Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Consistently wrong since 2002

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

This really is a full service blog.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

You cannot shame the shameless.

A dilettante blog from the great progressive state of West Virginia.

The willow is too close to the house.

The revolution will be supervised.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

No one could have predicted…

In my day, never was longer.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

A Senator Walker would be an insult to the state and the nation.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

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But the stimulus failed

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Things like this haven’t gotten enough attention:

Here’s a poll of economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business: “The first question asked whether the stimulus increased employment by the end of 2010. Eighty percent of the polled economists agreed. Four percent disagreed. Two percent were uncertain. The second question asked whether, over the long run, the benefits would outweigh the long-term costs (like paying down the extra debt). Forty-six percent agreed. Twelve percent disagreed. Twenty-seven percent were uncertain.”

Twelve percent is probably pretty close to the crazification factor in economics (I would guess it’s higher but I don’t know for sure).

Yes, the stimulus should have been bigger, I’ll admit.

Add it to the long list of times Obama was merely competent and right, instead of being omniscient and omnipotent.

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At The Chart Of The Matter

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Steve Benen kindly presents compelling evidence to squish “the stimulus failed, this President failed” nonsense on jobs and unemployment:

Despite last week’s annual revisions, the same metrics still apply: when jobless claims fall below the 400,000 threshold, it’s considered evidence of an improving jobs landscape, and when the number drops below 370,000, it suggests jobs are actually being created rather quickly.

And with that, here’s the chart — which reflects the revised, seasonably-adjusted data — showing weekly, initial unemployment claims going back to the beginning of 2007. (Remember, unlike the monthly jobs chart, a lower number is good news.) For context, I’ve added an arrow to show the point at which President Obama’s Recovery Act began spending money.

 

Stimulus happens, unemployment claims go down, and they’ve been decreasing steadily now for 3 years.  The problem is it took Bush roughly one year to cause the damage, and the expectation that President Obama could fix it by any means in that short of a time frame was ridiculous.  But even by November 2010 things were remarkably better by comparison.  Would have been nice if he and the Democrats in Congress who passed the stimulus had gotten a little credit then from the voters.

Would be even better if the voters gave them credit this November, yes?

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At Long Last, Someone Will Face a Waterboarding Related Prosecution

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So much fail:

The Justice Department on Monday charged a former Central Intelligence Agency officer with disclosing classified information to journalists about the capture and brutal interrogation of a suspected member of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah — adding another chapter to the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on leaks.

In a criminal complaint filed on Monday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation accused John Kiriakou, the former C.I.A. agent, of disclosing to several journalists the identity of a C.I.A. analyst who worked on a 2002 operation that seized and interrogated Abu Zubaydah, including using the suffocation technique known as waterboarding. The journalists included one at The New York Times, the complaint charged.

“Safeguarding classified information, including the identities of C.I.A. officers involved in sensitive operations, is critical to keeping our intelligence officers safe and protecting our national security,” said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., in a statement. “Today’s charges reinforce the Justice Department’s commitment to hold accountable anyone who would violate the solemn duty not to disclose such sensitive information.”

Mr. Kiriakou, 47, played an important role in the fight against Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks. He is the sixth person to be charged in connection with accusations of leaking classified information by the Obama administration, more than under any previous president.

At the same time, the Justice Department cleared the American Civil Liberties Union of wrongdoing for its efforts, on behalf of defense attorneys representing Abu Zubaydah and other “high value” Qaeda suspects, to identify officials involved in their clients’ interrogations. The attorneys were hoping to call such officials to testify in eventual trials to make the case that their clients should not be executed because they had been tortured while in the custody of the United States government.

Among other things, the F.B.I. complaint accuses Mr. Kiriakou of being a source for a June 2008 front-page Times article, written by reporter Scott Shane, that identified a C.I.A. employee who played a major role in the capture and interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and another high-level Qaeda figure, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Robert Christie, a spokesman for The Times declined to discuss the matter. “We’re not commenting at all,” he said.

Remember, folks, in the national security state, the real criminals are not the torturers, but those who talk about the torturers. All the criminals who did this shit? We need to keep on walking, not look backwards, yadda yadda yadda. The people who talked about the criminals? Lock those fuckers up.

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A Positive Ruling

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This is great news, and completely shocking:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that law enforcement authorities need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move.

The decision (.pdf) in what is arguably the biggest Fourth Amendment case in the computer age, rejected the Obama administration’s position. The government had told the high court that it could even affix GPS devices on the vehicles of all members of the Supreme Court, without a warrant.

“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.

In a footnote, Scalia added that, “Whatever new methods of investigation may be devised, our task, at a minimum, is to decide whether the action in question would have constituted a ‘search’ within the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Where, as here, the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area, such a search has undoubtedly occurred.”

In all, five justices said physically attaching the GPS device to the underside of a car amounted to trespassing and was a search requiring a warrant. The majority said “the present case does not require us to answer” whether police may employ GPS monitoring of a vehicle via an already onboard navigation system “without an accompanying trespass.”

Props to whoever can come up with the best excuse for the Obama admin coming out on the appallingly wrong side of this.

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What The EPA Just Did

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This seems to have flown under the radar for many of us:

Resisting strenuous last-minute lobbying by some of the nation’s biggest utilities, the Obama administration announced on Wednesday a final rule requiring power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants by roughly 90 percent within the next five years.

This is a big victory for environmentalists and scientists who have worked for 20 years to regulate these pollutants — and an even bigger one for the public. When fully effective, the rule could save as many as 11,000 premature deaths a year and avoid countless unnecessary illnesses.

Kthug puts this in perspective:

Let me repeat part of that: it will save tens of thousands of lives every year and prevent birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases. This is actually a much bigger issue, when it comes to saving American lives, than terrorism.

This is a nice Christmas present to America.

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We’re not at the end of the beginning, but perhaps the beginning of the end

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Something huge happened today.  The kind of thing that changes the nature of the economy, and Americans’ relationship with their government, and with the corporations that seem to rule so much of our world.

Today is the day that a significant part of the Affordable Care Act took effect.   Today is the day that companies that sell and provide health insurance have to start spending 80% to 85% of their income from insurance premiums actually delivering the services for which they charge their customers.  Overhead like office space and supplies, marketing expenses, salaries, and yes, profits have to come out of the remaining 15-20%.  The rule is called the the medical loss ratio, and in an important decision recently by the Department of Health and Human Services, the insurance companies cannot count the sales commissions that they give out to the people who sell you your insurance plan against the medical loss ratio.

The MLR can ONLY be allowed expenses, which must be actual costs of coverable medical expenses.  This is huge.  This means no more nonsense like refusing your mother’s cancer treatment because she forgot about that prescription skin cream she had for acne when she was fifteen when she was filling out the application.  Hell, the insurance companies are going to be scrambling to pay for coverable things because any part of that 80-85% they don’t spend on allowables will have to be refunded to the policy holders.

Simply put, this is the end of the beginning of the long track to single payer health care.

So, can private health insurance companies manage to make a profit when they actually have to spend premium receipts taking care of their customers’ health needs as promised?  Not a chance-and they know it. Indeed, we are already seeing the parent companies who own these insurance operations fleeing into other types of investments. They know what we should all know – we are now on an inescapable path to a single-payer system for most Americans and thank goodness for it.

Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice — Martin Luther King

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