Annnnd … the bucket of lukewarm spit award goes to Mark Halperin
by digby
I guess until they literally fire on Ft Sumter, and maybe not even then, the Villagers will insist that both sides are equally to blame:
Such a wise, wise man, so clearly superior to all those silly people fighting over all that silly health care and budget nonsense. I’m so glad he’s a leading arbiter of political conventional wisdom. It’s working out just great for everyone.
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by digby
“If you want people to get health insurance, the best way for them to get health insurance is to get a job.”
And fuck you to the self-employed and small business owners, I guess. Who needs ’em?
That’s not an original thought, by the way. You all recall this I’m sure:
On CSPAN’s Washington Journal yesterday, former Republican congressman Tom Davis received a call from an elderly woman named Dorothy, who said that because she has diabetes, health insurance companies “reject” her. “They don’t even want to accept me,” said Dorothy. “Is that, is that possible they could get away with that? That seems like discriminating.”
Davis responded by saying that he understood her “dilemma” and that she probably wouldn’t be able to retire by 62 as she desires. Advising her that she’d be alright if she found “a job with a major employer,” Davis said it would be “difficult” on her own:
DAVIS: I don’t think you’ll find, probably be able to find some health insurance but if its with a small business or you’re going out on your own, it’s difficult at this point. There may be a government plan or private plans that are mandated coming out of this that are maybe able to help you. … I don’t know any reason why you shouldn’t be able to find something out there, but you want to look for an employer that has a health care plan. Good luck.
And if that doesn’t work, beg for help from you neighbors:
WOMAN: “Senator Coburn, we need help (crying) my husband has traumatic brain injury, and his health insurance would not cover him to even drink, (Crying) and, what I need to know is are you gonna help him, where he could eat and drink, we left the Nursing Home and they told us we’re on our own.
He left with a feeding tube, I’ve been working with him but I’m not a speech pathologist, a profession though that take six years for a Masters, and I try to get him to eat and drink again and this means so much to me (crying). “
COBURN: “Well I think, first of all yeah, we’ll help, uh, the first thing we’ll do is see what we can do individually to help you, uh, through our office.
Uhm, but the other thing that’s missing in this debate is us as neighbors. Helping people that need our help, uh, you know, we tend to, (clapping) the idea that the government is the solution to our problem is an inaccurate, a very inaccurate statement, (clapping) Government, government…”
Oh, and by the way, they don’t think employers should be required to offer health insurance either. So, if they decide it’s too expensive, it’s really it’s all about begging from your neighbors. After all, if you get sick when you aren’t rich, it’s really your fault right? You should be humiliated. Or die.
h/t to @Tomtomorrow
NSA charm offensive?
by digby
For the first time since 1975, the NSA invited in a bunch of academics to flatter thembrief them about the secret programs and this interview with one of the participants gives us some idea of what their charm offensive is supposed to accomplish. I’ll let you read the whole thing but these answers from the NSA struck me as being so vacuous as to demand some kind of response:
Q: Have Snowden’s actions endangered national security or international relations?
A: The standard lines about “irreparable harm” are not convincing to many people because they are so vague, we’ve heard them so often, and the government classifies boatloads of information that shouldn’t be secret.
But NSA officials got a little more specific. They said Snowden has hurt national security in three ways: The first is that he revealed government surveillance capabilities. Second, he’s revealed politically embarrassing things that are harming relations with our allies – and they believe there is more to come. (Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff postponed a state visit to Washington, for example, following the release of evidence that the U.S. spied on Brazilian politicians and business leaders.) They said Snowden has a pattern of releasing embarrassing information around big international meetings, such as the G20 summit. The third damaging impact is that Snowden has hurt the NSA’s ability to produce intelligence.
If he revealed embarrassing information about the US Government spying on its allies and it harmed relations with them, isn’t the problem that the government is doing this, not that it’s been revealed? I guess they honestly believe that America should be spying on her allies and that Americans think that’s a good thing. I don’t think that’s been determined. If the government is doing things that will break trust with their friends maybe it should think twice about doing it rather than getting bent out of shape when its been discovered. I’m sorry they’re embarrassed. Perhaps they should consider not doing embarrassing things.
(Oh, and saying that Snowden has “hurt NSA’s ability to produce intelligence” doesn’t qualify as “more specific.”)
I don’t mean to be critical. It’s an interesting interview:
Q: What were your biggest takeaways from this meeting?
A: I would say one of the things that I did walk away from the meeting hearing – and I think that perhaps this is the big policy question – is that the NSA orientation is to collect now, ask questions later. So the question is: Is that the right operating philosophy; are we comfortable as a democratic society with that collect-now-ask-later approach?
I would hope not. But the implication is that we are all totally on board with the NSA’s (secret) spying mission and are simply arguing over the methods. That’s not true. There is a ton of dissent out there over the idea that the NSA should have these capabilities at all and certainly whether it should be spying on our allies, particularly when it comes to doing it for commercial purposes (as it seems to have been done in Brazil and China at least.) After all, in today’s global economy that is not something that necessarily benefits average Americans or any other average person on this planet.
Moreover, allowing any secret government agency this kind of power and virtually unlimited resources, regardless of the alleged oversight (which in practice operates 99% of the time as a rubber stamp)is begging for trouble. There may be trade-offs involved in checking this power, but it’s far more likely that the greater threat to our freedom will come from within rather than without, particularly when you have a gargantuan bureaucracy which always seeks to maintain itself. It’s just the way these things work. This thing clearly needs to be reined in generally, not just have its methods re-evaluated.
This is just more of the “we need to be more open about how awesome we are so that people will be “comfortable” with our massive secret spying operation.” But that’s why they call it Big Brother — so people will feel comfortable.
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It takes a comic
by digby
Thanks goodness for the cartoonists:
Exchange grate
by digby
Listening to the Republicans lie outrageously on the Sunday shows about the catastrophic effects of a program that isn’t even in effect (while denying that climate change exists!) is enough to give me a headache. It reminded me of this:
Rick Perlstein wrote a fascinating article for The Daily Beast about what he calls out “mendocracy” — which means a society ruled by liars. He discusses the fact that most Americans believe that Obama raised their taxes when he actually lowered them and uses Limbaugh’s admonition to his audience that Obama always means exactly the opposite of what he says as an example of how that kind of thing comes to pass.
(a) A mountebank teaches his millions of followers that everything the president says is a priori a lie;
b) The mainstream media that acts as if anything his millions of followers believe is a priori deserving of respect as heartland folk wisdom (note the cover article lionizing Limbaugh in this week’s Newsweek);
(c) The president unilaterally renders himself constitutionally incapable of breaking the chain between (a) and (b), such that, (d), the assumption that Obama raised taxes when he really lowered them becomes hegemonic for a majority of the electorate, and even a large plurality of Democrats.
Q.E.D.: Governing has become impossible.
Nothing beats this nonsense about the ACA already causing millions of people to suffer and die when it hasn’t even started — which is why they have to stop it. It’s so daft, it’s hard for me to believe they can say this without their heads exploding. But they’re all doing it. The morning talk show round tables were simply incomprehensible as a result.
We’re so screwed.
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NY Times: The NSA can track your social connections
by digby
If this is really ok with everyone, I give up. The New York Times reports today:
Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.
The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.
The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.
The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.
But don’t worry. Unless you know a foreigner or know someone who knows a foreigner or someone who knows someone who knows someone who is a foreigner you have absolutely nothing to worry about:
An agency spokeswoman, asked about the analyses of Americans’ data, said, “All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.”
“All of N.S.A.’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose,” the spokeswoman added. “Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity.”
The legal underpinning of the policy change, she said, was a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans could have no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called. Based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the Pentagon decided that it was permissible to create contact chains using Americans’ “metadata,” which includes the timing, location and other details of calls and e-mails, but not their content. The agency is not required to seek warrants for the analyses from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court:
Well, at least they can’t share their analysis with other agencies. Well, not much anyway. (Not that we’d know about it if they did since federal agencies routinely dummy up their evidence trail so as not to reveal where they got the information.)
And remember the minimization rules on this have a very convenient out when it comes to sharing the information:
In the 2011 memo explaining the shift, N.S.A. analysts were told that they could trace the contacts of Americans as long as they cited a foreign intelligence justification. That could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation or international drug smuggling to spying on conversations of foreign politicians, business figures or activists.
Analysts were warned to follow existing “minimization rules,” which prohibit the N.S.A. from sharing with other agencies names and other details of Americans whose communications are collected, unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence reports or there is evidence of a crime.
There are lots of “crimes” on the books.
And you have to love how drug smuggling is always right up there with nuclear proliferation as an existential threat.
And as we deal with more budget madness in Washington, it’s important to consider this:
The overall volume of metadata collected by the N.S.A. is reflected in the agency’s secret 2013 budget request to Congress. The budget document, disclosed by Mr. Snowden, shows that the agency is pouring money and manpower into creating a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion “record events” daily and making them available to N.S.A. analysts within 60 minutes.
The spending includes support for the “Enterprise Knowledge System,” which has a $394 million multiyear budget and is designed to “rapidly discover and correlate complex relationships and patterns across diverse data sources on a massive scale,” according to a 2008 document. The data is automatically computed to speed queries and discover new targets for surveillance.
That’s a lot of money don’t you think? And we have no idea if these programs are the least bit effective. That’s top secret too.
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Saturday Night at the Movies
The man show: Rush and Don Jon
By Dennis Hartley
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| Rush: Mano a mano |
I’ll admit up front that I don’t know from the sport of Formula One racing. In fact, I’ve never held any particular fascination for loud, fast cars (or any kind of sports, for that matter). If that makes me less than a manly man, well, I’ll just have to live with that fact. However, I am fascinated by other people’s fascination with competitive sport; after all, (paraphrasing one of my favorite lines from Harold and Maude
Apparently, back in the 70s, there was a “merciless” mano a mano sports rivalry (even sexier than the one betwixt Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky?!) involving a pair of European F1 drivers. Now, I’m taking director Ron Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan’s word for it, because prior to watching the Frost/Nixon
As one might expect, there’s a lot of ear-plug inducing scenes involving loud cars navigating dangerously narrow roads at suicidal rates of speed, as the two rivals chase each other on assorted Grand Prix courses all around Europe and Asia. What you might not expect, however, is the compelling dual character study that lies at the heart of the film. The “rivalry” reveals itself to be more of a relationship borne of a begrudging mutual respect; taking on an even more interesting dynamic following Lauda’s near-death experience in a horrific fiery crash on the notoriously deadly Nurburgring circuit in 1976. Bruhl and Hemsworth both give excellent performances (each actor also bears an uncanny physical likeness to his respective real-life counterpart). Bruhl (who had a brief but memorable turn as a skeptical and quietly menacing SS officer in Inglourious Basterds 
I found Howard’s film reminiscent of Michael Ritchie’s Downhill Racer, another “sports movie” that isn’t really so much about sports per se, as it is an examination of the obsessive nature of a person who strives to be a “champion”. In that 1969 character study, Robert Redford plays a talented but arrogant athlete who joins the U.S. ski team, immediately butting heads with the coach (Gene Hackman), his teammates and pretty much anyone else he comes in contact with (OK, he’s a dick). Like Hunt and Lauda (at least, as they are dramatized here), the Redford character only seems truly fulfilled when he’s “winning”…everything else is superfluous. I also see an interesting corollary with Howard and Morgan’s previous creative collaboration, suggesting a possible diptych. The adversarial dynamic between David Frost and Richard Nixon is similar to Lauda and Hunt’s. Frost was handsome, outgoing and had a rep as a “ladies man” (like Hunt) and Nixon was brooding and stand-offish, yet quietly crafty (like Lauda). Frost and Nixon circled each other warily, like two boxers vying for the champion’s belt. I’m not sure how I got from Formula One to politics. Say, is there some kind of trophy for what I just did?
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| Don Jon: Guido a guidette |
In her review of the classic 1966 film Alfie, in which Michael Caine stars as a self-styled “Cockney Don Juan” who pridefully confides his chauvinistic tenets on sex and shameless objectification of women directly to the audience, the late Pauline Kael wrote in reference to screenwriter Bill Naughton’s dialogue that “[he] keeps the viewer absorbed in Alfie, the cold-hearted sexual hotshot, and his self-exculpatory line of reasoning.” If you fast forward the time line from swinging 60s London to the present-day Jersey shore, trading a double-breasted suit for a wife-beater, this could double as a description of the eponymous character of Don Jon, who explains his philosophy thusly:
There’s only a few things I really care about in life. My body. My pad. My ride. My family. My church. My boys. My girls. My porn.
“Self exculpatory” is an understatement. Especially once Jon (played with unfettered “fuhgettaboutit” swagger by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who also wrote and directed) really gets cooking on a breathless jag describing his love affair with internet porn. Not that he has any trouble with the ladies, mind you (his nickname stems from a seemingly effortless ability to bed a different woman every weekend, much to the wonderment and admiration of his “boys”). This may be moot to interject, but our hero may be exhibiting classic signs of sex addiction. I’m not judging; I’m just sayin’. Anyway, back to the porn. The thing is, as much as he does love the ladies, it seems that sex with a partner somehow never measures up to the online experience; he can’t “lose himself” in the moment in quite the same way. Again, I risk belaboring the obvious: Is it possible that the porn addiction has given ‘Don’ J some unrealistic expectations about actual adult relationships?
Enter Barbara (Scarlett Johansson) a knockout beauty who responds to Jon’s time-tested moves…but only up to a point. She is nobody’s one-night stand; she wants to be wooed. At first, Jon responds like the proverbial deer in the headlights. This could require radical concessions, like maybe (gulp) meeting for lunch or (worse case) coffee first. What is this strange new feeling? Could it be this “love” of which people speak? And just as Jon begins to sense the paradigm shift, he meets another (more mature) woman (Julianne Moore, acting circles around everyone else) who seems to be genuinely interested in him as a person (he has no idea what to make of that). Jon’s amusing Sunday confessions begin to expand beyond his typical “Bless me, Father, I masturbated 34 times this week.”
Gordon-Levitt has poured admirable effort into his directing debut, but in his over-eagerness to prove himself, he may have put a few too many eggs in the basket. On the plus side, he’s assembled a great cast. In fact, some of the supporting players threaten to walk away with the film; particularly a surprisingly effective Tony Danza (yes, that Tony Danza) as Jon’s father, telegraphing (with expert comic timing) how the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree. Brie Larson (as Jon’s sullen sister) steals every scene she’s in-no small feat considering that she spends most of the film staring at her cell phone, until deciding to impart a few words of wisdom toward the end (it’s that whole Silent Bob thing). On the down side, there are jarring tonal shifts that leave you scratching your head as to what Gordon-Levitt is trying to say at times with this (sort of) morality play/social satire hybrid. Still, I was entertained. I laughed, and almost cried (just don’t tell my boys).
Follow the money
by digby
Lee Fang takes a look at who’s making a buck at bucking Obamacare. Unsurprisingly, it’s the usual suspects. No matter what, they always find a way to turn a profit:
To gain steam for his initiative to tie funding of the government to defunding Obamacare, Senator Ted Cruz appeared at events over the summer with the Tea Party Express, a political action committee. “Either continue funding the government without giving one more dime to Obamacare, or shut down the government,” demands Tea Party Express chair Amy Kremer.
The Tea Party Express, in turn, has sponsored fundraising drives to help “elect more leaders like Ted Cruz.”
One problem for Cruz-acolytes hoping to make their way into office? The Tea Party Express PAC has spent nearly every dollar of the $2.1 million it has raised this year on campaign consultants and fundraising fees, but not a dime in transfers to candidates or on independent expenditures. In previous years, the PAC has funneled much of its proceeds to Russo Marsh and Rogers, a Republican consulting firm in Sacramento, California.
The frantic crusade to screw up the launch of the Affordable Care Act is a sad tale in American politics. If conservatives are successful, even with a short-term government shutdown Cruz and his House GOP allies might achieve, patients will suffer. If young people fail to sign up for health insurance—the stated goal of one Koch-backed front group now airing television advertisements—more will drown under crushing debt if they find themselves in need of serious medical care. But Washington, DC, has a bizarre way of incentivizing harmful behavior, and the sabotage Obamacare campaign is not without its winners.
A set of campaign consultants and insurance agents stand to profit from confusing Americans on the eve of the healthcare reform enrollment date.
The conservative media frenzy over the defunding debate has invigorated donors to many PACs, not just Tea Party Express. The Senate Conservative Fund PAC recorded its largest-ever fundraising hauls last month, though it spends way more on candidates and on candidate ads than the Tea Party Express. Still, the Jim DeMint–linked PAC expended nearly half its coffers on administrative, research and fundraising payments this year. FreedomWorks, the RNC and the Club for Growth have hopped on the Cruz campaign to raise funds by advocating the repeal of Obamacare. For a non-federal election year, at least these PACs are doing well.
The rigid anti–healthcare reform politics of the Koch brothers is also having a stimulative effect upon a small circle of Republican consultants. Americans for Prosperity, the largest Koch-owned front, pays the traditional 15 percent commission rate on all their television buys—the latest round going to Target Enterprises, a Sherman Oaks, California-based GOP media company. And with a seemingly endless appetite for anti-Obamacare paid media and anti-Obamacare grassroots organizers, Koch makes good on its claim of being a stellar job-creator, at least for jobs in right-wing political advocacy.
There’s more, much more. Wingnut welfare is a huge business that depends upon fear and loathing of government programs and Americans of a dusky hue (actually that’s the same thing in their minds) to make big bucks for those who work in that business. And with benefactors like the Koch Brothers, there’s a whole lot of money to go around.
California Dreaming
by digby
New Rule: Conservatives who love to brag about American exceptionalism must come here to California, and see it in person. And then they should be afraid — very afraid. Because while the rest of the country is beset by stories of right-wing takeovers in places like North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin, California is going in the opposite direction and creating the kind of modern, liberal nation the country as a whole can only dream about. And not only can’t the rest of the country stop us — we’re going to drag you along with us.
It wasn’t that long ago that pundits were calling California a failed state and saying it was ungovernable. But in 2010, when other states were busy electing whatever Tea Partier claimed to hate government the most, we elected a guy who actually liked it, Jerry Brown.
Since then, everything Republicans say can’t or won’t work — gun control, immigration reform, high-speed rail — California is making work. And everything conservatives claim will unravel the fabric of our society — universal healthcare, higher taxes on the rich, gay marriage, medical marijuana — has only made California stronger. And all we had to do to accomplish that was vote out every single Republican. Without a Republican governor and without a legislature being cock-blocked by Republicans, a $27 billion deficit was turned into a surplus, continuing the proud American tradition of Republicans blowing a huge hole in the budget and then Democrats coming in and cleaning it up.(Read …. on)
That can’t be right. It’s a dystopian hellscape filled with shallow people who only care about themselves (well, except for that liberal thing.) Nobody would ever want to live here.
Well unless you like nice cities and small towns, great weather, great beaches, mountains and deserts and a lot of really, really good food, especially mexican food — and lots of Mexicans! And despite the allegedly Stalinist, conformist nature of liberalism people are quite free here to be as individualistic as they choose, which is oddly what the liberty loving right hates most about us. They call us fruits and nuts and get mad because we eat vegetables.
The truth is that it’s very far from perfect here. It’s not as if the Democrats in Sacramento, including Jerry Brown, are free from conflict and corruption. But for the most part, they aren’t insane which makes a huge difference when you’re trying to drag yourself out of a hole created by greedheads and kooks in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis. Just denying lunatics the power to create chaos is enough to allow for some modest government actions to turn the ship of state a few degrees toward normal. Lord knows they could have done more. But Maher is correct that we were able to at least keep the state from completely melting down by refusing to empower this right wing freakshow.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating and our pudding tastes a lot better than it did a few years ago. Unfortunately, our national government will very likely be held hostage by the far right in the House for quite a long time to come with no hope of changing it. These fanatics have basically walled themselves off in gerrymandered districts with only FOX and Rush to keep them company and they’re determined to hunker down and outlast the rest of us. Who knows what chaos they’ll leave in their wake when this is all done?
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So what do they really want?
by digby
This is an interesting observation from Stan Collander:
To understand why [the Republicans are willing to contemplate shutdown], I need to again refer back to something I posted more than two years ago, right after I was the first speaker at the first meeting of the House tea party caucus.
I was talking informally with a number of the members of Congress who had been there after the meeting ended. There was unanimous agreement among those members that the biggest thing the House GOP had done wrong during the 1995 and 1995-96 shutdowns was that it had given in to Bill Clinton too early. The GOP would have gotten a much better deal, they told me, if it had pushed harder and been willing to keep the government closed longer.
Pushing until the very, very last minute has been one of the mainstays of the House GOP’s negotiating strategy on budget issues ever since . With one exception — House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) unilaterally deciding nine days before the deadline to cut a deal with the White House to extend the reduction in the payroll tax — every budget decision since 2011 has gone up to, and in some cases beyond, the deadline.
This is why no one should have been surprised when the House GOP announced earlier today that it will not simply accept the Senate-passed clear CR. even though there are less than three full days before the end of the fiscal year. It may still do that or, rather, the caucus may allow House Democrats and handful of Republicans to do that, but it will only happen at or just after Monday at midnight…and even that’s not certain.
Anything else would have violated the tea party negotiating principle I was told in February 2011.
So what do they expect to get by pushing this to the very limit? Surely it isn’t the Obamacare delay. That’s just not going to happen. And it’s hard to see that repealing the Medical device tax would be enough to justify all this drama. So what’s the real bottom line?
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