Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
After a few days of playing all the Poppy Bush-era alternapop it could find, my Pandora REM station finally gave up and served Wicked Game. Video frustratingly almost-but-not-ever-quite NSFW.
Chat about whatever.
***Update***
BTW for some reason Pandora + REM delivers a ton of U2 and The Police but zero Talking Heads. Anyone know why it does that? I would have expected to at least hear David Byrne before Chris Isaak.
BTW 2, the best Pandora Station is Willie Nelson. Prove me wrong.
She also happens to be right:
Nearly a week has gone by since the Supreme Court’s unexpected decision to enlist in the latest effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act, and the shock remains unabated. “This is Bush v. Gore all over again,” one friend said as we struggled to absorb the news last Friday afternoon. “No,” I replied. “It’s worse.”
What I meant was this: In the inconclusive aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, a growing sense of urgency, even crisis, gave rise to a plausible argument that someone had better do something soon to find out who would be the next president. True, a federal statute on the books defined the “someone” as Congress, but the Bush forces got to the Supreme Court first with a case that fell within the court’s jurisdiction. The 5-to-4 decision to stop the Florida recount had the effect of calling the election for the governor of Texas, George W. Bush. I disagreed with the decision and considered the contorted way the majority deployed the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee to be ludicrous. But in the years since, I’ve often felt like the last progressive willing to defend the court for getting involved when it did.
That’s not the case here. There was no urgency. There was no crisis of governance, not even a potential one. There is, rather, a politically manufactured argument over how to interpret several sections of the Affordable Care Act that admittedly fit awkwardly together in defining how the tax credits are supposed to work for people who buy their health insurance on the exchanges set up under the law.
Further, the case the court agreed to decide, King v. Burwell, doesn’t fit the normal criterion for Supreme Court review. There is no conflict among the federal appellate circuits. (Remember that just a month ago, the absence of a circuit conflict led the justices to decline to hear seven same-sex marriage cases?) In the King case, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., unanimously upheld the government’s position that the tax subsidy is available to those who buy insurance on the federally run exchanges that are now in operation in 36 states.
A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-to-1 the other way, accepting the plaintiffs’ argument that the language of the statute limits the tax subsidies to those who buy insurance through the state exchanges, which only 14 states have chosen to set up. The full appeals court quickly vacated the panel’s judgment and agreed to rehear the case. The new argument was set for next month, and the briefs were already filed. The absence of a circuit conflict and an imminent rehearing by the country’s most important court of appeals would, in the past, have led the Supreme Court to refrain from getting involved.
So no, this isn’t Bush v. Gore. This is a naked power grab by conservative justices who two years ago just missed killing the Affordable Care Act in its cradle, before it fully took effect. When the court agreed to hear the first case, there actually was a conflict in the circuits on the constitutionality of the individual insurance mandate. So the Supreme Court’s grant of review was not only unexceptional but necessary: a neutral act. The popular belief then that the court’s intervention indicated hostility to the law was, at the least, premature.
Yep.
Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, which was responsible for the disaster at the Upper Big Branch Mine in WV, was indicted today on multiple counts:
Don Blankenship, the longtime chief executive of Massey Energy, was indicted today on charges that he violated federal mine safety laws at the company’s Upper Big Branch Mine prior to an April 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners.
A federal grand jury in Charleston charged Blankenship with conspiring to cause routine and willful violations of mandatory federal mine safety and health standards at Upper Big Branch during a period from Jan. 1, 2008, to April 9, 2010, U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin said.
The four-count indictment, filed in U.S. District Court, also alleges Blankenship was part of a conspiracy to cover up mine safety violations and hinder federal enforcement efforts by providing advance warning of government inspections. The indictment also alleges that, after the explosion, Blankenship made false statements to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission about Massey’s safety practices prior to the explosion.
“Blankenship knew that UBB was committing hundreds of safety-law violations every year and that he had the ability to prevent most of the violations that UBB was committing,” the indictment states. “Yet he fostered and participated in an understanding that perpetuated UBB’s practice of routine safety violations, in order to produce more coal, avoid the costs of following safety laws, and make more money.”
I’ve uploaded the indictment (.pdf) for you to read, and you can really get a sense of what a total scumbag the man is and how he bullied and badgered everyone to break the law and to continue to pay no attention to the HUNDREDS of safety violations that would directly lead to the deaths of those miners. He wrote multiple notes like “you have a kid to feed” and “I’m looking to make an example” and so forth, and they had an elaborate system to provide advanced warning to workers to cover up violations when safety inspectors showed up.
If you remember, Blankenship is the lovely gentleman who bought himself a couple judges and and has been basically an example of everything wrong with our corporatocracy for quite some time. I hope they nail his ass to the wall and he spends the rest of his miserable life rotting in jail.
Over at the Big Picture, there is an extremely depressing post about how the markets are rigged in a myriad of ways:
The big banks and other giants manipulate numerous markets in myriad ways, for example:
- Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here
- Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . And raiding allocated gold accounts
- Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them (and see this)
- Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. See this, this, this, this and this. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car
- Cheating homeowners by gaming laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure
Actually 2 dumb questions. The first is simple. Why has some ambitious, young US Attorney with either no political ambitions OR lots of political ambition and independent family wealth not started to RICO most of the major US financial players.
The second is far narrower. Most municipal pension funds and smaller corporate pension funds pay a lot in fees for market average performance at best. Is there a better way?
My retirement is overwhelming composed of a 401(K) in a Target 2045 fund. I outsource all the decision making on asset allocation to professionals who will buy a combination of stock index funds and bond index funds in differing proportions for me for the next 30 years. I pay under half a point in fees a year for this service and get roughly market average returns. Why don’t more pension funds contract Vanguard or another big low cost money management firm to manage all of their funds in a Target 2025 or Target 2030 portfolio (shorter time horizons as most defined benefit plans have an average age of participant greater than my age) and dramatically reduce the number of cheat points available for the Wall Stree thieves?
Update 1: Commenter BurnspbEsq answers question #1
Because you need three predicate offenses. Tell me what the predicate offenses are, and describe in detail the admissible evidence that can be used to prove every element of each of those offenses beyond a reasonable doubt.
Dumb question of the day on target retirement fundsPost + Comments (54)
Sometimes I think they mix lead paint chips in with the coffee grounds at Politico. pic.twitter.com/Ie47KofWAj
— Jesse Berney (@jesseberney) November 13, 2014
Possibly related, Marc Ambinder at The Week tells us that “Alien conspiracy theorists think the government is on the verge of spilling big secrets“:
For as long as I’ve been reading about alien conspiracies, it’s been an accepted article of faith among believers that the government was the enemy of the people and was conspiring with an alien race, or simply with other governments in our world, to keep evidence of a sentient extraterrestrial presence hidden.
In 2012, authors Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel became instant iconoclasts within the believer community when they published a book, After Disclosure, that laid out meticulously what the government should do to prepare the public for the “disclosure” of the conspiracy. The book leans in to the notion itself. The government conspirators, say these two, think that the conspiracy is untenable and that a full and open discussion of the fact of alien sentience is the best way to unite the world. Somehow.
This big secret will be revealed in 2015, if the chatter on shows like Coast-to-Coast AM is any indication. Why? Well, the “Grays” — the name given to the aliens who either conspire with the government to keep their presence hidden or are on the verge of attacking the Earth — have somehow given an ultimatum to their human co-conspirators. Maybe it’s time to move humanity into the next phase of their existence. Maybe humans are battering the planet so badly that the Grays, who need the milk of the Earth to survive, are in peril. If humans fail to disclose the Grays’ existence, then the Grays will make themselves known by, perhaps, a global television event that shows off their gravity-defying hardware…
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Apart from waiting for McConnell, Cruz and Paul to peel off their skinsuits and declare open war on humanity during the 2015 State of the Union, what’s on the agenda the evening?
From commentor Satby:
The Juice commentariat has been very good to us, so I wanted to update everyone on my big guy. He had, it turns out, an aggressive malignancy and though he had been doing well for the last 6 weeks, 48 hours ago that changed drastically. He suddenly stopped eating, though he had a voracious appetite to that point, and though I tempted him with roasted chicken and hot dogs (his favorite!) he didn’t eat more than a morsel, mostly to appease me I think. Other signs that he was done fighting became more obvious as Tuesday went on, then this morning, his labored breathing let me know it was time to call the vet, who came out, examined him, and agreed with me that he was letting us know he was ready to go.
Biggie was seized, along with his sister Lady and lots of other dogs in a puppy mill raid somewhere near Quincy IL 10 years ago. He was estimated to be about 2 at the time, had been used as a stud, and had never been outside of his cage. He was terrified of everything: leashes, cars, strangers, cats, loud noises, water, other dogs. Neither was housebroken, knew how to walk on a leash, or any commands at all. I was contacted as a last resort by a contact I knew from rescue transports: Lady and Biggie were due to be euthanized by the small rural animal control that held them because no other rescue had spoken up for them. Would I take them temporarily? On the day they were to be put to sleep, they travelled north for me to foster until we could find adopters or a rescue to take them.
Lady adapted quickly and was adopted by a lovely woman after only a few weeks. Biggie spent his first few weeks hiding under the kitchen table and fighting his collar and leash every time we tried to go out. And lifting his leg on every brand new cabinet in my freshly remodelled kitchen. My large, boisterous teen-aged boys spent hours under the table with him, talking softly to Biggie and letting him know he was safe, helping him to relax. Slowly Bigs came out of his shell. He bonded with one of my cats first, the two would curl up under the table to sleep.
There were rumors that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the raving kook who is the self-proclaimed Caliph of ISIL / ISIS / Islamic State and who appears to share former FL Governor Charlie Crist’s fondness for portable fans, was killed in a recent US bombing raid.
But he appears to have released a new audiotape referencing recent events, including President Obama’s decision to deploy an additional 1,500 US troops to Iraq, so he’s still alive. Bummer.
Please feel free to discuss the ISIS lunatics, the wisdom of continuing US involvement in Iraq or any other topic — open thread.