Month: November 2015

A little more than kin, and less than kind

by digby

I have a friend who used to comment all the time about how difficult it must have been for Poppy Bush to see his son destroy the family legacy. I always replied that blood was thicker than water and that he was probably all in on whatever Junior wanted to do.

It looks as though my friend was right. Poppy is 91 and he’s letting it all hang out — just as son Jeb is trying desperately to gain some traction on the presidential trail. What a family. Via The Atlantic:

[I]n a new biography, former President George H.W. Bush tells Jon Meacham just what he thinks about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld’s work in his son’s administration, as reported by Fox News and The New York Times.

“He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with,” the elder Bush said of the man who served as his secretary of defense. “Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East.” He said Cheney built “his own empire.”

“I’ve concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here—iron-ass, tough as nails, driving,” George H.W. Bush said. (One takeaway from the book is Bush’s love of the phrase “iron-ass,” which seems at once like a dated Yankee descriptor and also delightfully vivid.)

He was even harsher about Rumsfeld, who he deemed an “arrogant fellow.”

“I think he served the president badly,” Bush said. “I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything. I’ve never been that close to him anyway. There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that.”

Bush—or 41, as the family calls him, in contrast to his son, 43—doesn’t let George W. Bush off the hook entirely.

“The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department,” he said. “I think they overdid that. But it’s not Cheney’s fault. It’s the president’s fault.” He also told Meacham, “I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there—some of it his, maybe, and some of it the people around him.”

The scathing remarks may be explicitly about what happened between 2001 and 2009, but they’re rooted in much longer disagreements and feuds, running back some four decades.

The article goes on to discuss the longstanding rivalry between Rumsfeld and Bush Sr and it’s really interesting. Junior choosing his daddy’s great rival was something of a slap in the face. And although Cheney and Poppy got along somewhat better they weren’t exactly close.

The idea that George W. Bush’s foreign policy reflected a fundamental shift in worldview from his father’s approach is not a new one. It was made in 2003, and my colleague Conor Friedersdorf argued in October that Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign was foundering in part because by aligning himself with his brother, he had taken up the wrong George Bush’s worldview. One reason for that shift, surely, was that George W. Bush’s administration was heavily influenced by Rumsfeld and Cheney, two men who had long had a harsher and more aggressive approach to the world than George H.W. Bush. What do Bush 41’s comments to Meacham indicate, inside this context?

For one, the book shows that Bush père really did have substantive disagreements with much of his son’s conduct of foreign policy. (He also singled out one 2002 speech for criticism: “You go back to the ‘axis of evil’ and these things and I think that might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything.”) It isn’t quite right to say that Bush 41 is letting his son off the hook; after all, he told Meacham, “The buck stops there.” It’s also true, however, that the harshest words are reserved for Rumsfeld and Cheney.

This isn’t really new either. There was a tremendous amount of ink spilled in the early years of the Bush 43 administration over the “daddy issue.” It was always obvious that Junior had some primal need to defy his father.

This reporter thinks Bush Sr’s book may be a clever, if byzantine, way to close family ranks since Junior has also been slightly critical of Cheney and Rumsfeld. The idea, I guess, is that they are trying to lay the blame for Junior’s epic failure at their feet — and Poppy gets to settle some old scores in the process.

Maybe. But Occam’s Razor says that in the twilight of his life, Bush Sr just wants to put some distance between his son’s legacy and his own. And in the process he’s making life even more difficult for his other son as the poor guy makes a desultory attempt to redeem the family name.

Did I mention Shakespeare?

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Dispatch from taser nation

by digby

It’s good to see the major media finally waking up to the fact that police are using tasers as torture devices that are killing a fair number of unarmed citizens. This story in today’s Guardian goes in depth on the killing of nearly 50 people just this year with tasers:

Calvon Reid writhed in pain before he died. “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” the 39-year-old screamed. Reid, an African American father of two, was held face-down by two police officers on a grassy lawn inside a predominantly white, gated retirement village in the south Florida suburb of Coconut Creek in the early hours of 22 February.

Moments before, two officers, standing 10ft away, had deployed their weapons in tandem. Not guns, but Tasers. The barbs struck Reid in the chest, according to eyewitnesses, unleashing 50,000-volt shocks to his body. Reid stopped breathing within moments; two days later, he died in the hospital.

“The whole thing seemed brutal,” 58-year-old locksmith John Arnendale told the Guardian from the ground-floor apartment at Wynmoor Village retirement homes where he watched Reid lose consciousness for the last time.

It is not clear why the officers were trying to arrest Reid in the first place. He was not accused of any crime. Though police say he was acting aggressively, other witnesses have disputed this.

“They didn’t have to use a Taser to stop him,” Arnendale said. “There were four of them and he wasn’t huge or particularly athletic. They certainly didn’t choose the least harsh thing to do with him. They were kind of punishing him.”

While deadly police shootings in the United States have gained international attention this year, Reid is one of 47 lesser-known people who lost their lives after law enforcement officers deployed a Taser, according to The Counted, an ongoing Guardian investigation documenting fatalities that follow police encounters.

Reid’s case is, in many ways, tragically typical of the other deaths following the use of a Taser by police in 2015: he was unarmed, as in all but three cases. Like nearly 40% of the victims, he was black. And as in at least 53% of such cases, the suspect was displaying signs of intoxication before his or her death. As with many of these incidents, Reid died following shocks administered seemingly in violation of national guidelines, by officers belonging to a police department with lax rules on how these less-lethal weapons should be used.

There’s much more at the link.

Police often use tasers to exact street justice on people whom they feel disrespect them. It’s so common that people don’t even comment on it anymore. And Americans accept this as a perfectly normal police tactic. After all, it doesn’t leave marks like a baton beating would so it’s no big deal. Unless you fall head first and knock your teeth out. Or hit the curb and get a concussion. Or die.

This is not the only big story about tasers in recent days. This one from the LA Times about taser torture on the border is astonishing, even to me and I’ve been following this stuff for too long:

Searching for a way to curb fatal border shootings, Border Patrol leaders decided in 2008 that their agents needed a new weapon on their belts.

The agency began to supply Tasers, a hand-held device that delivers a paralyzing electric charge, as a way to end confrontations quickly and safely.

But in scores of cases along the border, the Tasers became instruments of excessive force, a Los Angeles Times analysis found.

The Times examined 450 uses of Tasers from 2010 to 2013 that were documented by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

At least 70 times, agents fired the devices at people who were running away, even though there was no struggle or clear indication that agents were in danger, according to use-of-force reports. At least six times, agents used the weapons against people who were trying to climb over the border fence back into Mexico.

Two people were shocked while they were handcuffed. Two were hit with five cycles of the weapon, even though the agency’s policy says no one should receive more than three.

Three people died after being hit by Tasers wielded by border agents or customs officers. In one episode, 24-year-old Alex Martin, who had led agents on a car chase, burned to death after a border agent smashed his car window and fired a Taser inside. The device ignited an explosion and fireball.

Others were seriously hurt. Jose Gutierrez Guzman, a 45-year-old Mexico native who grew up in Los Angeles, was struck with a Taser in 2011 as he sprinted away from officers at an Arizona border station. He fell on his head and suffered permanent brain damage, according to a pending lawsuit he filed against the federal government.

Investigations found no wrongdoing in either case.

Using tasers in lieu of guns wherever possible should be a no-brainer. But in none of the above cases can you say that the officers would have had to fire their guns if not for the taser. They are clearly being used as legal torture devices to coerce compliance — and as a method of punishment.

What’s interesting about both of these articles is that it’s finally becoming clear to people that tasers are tools for police brutality and are being commonly used for that purpose. They cause great pain and trauma and sometimes kill people. They could be useful if used with discretion. But too many police do not see them as a replacement for the gun in cases where their lives or the lives of others are not in immediate danger but simply as pain compliance — a euphemism for torture.

It’s long past time our society took a long hard look at these devices. For too long tasers were seen as  funny, slapstick comedy. (The still are by Hollywood, which really needs some education on this subject.) And that’s no less creepy than laughing at police delivering a beatdown to a citizen on the side of the road. I’m glad to see that the press is finally taking up the subject and seeing it for what it has become.

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It’s all about him

by digby

Ben Carson says that he has a small ego. But what I see in this Facebook post is someone who thinks that he can lead the world simply because he is who he is.

That’s not just ego. It’s megalomania:

Tonight, going through all of your questions, I wanted to touch on a few issues that seem to be asked by many people.

I would like to deal with one question tonight in some detail. The issue is experience. Several people ask what they should tell their friends when people say “I like Carson but he has no political experience”.

You are absolutely right — I have no political experience. The current Members of Congress have a combined 8,700 years of political experience. Are we sure political experience is what we need. Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience. What they had was a deep belief that freedom is a gift from God. They had a determination to rise up against a tyrannical King. They were willing to risk all they had, even their lives, to be free. Today we find ourselves with an entire class of politicians. No one in Philadelphia, during that summer our nation was born, dreamed that service was a career with a pension. America was the land of the Citizen Statesmen. They were merchants, lawyers, farmers — and yes, even doctors.
They were willing to stand for freedom.

Today, the political class stands in the way, not for the people. They demand pensions and perks. This is not what our Founders envisioned for America. I spent my life treating very ill children. Over 15,000 times I gave my all to prolong their lives. I was blessed to do it. But when it came time for me to retire, I simply could not sit back any longer. These children became my family. What our government is doing to them is outrageous. I am prepared to risk all that I have to try and make a difference in their future. I built one of the nation’s best medical centers. I served for two decades on the boards of Costco and Kellogg. I built a national scholarship program.

My experience is very different than what we have come to expect. I grew up poor. I know what it is like to be homeless and hungry. I know the pain of poverty. I also know that education and a mother’s love can be the path out of dire poverty. I know what it is like to see water fountains you are not allowed to drink out of because of your skin color. I also know that once you peel back the skin, the brain is the same no matter what your skin color or continent you live on. I know that victimhood is a trap. I know that it is our Christian responsibility to offer those less fortunate a hand up. I know my faith is strong and my ego is small.

I know that my path to the White House is different than most. But I also know I bring all of the pain and joy, the success and failure, the lessons learned through love and sorrow in my life’s journey. Bill Clinton was famous for saying “I feel your pain” — well, I have walked in your shoes.

I do not have political experience, I have a life journey. A journey that not only made it possible for me to relate to so many different people, but also one where time and time again I was told I would fail, only to succeed. My candidacy is different, that I grant you. I have neither Donald Trump’s money or Jeb Bush’s political network. However, I wouldn’t trade a single child I treated for all of Trump’s money. While I admire the Bush family’s dedication to service, I too served — nights, weekends, holidays, birthdays and anniversaries with severely injured patients were my public service.

I didn’t go to embassy cocktail parties or beg lobbyists for money. I spent night after night in a quiet, sterile room trying to save the life of a small child. That was my life’s service. This is my life’s experience. What I have is a lifetime of caring, integrity and honesty. I have experienced the American Dream. No where in the world, other than America, could a man whose ancestors were slaves, rise to become a leading brain surgeon and one day seek the Office of President.

The very fact that I am running is testament to the greatness of America. If all you want is political experience then I cannot be your candidate.

Thank you for staying up with me.

Goodnight,

Ben

That post got nearly 180,000 likes.

The crazed secular progressives are thwarted again

by digby

The Secret Service has accepted Donald Trump and Ben Carson’s request for protection. Think about that for a moment.

If you are wondering who is threatening these two, Ben Carson explained the request a while back:

“I’d prefer not to talk about security issues but I have recognized — and people have been telling me for many many months — that I’m in great danger because I challenge the secular progressive movement to the very core.”

Secular progressives, the wimps who cannot keep America safe and refuse to arm themselves like true patriots, have put Carson in great danger. Sure they have.

The Secret Service apparently agrees that some kind of threat exists. But let’s just say it’s highly doubtful that it’s the left wing hippies. If there are people out there who are angry and violent about politics right now, I think the followers of their Republicans rivals are a more likely place to look.

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Support your local constitutional expert


by digby

Another county in Oregon passed a measure on Tuesday allowing the sheriff to ignore federal and state law, instructing him to “interpret the constitution” as he sees fit.  This is yet another example of the mainstreaming of right wing extremists. I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

Read on. There’s more.

A RICO Exxon lawsuit — a “slam dunk” to win, a threat to investors, and a possible threat to execs

by Gaius Publius

Sorry about the long title, but all three pieces of it — the “slam dunk,” the threat to investors, the threat to executives — are important.

Your background. Bernie Sanders and Sheldon Whitehouse in the Senate, and Ted Lieu and Mark DeSaulnier in the House, have called on the Department of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil for possibly perpetrating fraud, and if warranted, launch a RICO investigation of the company (and other fossil fuel companies) similar to the tobacco industry lawsuit it launched, and won, more than a decade ago. In addition, four House members including Ted Lieu have also called on the SEC to investigate Exxon for fraud, perhaps under the Sarbanes-Oxley law.

From Sen. Sanders’ letter (quoted here):

“I am writing regarding a potential instance of corporate fraud – behavior that may qualify as a violation of federal law.”

I’ve written about this a number of times, as have others, notably Bill McKibben. Here I want to look at what a set of investigations might mean. My source is this piece from Seeking Alpha, an investor-oriented site. At the end, I’ve appended a request for our Democratic candidates for president in the form of a speech I’d like one of them to give.

A “Slam Dunk” to Win

The first point from my headline is this: So many damaging Exxon documents have already been made public, that according to Seeking Alpha, a Department of Justice lawsuit would be a “slam dunk” to win. Duane Bair at Seeking Alpha:

On October 20, 2015, Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking the Department of Justice to investigate allegations made public through an in-depth expose by InsideClimate News. The Pulitzer Prize winning group is dedicated to providing objective facts regarding the debate around energy and climate change. The reporters spoke with hundreds of former Exxon scientists and executives, combed through thousands of pages of scientific studies and thousands of in-house memos. Their findings are astonishing. […]

Here Bair details why those findings are “astonishing.” I urge you to click through if you want a fast summary of the extend of the wrong done by Exxon executives, and how far back that wrong-doing goes.

After detailing the many ways this lawsuit would be identical to the tobacco case — the comparison, as Bair lays it out, is striking — he then concludes (my emphasis):

If the DOJ opts to take up the case, as Senator Sanders and several members of Congress have suggested they do, it would appear to be a slam dunk case for the Justice Department.

At this point, it would be almost corrupt (though not in the money sense) for the Justice Department not to investigate.

A Threat to Investors

My second point from the headline is this: As much as a RICO lawsuit would threaten the reputation of all fossil fuel companies (and it would) — and be a true game-changer in the climate debate (it would be that too) — a RICO suit could also destroy the companies’ stock valuations. If that’s not a threat to investors, I don’t know what is.

Now remember the rule about collapses — once they start, they often happen quickly. In addition to the four charts at the top of this piece, I could have shown any number of stock market collapses. In 1933, you could have bought a typical S&P stock for pennies on the dollar, but then you’d have to wait until after Eisenhower was elected president, a full generation, for the price to recover.

The problem with a stock collapse in the carbon industry is that prices may never recover. After all, carbon extraction is a doomed industry. Yes, we’ll need carbon for energy for a while, but that while needs to be as short as possible. One of the consequences of a RICO investigation would be that while the suit is going on, its investors are looking at loss of value.

Bair again:

For investors, this [a RICO lawsuit] is a material concern. The cost of defending against a federal investigation will weigh down earnings, distract management and cause public outcry. In the light of a presidential campaign, the intense media attention should be taken seriously. Despite the remaining wide use of tobacco products, American tobacco companies have never recovered from the years of litigation and class action lawsuits. That industry is in a slow decline. If Bernie Sanders has his way, the same fate is imminent for Exxon Mobil.

Three points here:

1. Would you invest in a stock whose price was declining over a protracted period, or collapsing, even if that decline or collapse was deemed temporary? If you wouldn’t, who would? Investors in cases like these won’t reenter a market until they think the price has found a bottom.
    
2. What kind of turmoil would the fossil fuel industry find itself in, if it could not finance its operations, even if its product was deemed necessary? Would this turmoil itself not accelerate a stock price collapse?
    
3. If investors won’t put new money into an industry they deem temporarily toxic, even one as (currently) vital as carbon extraction, wouldn’t that accelerate investment in a promising and necessary replacement industry, like renewables?

If investors won’t risk their money buying carbon stock; if the industry’s stock prices fall precipitously; if there’s an accelerated demand for a replacement (again, renewables) whose investment price is deemed likely to rise — how is any of that not good?

And if that weren’t enough of an incentive to force this legal action, there’s more.

A Threat to Executives

A final point, one that’s not made by the Seeking Alpha article but that has to be considered. The Sarbanes-Oxley law makes corporate executives personally and criminally liable for fraudulent statements on annual and quarterly reports that go out under their signature. The value of corporate assets — including, in the case of the carbon industry, its oil, gas and coal reserves — is part of every annual statement. If a corporation knows, for example, that climate change will inevitably “strand” (render valueless) a large percentages of those assets, and yet misdeclares and knowingly overvalues those assets … well, that sounds like investor fraud to me.

Once a Sarbanes-Oxley investigate starts, especially in the roiling climate of a RICO investigation, you may see not just price chaos, but CEO chaos as well — by which I mean the chaos of CEOs mounting their corporate jets for Switzerland, family and numbered bank accounts in hand.

It’s Going To Take Force

It’s going to take force, not discussion, to end the death grip of the carbon industry, and lawsuits are force. Just ask the tobacco industry.

Look, this business has to die, selling carbon as fuel, and at the fastest possible rate. To ensure the best possible future for ourselves and our children, we need to switch to 100% renewable energy starting now and at a WWII “wartime production” pace. Yet this industry is so wealthy and so “connected” — after all, both Obama and Clinton have supported more extraction, even while speaking against it — that its executives will not stand down, will not stop, until they are forced to.

This is the crucial question, isn’t it? Are we willing to force them to stand down? Many of us are; perhaps many of you are as well. If so, god and the U.S. criminal code has given us an incredibly powerful tool. The tool is, in fact, so powerful that on consideration, I fully understand why Loretta Lynch and Barack Obama may be afraid to use it. Given what’s been revealed about Exxon already, a RICO suit against the big carbon companies would be a slam dunk.

I’d bet money that the government is afraid to use it … precisely because it would work.

A Call to Democratic Presidential Candidates

So I make this appeal. If any pro-climate Democratic presidential candidate makes the following statement, she or he would be greeted as a hero by the large majority of the country that is actually starting to see the problem clearly. Here’s the statement, as plainly as I can write it, as a series of easy-to-digest bullet points:

▪ If I am elected, I will immediately appoint an Attorney General who will open a RICO investigation into the fossil fuel industry. I do not need Congress to give me permission. Investigating fraud under the U.S. criminal code is the job of the Justice Department, and I will appoint only someone who will do that job, starting on day one.

▪ In addition, if I am elected, and if it is determined that the fossil fuel industry has violated the corporate fraud law known as Sarbanes-Oxley, I will see that law enforced, even against the executives themselves, to the extent the law provides.

▪ Why will I do this? Because as president I’m sworn to enforce the law. It is my duty, and if you elect me to this office, I will do the duties of the office, all of them, in a responsible manner.

▪ But there’s more. I am also doing this because I have children and grandchildren. Many of you have children and grandchildren as well. Almost every climate scientist on earth is telling us that we are facing an emergency unlike any our species has ever encountered. Many of you, a great many of you, are coming to that realization as well. It’s a simple fact. We see it every day. This planet, our home, is becoming less and less habitable. That degradation has to stop, and it will only stop when we stop emitting carbon into the air. It’s that simple … that easy.

▪ So I am doing my part, and I will do more. I have a duty, we all have a duty, to our children and grandchildren, to leave the planet as habitable as it was when we, your generation and my generation, were born into it.

▪ That is also the duty and the goal of your government, to protect our common inheritance, and I will aggressively pursue that goal with every tool of the executive branch.

You have my word.

It’s a simple thing to say, grounded in both simple truths and simple next-step actions. Giving some form of the above speech is almost a no-brainer, assuming a presidential candidate who “gets it” about carbon and the climate. Here’s what our future looks like if we don’t act.

Mr. Sanders, Mr. O’Malley, Ms. Clinton — are you ready to defend the future of our children? Feel free to make this speech on the first day it makes sense to do so.

If you would like to add your name to a “Prosecute Exxon” petition, click here. Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. If you like, you can help him here; adjust the split any way you wish at the link.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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Lack of good order, discipline and supervision
by Tom Sullivan

A friend who worked for a local news crew once got to ride with police officers practicing tactical driving on the training center’s skid pad. “You do not want to mess with them afterwards,” he told me. “They are so pumped full of adrenaline they could really hurt you.” One officer admitted that once while swinging his nightstick to knock a fleeing suspect off his feet, he had broken the man’s arm.

Adrenaline. Is that all there is to it?

Najee Rivera panicked when two Philadelphia police officers pulled him over on his motor scooter in May 2013, reportedly for running a stop sign. Raw Story takes up the story:

“To be honest, I was afraid,” Rivera said. “I saw them get out of their car with nightsticks. I heard one of them call me a spic. I hadn’t done anything wrong, so I took off. I shouldn’t have, but I was scared of them.”

Given recent, highly publicized police encounters, he may have had reason to be scared.

Rivera took off — at a blazing 25 mph — on his scooter. The police cruiser rolled up behind him. An arm shot out the passenger side and knocked him off the bike and, as he lay injured, the officers beat Rivera until his nose was broken, his eye socket damaged, and his gashes “required 38 surgical staples to his head and 18 stitches to his face.” Their report said Rivera had “slammed one into a wall” and thrown elbows.

After Rivera’s girlfriend went door to door in the neighborhood and found a surveillance video that captured the moment, the two officers were arrested for “multiple charges of assault and filing false reports.”

David Krajicek reports on the psychology of the encounters:

“It’s called contempt of cop or POP: pissing off police,” says Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminologist and leading expert on police violence and pursuits. “These guys have a sworn duty to catch the bad guys, and that becomes an overwhelming instinct when someone runs from them. They’re going to try to catch them.”

And when they do, bad things often happen. Nothing seems to transform an otherwise reasonable police officer into a crazed beast faster than someone who flees.

Adrenaline, yes, says emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska Omaha, Sam Walker. But training is supposed to teach officers how to “curb instincts and impulses and to act rationally and carefully” under stress.

Time to recall the textbooks?

“None of these cases ever begins with an officer saying, I’m going to go out and kill somebody,” Alpert told me. “But the process is the same. You get ramped up, you get excited, and you get yourself deeply invested emotionally in a pursuit. You think what you’re doing is right, you believe what you’re doing is right, but it turns out not to be right.”

Former Atlanta cop Gregory Gilbertson who teaches criminal justice in the Seattle area calls most pursuits “totally unwarranted.” It indicates “a lack of good order, discipline and supervision in the field.” He continues:

“Everyone asks the same question about the Freddie Gray case,” says Gregory Gilbertson. “’Why was he running? If he’s so innocent, what made him run?’ Well, I don’t care what Freddie Gray was doing and why he ran…Just because they run from you doesn’t justify you chasing them. Simply looking at a police officer and taking off running is not a crime. Is it suspicious? Yes. But it’s not a crime….Maybe they’re afraid and just want to get away. We should always remember that a certain segment of the American population has never had a good experience with a police officer.”

And people like Rivera are turning up dead and hospitalized over “chicken crap stuff.”

Isn’t the whole point of training to teach officers to perform professionally in a crisis in spite of  the tunnel vision produced by fear and adrenaline? If police academies were public schools, we would blame the teachers and their unions, amirite?

Shopping for medical care

by digby

Gosh, this seems as if it might be something worth changing, via Vox’s Sarah Cliff:

[T]wo women are co-workers with the same insurance plan. By coincidence, they happened to become pregnant around the same time and gave birth at the same hospital. They both selected in-network obstetricians to deliver their babies. Both chose to receive an epidural from an anesthesiologist as they gave birth — and that’s where things began to diverge. Here’s more from their co-authored blog post at Health Affairs:

Layla received an unexpected bill for $1,600 for anesthesiology services and warned Erin to expect the same. Yet Erin’s bill never came. Layla happened to deliver on a day when an out-of-network anesthesiologist was on call, while Erin was seen by an in-network anesthesiologist. Purely by chance, one of us received an expensive physician bill and the other did not have to pay a dime.

The two later figure out what happened: While the hospital they chose was in-network for the health insurance plan, Layla’s anesthesiologist was an out-of-network provider. Just because he worked at the hospital, that didn’t guarantee that he was one of the doctors that the insurer had in contract.

“Who would have the presence of mind during labor to ask whether the anesthesiologist on call is part of her insurance network?” Taylor and Parast write in their blog post. “While providing patients with information regarding which physicians are in network is an important part of health insurance transparency, it is meaningless in situations where the patient has no choice.”

The New York Times featured a horror story about someone who was insured but billed over a hundred thousand dollars after emergency surgery for an anesthesiologist who wasn’t “in network.” In fact, the Times piece indicated that this could be a scam where some doctors who were in network split the fees with those outside it.

If a person is in their network approved hospital they should not be charged for services by people who have not contracted with that hospital. Period. This should be something that the insurance companies battle out with the hospitals not something about which an individual should even be aware. You follow the rules and go to your designated facility that should be the end of your responsibility. How it isn’t already is just mind-boggling.

The hoops you have to go through if you’re travelling or if you’re taken to a hospital out of network are already ridiculous. Emergencies should be paid by insurance without question wherever we are in the country. But this takes it to a whole new level. You’re in an emergency medical situation and you’re expected to inquire as to whether your doctors are in your network? And what if they aren’t? Are you expected to stop treatment until they offer you someone who is? It’s crazy.

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Wingnut headquarters celebrates the Kentucky victory

by digby

In case you wondered how the right wing interpreted last night’s big win in Kentucky, here it is:

Matt Bevin, the Tea Party-backed candidate who two years ago took on Senator Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky Republican Primary, and last spring won a contentious Republican Primary for the nomination for Governor, has defied the pundits and won the General Election for the Bluegrass State’s highest office.

Matt BevinWhen the Republican establishment’s poisonous Mitch McConnell defeated Matt Bevin in the 2014 Senate Primary Karl Rove used the defeat as evidence the Tea Party was dead and lauded the result of McConnell’s multimillion dollar content-free trashing of Bevin, calling the incumbent Senator’s campaign masterful and superb.

Other establishment Republican pundits were equally dismissive when Bevin defeated James Comer, Kentucky’s incumbent Republican Agriculture Commissioner, and former Louisville city councilman Hal Heiner, to win the gubernatorial primary. The Republican establishment dismissed Bevin’s grassroots-powered campaign and predicted a Democratic win and the loss of a winnable governor’s race.

We wonder what Rove will say today now that Matt Bevin has been elected Governor?

Naturally the political elite will be looking for ways to explain Bevin’s victory that do not involve embracing his conservative positions, but the reality is that after his narrow primary win Bevin didn’t back down from the conservative positions that powered his run in the primary.

“We will stand on our state sovereignty, we will do what is in our best interest, we will say to the federal government, who tries to bribe us to do what is not in our best interest with federal dollars … we will say `keep your dollars, keep your suggestions,’ and we will do what is best for the people of Kentucky,” he said after his primary win.

And he stuck to that conservative platform throughout a campaign that saw the establishment and liberal media regularly predict his demise.

As the Louisville Courier-Journal (which endorsed his opponent) noted, Bevin called for an austere budget to pay down Kentucky’s state worker pension program’s unfunded liability, and he promised to move new teachers over to a 401k type program rather than a traditional pension. And as governor, Bevin promised to do away with the Kynect Obamacare portal, rescind the state’s Medicaid expansion and push for the Kentucky General Assembly to institute pro-business policies like right-to-work and lawsuit reform.

Bevin regularly hammered his Democratic opponent on the failures of Obamacare and the disaster Obama’s “clean energy” executive mandate would wreak on Kentucky’s coal industry – and its traditionally Democrat-leaning workforce.

While Bevin originally ran largely on economic issues, the Louisville Courier-Journal observed that his campaign pivoted toward social issues as the gay marriage issue “blew up” in Kentucky with a federal judge sending Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis to jail because of her refusal to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Bevin called for Gov. Steve Beshear to issue an executive order freeing Davis of the responsibility of issuing the licenses and had his photo taken with Davis.

Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, which represented Davis in her legal battles, also claimed that Bevin’s victory was due in part to the Davis saga.

“The people favor traditional values and marriage, and they are tired of the political elites represented by Governor Beshear who are out of touch with ordinary, God-loving citizens,” he said.
[…]
The victory was broad and deep with Bevin and Hampton winning all but 14 of Kentucky’s 120 counties, including stalwart Democratic counties like Pike and Woodford, according to The Louisville Courier-Journal.

Republican State Senate President Robert Stivers called Bevin’s win a “total repudiation” of the Democratic Party in Kentucky as well as Obama’s policies on coal and healthcare.

Don’t believe establishment media stories about the death of the Tea Party movement.

It should be no big surprise when a Tea Party candidate who is outspent by millions loses, as Matt Bevin did in the race two years ago against Mitch McConnell. The story the establishment media isn’t telling you is that even when a Tea Party candidate loses a big race down ballot limited government constitutional conservative candidates continue to win, and when a limited government constitutional conservative like Matt Bevin heads the ticket, and runs as an unabashed conservative, it can lead to a virtual wipeout of the liberal establishment.

There you have it. First the Tea Party will wipe out the Republican establishment and then it will wipe out the liberal establishment. They’re halfway there.

We’re on the verge of Utopia.

Send money.

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Ben Carson believes everything he hears and reads

by digby

He does. Everyone is all a-twitter about his recent comment that he believes the pyramids were built for grain storage. Now this sounds odd, mostly because we know for a fact that they were built as tombs — hence the mummies and artifacts buried inside them.

But many right wing Christians are convinced that the first pyramid built by the Pharoah Imhotep was actually a grain silo and that Imhotep was actually Joseph from the Bible. (You can read the whole story if you really want to know it.) Carson didn’t explicitly say he was referring to the Step Pyramid, which is the one in question, so it’s possible that’s what he meant. It doesn’t matter. It’s just more evidence that Ben Carson is the most gullible person in America.

Recall that he was taken to caves in Arizona by wingnutty Sheriff Paul Babeau and told that they harbored drug smugglers. Somehow he got confused and thought this has something to do with immigration and suggested the next day that we should use drones at the border. He later explained that he was talking about droning the caves. Or something.

Ben Carson has a lot of information in his brain and it tends to get muddled. Aside from the medical knowledge, it’s almost all far right Christian and right wing fever swamp propaganda.

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