Comparing Pundits

Two dueling op-eds in today's Washington Post are on basically the same topic: how much the other guy is lying. The difference between them is telling.

Dana Milbank's piece describes how Romney tells multiple whoppers one after the other at every appearance, completely mischaracterizing Obama's record, his speeches, and the state of the economy, and the reality of the world as we know it. Milbank also acknowledges that many politicians, including Obama, say things that they know aren't true. In particular, Milbank criticizes Obama's incorrect statement that it would be "unprecedented" for the Supreme Court to strike down the health care law.

George Will begins with the following statement:

Barack Obama’s intellectual sociopathy — his often breezy and sometimes loutish indifference to truth — should no longer startle.

And then goes on to criticize Obama for the same statement about the Supreme Court knocking down unconstitutional laws. For the record, I agree that Obama is wrong on this.

But Will's selective criticism is quite telling. Where Milbank takes a reasoned and honest look at politics and the things both sides say, Will is in full propaganda mode. He doesn't make the slightest nod to the horrific Republican record of lies, from Richard Nixon's "I'm not a crook," to Reagan's "we don't negotiate with terrorists," to George Bush linking Saddam to 9/11, to the litany of misstatements, inaccuracies and outright lies categorized by PolitiFact that Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum and Romney have spouted throughout the Republican primary. Ron Paul is the exception to the Republican rule: his misstatements and exaggerations are in line with your average Democrat's, easily attributable to zeal rather than a hypocritical effort to rewrite history and warp reality. His acknowledgement of Republican errors is laudable, though I still disagree with pretty much everything he says. So do most Republicans, but usually for the opposite reason.

Will also says:

Obama flagrantly misrepresented the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which did not “open the floodgates” for foreign corporations “to spend without limit in our elections” (the law prohibiting foreign money was untouched by Citizens United) and did not reverse “a century of law.”

and

[Obama's] defense will be his campaign because he cannot forever distract the nation and mesmerize the media with such horrors as a 30-year-old law student being unable to make someone else pay for her contraception.

which is an intentional lie about Fluke's testimony in service to perpetuating the Limbaugh/Republican lie that contraceptives are all for fun and games and not real health problems.  Menstrual cramps can be agonizing and some women who never have sex use the hormones in the pill to prevent the pain (no, painkillers just don't cut it). Fluke's testimony wasn't even about that: it was almost in its entirety dedicated to a friend who will never be able to have children because she was denied medication to prevent uterine cysts. That medication just happened to be in the form of birth control pills, and therefore the employer thought she was lying just to have sex.

Will is flagrantly denying reality and displaying the utmost hypocrisy here. He casually calls the president a liar, and then goes on to breezily discuss who would be best qualified to perpetuate Will's Republican hypocrisy.

His take on Citizen's United is a prime example. While it's true that the law against foreign contributions is still in place, many of the organizations spending money on our elections have no requirements to report their donors. Without that information, there is no way to know whether foreigners are funneling cash through dummy shell corporations and then into the electoral process, and thus utterly no way enforce that law. (And we already know there are plenty of people motivated by foreign interests donating money to candidates.)

When there is the appearance and possibility of corruption, and there is no way to even detect that a law is being violated, the presumption must be that corruption is occurring. This is the standard that judges are held to in cases of conflict of interest. It is the standard that Republicans use when they propose laws that require all voters to show ID at the polls, even when there's no evidence of voter fraud. To do otherwise would cause us to lose faith in the integrity of the system, they say. Similarly, Republicans insist that we need to force all workers to prove that they have the right to work in this country to prevent illegal aliens from taking jobs away from real Americans.

Preventing foreign contributions to political campaigns is in exactly the same category as stopping non-citizens from voting and working. Requiring full disclosure of campaign donors' identities (not just their dummy shell corporations) would be a good first step. Yet Republicans oppose this simple and straightforward solution because they say they believe that corporations have right to free speech, that money is speech, and that corporations have a "right to privacy" to prevent them from being unjustly attacked. A right that Republicans don't believe that individuals have when they wish to obtain an abortion or contraception.

Republican are fine with forcing doctors to harangue women, wasting their time and (our) money on useless tests, making them listen to fetal heartbeats and violating them with ultrasound wands. Republicans are completely fine with embarrassing and intimidating women who were raped or can't afford to support another child, but they don't want to embarrass multinational corporations by making them admit they're supporting Mitt Romney.

I used to be a Republican, but this sort of outright hypocrisy drove me out of the party. I was an independent for many years, voting for numerous Republican candidates for the state legislature, governor and congress. But as the years went by the Republican Party has ejected everyone I've ever voted for. They're even going after long-time conservative stalwarts like Dick Lugar. Dick Lugar!

The Republican Party has gone so far off the rails it's no longer safe to vote for any Republican. The enforced loyalty to parochial ideology prevents individual Republicans from voting their own consciences for fear of being stabbed in the back, like Lugar. This lock-step central-committee dictatorship simply doesn't exist in the Democratic Party, which is why I've gravitated there. Democrats, like the Blue Dogs, can still vote their own minds, but individual Republicans can no longer make their own decisions; their votes are dictated by the Powers That Be.

And Grover Norquist is the man that many believe is that Power. He's famous for having said that he wants to shrink the government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub. By enforcing a tighter and more restrictive notion of what it is to be a Republican, and coercing Republicans at every level of government to kowtow to his demands, Norquist may eventually find himself able to fit the entire Republican Party into that bathtub.

Energy Question

I follow Gallup polls pretty closely as they are usually the best indicator of where people are at on various issues. This one on energy and the environment caught my eye for its apparent dichotomy.

Americans Split on Energy vs. Environment Trade-Off

So, while 47 percent say that energy production should be prioritized, 44 percent say that environmental protection should be prioritized. Basically, we want to have both. This is a closer margin than last year when it was 50-41 for energy production. Both of these numbers mark a shift from the early 2000s when it was flipped in favor of environmental protection.

The good news is that most Americans (by a margin of 59-35 percent) favor alternative energy to oil and coal. So why aren't our leaders taking us there?

And Reality Wins Again!

I hope we see a lot more of these types of videos!

More Like This, Please

I'm hoping that the media runs more stories like this as the election kicks into high gear this year. While I know that nearly all of the base will always believe whatever their leaders tell them, the swing voters need to see the facts and make a more informed decision. The first example is precisely what I am talking about.

ROMNEY: "The president's attention, it was elsewhere, like a government takeover of health care and apologizing for America abroad." 

THE FACTS: Obama's law keeps the private insurance industry at the heart of the health care system and avoids a single-payer government system like Canada's. It seeks to achieve universal coverage by requiring insurers to accept people regardless of medical history, subsidizing costs for many in the middle class as well as the poor, establishing new markets for those who don't get insurance at work and requiring most Americans to obtain coverage, with penalties if they don't. 

That's precisely what Romney did, first, as Massachusetts governor. 

Romney argues that states have the right to establish an individual insurance mandate and Washington doesn't — a question the Supreme Court is deciding. But whether the federal law is found constitutional or not, it does not add up to a government takeover. 

Even when fully implemented, if the court allows that, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that 58 percent of working-age Americans and their families will be covered through employer plans — about the same as now. 

In his world travels, Obama has said at times that the U.S. acted "contrary to our traditions and ideals" in its treatment of terrorist suspects, that "America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy," that the U.S. "certainly shares blame" for international economic turmoil and has sometimes shown arrogance toward allies. 

Obama's statements that America is not beyond reproach in its history usually come balanced with praise, and he is hardly alone among presidents in acknowledging the nation's past imperfections. But these were not apologies, formal or informal.

This last bit I will never understand. President Obama has not gone around the world apologizing for the United States. It's just an absolute lie.  I wonder how today's GOP would react to Ronald Reagan formally apologizing to the Japanese-Americans interred during World War II. One more example of how he would be labeled a commie traitor today.

Of course, the president is not above criticism either. As the article notes, SOME Republicans (not all) supported the idea of a mandate. And the president himself was against it as a candidate, although that was because he wanted a public option at the time.

Take note of the contrast here. Romney, a Republican? Out and out lying. The president? Spinning and not telling the full story. This is a great example of what I mean when I say that, while the Democrats are not above fault, they certainly do not engage in absolute fabrication with the intent to magnify hate, anger, and fear.

It's Mitt!

After last nights primaries, it's now very clear that Mitt Romney is going to be the GOP nominee. This means that a conservative will not win the White House in 2012.

All of this makes me wonder how and why people are going to vote for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. I suppose I would understand if it's purely out of spite or high emotions. Perhaps some have even deluded themselves into thinking that Mitt Romney is actually going to do what he says he is going to do. I had someone tell me the other day (actually, I've had a few people tell me this) that he LOOKS LIKE a president and Barack Obama doesn't. I guess looking the part is of paramount importance.

But these are the only reasons I can think of that would drive people to vote for him. He's not a small government guy at all. More importantly, he's not going to create jobs. His track record shows that he's exactly the type of leader that caused the collapse of 2008. He says he wants less regulation, permanent tax cuts for the wealthy, and trickle down economics. Those policies have been shown to be failures.

Last night, he said that the president doesn't know anything about private sector job growth and has, in fact, been poor at it.

Really?

Sadly, there is no doubt in my mind that this campaign is going to be filled with "inside the bubble" statement and thinking just like this. Take a look at how the president's policies affected job creation with this interactive page. 

These are the facts on job growth during the Obama administration. Add in the stock market gains (perhaps RECORD gains) and 3 percent real GDP growth in Q4 of 2011 and Romney's statement is just plain wrong.

So, why would he be a better economic president?

I Agree....With Rush Limbaugh?!!???

Well, not really him but his explanation of the theory is quite insightful:)

 

Messing with the Constitution for Partisan Gain

Minnesota is one of several states that either has or is enacting voter ID laws, all pushed exclusively by Republicans. These require that you have a current picture ID, such as a driver's license, in order to vote. Some states accept other forms of ID, such as a gun license, but disallow other forms of identification with pictures, such as student IDs.

Proponents of such laws, exclusively Republicans, claim that there's an epidemic of voter fraud. During the Bush administration Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez demanded that US attorneys push the prosecution of these sorts of cases. The episode resulted in both Rove's and Gonzalez's resignations.

In 2010 the house and senate in Minnesota were won by Republicans, but a Democrat was elected governor. To get around a certain veto of voter ID legislation, the Republicans are trying to add a constitutional amendment to require photo IDs at the polling place.

This is a spectacularly stupid idea, as it's always a bad policy to monkey with the constitution for partisan hot-button issues, as well as clutter the constitution with picayune details of law enforcement that will certainly change as technology improves in the future. And it's completely unnecessary, because it's already illegal to commit voter fraud.

The ACLU, which opposes the amendment on the basis that  it's a form of poll tax because it would deny poorer citizens the basic right to vote if they don't drive or have a photo ID, challenged proponents of the law to find cases of voter fraud that would have been stopped by picture IDs at the polls. So far none of the submissions have panned out. The supposed strongest case submitted involved a mother who used an absentee ballot to vote in her daughter's name, while the daughter voted at her school. But no IDs are checked when you fill out an absentee ballot--that's the whole point of absentee ballots.

Basically, the number of people who commit voter fraud in Minnesota by walking into a polling place and claim to be someone who they're not is zero. Think about it: how many people have the gall to lie to an election judge's face, sign the roster with someone else's signature and face a felony charge? How will they know that the person they're pretending to be hasn't already voted? How can they know that the election judge won't know that person? In most jurisdictions, election judges are older people from the community who've worked at the polls for years if not decades. They pretty much know everyone who votes. If someone's trying to impersonate a dead man, the election judge may well have attended his funeral.

In Minnesota, election judges have the responsibility to challenge suspected fraudulent voters. Under certain circumstances the roster at the polling place will already have a notation requiring that the election judge check the voter's ID. If they don't have ID there's already a form to fill out and several questions to answer and they fill out a provisional ballot instead of a regular one. Similar rules apply to people who register to vote at the polls.

To prevent further skulduggery, critical processes performed by election judges are required to have judges from two different parties. Such activities include initializing voting machines, signing the totals at the end of the day, taking results to city hall, assisting voters who need help filling out their ballots, etc.


Now some of you will say, "Wait a minute. If you've got an inside man at the polling place, you can commit fraud on a massive scale." And, yes, that's true. But photo ID does absolutely nothing to prevent that, and would perhaps make it easier because of the false sense of security that photo ID provides.

Furthermore, any kind of organized and sophisticated voter fraud scheme involving impersonation of individuals wouldn't be slowed down by photo ID; fake IDs are ubiquitous. How could an election judge possibly tell a valid license from a good fake? It's trivial for teenagers to get forged IDs to buy booze and get into clubs. All you really need to forge drivers licenses is a supply of blank cards, a computer, a printer and a laminator. You can do it all in the back of a van outside the polling place.


The current system in Minnesota has worked well for decades, and was improved after the close contest between Franken and Coleman 2008. Suggestions Democrats made in reaction to voter ID would actually provide more security than the ID would. It would put the burden on the state to validate the voter's identity by giving the election judge a picture of the voter with an electronic roster. A person registering at the poll would have their picture taken, which would be a solid deterrent against those attempting fraud. The Republican constitutional end-run around the governor smells like voter suppression and an attempt to avenge Coleman's loss.

To be sure, significant voter fraud has taken place in other states, and I have no doubt that a small amount of voter fraud is taking place in Minnesota. But not by people impersonating others at the polls, and it wouldn't be stopped by the voter ID amendment. Real electoral fraud involves absentee ballots and voting in the wrong jurisdiction or in multiple jurisdictions, most often by people who think they have the right to vote everywhere they own property. People like, say, Ann Coulter, who has had brushes with the law because she voted in Connecticut while being registered to vote in New York.

The biggest potential for voter fraud in Minnesota is not at the polls, but with absentee ballots. These are most often used by the elderly (who move to warmer climes in the fall or are too infirm to vote in person), military personnel, people who travel extensively and students. Because there is no photo ID requirement whatsoever for absentee ballots and no one to check that ID, there's no way to know who filled out an absentee ballot. There's a signature check, but in most jurisdictions that's against the form you filled out to request the absentee ballot in the first place. And who's to say the actual voter filled that form out, or that the people who check those forms actually are competent at comparing signatures?

There are likely hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans who are no longer mentally competent whose children or nursing home attendants are voting two or more times by filling out absentee ballots with their own choices. And there probably thousands of students whose parents are voting twice, and thousands of military personnel whose spouses are voting twice. And thousands of retirees and people who own vacation homes who are voting in multiple jurisdictions.

In short, Republicans are locking a technical solution into the constitution to fix problems that don't exist, wasting taxpayer money and creating needless bureaucratic hurdles for people who don't drive or are too poor to afford a car. They are trying to deny the rights of the poor by pretending to prevent an unlikely crime by a few, all the while blithely ignoring the real potential for rampant fraud by the many with absentee ballots.

To really stop absentee ballot, voter impersonation and dead-man voter fraud, we would need a nationwide computer network that linked all jurisdictions, and we would need to assign a unique voter ID to each person, and we would need to ensure that each person only had one ID, and we would need a national registry of all births and deaths based on that ID. Most Republicans would claim this is government overreach and Big Brotherism at its worst. And then we'd have to ensure that this computer network couldn't be scammed by hackers and fraudsters trying to manipulate election results from the top down.

Because that's the real threat: why commit electoral fraud by impersonating people one at a time, when you can buy elections wholesale by controlling the private companies who run the computers that count the votes?

A Cheezy Update

It's been a while since I talked about Wisconsin and Scott Walker and, with all the latest news, it's time for an update. The recall election has been set for June 5th with a Democratic primary on May 8th. Tom Barrett, the Milwaukee mayor and Democratic challenger in 2010 whom Walker ultimately defeated, will run again. Kathleen Falk, former Dane County leader, will compete with Barrett in the primary.

Recall that Barrett made national news when, as the mayor of Milwaukee, he intervened in a dispute, at the Wisconsin State Fair,  to try to protect a woman being attacked and ended up being beaten by a tire iron while defending her.

I think that Barrett is a much better candidate than Falk who strikes me as too much of a contrast with Walker. Barrett only lost by 124,000 votes and, with nearly 1 million signatures gathered for Walker's recall, seems a better challenger.

The recall election itself is going to be tight because neither side can really claim that Walker has done a good job or a bad job. Take a look at this graphic.

While Scott Walker certainly hasn't lived up to this promise, he hasn't exactly done anything that is deeply disastrous. The Wisconsin jobs reports for March, April and May will have quite the level of scrutiny leading up to the election. If they show any sort of job loss, he's toast. Any job gains and he might squeak it out.

The latest polls show an even 48-48 split on Walker and a Democratic challenger so it may simply come down to turnout. But remember that 2 GOP Senators were recalled last year and Walker isn't the only one being recalled in this election. The Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch and GOP Senators Scott L. Fitzgerald, Van H. Wanggaard, Terry Moulton and Pam Galloway are also being recalled. Fitzgerald is safe but Galloway has already resigned her seat for family health reasons which leaves it totally open. She won by only 3,000 votes in the last election. Wanggaard won by the same margin in 2010 with Moulton winning by a couple thousand more. Any of these three seats could flip which means that even if Walker wins, he won't be able to push through any sort of agenda.

So, it's going to be interesting to see what happens in Wisconsin. Oh yeah, there's a primary there tomorrow. Mitt is going to win and pretty much sew up the nomination.

Sunday Reflections

A Government Centered Society?

At a campaign stop yesterday in Appleton, Wisconsin, likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney said that President Obama wanted to create a "government centered society."

How is that exactly?

The stock market just had its best first quarter in 14 years. The surge has sent Wall Street analysts, some of whose forecasts seemed too sunny three months ago, scrambling to raise their estimates for the year. "That it's up isn't surprising. It's the magnitude," says Robert Doll, the chief equity investment manager at BlackRock, the world's biggest money manager.

Doll says stocks could rise 10 percent more before the end of the year. That would be enough to push the Dow Jones industrial average to an all-time high and the Standard & Poor's 500 close to a record.

Funny. I thought that President Obama was destroying free enterprise. Ah well, I guess it's back to tapping into the ol' inner rage, ignoring facts, and making things up again.

Get ready for the gun grabbing Obamabots!!

Now I Know Why I've Been Hearing Crickets

"Is there a criminal activity? Perhaps not," Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa told POLITICO after last Tuesday’s showdown with Energy Secretary Steven Chu. "Is there a political influence and connections? Perhaps not. Did they bend the rules for an agenda, an agenda not covered within the statute? Absolutely." 

And with this admission, a spear of reality has penetrated the Bubble and the dreams of many dashed.

Perhaps the disheartened can spend some time trying to find a solution to the very much real problem of China burying our solar energy sector with billions of dollars of grants to their businesses.

You know, actually solving a problem....

Good Point

Fox Friday!

Boy oh boy, has Fox News changed lately. The right has become increasingly frustrated with its move to at least attempt to be more fair and balanced. Many are moving towards CNN where the likes of Erick Erickson and Ari Fleischer wax poetic on a daily basis.

But this recent column really takes the cake!

5 reasons ObamaCare is already good for you

Fox Fucking News...Whoda thunk it? Here's my favorite of her five points because it addresses some most unwelcome childish dishonesty that has inserted its shriveled penis into the lexicon.

4. The Congressional Budget Office recently cut health care reform’s cost estimates. 

Conservatives have relied on apples-to-oranges accounting gimmicks to suggest the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently doubled the cost estimates for the Affordable Care Act. In fact, the CBO adjusted its estimates to say the Affordable Care Act will cost less than originally projected. Moreover, the CBO has said that repealing the Affordable Care Act would increase the deficit by $210 billion.

So much for being concerned about the deficit...as long as they WIN!!!

OMG!

Did you hear the big news? Obamacare is DEAD! After facing some questions on par with the Spanish inquisition, solicitor Donald Verrilli completely blew it, it's all over, and let's get ready for our new president, Mitt Romney.

Well, at least that's what the "liberal" media said yesterday (even though the actual decision won't be handed down until June). Since when are they all in the tank for the opponents of the law? They keep saying that people are being forced to buy health care. That's not true at all. You don't have to buy it at all. If you don't, you pay a tax, which is very, very Constitutionally valid.

Even the actual liberal media is behaving irrationally (see: hysterical old ladies). They seemed to completely ignore the tough questions that Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy asked of Paul Clement and Michael Carvin, who are challenging the law. For example, Roberts told Carvin that he was not addressing the government's point, "which is that they are not creating commerce in health care. It's already there, and we are all going to need some kind of health care; most of us will at some point."

And Roberts accepted the fact that the mandate was not an order but a tax. This is important to note because on Monday in response to questioning from Justice Elena Kagan, Verrilli noted that under the law, a person who chooses to pay the tax penalty rather than comply with the mandate will not be considered in violation of the law. So it’s a choice — not a unilateral command. If even one of the conservative justices agrees, he could vote to uphold the law on unexpected grounds. It's entirely possible that you would have four votes to uphold the law under the Commerce clause and two votes to uphold it under taxing power.

Kennedy said the government might be right that the interwoven markets of health insurance and health care are unique. "The young person who is uninsured is uniquely proximately very close to affecting the rates of insurance and the costs of providing medical care in a way that is not true in other industries," Kennedy said. "That's my concern in the case." I also thought it was interesting that Clement acknowledged here that a system of national health care is likely constitutional even though the individual mandate was not.

This brings us to what may happen if the mandate portion is struck down. Robert Reich has an interesting take on this. 

If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions. When this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they’re willing to remove that requirement – but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes. If they did this the public will be behind them — as will the Supreme Court.

But how could this happen?

Americans don’t mind mandates in the form of payroll taxes for Social Security or Medicare. In fact, both programs are so popular even conservative Republicans were heard to shout “don’t take away my Medicare!” at rallies opposed to the new health care law. There’s no question payroll taxes are constitutional, because there’s no doubt that the federal government can tax people in order to finance particular public benefits. But requiring citizens to buy something from a private company is different because private companies aren’t directly accountable to the public. They’re accountable to their owners and their purpose is to maximize profits. What if they monopolize the market and charge humongous premiums? (Some already seem to be doing this.)

All of this makes me wonder if this is the president's back up plan. Not only is he a constitutional scholar but he's a very smart and pragmatic guy. His opponents are being terribly naive if they are assuming that he fast tracked this case without having multiple contingency plans.

The other way to look at all of this is political. If parts of the law are struck down, that takes a galvanizing principle out of the campaign. In fact, if the law is upheld, the base is going to be very motivated to get out and vote for repeal (even though we all know that Romney isn't going to do that if he wins).

So, I guess I'm not really worried either way it turns out. It's too bad that some liberal folks are so worried that they have all but given up because I don't think they are really considering all of the possibilities here. And that's why I'm truly going to enjoy the "winning the argument/proved them wrong" victory dance that the right will do if the mandate is struck down.

Enjoy it while it lasts, folks!

PPACA A GO GO

With the second day of oral arguments being heard in the Supreme Court regarding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, I thought it would be timely to put up a post with my various thoughts on the issue.

First of all, today is the key day as they are discussing the issue of the mandate. I'm wondering the team that is arguing to uphold the law as is will look to this bill, enacted in 1798 by the 5th Congress and signed by founding father John Adams, as an example of how the government can more or less force people to get health care. An Act For The Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen would never pass muster with the Republicans of today. Clearly they would label it as "government overreach" and "something our founding fathers would never do"...even though our founding fathers did just that!

The type of question that each justice asks is usually indicative of how they are going to vote. I think it's safe to say that Thomas and Alito will be voting to strike down the mandate. Scalia is likely to vote that way as well, although there is some early indication that he doesn't like to mess around with bills that Congress have already passed. With Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsberg and Breyer likely to support the bill, that leaves Roberts and Kennedy and I think it's very possible that each will support to uphold the law as is given the other precedents that are being introduced.

PolitiFact has a page up that lists all the misconceptions about the health care law which have, no doubt, helped drive up its disapproval rating to around 47 percent. Here's the one that most people believe but is, in fact, a "Pants on Fire" lie.

Chris Christie slams health care reform as “a government takeover of health care”

While the reform gives the federal government a larger role in the health insurance industry, it doesn’t eliminate the private market. In fact, the reform is projected to increase the number of citizens with private health insurance. We know Christie doesn’t like the national health care reform, but he should know better than to call it a "government takeover." That’s been proven wrong over and over again, making his claim simply ridiculous. 

Yeah, well, never touch a man's paranoia. It's a sacred thing.

The outcome of their ruling is going to be very interesting. How much will it affect the president's chances of re-election?

Finally, Some Sense on Patent Nonsense

Today the Supreme Court threw out a lower court ruling that allowed human genes to be patented. They sent the case back to the lower court in light of their recent decision that laws of nature can't be patented.

Finally, a ray of light on the Intellectual Property front. The idea that human genes that were simply found could be patented is, so to speak, patent nonsense. The company that found the BRCA gene, which predisposes those who carry it to several types of cancer, had created an exorbitantly priced test. Their claim of a patent on the gene itself was used as a legal hammer to prevent others from researching the gene and diseases it caused. The gene is found in predominantly Eastern European Jewish descent.

The company, Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City, Utah, argued that they should be rewarded for years of research. But the reality is that it's not the science being rewarded, but the legal chicanery that pushes the bounds of common sense and tries to patent things that have existed in nature for thousands if not millions of years.

The discovery of this gene and its function hinged on genetic sequencing and analytical techniques that other scientists developed long ago. If Myriad have developed a new and innovative test for the gene, that would be patentable. But since Myriad used techniques others developed in their research, and had done nothing original, their lawyers decided to pull a fast one and patent the gene instead.

The argument that this will hurt scientific research and discourage development of future treatments is totally bogus. Myriad did the minimum possible here: they developed a test for a gene. They did not find out how the gene causes cancer, find a treatment or a cure. They just sat back to cash in on it. In fact, Myriad was the one standing in the way of scientific progress: the patent on the gene gave Myriad the ability to sue other researchers investigating the gene, preventing them from looking for a treatment or a cure.

Now that would be something worth patenting.

Racist or Racial Profiler?

There's been a lot of talk about whether George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin as he walked down a Florida street with his bag of Skittles, is a racist. Zimmerman's lawyer says he's not. I'm willing to take Zimmerman at his word: if he says that some of his best friends are black, that he's raising money for an African American church, I'll believe it.

But that isn't really the issue. You don't have to be a racist to be a racial profiler. In 2009, 40% of male prisoners in the United States were black (whites were 33% and Hispanics 21%). In the 2010 census blacks made up 12.9% of the U.S. population. George Zimmerman has taken a 14-week citizen's police academy course. His father is a retired Virginia Supreme Court magistrate judge and his mother worked as a deputy clerk of courts.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/23/2712299_p2/george-zimmerman-self-appointed.html#storylink=cpy

Given the incarceration rates, someone like Zimmerman could easily come to the following conclusion: blacks are three times more like to commit crimes than whites. However, that's really not what the numbers say: all they say is that the percentage of blacks in prisons is three times higher than that of whites.

There could be any number of reasons why that is: Blacks are more likely to be jailed than whites. Blacks receive longer prison sentences than whites for the same or similar crimes (as evidenced by now-outlawed crack/powder cocaine sentencing guideline disparities). Blacks are more likely to be poor, and can't afford top lawyers and wind up going to jail for crimes that whites typically avoid conviction for or obtain non-prison plea deals. Judges are more lenient sentencing white criminals, and lighter-skinned blacks receive shorter sentences. Whites who steals millions of dollars in white-collar crimes often get off with no jail time or one-year stints in Club Fed, while blacks caught with a few dime bags can go to jail for the rest of their lives because of three-strikes laws. Many blacks live in poor areas dominated by drug gangs, where young black men are often forced to choose sides in gang turf wars on pain of death, which predisposes them to committing crimes in the first place. The whole gangsta rap/hip hop vibe romanticizes the image of the black man as a street tough. And so on.

Interestingly, the incarceration rates among women are different: white women constitute 46% of the prison population, black women 32% and Hispanics 16%.

Geraldo Rivera has, as always, brought much needed logic to the debate: he says that Trayvon Martin's hoodie got him killed. Because you know what kind of people wear hoodies...

Zimmerman hasn't been arrested because the local sheriff thinks that Florida's "stand your ground" law protects him. But one of the sponsors of that law, former Senator Durell Peaden, disagrees:

The 911 tapes strongly suggest Zimmerman overstepped his bounds, they say, when the Sanford neighborhood crime-watch captain said he was following Trayvon and appeared to ignore a police request to stay away. 

“The guy lost his defense right then,” said Peaden. “When he said ‘I’m following him,’ he lost his defense.”

Given what I heard in that 911 call and what I've read about his history, it sounds like Zimmerman is an overzealous neighborhood vigilante and a wanna-be cop. He has a history of being short-tempered, getting into fights and has had a couple of brushes with the law. He was tired of punks breaking into houses on his watch and he was gonna be the hero.

Our laws are supposed to protect us from people who might do us harm, intentionally or unintentionally. We don't want loose cannons on a short fuse out there playing cops and robbers. Because, as Geraldo so sagely reminded us, it's not just black kids who walk down the street at night wearing hoodies and listening to hip hop blaring in their earbuds.

Not Standing Your Ground

I've had several requests to comment on the Trayvon Martin case. Fortunately, Neil Boortz pretty much sums up how I feel. 

Trayvon Martin’s family says that they don’t believe that their son would have been killed if it were not for the color of his skin. I believe they’re right.

The Grand Jury will convene on April 10th to consider this case. I feel it is likely that charges will be brought against Zimmerman, as they should be. He should not be able to use Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” statute as a defense. You are not “standing your ground” when you are pursuing someone.

And what about the charge of racism?

The more likely scenario here is one of pure prejudice. George Zimmerman saw a young black male in his neighborhood at night, and immediately pre-judged the situation, coming to the conclusion that Trayvon Martin was up to no good.

The simple fact that he was a black youth wearing a hoodie immediately put Zimmerman into perceptual bias mode and that was that. This doesn't even include the likely mental disability that Zimmerman has and his several dozen calls to 911 which ended in false alarms.

In addition, how is it that someone who was convicted of assault (then scrubbed from his record) was able to get a firearm?

This Simple Method

I find Rush Limbaugh obnoxious, but I've been able to coexist comfortably with him for 20 years by using this simple method: I never listen to his program. The only time I hear him is when I'm at a stoplight next to a pickup truck.  (Bill Maher in his wonderful new column, "Please stop apologizing.")

For all the bitching I've done over the years about Rush Limbaugh, I have to say that I really hope they don't drive him off the air. I like him right where is...loud and misogynistic!

George Joins The Cult

In the Krugman piece linked below, we see the following excerpt.

For example, last year George Will declared that the Obama administration’s support for train travel had nothing to do with relieving congestion and reducing environmental impacts. No, he insisted, “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.” Who knew that Dagny Taggart, the railroad executive heroine of “Atlas Shrugged,” was a Commie?

George, I used to have respect for you as at least being a thinking conservative. Now, you aren't even that. Ah, well, at least I have an explanation as to why the right don't like choo-choos.

Somehow, In Their World...

A recent article in the New York Times offers an excellent summation of how truly exciting the future will be in regards to energy in this country.

Across the country, the oil and gas industry is vastly increasing production, reversing two decades of decline. Using new technology and spurred by rising oil prices since the mid-2000s, the industry is extracting millions of barrels more a week, from the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the prairies of North Dakota. 

That's right. And it's simple fact that has driven the right in this country to paranoid fits about the president and the Democrats. How dare they not act like a bunch of granola eating tree huggers?

Taken together, the increasing production and declining consumption have unexpectedly brought the United States markedly closer to a goal that has tantalized presidents since Richard Nixon: independence from foreign energy sources, a milestone that could reconfigure American foreign policy, the economy and more. In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005. 

But no, say it ain't so! Somehow they must be plotting and restricting access to energy reserves, right?

Wrong.

The domestic trends are unmistakable. Not only has the United States reduced oil imports from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries by more than 20 percent in the last three years, it has become a net exporter of refined petroleum products like gasoline for the first time since the Truman presidency. 

The natural gas industry, which less than a decade ago feared running out of domestic gas, is suddenly dealing with a glut so vast that import facilities are applying for licenses to export gas to Europe and Asia. 

National oil production, which declined steadily to 4.95 million barrels a day in 2008 from 9.6 million in 1970, has risen over the last four years to nearly 5.7 million barrels a day. The Energy Department projects that daily output could reach nearly seven million barrels by 2020. Some experts think it could eventually hit 10 million barrels — which would put the United States in the same league as Saudi Arabia. 

Alright, well, what does the energy sector think?

“We’re having a revolution,” said G. Steven Farris, chief executive of Apache Corporation, one of the basin’s most active producers. “And we’re just scratching the surface.”

Today, more than 475 rigs — roughly a quarter of all rigs operating in the United States — are smashing through tight rocks across the Permian in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. Those areas are already producing nearly a million barrels a day, or 17 percent more than two years ago. By decade’s end, that daily total could easily double, oil executives say, roughly equaling the total output of Nigeria. 

So, why is the right continuing to insist that the president is trying to block energy output? Especially in light of this information?

Mr. Obama’s current policy has alarmed many environmental advocates who say he has failed to adequately address the environmental threats of expanded drilling and the use of fossil fuels.

Well, Paul Krugman has the answer. 

This claim isn’t just nuts; it’s a sort of craziness triple play — a lie wrapped in an absurdity swaddled in paranoia. It’s the sort of thing you used to hear only from people who also believed that fluoridated water was a Communist plot. 

Sadly, I have experienced this in comments with some folks who can't seem to understand this basic fact.

Simple economics suggests that if the nation is producing more energy, prices should be falling. But crude oil — and gasoline and diesel made from it — are global commodities whose prices are affected by factors around the world. Supply disruptions in Africa, the political standoff with Iran and rising demand from a recovering world economy all are contributing to the current spike in global oil prices, offsetting the impact of the increased domestic supply. 

Why it is so difficult to understand the concept of a world market perplexes me.

It must (as is usually the case) the fact that the paranoia about Barack X has taken over. Somehow, in their world, this...

The newfound wealth is spreading beyond the fields. In nearby towns, petroleum companies are buying so many pickup trucks that dealers are leasing parking lots the size of city blocks to stock their inventory. 

Housing is in such short supply that drillers are importing contractors from Houston and hotels are leased out before they are even built. Two new office buildings are going up in Midland, a city of just over 110,000 people, the first in 30 years, while the total value of downtown real estate has jumped 50 percent since 2008. With virtually no unemployment, restaurants cannot find enough servers. Local truck drivers are making six-figure salaries. 

“Anybody who comes in with a driver’s license and a Social Security card, I’ll give him a chance,” said Rusty Allred, owner of Rusty’s Oilfield Service Company. 

is not happening.

Wow.

As Jon Stewart says, "The Republican Party...rooting for America to fail since 2008."

And Then There Were Six...

A while back, I predicted the election would come down to 13 states. I am now amended that to 6. Missouri and Iowa are going to go for the GOP no matter who the nominee is as the evangelical base in each state is very organized and motivated. And Iowa is doing comparatively better, economically speaking than the rest of the country so social issues are going to have bigger play there. And Missouri has really solidified its conservative base so it's going to be nearly impossible for the president or Senator McCaskill to win there.

But with Mitt's shenanigans in Michigan and the massive movement in Wisconsin to oust Governor Walker, the president can look forward to victories in those states. The heavy Latino population in New Mexico will also turn that state blue and New Hampshire, even with all its stalwart old guard conservatives, will also go for the president due to demographics (the youth and female vote). The latest polling out of Virginia also shows the president with very comfortable leads over all the GOP candidates. Again, we're talking demographics here.

So that leaves him with a likely 244 electoral votes. 26 to go and 6 states. Those states are Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. At this point, each of them could go either way but all he really needs is Pennsylvania (even John Kerry won that state) and just one more to put him over the top. So things are looking pretty good for the president at present.

Click here for my map: 2012 Presidential Election: Electoral Map:

The Sketch Heard 'Round The World

Eric Fehrnstrom, Senior Romney adviser, obviously had no idea the fury he was about to unleash when he made this comment.

 

In so many ways, this is Mitt Romney. As the likely nominee of the conservative party of this country, he's really not a conservative. He just plays one on TV. When the fall campaign starts, he's going to start to try to appeal to the independents of the electorate. But will he be able to do so after all the "Barack X" language that has been coming out of his mouth for the last several months?

As the recent Purple Poll shows, the president is doing very well with independents again so Mittens really has his work cut out for him. Having to spend the next two months moving farther and farther to the right will certainly not help. Check out his unfavorables on page 3. Wow!

Getting in Your Facebook

A lot of people complain about how much government is getting involved in our personal lives, how intrusive it has become, yada yada yada. But there's another force that's even more intrusive, who knows far more about you than the government and is in a position to use information that should be completely private against you.

Your employer.

Last month there was a big noise when the Obama administration announced its plans for contraception coverage. It took them two tries to get it right, but in the end most quasi-religious organizations will be able to opt out of covering contraception and have the insurance company do it instead. This still presents a problem with organizations that self-insure, but it points out the real issue.

Our employers has no business knowing anything about our personal lives. In particular, they have no right to know our medical history, unless we're claiming sick time or maternity leave, we've been injured on the job, or medical problems are affecting our job performance. Some jobs, like airline pilots and football players, obviously require closer scrutiny of the employee's medical condition. But with the vast majority of us, our medical histories should be between us and our doctors. Our employers have no business sticking their noses into our private business.

Yet employers more and more seem to think that they own us. For years employers have been pushing for invasive drug-testing beyond jobs like police, pilots, bus drivers, etc., and into office jobs where it really doesn't matter. They've been on employees' cases for quitting smoking, losing weight, getting more exercise, etc., mostly in service to cutting their health care costs.

Now some employers have begun forcing potential employees to give their Facebook passwords so they can peep into your private profile. This is a clear invasion of privacy, and it's also against the policies of Facebook and most every other online service: you're never supposed to give out your password.

What people say on Facebook doesn't necessarily represent the reality of their lives. And relying on Facebook for any kind of real information is an extremely dubious: if you've got something to hide you can just make a separate Facebook account that only your "in" friend know about. Even worse, anyone can make a Facebook account in your name and make it appear that it's yours.

One form of cyber-bullying involves creating fake Facebook identities for the victims, then making posts that get the victim into trouble, such as terroristic threats. This problem isn't particularly new, it's been woven into the plots of shows like CSI: New York for years now.


Everyone across the political spectrum claims to be for freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The real question is how to proceed when the rights and freedoms of different groups and individuals collide: for example, those of employers and employees.

Employers have the right to control what you do on their time and with their equipment: you shouldn't be wasting time shopping on Amazon, posting on Facebook or looking at porn on your work computer.

But as long as you show up for work on time and do your job adequately, your employer has no right to know whether you use contraception, drink two vodka Martinis every night, or what your Facebook password is.

Still More Facts

In many ways, I'm very happy the energy issue is out front and center right now in public debate because we are starting to see more articles like this.

More US drilling didn't drop gas price

A statistical analysis of 36 years of monthly, inflation-adjusted gasoline prices and U.S. domestic oil production by The Associated Press shows no statistical correlation between how much oil comes out of U.S. wells and the price at the pump. Political rhetoric about the blame over gas prices and the power to change them — whether Republican claims now or Democrats' charges four years ago — is not supported by cold, hard figures.

Oh really? 36 years you say?

Seasonally adjusted U.S. oil production dropped steadily from February 1986 until three years ago. But starting in March 1986, inflation-adjusted gas prices fell below the $2-a-gallon mark and stayed there for most of the rest of the 1980s and 1990s. Production between 1986 and 1999 dropped by nearly one-third. If the drill-now theory were correct, prices should have soared. Instead they went down by nearly a dollar.

Uh...oops.

Further...

Sometimes prices increase as American drilling ramps up. That's what has happened in the past three years. Since February 2009, U.S. oil production has increased 15 percent when seasonally adjusted. Prices in those three years went from $2.07 per gallon to $3.58. It was a case of drilling more and paying much more. U.S. oil production is back to the same level it was in March 2003, when gas cost $2.10 per gallon when adjusted for inflation. But that's not what prices are now.

.But what about Keystone?

Supporters of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline say it would bring 25 million barrels of oil to the United States a month. That's the same increase in U.S. production that occurred between February and November last year. Monthly gas prices went up a dime a gallon in that time. 

Facts, folks. These are facts. Read the entire piece as it contains many more hard statistics.

And what is it again that affects prices?

That's because oil is a global commodity and U.S. production has only a tiny influence on supply. Factors far beyond the control of a nation or a president dictate the price of gasoline.

Why is that so difficult for people to understand? Oh yes, that's right...Barack X and his army of killer robots that are destroying free enterprise in this country.

Of course, the ultimate irony here is that I'm beginning to think that supporters of increased domestic drilling are under the impression that the United States government would own the oil. They wouldn't, of course, because that would be socialism, right? So, the companies that would own the oil would be able to sell it on the free market.

Where do you think they would go and sell it?

Vote for me, I know nothing and hate the same things you do.

I finally got around to watching my TiVo'd copy of the HBO film, Game Change. Despite Sarah Palin's protestations, I found the film to be pretty much accurate and, not surprisingly, I'm still enormously frustrated that there are people out there still who think that she would be a competent president.

A recent piece by Richard Cohen over at RealClear Politics not only sums up the very core of Ms. Palin but also is extremely illustrative of what happens when the right gets caught in their willful ignorance.

The movie portrays Palin as an ignoramus. She did not know that Queen Elizabeth II does not run the British government, and she did not know that North and South Korea are different countries. She seemed not to have heard of the Federal Reserve. She called Joe Biden "O'Biden," and she thought America went to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein, not al-Qaeda, had attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. Not only did she know little, but she was determinately incurious and supremely smug in her ignorance.

Being smug in their ignorance has now become a catechism. This is especially evident if anyone left of center confronts them with irrefutable facts.

At the same time, she was a liar. In the movie, she was called exactly that by McCain's campaign chief, Steve Schmidt, who came to realize -- a bit late in the game -- that one of Palin's great talents was to deny the truth. When confronted, she simply shuts down -- petulant, child-like -- and then sulks off.

Petulant and child-like..hmmm:)

Another thing about the film was the big reveal about the VP debate. I remember sitting in my family room and watching it with our very own last in line. After it was over, I turned to him and said, "Hey, she did a good job." Well, she did but, according to the film, it was all an act. She didn't have any idea what she was saying and simply memorized the lines. Great...

What's interesting about the rest of Cohen's piece is how he ties it to the 2012 election.

Apres Palin has come a deluge of dysfunctional presidential candidates. They do not lie with quite the conviction of Palin, but they are sometimes her match in ignorance...ignorance that has become more than bliss. It's now an attribute, an entire platform: Vote for me, I know nothing and hate the same things you do.

I think Sarah Palin was the spark that ended up given birth to the fictional character of Barack X. Many of his detractors (both public and private) simply can't accept the fact that he has been a good president and has done a good job. So, they ignore his accomplishments and create living pinata upon which they can unleash their hatred.

I guess I can take comfort in the fact that Sarah Palin will never be president and that the most ardent and extreme people like her really don't have as much power as the media makes them out to have.

A Problem With Math (and fundamental principles of markets)

A recent discussion in comments has once again illustrated the problems with facts and math that tend to come up when the right are talking about their fictional character, Barack X.

Their latest line of fantasy is how the president is responsible for high gas prices and if he would just unshackle the energy industry, we could decrease our dependence on foreign oil.

One small problem with this narrative is (as always) reality.

(Source: Energy Information Administration) 

The other reality item to consider is the world market.

(Source: Energy Information Administration) 

We could drill everywhere the right wants us to drill and it wouldn't matter. We will still be shackled to the world market.

So, the next time that mouth foaming uncle who gets his facts from right wing blogs says that we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, politely inform them that President Obama has been doing that.

Pander-monium

Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney went to Puerto Rico last week to campaign for delegates. While there, both Romney and Santorum pandered.

Romney pandered to locals in the normal way: he said nice things about Puerto Rico, and pledged to help Puerto Rico become a state if the referendum for statehood passes this coming November.

Santorum went to Puerto Rico to pander not to the locals, but to the middle-aged angry white men in the Tea Party back on the mainland. Though Santorum has endorsed statehood for Puerto Rico without preconditions in the past, he no longer supports statehood for Puerto Rico unless they speak English. He said:

Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law. And that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal language.

There's no such law. In fact, Puerto Ricans already enjoy American citizenship. They have to pay most federal taxes—they're enrolled in Social Security and Medicare—but they don't have to pay federal income tax. Many American companies have subsidiaries in Puerto Rico, and since it's a U.S. territory and workers are American citizens, they are eligible for security clearances. High-tech military contractors like Honeywell are therefore sending high-paying jobs to Puerto Rico to take advantage of the lower salaries and cost of living.

There are two basic kinds of pander: saying nice pleasant things to endear oneself to your listeners (Mitt's), and saying mean and incendiary things to incite vitriol (Rick's). Santorum's defenders claim he's just telling it like it is, and Romney is mealy-mouthed. But because there's no English language requirement for statehood, Santorum is either woefully ignorant of the law and therefore not fit to be president, or he's willfully lying about it to get votes. Since Santorum previously supported Puerto-Rican statehood, he's obviously lying now.

But he's just playing out the new "Southern strategy" that many Tea Party and anti-immigrant groups adopted the last few years. It is this core group of Republicans that Santorum went to Puerto Rico to pander to, solidifying his position as the one true Anti-Romney. In contrast to Romney's placid acceptance of Puerto-Rican self-determination, Santorum is pledging to inflict pain and humiliation on Puerto Rico before letting them into the club.

As it turned out, Romney got more than 50% and therefore won all 20 delegates. (Santorum apparently got only 8%.) This was expected, as pretty much the entire Republican establishment, including the governor of Puerto Rico, had endorsed Romney. Santorum almost certainly knew this, and knew going to Puerto Rico could not possibly win him a single Puerto-Rican delegate. The entire exercise was therefore cynically executed to maximally manipulate anti-Latino sentiment among the Republican base.

The thing is, it's not clear whether Puerto Rico really wants to become a state. When they voted on this in 1998, "none of the above" beat out statehood 50.5 to 46.6%. It's also not clear that Republicans would allow it to happen: with all the anti-Latino vitriol they've spewed in the last several years, they're probably afraid it would mean adding two Democratic senators and three or four Democratic representatives.

But Puerto Rico's current status seems wrong: they're essentially in the same boat the American colonies were in before the Revolution. They're subjects of some big country across the sea, but they don't get to vote for president or Congress. In other words, they are suffering from taxation without representation. That should get them some sympathy from the Tea Party.

He Said...What?

If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy. So you have to, at the same time, create pro-growth tax policies.---Mitt Romney, February 21, 2012, in Shelby Township, Michigan 

Uh...yeah, that's actually correct. How did we miss that one?

Oh, The Irony...

It's become quite obvious over the last several weeks that the mouth foaming that emanates from the right about the president's policies, as well as the federal government in general, is continuing to reach heretofore unseen depths of hypocrisy. A shining example of this is the states that continually vote Republican actually receive the most federal aid and tax dollars from the states that vote for Democrats.

But this one really takes the cake.

Plaintiff challenging healthcare law went bankrupt – with unpaid medical bills

Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama's healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue. Brown "doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it," said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation's case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.

But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address.

This would be funny if it weren't so tragic. The willful ignorance here is simply astounding.

The truly frustrating part is that we all still end up paying for her anyway, as Wendell Potter, former Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, recently noted...

Somebody has to pay for it. And guess who that is? It is all of us. Even Mary Brown. She and the rest of us cover that uncompensated care either through higher taxes to support the Medicare and Medicaid programs or through higher health insurance premiums. The care that presumably is "absorbed" by the hospitals is, in reality, being absorbed not by those facilities but by us. This is what the term "cost shifting" is all about. 

And this irrational way of paying for that so-called uncompensated care has us locked into a dysfunctional system in which costs for both the insured and the uninsured keep spiraling upward.

That's right, adolescent whiners, and that's why the PPACA is the best option at present. Scream all you want about it but simple and neat solutions to complex problems like health care don't fucking exist. Everything is not going to be perfect and we're just going to have to live with it...a truly hard thing to swallow for many people.

But, hey, at least those adolescents on the right will always have something to bitch about because it won't be perfect so that counts for something, hmm?

Not A Good Sign

Voter turnout thus far in the GOP primaries has been very low. In fact, it is lower than 2008 and that is not a good sign for the eventual nominee. A recent report from the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Center for the Study of the American Electorate details the numbers.

Overall, voter turnout so far is 11.5% of the 68.1 million citizens eligible to vote in the 13 states. That's a drop from a 13.2% voter turnout rate in the same states four years ago. 

And there really wasn't that much enthusiasm back then either. But what about the key battleground states? In Florida, 1.6 million people voted in 2012 compared to 1.9 million in the 2008 GOP primaries. In Nevada, the turnout in 2008 was 44,000. This year it was 32,000. That's nearly a 25 percent drop off. And in Colorado voter turnout was down about 7 percent this year in comparison to 2012.

Does this mean good things for the president?

Hmm...

An apt description of some of my commenters...:)

Where It's At

Well, the GOP primaries are slogging merrily along and Rick Santorum simply will not go away. That's because, as much of the base and the country knows, Mitt Romney isn't really a conservative. He is just awkwardly playing one on TV.

Now, most of you know that I like Mitt Romney personally and wish that he would just come out and be the pragmatic dude that I know he can be. But there's this little thing called the Republican nomination that he has to get first. And, since the GOP keeps moving further and further right every day, he has to play make believe and pretend that Barack X is building an army of robots programmed to take away guns and bibles.

But he just doesn't look like he's into it...talking about cheezy grits and y'alls and such...so, Rick Santorum just won three states in a row (Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi) and Mitt's inevitable nomination doesn't look so inevitable.

I think he's still going to win but I guess I'm wondering how far he is going to go in trying to get the nomination. What crazy crapola is going to come out of his mouth to prove to the base that he's a "severe conservative?"Likely it will be worse than his "the president is destroying free enterprise" comment but, hey, that's they ugly face of American populism that he has to placate.

Personally, I'd rather people go after Mitt on his foreign policy plans. What exactly are they? And how will they be more effective than President Obama's policies, nearly all of which have been successful?

No Shit

The Evolution of Princesses

It's springtime, and we all know what that means: the beginning of the blockbuster movie season. Last weekend Disney's John Carter opened, with many critics predicting its doom, pointing out that the viewing public has not been kind to movies about Mars. Speculation was rife that the movie—about a Civil War vet who goes to Mars—would bomb terribly. As it turns out, it wasn't a total dud; it did fairly well overseas so it may break even in the long haul. But prospects for a sequel—apparently the only criterion for success in movies—are bleak.

I liked the film. Over the years I've come to like historical dramas like Rome and The Tudors, alternative histories and retro-future Victorian steampunk settings. But I can see that for some John Carter might lack a certain pizzazz; it's more or less true to the understated tone of the Victorian era, and the characters don't have the same edgy sarcastic wit we've come to expect in summer blockbusters, even characters in the Victorian era like the Sherlock Holmes of Robert Downey Jr. The deserts of Mars feel more like Roman Egypt than Tatooine, especially with the casting of Rome's Ciaran Hinds and James Purefoy.

John Carter is based on  Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Barsoom novel,  A Princess of Mars. 2012 is the hundredth anniversary of its publication in serialized form in The All-Story, with the title Under the Moons of Mars. It was republished as a novel in 1917. (It's available for free at Project Gutenberg in HTML and e-book formats.)

Burrough's novels paved the way for the Tarzan movies and Buck Rogers serials in the thirties, which were the templates for modern blockbusters like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Arc. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells preceded Burroughs, but their work was somewhat abstract, while Burroughs's pulp fiction was full of rip-roaring swashbuckling adventure. And naked ladies.

Though I've read science fiction for more than forty years, I hadn't read any Burroughs until two years ago. My tastes tended more toward "hard science fiction" and writers like Asimov, Benford, Clarke, Heinlein, Niven, Varley, Zelazny, and so on. In my younger days Burroughs' Victorian writing style didn't attract me, and the social attitudes on race and gender expressed in his work, typical of his era, turned me off. Though I'm sure many of his contemporaries found his ideas outrageously radical and far too sympathetic to "primitives."

Making a movie from a book entails a great deal of condensation and restructuring. A two-hour film simply doesn't have the time to delve into subplots, or develop characters to the same extent a novel can.  Many characters have to be axed, or their functions must be combined into a single character. Often the conventions of a novel don't translate well into film.

Thus, many aspects of Burroughs' novel were changed: the mode of Carter's translation to Mars was altered to suit modern technological sensibilities; a new major character was added (pulled from a subsequent book in the series); even the characters' attire was altered—if filmed as originally written, the movie would have drawn an NC-17 rating. Did I mention naked ladies?

But perhaps the biggest change of all was the character of Dejah Thoris. As described in the novel, "She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure." Symmetrical?

Burroughs' Dejah Thoris was the typical damsel in distress. When they first met, she was depicted as the haughty, condescending daughter of a nobleman, though somehow even this endeared her to Carter.

John Carter's Dejah Thoris is thoroughly modern, recast in the mold of Princess Leia. She's the Martian scientist on the verge of a technological breakthrough that would save her planet, only to be sabotaged by the villains. She's a top-notch sword fighter, wears more armor than Carter and could probably whoop him in a fair fight (his great Earthly strength is a major plot point). She's a scholar who can read ancient languages. When she's ultimately forced into cheesecake mode, she disdains it.

Even the underlying theme of the novel and the motivation for Carter and Dejah Thoris to meet—the deteriorating Martian biosphere—is discarded. Instead they are brought together when she flees a forced marriage to the villain who threatens to enslave all Mars.

In short, the changes with Dejah Thoris directly reflect the changed role of women in society a century after the novel was published. Today many top scientists, CEOs and politicians are women. Women serve in the military alongside men, and in workplaces everywhere else. Since 2000 women have outnumbered men in college 57-43%. Women still have not attained true equality, though the college numbers indicate that women will eventually to catch up.

Yet a hundred years after Under the Moons of Mars was published we still have politicians like Rick Santorum whose attitudes toward women seem to be even more antiquated than Edgar Rice Burroughs'. Santorum rails against birth control and abortion and women in the military; he seems intent on returning women to the chattel status that John Carter's Dejah Thoris fled. Women are not dainty, fragile princesses who must be coddled and simultaneously blamed for inciting men to lust.

Whether or not John Carter enjoys box office success, it's another clear reflection that in popular culture and among the young the issue of women's equality and their right to decide their own fate has been decided. And that's not just Hollywood propaganda. Women outnumber men in the voting age population, and they may well decide the election this fall.

It's just a matter of time until people like Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, the pope and the ayatollahs give up the ghost and give women their due.