granny D”), at age 88, began her famous walk from Los Angeles to D.C. with the sign “campaign finance reform” on her chest, a dozen or so of us will start to walk in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, the place the first 2016 presidential ballots will be cast. For two weeks, with more than 100 joining us along the way, we will walk south across New Hampshire, ending up in Nashua on January 24, the day Granny D was born.
Along the way, we will recruit everyone we can to do this one thing: We want them to ask every presidential candidate at every event between now and January 2016 one question: “How will YOU end the system of corruption in D.C.?”…
You can help. Please help. You can still join the walk. You can spread the word of the walk on Twitter with the hashtag #NHRWalk. You can sign a petition from wherever you are to push the candidates to answer this one question. You can send support that will help this movement grow.
It will always be my penance to believe that I didn’t do enough for my friend. I will do more. This is the start. If we’re lucky, we’ll mark the third anniversary of that terrible day with the real hope that the New Hampshire primary will turn upon this issue. And if we’re super lucky, we’ll mark the fourth with the anticipation of a president who made it her or his issue. And won.