Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I know that we try to eschew jokes about appearances (in my case, glass houses and all that), but I am just going to note that this is NOT a good look for someone seeking the nomination to be President:
He looks like like one part Pappy and one part Herbie the Love Bug. Obligatory video:
It’s getting interesting* down Athens’ way:
ATHENS — Greece on Thursday told the International Monetary Fund it would not make a $335 million payment due Friday, taking a little-used option to defer that payment and three others until the end of the month.
Coming amid tense debt negotiations with the I.M.F. and European creditors, Greece’s decision holds political and financial-market implications that are hard to predict.
There’s a historical resonance sounding in the brinksmanship going on here. This isn’t just a matter of debt and punishment. What’s at stake may extend as far as the post-war and then the post-Cold War idea of Europe. That would be the one intended to prevent even catastrophically incompetent or indifferent rulers from lurching into any replay of the summer of 1914.
Here’s Krugthulu, just as worried as I am — and way better informed:**
There’s an odd summer-of-1914 feel to the current state of the Greek crisis. While some of the main players are, rightly, desperate to find a way to head off Grexit and all it entails, others – on the creditor as well as the debtor side — seem not just resigned to collapse but almost as if they’re welcoming the prospect, the way, a century ago, far too many Europeans actually seemed to welcome the end of messy, frustrating diplomacy and the coming of open war.
The most troubling sign to me is the persistence of the disbelief on the part of international elites/opinion shapers that the Greeks might actually bolt from the Euro. Never mind the risk to the various institutional ties that are supposed to hold Europe together in a way that bars future conflict, armed and otherwise. The idea that someone in a dispute might do something you don’t like seems just too difficult to accept on the part of Greece’s negotiating adversaries.
But there is real hardship in Greece right now, and there has been for years. Political imperatives matter too: the Greek government is new, left-leaning, and in power because they explicitly promised not to make deals that would satisfy Germany at the expense of the Hellene in the street. There really is no guarantee — and lots of reasons to believe the reverse — that this one little, broke country will actually do the bidding of its would be financial masters — and yet even the slightest sign that such resistance is real evokes a kind of bemused wonder.
You can see something of the cognitive dissonance even in the brief “breaking” story in the Times linked above:
Although the practice of bundling I.M.F. loan payments into a single sum during a calendar month is allowed under the fund’s rules, the last time that option was taken was by Zambia in the 1970s.
I’m sure there’s a kinder way of reading that sentence, but it hits my ear as “Greece has the right to do this, but they shouldn’t.” Unwritten rules, old boy. Unwritten rules.
I’m with Krugman: whether or not Greece would be better off or not dumping the Euro, Europe and the world gain an enormous amount from financial stability — which would be badly shaken if it looked like Euro-troubles were about to overtake the currency union. In other words, it looks to me like Europe (even Germany!) needs Greece at this moment at least as much as Athens needs Brussels.
But what do I know: I once vowed as a blogger not to behave like a pundit, which is to say, to bloviate about stuff I know only superficially and at second hand. One thing I do know about, though, and have written on, is World War One. No one’s mobilizing at this moment, and historical analogies are always fraught on so many levels. But still, the insouciance, the lack of imagination about consequences — that was overwhelming then. I smell it thickening in the air now. That’s not good.
Over to y’all. What knowledge and insight lurks within the snarling mass of the Balloon-Juice commentariat.
*As in, “May you live in interesting times.”
**This was written last Friday, which is to say before this latest news dropped.
Image: Ludwig Koch, The allied monarchs and their field-marshals in the First World War, (Kaiser Wilhelm II of the German Empire with Austria’s Franz Joseph) c. 1915
While it’s beautiful to hear your name shouted as you walk across the stage at high school graduation, it’s not unreasonable for the school administration to want order. So when the school superintendent of Senatobia High School in Mississippi explained before the ceremony that everyone should hold their applause and excitement until after all the students have accepted diplomas and if not, they would be removed, that was okay. And after four parents yelled for their kids that’s exactly what happened. But that wasn’t all:
Senatobia Municipal School District Superintendent Jay Foster filed ‘disturbing the peace’ charges against the people who yelled at graduation. Officers issued warrants for their arrests with a possible $500 bond. “It’s crazy,” Henry Walker said. “The fact that I might have to bond out of jail, pay court costs, or a $500 fine for expressing my love, it’s ridiculous man. It’s ridiculous.” … “Okay,” Miller said. “I can understand they can escort me out of the graduation, but to say they going to put me in jail for it. What else are they allowed to do?”
Talk about unjustly raining on someone’s parade.
Team Blackness also discussed the Alabama Senate voting to change the name of the Edmund Pettus Bridge where Bloody Sunday took place, why New Jersey health “experts” think you shouldn’t eat sewer fish, and a lunch lady who was fired for giving kids who couldn’t afford them free lunches.
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Getting A Warrant For Cheering For Your High School Graduate??Post + Comments (40)
There was an excellent article in Vox by a black ex-cop about race and policing:
And no matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty.
Where did the narrative of the heroic officer bravely battling against non-white scumbags originate? Has it always been with us?
I certainly remember ’80s Dirty Harry movies perpetuating this narrative, saying in fact that a real cop had to take matters in his own hands because the librul nanny state over-regulated policing. When I wrote about the shift in movie mores from the ’70s to the ’80s, reader BG emailed to say I hadn’t mentioned Dirty Harry movies which devolved from somewhat complex movies to Reagan era propaganda.
Did the heroic cop narrative especially take off in the ’80s or was it always the same?
Scaring the nation with their guns and ammunitionPost + Comments (120)
But then it never was a matter of trust.
President Obama’s argument that Democrats should trust his vision on trade is falling flat on Capitol Hill.
Democrats — even some of Obama’s closest allies — say it’s not enough for the president to pronounce his trade agenda the most progressive in history.
The lawmakers want assurances that the agreements under negotiation, particularly a huge deal being finalized with Pacific Rim nations, will protect U.S. jobs — assurances many say they simply haven’t gotten.
“I take the president at his word that he believes … the argument he’s making, but I think he’s wrong,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said Wednesday.
“The analysis I’ve done comes to a very different conclusion,” he added. “It’s clear that this will, in the long term, not result in the growth of American jobs and an increase in wages.”
Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), head of the Congressional Black Caucus, said he’s in talks with administration officials, who have yet to convince him the president’s trade agenda would create jobs in North Carolina.
“I’m still at the place I’ve always been: leaning no,” Butterfield said Wednesday.
“There’s a difference between growing the economy and helping American companies grow the bottom line, and creating jobs,” he added.
Fast track authority legislation in the House is going to be a long, ugly road. House Democrats are overwhelmingly against it, and Orange Julius is going to need to come up with something like 200 Republican votes in order for this to have any chance of passage. Recent history has shown that depending on his skills at whipping votes is a major loser of a bet.
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks is trying to crowdfund a hundred grand as a reward for somebody to leak to them the bulk of the text of the TPP, so there’s that.
Invisible providers are providers that people can not choose directly. They tend to fall under the PEAR specialties of Pathology, Emergency Medicine, Anesthesiology, and Radiology. PEAR providers are seldom in insurance company directories because people don’t choose their pathologist, they don’t choose who treats them at the ER, and they don’t choose who knocks them out when there is a surgery. Traditionally, most PEAR providers were employees of the hospital that they worked at, and thus they were in network at in network hospitals. Their charges would be part of the overall contract package between an insurance company and the hospital.
Over the past fifteen years or so, hospitals have been outsourcing their PEAR specialties to specialty provider groups. These groups are no longer bound by the hospital’s insurance contract, and they often resist being part of an insurer’s network because the typical insurance company threat that they’ll redirect members elsewhere is a hollow threat. A Par hospital will need someone to do their pathology and the insurer can’t mandate that pathology sample be sent 10 miles away to a par facility for a fast verification that the cancer is gone.
The PEAR providers are now out of network providers that can charge anything that they want which produces provider-insurer pissing matches and big bills for patients who thought that they did everything right in finding a par surgeon, a par hospital, pre-authorized the stay, and arranged for a relative to pick them up two days after a surgery with the expectation that they would max out their in-network deductible and owe nothing else besides parking.
Instead, the patient would max out their in-network deductible as expected but then get hit with a $10,000 pathology charge, and a $27,500 anethesiology charge that the insurance company would only pick up half as those are out of network providers. This is worse for HMO and EPO plans than PPO plans as PPO plans will pay something.
California is doing something about this:
A measure that would protect Californians from so-called “surprise” doctor bills cleared the Assembly floor on a 69-1 vote Tuesday.
AB 533, authored by Rob Bonta (D-Oakland), targets situations in which consumers get care at a facility that’s in their insurance network, but also receive services from a provider who is not in their network.
Bonta’s legislation would, in such circumstances, limit the amount a patient can be charged by an out-of-network doctor to no more than the amount the patient would have paid had the physician been in network.
The PEARs will cry, but this is a good idea.
Conflict of interest standards are for the little journalists –> https://t.co/hvR8F8pkbD
— Billmon (@billmon1) June 4, 2015
>@tomfriedman uses Baltimore Uprising as excuse to run a commercial for his wife’s charter school. @AdamJohnsonNYC http://t.co/ekWfTAPvZt
— FAIR (@FAIRmediawatch) June 3, 2015
The Moustache of Understanding is never one to let go a bad old idea, and it looks like his rummaging through the dustbin of such turned up 1994 Newt Gingrich‘s least popular proposal. From Adam Johnson’s FAIR article:
… The piece reaches peak whitesplaining when pro-charter school Secretary of Education Arne Duncan chimes in and parrots the pernicious trope that the Baltimore Uprising was the result of “absent fathers”:
I asked Education Secretary Arne Duncan what he thought generally about the public boarding school model, which is expensive. He said, “Some kids need six hours a day, some nine, some 12 to 13,” but some clearly would benefit from a more “24/7” school/community environment. “I went to Baltimore and talked to teachers after the riots,” Duncan added. “The number of kids living with no family member is stunning. But who is there 24/7? The gangs. At a certain point, you need love and structure, and either traditional societal institutions provide that or somebody else does. We get outcompeted by the gangs, who are there every day on those corners.” So quality public boarding schools need to be “part of a portfolio of options for kids.”
The not-so-subtle implication here: Absent black parents caused the “riots.” Not legitimate outrage. Not the brutal killing of a black youth. Not the subsequent lack of an investigation. Not the decades of rampant police abuse. But absent fathers and the catch-all of gangs. This is the type of centrist racist dog-whistling one would expect from the man who once said Hurricane Katrina was “good for New Orleans” because it led to more charter schools.
If only more kids could be funneled into the boarding schools of benevolent billionaires—who, incidentally, get massive tax breaks for running these programs—all would be well with the black community…
Our awesome “meritocracy”, where guys like Tom Friedman and Arne Duncan are well compensated for explaining that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds!
*********
Apart from keeping a sharp eye out for civic improvers bearing gifts, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Thursday Morning Open Thread: The Way We Live Now, #473Post + Comments (82)