Month: June 2015

The most frightening statistic you will see this week

by digby

Maybe this year:

YouGov’s latest research shows that 41% of Americans think that dinosaurs and humans either ‘definitely’ (14%) or ‘probably’ (27%) once lived on the planet at the same time. 43% think that this is either ‘definitely’ (25%) or ‘probably’ (18%) not true while 16% aren’t sure. In reality the earliest ancestors of humans have only been on the planet for 6 million years, while the last dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.

There is a religious split on this question. While most Americans who describe themselves as ‘born again’ (56%) believe that humans and dinosaurs once shared the planet, most Americans who do not describe themselves as born again (51%) think that they did not. Only 22% of born again Americans think that dinosaurs and humans did not coexist.

I think what shocks me the most is that only 51% of those who are not born again believe it.

This is dinosaurs, people. The obsession of every elementary school age boy and many a girl too. Even the Jurassic movies make it abundantly clear that humans and dinosaurs were not on earth at the same time.

maybe we’ve always been this uneducated. I sure hope so because that means we’ve managed to survive despite the fact that we are, as a species, dumb as paleolithic rocks.

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“As we look at this fact pattern, do you feel safer?”

by digby

Another idiotic open carry scare:

According to authorities, the two men walked into the Walmart on Highway 49 around 8 p.m. Witnesses said the man holding the shotgun was actively loading and racking the firearm. Walmart does not have a policy about guns inside its stores.

“If I were in a situation where I’m in the store shopping with my family and I see an individual loading a 12 gauge, and racking it, I’m not coming to the conclusion this is good,” said Papania. “While the actions of these two men are sanctioned by state laws, what they did negatively impacted our community.”

“If there was something I could have arrested these people for, I would,” said Papania.
[…]
“Gun laws should be such that it provides us security. As we look at this fact pattern, do you feel safer?”

That’s nice. But I’m sure we can all agree that it’s lucky for these fellas that they weren’t black or they would have been gunned down either by other patrons or the cops. I’m not kidding. It happens. In Walmart.

I don’t think anyone can confuse me with a police apologist. But I’m sympathetic to them when it comes to the fact that they are the ones on the front line of this ridiculous proliferation of guns. Yes, they sign up to face down armed criminals and that’s part of the job. (And yes, they abuse their authority all the time, particularly when it comes to African Americans and the mentally ill. There is no excuse for the institutional biases that so often come into play.) But you cannot blame them on some level for being paranoid when they are forced not only to take the risk of dealing with armed criminals but average citizens are swaggering round loaded for bear who don’t have clue (or care) what kind of mayhem they’re causing.

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The first attack ad of the Democratic primary

by digby

… against Bernie Sanders:

And no, this didn’t come from Clinton:

Associates of former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley are launching a super PAC intended to bolster the Democrat’s prospects as he formally announces his long shot presidential bid in Baltimore on Saturday.

Money raised by Generation Forward will be used to run an independent campaign on O’Malley’s behalf in early nominating states, its founders said. The political action committee’s name is aimed at sending a specific message: that 52-year-old O’Malley is better suited to represent younger generations than 67-year-old Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic front-runner.

“This is not your grandmother’s super PAC,” Damian O’Doherty, the group’s chief executive, said in an interview Wednesday. He described plans for outreach on the ground and via digital media, as well as collaboration with other like-minded groups — a departure, he said, from the traditional super PAC model of simply raising money to air TV ads.

They seem like nice kids.

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Can’t we think of the real victims — gun owners?

by digby

I wrote about how the Republicans are turning the gun issue back on Democrats today for Salon:

We have all been harshly schooled by the right wing in recent days about the inappropriateness of talking about policy in the aftermath of a mass murder. It’s very rude. Possibly the worst thing anyone can do at times such as these is to try to find reasons for the actions and attempt to find some way to avoid tragedy in the future. This is known as “politicizing” a tragedy and it’s very upsetting to the delicate sensibilities of our conservative patriots.

In the wake of the Charleston murders last week, both President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton made strong statements renewing calls for gun safety legislation. Republicans candidates joked about how much they loved their guns. And the pundit response was predictably hysterical. The usual suspects made the predictable vacuous observation that other countries have mass shootings too, as if that somehow mitigates the fact that the United States is the only western nation to turn it into a national pastime. They believe there is no need to acknowledge the fact that Americans are 20 times as likely to die from gun violence as citizens of other developed countries. And we certainly needn’t worry about trifles such as this:

Rather than simply tallying the yearly number of mass shootings, Harvard researchers Amy Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller determined that their frequency is best measured by tracking the time between each incident. This method, they explain, is most effective for detecting meaningful shifts in relatively small sets of data, such as the 69 mass shootings we documented. Their analysis of the data shows that from 1982 to 2011, mass shootings occurred every 200 days on average. Since late 2011, they found, mass shootings have occurred at triple that rate—every 64 days on average.

To even mention such things in the wake of the latest round of killing is boorish and disrespectful to gun owners.

Interestingly, none of them seem to think that the commentary blaming the victims for failing to be like movie heroes and shooting the gun out of the perpetrator’s hand before he even had a chance to fire and hurt someone is out of line. (That must be the scenario they see or they would be endorsing the idea that the best we can hope for is for there not to be quite so many dead bodies. But they wouldn’t say that would they?)

Still, most of these gun proliferation advocates aren’t as bad as this South Carolina elected official, who said, “These people sat in there and waited their turn to be shot. That’s sad that somebody in there with the means of self-defense could have stopped this… why didn’t somebody just do something? I mean, you got one skinny person shooting a gun. I mean, we need to take and do what you can.”

(He did apologize later, so that’s good.)

More at the link.

That time when Justice Roberts proved he wasn’t a total intellectual whore

by digby

So, it appears that Chief Justice John Roberts decided that his reputation as a reasonable human being couldn’t survive signing on to the fatuous notion that one should literally put millions of people’s people’s lives at risk over what is obviously nothing more than a typo. He was unwilling to accept the fiction that the congress would “fix it” knowing very well that the congress is barely able to agree on what time of day it is.

Whew. The world has not gone completely mad. At last not today, on this issue.

I’m going to guess we’ll be seeing a lot of this shortly.  Right wingers don’t take kindly to this sort of thing:

Jeff Toobin just pointed out on CNN that Roberts is still a very conservative justice and this idea that he’s a “liberal” is daft. This is just a sign of how absurdly right wing the conservative legal community has become that they would even think of pushing a daft case like this one.  Roberts is just not willing to be a total intellectual whore for their hobby horses.  

But don’t worry, the Republicans will nickle and dime Obamacare to death in any way they can forever. It’s way too vulnerable to that sort of thing.  But this outcome shows that  a majority of the court is not going to accept any excuse conservative miscreants can find to destroy it.

Here’s Ian Milhiser’s analysis.

Update: ICYWW

SCOTUS watch Th, Fr, Mo
by Tom Sullivan
“As goes the next president, so goes the court,” Rachel Maddow wrote in the Washington Post. It is best to keep that thought firmly in mind going into 2016. It is easy to get bogged down in the personalities, the coverage, and the presidential horse race. The Big Money Boyz put their attention elsewhere. Maddow asked a Democratic campaign operative if candidates heard different concerns from donors than from just plain folks:

I got a surprised look in response — I think it was shock at my naivete — and a two-word answer: “Supreme Court.” The direction of the court and potential court nominees came up infinitely more often with donors than they did with average people.
I then asked a senior Republican operative the same question. I got the same response, minus the shocked look (I think he already knew I was naive).

Shoes are about to drop at the Supreme Court any time now. Power plant emissions, redistricting, same-sex marriage, and of course, King v. Burwell, in which we find out whether the court will rule against the Affordable Care Act and its own credibility.
Amy Howe runs down the remaining cases “in Plain English” at SCOTUSblog. An all-star panel at Slate is discussing the effects the rulings will have on an already polarized country. Or check out the Wall Street Journal, if you prefer.
Marriage equality activists are planning “Decision Day” rallies across the country to respond to the court’s Obergefell v. Hodges et. al. (same-sex marriage) ruling, however it goes.
Stay tuned at 10 a.m. EDT today to see which shoe drops next.

“Cuz we’re so good and they’re so evul”

by digby

Huckleberry:

“I don’t know how you can sit with somebody for an hour in a church and pray with them and get up and shoot them. That’s Mideast hate. That’s something I didn’t think we had here but apparently we do.”

Like everything else, “our” hate is so much better than “their ” hate.

It never occurred to him that nice little white boys from South Carolina might be vicious homicidal bastards? It’s true they haven’t had a full blown lynching in a while, but there was a time they made quite a habit of it. Senator Graham needs to get out more.

By the way, Graham might be misled by the fact that South Carolina doesn’t seem to have any more racially based hate crime than other places in the US. But there’s a possible reason for that:

[It] has no specific hate-crime legislation on the books. Like all states, South Carolina is covered by federal laws defining hate crimes. But unlike nearly every other state, South Carolina doesn’t specify tougher sentences or widen the group of people who can be victims of hate crimes.

The don’t need it because they don’t have that “mideast” hate. Well, most of them don’t anyway.

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These are terrible people

by digby

I don’t know what would have possessed these doctors to be this crude and disgusting toward their patients but it kind of makes you wonder how prevalent these behaviors might be:

The colonoscopy took place in Shah’s surgical suite on April 18, 2013, according to the man’s lawsuit. While being prepped for the procedure, the man apparently told Ingham that he had passed out previously while having blood drawn and that he was taking medication for a mild rash on his genitals.

Because he was going to be fully anesthetized, the man decided to turn on his cellphone’s audio recorder before the procedure so it would capture the doctor’s post-operation instructions, the suit states. But the man’s phone, in his pants, was placed beneath him under the operating table and inadvertently recorded the audio of the entire procedure, court records show. The doctors’ attorneys argued that the recording was illegal, but the man’s attorneys noted that Virginia is a “one-party consent” state, meaning that only one person involved in a conversation need agree to the recording.

The recording captured Ingham mocking the amount of anesthetic needed to sedate the man, the lawsuit states, and Shah then commented that another doctor they both knew “would eat him for lunch.”

The discussion soon turned to the rash on the man’s penis, followed by the comments implying that the man had syphilis or tuberculosis. The doctors then discussed “misleading and avoiding” the man after he awoke, and Shah reportedly told an assistant to convince the man that he had spoken with Shah and “you just don’t remember it.” Ingham suggested Shah receive an urgent “fake page” and said, “I’ve done the fake page before,” the complaint states. “Round and round we go. Wheel of annoying patients we go. Where it’ll land, nobody knows,” Ingham reportedly said.

Ingham then mocked the man for attending Mary Washington College, once an all-women’s school, and wondered aloud whether her patient was gay, the suit states. Then the anesthesiologist said, “I’m going to mark ‘hemorrhoids’ even though we don’t see them and probably won’t,” and did write a diagnosis of hemorrhoids on the man’s chart, which the lawsuit said was a falsification of medical records.

After declaring the patient a “big wimp,” Ingham reportedly said: “People are into their medical problems. They need to have medical problems.”

Shah replied, “I call it the Northern Virginia syndrome,” according to the suit.

It does make you wonder about all that advice about being your own advocate. Who knows what someone might do to get back at you for it?

Is this the medical equivalent of videos of police when they think no one is looking?

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Gone girl #Palin

by digby

The end of an era:

Fox News will not renew its contract with Sarah Palin, whose bombastic appearances have been a cable staple since the former Alaska governor’s failed run on John McCain’s ticket in the 2008 presidential election cycle. When asked for comment, a Fox News spokesperson confirmed the network had amicably parted ways with the governor on June 1.

Palin, 51, is expected to make occasional guest appearances on Fox and Fox Business, and will appear on other networks and cables. She has a show on the Sportsman Channel, does a lot of speeches, and will announce a new publishing project soon.

When Palin was at her zenith, she made frequent appearances, and Fox installed a camera at her house. But executives consider her less relevant now, and her appearances were sometimes hampered by the vast time difference with Alaska. She remains a huge conservative force on Facebook, with 4.5 million fans – twice that of Rand Paul, who has the biggest reach in the 2016 field. She also has 1.15 million Twitter followers.

Sadly, since rumors of MSNBC’s imminent shift away from liberal talk (just as liberal politics are ascendent and politics are about to explode in a hotly contested presidential race) continue to seep out, I wouldn’t be surprised if that executive braintrust will want to get a little Sarah action.

Either way, she’ll do fine. She’s got her millions now and will surely make more.

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The company they keep

by digby

Republicans want to make the next election about foreign policy and specifically President Obama and former secretary of State Clinton’s handling of it, which they commonly describe as feckless and cowardly. In fact, in the recent NY Times-CBS poll only 12% of GOP voters said they approved of his foreign policy.

Check out who agrees with them on this question and who doesn’t.

It looks as though only Russia, Pakistan, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories  have similar levels of misgivings.

*Yes, it’s true that “approval” is not exactly the same as “confidence” but I think it’s fair to say that Republicans have the same opinion either way.

There’s this too, which is just depressing.