Month: November 2009

Tiger: Likely Bankrupted

Well, looks like this about wraps it up for Tiger Woods:

An Orange County Utilities manager told the Sentinel today his agency likely will bill the golfer about $600 for the expenses related to repairing the fire hydrant the pro-golfer struck.

It cost about $85 to pick up the damaged hydrant. And now there’s a work-order with the county for about $450 to repair and replace the hydrant.

No doubt Tiger will be too busy working double night-shifts at Winchell’s and/or take to driving a gypsy cab in vain hope of paying off these unbelievable debts. Thank you, Orlando Sentinel, for this sort of incisive, hard-hitting reportage. Truly a service to the Western World.

And, before you start feeling sorry for Tiger, get ready to feel really sorry for Tiger:

And eventually, the county will need to replace the sod around the hydrant.

Will it never end? Will we never let this poor man up? Hasn’t he suffered enough!?! I guess not, as the putative other-lady has this to say:

Although I’ve been romantically linked to a famous baseball player, a Broadway star, a musician, and various film and television actors, I will never kiss and tell

You stay classy, Orlando Sentinel.

Memo to Joementum and all his friends: Doing nothing will do harm. It will add to the deficit, and, according to this latest bit from the CBO analysis, it will cost families and individuals money, no matter what bracket they are inhabiting. Oh, and doing nothing leaves ~30 MILLION PEOPLE uncovered that would, in fact, get health coverage under the Senate plan. Those people need to shape up and go die in the streets like good American Citizens.

But, by all means, let’s play pretend that doing nothing is not only a viable option, but the only sane option. And media: let’s continue to let people say shit like this without challenge of any sort. To ask if they have any sane reasoning behind their obstructionism just wouldn’t be polite.

SHIELDS: We have a president of real intellectual horse power who is cool, detached and analytical and if anything you can watch the emotional side of him emerge in this whole process. … There’s an emotional aspect, the comforter in chief as well as the commander in chief. Both roles. And I think it makes me nostalgic for those days when we had a manly man in the White House who could say, “Let’s kick some tail and ask questions afterwards” you know? That’s what we really need instead of any reflection.

–Mark Shields,
who should be shipped off along with his buddy David Brooks. Seriously, what is wrong with these people? Why are they still allowed to exert control over the print and televised discourse?

(via Think Progress)

A Joke

David Brooks, yesterday, 11/15:

[Sarah Palin is] a joke. I mean, I just can’t take her seriously. We’ve got serious problems in the country. Barack Obama’s trying to handle war. We’ve just a had guy elected Virginia governor who’s probably the model for the future of the Republican Party, Bob McDonnell, pretty serious guy, pragmatic, calm, kind of boring. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination – believe me, it’ll never happen. Republican primary voters are just not going to elect a talk show host.

David Brooks, 10/08:

It took [Sarah Palin] about 15 seconds to define her persona – the straight-talking mom from regular America – and it was immediately clear that the night would be filled with tales of soccer moms, hockey moms, Joe Sixpacks, Main Streeters, “you betchas” and “darn rights.” Somewhere in heaven Norman Rockwell is smiling.

[–and, from his NYT perch–]

Many people are conditioned by their life experiences to see this choice of a running mate through the prism of identity politics, but that’s the wrong frame. Sarah Barracuda was picked because she lit up every pattern in McCain’s brain, because she seems so much like himself.

The Palin pick allows McCain to run the way he wants to — not as the old goat running against the fresh upstart, but as the crusader for virtue against the forces of selfishness. It allows him to make cleaning out the Augean stables of Washington the major issue of his campaign.

Thoughtful people are welcome to change their minds. Encouraged to do so when the facts as we may know them change. What Brooks has been up to, though, is pretty clearly peddling that particular brand of NYT horseshit to the rubes whilst, simultaneously:

at a media panel for elites at the Le Cirque in New York City, Brooks denounced her anti-intellectual candidacy as a “cancer” on the Republican Party.

This sort of thing is the root of the problem with our discourse. At least in the past, it seemed you only had hearsay to go on; you suspected as much but could never hope to pin somebody on this sort of thing. Now, though, we have transcripts and often video of these sorts of brazen acts of dishonesty almost in real-time. And yet there’s still never, ever any accounting at the end of the day. Quite the opposite. Wrong on the war? Here’s a promotion, son; right on the war: You’re fired. Try not to be so shrill.

We’ve got to start unseating these people. Lou Dobbs makes a start, but is only the first of many. Elections have consequences. That Brooks didn’t learn this once and for all back in 2000 speaks volumes. He’s still playing at it like this is all some sort of elaborate parlor game that matters not at all. It’s unforgivable.

True Lies Wide Shut

Every now and then a statement rolls in front of your eyes that you stop and re-read, then think about, and then read again. But it’s the same information every time. Rest assured, I am not making this up:

After he finished making “True Lies,” [director James] Cameron called [Stanley] Kubrick, by then a recluse, and invited himself over. They spent a day, in the basement of Kubrick’s house in the English countryside, watching “True Lies” at Kubrick’s flatbed editing station.

I imagine some of the conversations went like this:

“Yeah, Stan, that 2001 was okay, but, man, take. a look. at this. You are goddamned right I had Schwarzenegger and Jaimie Lee Curtis kiss in front of a mushroom cloud. You are goddamned right I did that. Nobody does that but Cameron! ”

I admire the man for his brass balls (read all about them in the source article in the New Yorker). Coulda been a salesman. (Tough racket.) Also for this:

Cameron was born in Canada, and grew up in a small town not far from Niagara Falls. (He revoked his application for American citizenship after Bush won the election in 2004.)

It’s a great profile. Especially since the author, Dana Goodyear, saw fit to include this gem:

As an instance of feminist iconography it perhaps leaves something to be desired.

Get away from Aliens, you bitch!

The funny thing about all of this is that no matter how bad all their ideas are, no matter how disastrous their governance has been, no matter how many horrible things they have done to the economy and this country, what really is killing the Republican party is that deep down, they are just complete assholes.
[…]
People don’t like to be treated like crap, and grown-ups don’t want to be associated with people who yell “You lie” or scream “socialism” or “Hitler” or accuse you of being a terrorist whenever they don’t get their way.

John Cole, hitting on a very basic reality for today’s GOP.
Naturally, this is bad for the Democrat.

Price of Failure

Lots of people seem to think that if we don’t get all the way to single payer (or some other abstract, personal measure of “success” in health insurance reforms) that the reform is not worth doing. I think Ezra Klein destroys that meme rather completely while noting that failure doesn’t breed more expansive second-tries; instead, it only breeds more caution on the subsequent go-round:

Truman sought single payer. His failure led to Kennedy and Johnson, who confined their ambitions to poor families and the elderly. Then came Nixon, whose reform plan was entirely based around private insurers and government regulation. He was followed by Carter, who favored an incremental, and private, approach, and Clinton, who again sought to reform the system by putting private insurers into a market that would be structured and regulated by the government. His failure birthed Obama’s much less ambitious proposal, which attempts to reform not the health-care system, but the small group and nongroup portions of the health-care system by putting a small minority of private insurance plans into a market that’s structured and regulated by the government, and closed off to most Americans.

Never get tired of talking about Nixon re: healthcare reform. Anywho, Ezra goes on:

Medicare and Medicaid began as fairly limited programs. Medicaid was pretty much limited to extremely poor children and their caregivers. Medicare didn’t cover prescription drugs, or individuals with disabilities, or home health services.

But once the programs were passed into law, they were slowly and continually improved. They became more expansive, with Medicaid growing to cover not only poor families but also poor adults, and the federal government giving states the option, and matching dollars, to include more people under the program’s umbrella. Medicare was charged with covering people with long-term disabilities, and it was eventually strengthened with a drug benefit, more preventive coverage, the option of supplementary plans and much more.

Pass something. The worst version of the Baucus bill would indisputably improve the lot of millions, millions of Americans. The main thing to focus on is keeping the outcome one that quantifiably improves the experience for many, if not most, consumers. The voters out there can accept an imperfect solution, so long as they sense they are no longer being utterly screwed by their insurance company. This will (presumably) happen the first time they make a claim, or change jobs, or (hopefully) see their premiums drop and their pay rise accordingly post-reform.