Month: February 2013

Oscar stats for political junkies

by digby

If you political junkies would like to turn the Oscars into some wonky fun, I’d recommend that you read Nate Silver’s statistical take on it — it’s lots of fun. As someone who observed this game close up for many years, I can tell you that his methodology is pretty good — there’s definitely a certain bandwagon effect to the awards.

Anyway, here’s the upshot:

There’s usually at least one surprise. I think it could be Best Picture. (Silver Linings Playbook is coming on strong.) But we’ll see.

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Authoritarian Freedom Fighters (yes, I’m talking about the NRA)

by digby

There’s a lot of liberal crowing about the success of progressive activism, and not without merit. The world has changed for the better as a result of the long term pressure and confrontational politics of various civil rights groups, most recently the highly successful strategies of the gay rights movement. (Read this powerful, moving piece by Garance Franke-Ruta if you doubt it.)

But even with all that, I still think that the most successful single issue group of the last quarter century has to be the NRA:

It sounded like a throwaway line. Toward the end of a four-hour Senate hearing on gun violence last week, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice president of over two decades, took a break from extolling the virtues of assault rifles and waded briefly into new territory: criminal justice reform. “We’ve supported prison building,” LaPierre said. Then he hammered California for releasing tens of thousands of nonviolent offenders per a Supreme Court order—what he’d previously termed “the largest prison break in American history.”

But California’s overflowing prisons, which the Supreme Court had deemed “cruel and unusual punishment” in 2011 because of squalid conditions, were partly a product of the NRA’s creation. Starting in 1992, as part of a now-defunct program called CrimeStrike, the NRA spent millions of dollars pushing a slate of supposedly anti-crime measures across the country that kept America’s prisons full—and built new ones to meet the demand. CrimeStrike’s legacy is everywhere these days.

CrimeStrike arose out of necessity. The NRA had come into its own as a political power during the Reagan era, but by the early 1990s, it was strapped for cash. The organization ran up a $9 million deficit in 1991 and was on pace for a $30 million shortfall in 1992, even as it was preparing to go to the mattresses over assault weapons and background checks. The NRA needed a shot in the arm.

LaPierre launched CrimeStrike that spring with $2 million in seed money from the parent organization and a simple platform: mandatory minimums, harsher parole standards, adult sentences for juveniles, and, critically, more prisons. “Our prisons are overcrowded. Our bail laws are atrocious. We’ll be the bad guy,” he announced.

The NRA took its case to the public. “Will you let criminals rape your rights?” asked a four-page ad in a 1994 issue of Field & Stream magazine. And the real culprit was in the White House: “The Clinton administration has already cut federal prison construction by $550 million in favor of ‘community placement’ and ‘criminal rehabilitation programs.'” This was reviving an old conservative talking point: Democrats were soft on crime.

It worked like a charm.

This shows exactly what kind of people NRA followers really are. For all their talk of watering the tree of liberty with blood of tyrants, they are actually the worst kind of authoritarians. They’re fine with government power when it comes to any police agency (not charged with gun regulation) and they cheer it enthusiastically when it imprisons large numbers of people they consider to be undesirable. The only powers they don’t wish the government to have is the power to tax them for the cost of these authoritarian institutions or to regulate their personal firepower. And they downright love a man in uniform, whether a cop or a soldier. In fact, they don them themselves as often as possible:

If they had their way, the model for the US would be none other than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which worked out very well indeed for the “right” people. (Not so good for the “wrong” ones though …)

Read the whole story at Mojo about the NRA’s prison plan. And then contemplate the fact that the Democrats decided after the 2000 election that they couldn’t possibly go against them ever again. (And people wonder why so many of us find the Democratic Party’s “strategies” so contemptible.)

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“Highly sensitive” secrets

by digby

Unbelievable:

“When I went through the process of becoming press secretary, one of the first things they told me was, you’re not even to acknowledge the drone program,” Gibbs said on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes” on Sunday. “You’re not even to discuss that it exists.”

Gibbs, who was recently hired by MSNBC as a contributor, called the proposition “inherently crazy.”
“You’re being asked a question based on reporting of a program that exists,” Gibbs, who served as White House press secretary from 2009 to 2011, said. “So you’re the official government spokesperson acting as if the entire program—pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Obama’s former spokesman said that while the administration has recently expressed the need to be more transparent about its use of drones, certain aspects of that program are “highly sensitive” and will likely remain secret.

“I have not talked to him about this, so I want to be careful,” Gibbs said, “but I think what the president has seen is, our denial of the existence of the program when it’s obviously happening undermines people’s confidence overall in the decisions that their government makes.”

Really? Naaaah.

And to think I remember a time when the Press Secretary lying outright to the press and the public was seen as something of a breach.

I can’t but be reminded of this:

And this:

SCARBOROUGH: “What we’re doing with drones is remarkable: the fact that over the past eight years during the Bush years – when a lot of people brought up some legitimate questions about international law – my God, those lines have been completely eradicated by a drone policy that says: if you’re between 17 and 30, and within a half-mile of a suspect, we can blow you up, and that’s exactly what’s happening . . . . They are focused on killing the bad guys, but it is indiscriminate as to other people who are around them at the same time . . . . it is something that will cause us problems in the coming years” . . . .

KLEIN: “I completely disagree with you. . . . It has been remarkably successful” —

SCARBOROUGH: “at killing people” —

KLEIN: “At decimating bad people, taking out a lot of bad people – and saving Americans lives as well, because our troops don’t have to do this . . . You don’t need pilots any more because you do it with a joystick in California.”

SCARBOROUGH: “This is offensive to me, though. Because you do it with a joystick in California – and it seems so antiseptic – it seems so clean – and yet you have 4-year-old girls being blown to bits because we have a policy that now says: ‘you know what? Instead of trying to go in and take the risk and get the terrorists out of hiding in a Karachi suburb, we’re just going to blow up everyone around them.’

“This is what bothers me. . . . We don’t detain people any more: we kill them, and we kill everyone around them. . . . I hate to sound like a Code Pink guy here. I’m telling you this quote ‘collateral damage’ – it seems so clean with a joystick from California – this is going to cause the US problems in the future.”

KLEIN: “If it is misused, and there is a really major possibility of abuse if you have the wrong people running the government. But: the bottom line in the end is – whose 4-year-old get killed? What we’re doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.”

If these are the rationales for using drones, you can see why they wanted to keep it a secret. History is not going to be kind about this.

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You can’t take it with you (Or why dying people aren’t smart consumers)

by digby

From the annals of bad punditry, I bring you an excerpt of This Week with George Stephanopoulos:

BRILL: Well, if you put Medicare in the context of the larger health care system, and this is something that everybody at this table is going to think that I should go to a mental hospital when I get finished saying this, the government and all of us would actually save money if you lowered — I said lowered the age for Medicare. If the Medicare age were 60 instead of 65, the economy and the taxpayers would actually save money. And George, please don’t look at me like that.

RATTNER: You’re potentially right. And part of the argument — you’re taking people out of the Medicare age to 67 is you’re taking people out of the Medicare system.

BRILL: Right. And what you would be doing, is you would be putting the most efficient player, which is Medicare — Medicare spends 80 or 90 cents to process a claim and the health insurance companies spend $18 or $20 or $25 to process a claim. Health insurance companies pay two, three, four times what Medicare pays for various services. So if you lowered the age, you would put more people into the bucket of much more efficient health care.

And the worst part about it is, the reforms that we have now, with the president’s plan, are actually going to raise the costs because all of the people who are 60, or 62, or 63, who can’t afford the premiums that they’re going to have now, are going to be subsidized by the taxpayer.

STEPHANOPOULOS: George, well that becomes an argument for a single payer system.

WILL: That is one argument.Here’s an argument against that, for a different kind of reform, all the big numbers, billions and trillions, 12 cents is the most important number. 12 cents is the portion of every health care dollar paid by the person receiving the health care. Someone else is paying the rest. It was 47 cents 50 years ago when Jack Kennedy was president.

Now, let me ask the five of you a question, you go to the doctor and he or she says they say I want to give you the following test? How many of you five say, how much does that going to cost?

BRILL: Give me two.

WILL: Don’t bother, because the doctor can’t tell you anyway.

BRILL: George, you’re completely wrong. We have tried that experiment with 30 million to 50 million Americans who don’t have health insurance and have to pay 100 percent right now. And they have no choice, they are powerless consumers. If you go to an emergency room and a doctor says you need a CA Scan, and the doctor may not even say it, they may just do it, you’re not sitting there as a consumer saying, gee, I wonder if this is the most efficient emergency room. I wonder if I really need that CAT scan.

STRASSEL: No, we haven’t, because we only have a small group of Americans who are doing that. We have a much larger group of Americans, like George says, who are getting their health care through their companies and it’s largely paid for them and they have no skin in the game.

The important part about your piece was that you mentioned that this is a seller’s market. There’s no transparency in the market. There’s no competition. There’s no ability for consumers to look around. We spend hours deciding which toaster we’re going to buy. We put no such thought or work into where we’re going to get our health care. And you have had companies like Safeway who worked with their employees to introduce some transparency. And you’ve seen a big reduction in health care costs.

BRILL: There’s a difference between buying a toaster and buying a CAT scan.

RATTNER: This is a huge moral question for the country, because I agree with George, that right now, most Americans do not see price in deciding whether to use health care. You see price in toasters, you see price in cars and homes, everything else. In health care, you don’t see price. And therefore, I have to believe, and I think your piece eluded to this, that when people go on Medicare, they really don’t see price, they tend to consume more than they otherwise would.

26 percent of all Medicare spending is last year of life. We don’t know how much of that is really efficacious spending. These are really tough moral questions for the country. But we’re going to have to deal with them if we’re really going to get health care under control.

First of all, let’s make note of the sad fact that Stephen Brill feels it necessary to note that people at the table will want to send him to a mental hospital for suggesting that we ought to lower the medicare age. What a sad comment on our time.

But get a load of George Will’s argument. He truly believes that patients are consumers in exactly the same way as toaster shoppers. Why, if only we had a list of prices we could shop around for the cheapest deal on our heart surgery. (Personally, I tend to wait until things come on sale so I sure hope I don’t drop dead before I at least get a coupon!)

I had thought we had already had this debate and most of the right wingers had realized they lost the argument. But that was far too optimistic. Apparently, it will never go away: they think the problem with our health care system is that people aren’t paying enough for it. If they paid more, they wouldn’t use it so much and costs would shrink. I’m not sure how you deal with the problem of people not having enough money to pay but I’m going to guess that Will believes this is the natural way of things and the great Invisible Hand of God will intervene if someone really deserves to live. The most important thing is to rein in all that superfluous medical spending that people are using just because it’s so much fun to have tests and procedures we don’t need. I do love a good colonoscopy but if I had to pay for it in cash, I might think twice about getting them done more than once every five years. Fingers crossed!

But as dumb as George Will’s solution is, it pales in comparison to Steven Rattner’s:

This is a huge moral question for the country, because I agree with George, that right now, most Americans do not see price in deciding whether to use health care. You see price in toasters, you see price in cars and homes, everything else. In health care, you don’t see price. And therefore, I have to believe, and I think your piece eluded to this, that when people go on Medicare, they really don’t see price, they tend to consume more than they otherwise would.

26 percent of all Medicare spending is last year of life. We don’t know how much of that is really efficacious spending. These are really tough moral questions for the country. But we’re going to have to deal with them if we’re really going to get health care under control.

Apparently, Rattner not only thinks that we all should be paying more for health care, he thinks that dying people should be shopping around for cheaper procedures. After all, everyone knows they waste a lot of money on that last year. If they knew how much their dying was costing, surely they’d shop for something less expensive. Because saving money is a very high priority when you’re dying.

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by digby

Dear Digby:   

One of the nice things about being a Member of Congress is that I have security clearance, and you don’t. (Sorry!) So I know about the threat that the looming sequester poses to a crucial top-secret military research project. Since we’re friends, I’ll tell you about it.
The U.S. Army has discovered that a small round white object, when hurled from close range at the upper extremities of an enemy combatant, can have a devastating impact, sometimes inducing unconsciousness. Deploying this weapon often results in immediate disorientation in the enemy combatant, reflected in his abrupt non-vertical motion and transient imbalance. The Army refers to these powerful weapons as “Ballistic White Spherical Objects,” or BWSOs. 

Although it packs quite a wallop, the BWSO is surprisingly compact. It measures only nine inches in circumference, small enough for a properly trained U.S. soldier to hold one in each hand. A fully-functional BWSO weighs only five ounces, making it practical for a U.S. soldier deployed on the battlefield to carry several of them, simultaneously, in his kit.
Remarkably, U.S. military experiments have demonstrated that the BWSO is completely resistant to electromagnetic pulses (EMPs), and other advanced electronic countermeasures. In the wake of an EMP caused by a nuclear blast, BWSOs evidently will continue to function in the prescribed manner, unless they are vaporized. 

BWSOs are especially useful in close combat, demonstrating the ability to project substantial force over small distances. Yet the effective range of BWSOs is proving to be very similar to that of grenades (for reasons as yet unknown). The effective range of BWSOs has been ascertained to be substantially greater than that of bayonets.
Currently, our entire supply of military-grade BWSOs comes from Costa Rica. 

Recognizing the obvious wartime threat, Pentagon military planners have considered the scenario in which the Chinese Navy blocks both the Pacific and the Caribbean sea lanes. The planners have assured the Joint Chiefs of Staff that we will nevertheless be able to maintain our supply of BWSOs because, since Costa Rica has no military, we can just take whatever we want. (A nation without a military – imagine that. But I digress.)

BWSOs are white objects, as the acronym implies. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is, however, in the midst of a year-long study at a secret location to determine whether BWSOs remain effective when they are red, green, blue or even purple. If these tests prove successful, then next year, DARPA will test striped BWSOs, and in the following year, plaid. 

Every BWSO features 216 pieces of red thread, or “stitches” (not to be confused with the medical treatment for combat wounds).  These “stitches” sometimes cause a completely unexpected feature upon deployment – a curvature in the arc of the BWSO’s trajectory. At first this was believed to be an optical illusion, or perhaps a gravitational lensing effect, in accordance with general relativity.  However, detailed telescopic studies performed by orbiting military satellites, in both the visible light and infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, have confirmed that this effect is genuine. 

Properly trained , a soldier can deploy the BWSO with mind-boggling speeds approaching 100 mph, or almost twice the velocity of a car on an interstate highway adhering to the national speed limit (if such a thing can be imagined). Interestingly, this is true of both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking drivers, and both automatic transmissions and “stick shifts.” At such velocity, scientific studies at Guantanamo Bay and certain “black ops” CIA locations have demonstrated that the impact of a BWSO upon the skull of an enemy combatant is devastating, especially when the enemy combatant is in chains.
Because BWSOs are usually non-lethal, they are also being studied for usage by internal security forces. One advanced concept is to deploy them from domestic drones. In the United Kingdom, tests are being conducted to see whether they can be integrated into the existing complement of equipment used by English “bobbies,” whereby one “pitches” and the other one “hits.” 

The U.S. Army’s current BWSO research program – placed directly at risk by the sequester — focuses on the maximum speed with which BWSOs may be deployed.  In this key project, the Army has identified and procured the services of certain experts in the field. These experts cannot be identified, for obvious reasons, but they definitely aren’t not named “CC Sabathia,” “Johan Santana” or “Barry Zito.” (Disturbingly, intelligence reports conclusively demonstrate that “Justin Verlander” may or may not be cooperating with foreign military forces in a similar manner, thus posing the very real threat of an “arms race.”) 

Due to earlier budget cuts, the Army found that it could not pay the normal daily rate for these experts, which is $600,000 for approximately two hours of work. The Army found, however, that it could procure these services for half-price, or only $300,000 for each two-hour “start,” if it conducted these tests between mid-October and late March.
These essential tests are being threatened by the sequester. If the sequester goes into effect at the end of this month, then we may never understand why Army test data indicate that Santana’s deployment of the BWSOs appears to be slowing. (Could it be a gradual increase in the strength of the Earth’s gravitational field?)  Or why Zito’s declining ability to force the BWSO trajectory to arc occasionally seems to leave the BWSO hanging in the air, much like a ripe pumpkin. 

We cannot leave America defenseless. We cannot let the terrorists win. Remember, they hate us because we are free. But the cost of that freedom is precisely whatever the current military budget happens to be, before any terrorist-coddling sequester cuts. 

Virtually all of the media coverage of the impact of the sequester on the US military-industrial complex has focused on the loss of jobs, as if hiring people to kill other people is some kind of national full-employment program. But having read all the way down to here, at least you, Dear Reader, you understand that there is a lot more at stake. 

Oh, and we’re also cutting the air traffic control budget by nine percent. That should have some interesting consequences. 

Courage, 

Rep. Alan Grayson 

P.S. Please sign our petition against Social Security and Medicare cuts at www.no-cuts.com, if you haven’t already.

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QOTD: Chris Hayes

by digby

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Go to work tomorrow, if you’re in session, which you never are, but on the off chance you ever go to Congress, just pass a one-sentence bill that repeals sequestration.

As I’ve said a thousand times, this was not written in stone, it did not come down from Mt Sinai, it was an agreement that was struck to save face in the moment and it can be unstruck at any time. There is nothing absolutely requiring the congress to go through with this.

There is some discussion that the only way this can happen is if the people see that government services they need are being affected and then put pressure on the government to end this game of chicken. Maybe that’s true. But let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t a purely political bind these people have gotten themselves into. This goes back to the ill-fated 2011 Grand Bargain negotiations in which both the White House and the Republicans in the House bungled things so badly that we are still dealing with the fallout.

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Hating on the poors

by David Atkins

John Cheese has a great Sunday read at Cracked: Four things politicians will never understand about poor people. Subjects include “Poor Does Not Equal Unemployed,” “Poor People Are Not Mindless Leeches,” “Poor People Aren’t Rampant Drug Addicts” and “You Don’t Have Real Sympathy for the Poor if You’ve Never Lived It.”

From the section on drug testing welfare recipients:

This is another hot debate in political circles because quite a few states have already adopted it, and several more are considering it. Why not? Yes, it was declared unconstitutional on grounds that it violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches, but other than that, it seems like a good idea. Drugs are a huge problem with the poor, and I most definitely don’t want to be handing my tax dollars to someone who’s just going to blow it on … well, blow.

That’s what all of these states thought, and some of them still think that. Then they did the testing and found out that, actually, the poor are pretty much as clean as the rest of us. In Arizona, out of 87,000 people they subjected to the test, exactly one monster-forkin’ person tested positive. One. And Florida had just as embarrassing results: 21 people tested positive out of 51,000. That was right before a federal judge showed up and put a boot in their … leg-hat, by blocking the law. Of course, that didn’t hurt their feelings much since the program not only didn’t save the state any money, but it actually put them almost $46,000 in the hole (must … resist), even when you factor in the money they saved by denying applicants.

What really troubles me with this one isn’t the occasional crackhead being booted from the system. It’s the 6 year old that isn’t being provided for, regardless of what illegal horsepoop their parents are putting into their bodies. As in all of these points, yes, those people do exist — I’ll never deny that. And yes, I think it’s a dagnabbit falootin’ shame that some of our money is going to crack instead of … well, literally anything else. But that child is along for the ride, regardless, and pushing him deeper into poverty is unacceptable on pretty much every level.

Read the whole thing. It’s tremendous.

There’s a certain style to political blogging that falls on deaf ears to many apolitical types. But an article like this from a humor website filled with the right dose of comedy and profanity can reach many of the ones that folks like me and Digby can’t. I strongly recommend forwarding this article to anyone suffocating under the delusions of Republican talking points about poverty and social welfare.

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They love the veterans to death

by digby

Oh fergawdsakes:

Per Charles Johnson, this comes from Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft, and spread by Drudge all over the paranoid wingnut circuit.

Here’s the thing: it only applies to mentally ill veterans whose veteran’s benefits have been legally placed in a guardianship due to incompetence a somewhat salient fact omitted from Hoft’s “report.”

I’m quite sure there are some far right gun proliferation activists out there who think veterans with mental illness so severe they are unable to even handle their own money should nonetheless be allowed to purchase firearms, but I’m going to guess that most Americans see this as a prudent regulation. If only the right wing cared enough about these mentally ill veterans to agree to pay for the support they need. And they seem to be unaware of(or don’t care about) the monumentally high suicide rate among veterans. The only answer they seem to have for any problem these days is to arm everyone and let God sort it out later.

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Institutionalized torture

by digby

George Will makes a good point:

“Zero Dark Thirty,” a nominee for Sunday’s Oscar for Best Picture, reignited debate about whether the waterboarding of terrorism suspects was torture. This practice, which ended in 2003, was used on only three suspects. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in protracted solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture and probably violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Noting that half of all prison suicides are committed by prisoners held in isolation, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) has prompted an independent assessment of solitary confinement in federal prisons. State prisons are equally vulnerable to Eighth Amendment challenges concerning whether inmates are subjected to “substantial risk of serious harm.”

America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of its prisoners. Mass incarceration, which means a perpetual crisis of prisoners re-entering society, has generated understanding of solitary confinement’s consequences when used as a long-term condition for an estimated 25,000 inmates in federal and state “supermax” prisons — and perhaps 80,000 others in isolation sections within regular prisons. Clearly, solitary confinement involves much more than the isolation of incorrigibly violent individuals for the protection of other inmates or prison personnel.

Federal law on torture prohibits conduct “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” And “severe” physical pain is not limited to “excruciating or agonizing” pain, or pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death.” The severe mental suffering from prolonged solitary confinement puts the confined at risk of brain impairment.

This is shameful and despicable and we should all be more mindful and attentive to what is going on in America’s prison industrial complex. I am as guilty as the next person of ignoring it far too often.

I must point out, however, that one of the legal distinctions between the torture of terrorism suspects or tasering of average citizens by police, is the fact that they have been offered no due process and have been found guilty of nothing. Of course, we can make another legal distinction between the torture of terrorism suspects and those in prison: the constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. (On the other hand the 4th amendment does guarantee due process, so inflicting pain on innocents in custody would seem to be doubly unconstitutional.)

In any case, this isn’t really complicated and doesn’t require any fancy legal arguments. There is no moral distinction among any of those circumstances. Torture is always wrong whether the person has been found guilty of a crime or not. It’s barbaric that we do it so often in our society. But then we are very exceptional.

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Michelle’s bangs

by digby

Ok, this makes it official.  Michelle Obama is the coolest first lady ever:

And by the way, the bangs look phenomenal, she is anything but fat and all she’s trying to do with her campaign is get kids to eat some vegetables and exercise more. Say what you want about her husband, he’s fair game, but she’s terrific. Fuck the critics.

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