Month: April 2010

(Go Die) In the Street

Turns out that a lack of healthcare killed, or at the very least contributed to the death of Alex Chilton:

At least twice in the week before his fatal heart attack, Chilton experienced shortness of breath and chills while cutting grass. But he did not seek medical attention, Kersting said, in part because he had no health insurance.

On the morning of March 17, she went to work. Chilton called her after suffering another episode; she arrived home before the ambulance, and drove him to the hospital. He lost consciousness a block from the emergency room, after urging Kersting to run the red light.

Just one case. But policies have consequences. This is one of them. Writ large it is exactly what makes us ~37th in healthcare outcomes amongst developed nations. It is inexcusable. God forbid any Democrat fucking talk about this. Ever.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.

J.K. Rowling
The single mother’s manifesto
Clearly, they’re still teaching formal reasoning in Jolly Old England.
Yet more evidence that it’s past time to give the colonies back.

Tea Klan in Brief(s)

Witness the Shirks, perhaps the most ironically named Tea Klanners in existence:

For the Shirks, it was a day for their children to seek inspiration from Palin and the other speakers, who questioned Obama’s patriotism and at least one of whom referred to him repeatedly as Barack Hussein.

The couple, who rely on Medicaid for their health care, were also upset about the nation’s new health reforms.

When asked why her family used state-subsidized health care when she criticized people who take handouts, Valerie Shirk said she did not want to stop having children, and that her husband’s income was not enough to cover the family with private insurance.

“I know there’s a dichotomy because of what we get from the state,’’ she said. “But I just look at each of my children as a blessing.’’

Truly paragons of the Individual Responsibility arm (far-right lunatic division) of the GOP. I mean, seriously. No doubt they arrived in a Cadillac.
Lest you think this is some isolated case, here’s another just like it (served up with a twist):

Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security – the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

Progress, I guess. When faced with a serious logical disconnect, a Tea Klanner didn’t just impugn the veracity of Social Security being a government program or somesuch, they reassessed their position. More like this, please.

And maybe there would be more like that if we bothered to teach any kind of formal reasoning or critical thinking in schools. Unfortunately, we all know that shit went out along with any other R not relating to Religion. Years ago.

The other angle here, of course, is the failure of the Democrat. Bridge falls, E. coli outbreak, mine explosion, train crash, whatever: each a powerful object lesson in what functional government can do that a non-functional, regulatory captured government cannot. But that sort of talk is, apparently, too shrill.

The issue is, who pays when banks make a bad decision — the banks or the taxyapers? Republicans want the taxpayers on the hook. They support business as usual on Wall Street, which means having taxpayers bail out the banks, rather than holding the banks accountable for their own mistakes.

Chris Van Hollen, chief of the DCCC, getting perilously close to useful.

Resolution 9

Mark Warner (D-Va.) discusses the early talking points surrounding the financial reform package:

If you haven’t spent time with these issues,“ Warner sighed, "it’s easy to pop off with sound-bite solutions that don’t work.”

Indeed it is. And that’s exactly what the GOP plans to do. And they’re already doing it; they have likely already won the framing war. Compare and contrast these statements from GOP fucktard in chief, Mitch McConnell

“We cannot allow endless taxpayer-funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks. And that’s why we must not pass the financial reform bill that’s about to hit the floor.”

-and-

“[The Dodd bill] gives the government a new backdoor mechanism for propping up failing or failed institutions…. We won’t solve this problem until the biggest banks are allowed to fail.”

with these (all from Warner):

“It appears that the Republican leader either doesn’t understand or chooses not to understand the basic underlying premise of what this bill puts in place.”

“Resolution will be so painful for any company. No rational management team would ever choose resolution. It means shareholders wiped out. Management wiped out. Your firm is going away. At least in bankruptcy, there was some chance that some of your equity would’ve been retained and you could come out in some form on the other side of the process. The resolution that [GOP Sen Bob] Corker and I have tried to create means the death of the company. The institution is gone.

Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, refers to the resolution authority as:

a "slush fund”

-and-

“the mere existence of this [slush] fund will make it all too easy to choose a bailout over bankruptcy.”

Warner counters:

“Again, it’s either that they don’t understand or they choose not to understand. There’s nobody in the financial sector who believes this. They’d laugh at the proposition that $50 billion is enough to get you through the resolution process if a couple of firms go down. What we’ve heard time and again is that the challenge in a crisis is to buy enough time to keep the lights on for a few days till you get the FDIC in here. You could make it smaller. Corker and I spoke about $25 billion. But this is funded by the industry.”

“And here’s the hypocrisy of the Republican leader’s comments, I can guarantee you that if there had not been some pre-funding, the critique would’ve been: ‘Look at these guys! They’ve left the taxpayers exposed! What’s going to keep the lights on for these few days? It’s going to be Treasury funds or Federal Reserve funds. The taxpayer will be exposed!’ ”

You are goddamned right they would. But that’s not the point. As usual, the Democrat has a nuanced, sober take on the way forward. The GOP has a short, meaningless slogan that offers no policy insight or suggestion whatever. It’s just "go die in the streets” pointed at their corporate paymasters. Of course, both parties know such an event would never be allowed to transpire, so all’s well.

What the Democrat should be saying:

The GOP wants to help these fatcats to the punchbowl. Again

The GOP is lining the pockets of the bankers and guaranteeing future bailouts

Why is the GOP against prosecuting the worst of the Wall Street offenses? Why do they want to perpetuate the boom/bust cycle that benefits only the richest few?

And etc… Rest assured you’ll hear none of those in the run-up to 2010. Attempts at financial reform will fail. The next economic meltdown will happen sooner rather than later and find an American government that’s financially unable to do anything about it. Depression II will make the current recession seem like the good old days. And will be blamed on Obama. Wait and see.

The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

[…]

By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day

[…]

While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India.

The United States Military proving again that a military junta may well be the only remaining avenue by which we achieve reasonable, empirical reality based, and forward looking governance and policy in these United States.

Can’t be said enough, apparently: contra David Brooks and seemingly every other Conservative hack, healthcare insurance reform does not pull some 10-6 stunt by funding later against tax or other revenue streams now. Just doesn’t. This chart proves that. Again. For the 47th time.

Not that we’ve proven a country that lets the facts get in the way of a good, whiny rant and a misspelled sign or two…

The basic picture of the federal government you should have in mind is that it’s essentially a huge insurance company with an army; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — all of which spend the great bulk of their funds on making payments, not on administration — plus defense are the big items.

Paul Krugman, demonstrating the sort of simple yet incisive and instructive logic that won him the Nobel Prize.

So let’s go back to [disgraced former Speaker Newt] Gingrich’s original sentence. “One of the things in the health bill is 16,000 additional IRS agents,” he said. First, that’s not a “thing in the health bill.” It’s an extrapolation from a CBO report. Second, the word “is” is wrong, as even the original GOP spin only used the word “may.” Third, the number 16,000 is wrong. Fourth, the word “agents” is wrong. But if the statement gets no credit for truth, it’s at least efficient: Not just anyone could pack four falsehoods into 13 words.

Ezra Klein

Steve is showing a completely interactive ad here, almost like a sub-app inside the application. Embedded video, toys to play with. Really impressive as far as mobile advertising goes. If that kind of thing excites you.

Joshua Topolsky, liveblogging the iPhone OS 4 event.
He hits on the key point: advertising, no matter how great, only excites the advertiser, generally not the advertisee (though in narrow circumstances: of course, you’re glad to hear about something that interests you. 99.9% of all web-based advertising I’ve ever seen would interest no one). Nothing poses more of a hazard to the platform than opening this sort of floodgate for intrusive, platform-wide ads than does iAd.
Which Apple itself introduced today.
The examples shown seem tame enough, but then it always seems tame to start. Advertisers simply will not content themselves with opt-in advertising tucked away inside an app, and the new suspend/resume function means there’s no escape, the interrupting ad will still be waiting for you when you return; these are the people to whom you’ve just given the keys to the kingdom, and it has the capacity to make the crown jewels (the information-driven apps) totally unusable.
Pundits keep thinking Apple is going to “closed” itself out of the mobile market just like they all have convinced themselves that Apple did in the PC market. They won’t. But if it’s not careful, Apple will ultimately advertise itself out of the market.