Month: November 2015

Ryan throws some red meat to the monster

by digby

It’s hard to know how much of this is bluster to please the wacko-birds but if he thinks he’s going to be able to control them by throwing some “process” their way after which they’ll settle down and be good boys and girls, I think he’s fooling himself:

New Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Tuesday refused to rule out attaching legislative policy riders to an omnibus spending bill, foreshadowing a possible confrontation with President Obama next month.

“This is the legislative branch and the power of the purse rests within the legislative branch, and we fully expect that we’re going to exercise that power,” Ryan told reporters at his first news conference since he was elected Speaker last week.

Obama and congressional leaders struck a major deal last week that lifts sequester spending caps, sets spending levels and raises the debt ceiling for two years.

But House and Senate appropriators will need to pass an omnibus spending bill to prevent a government shutdown by Dec. 11. That’s when a stopgap measure, known as a continuing resolution, is set to expire.

Obama and Democrats are insisting on a clean spending bill, free of controversial policy riders or “poison pills.” But conservatives will be pressing their GOP leaders to attach a slew of amendments, including one to defund Planned Parenthood.

“So we have a tough deadline, December 11,” Ryan said. “We’ve got not a lot of time between now and then.”

Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.) called the new Speaker’s refusal to rule out controversial riders “inconsistent with his duty to the responsible stewardship of the House.”

“That’s their cul-de-sac strategy,” said Hoyer, who added that Republicans are fully aware they’re offering riders that the president will veto.

“Playing chicken with the president of the United States is not responsible. [It’s] not good leadership, and I would hope that he would not pursue that,” Hoyer added. “I would hope that he lead, not follow, his more radical elements in the House.”

They always think they can give these Tea Party style wingnuts some scraps but they and their voters are no longer satisfied with that. Indeed, the whole “outsider” phenomenon is being driven by a sense of betrayal that the Republicans promise to do things and never deliver.

The far right believes that if their leaders would just have the cojones to hold their breath until they turn blue they can get what they want. They aren’t going to settle for less.

This would be fun to watch if it weren’t so incredibly destructive.

That damned democracy always interfering with what’s important

by digby

This piece in today’s Guardian featuring some memos from the Snowden cache really says it all. Here’s the essence of it:

Obviously, if the people know their government is spying on them freely they might be upset. So keep it a secret. For their own good.

After all, there’s no way the government would ever do anything nefarious with all the information. They are agents of the Lord. So don’t worry your pretty little heads about it.

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Chris Christie sounds almost human. But that doesn’t mean he knows what he’s talking about

by digby

So everyone is all excited about Chris Christie sounding almost human in this video in which he claims that his mother was never stigmatized for being addicted to cigarettes and getting lung cancer and so addiction to other drugs shouldn’t be stigmatized either. Obviously, I agree that addiction to other drugs should not be stigmatized and should be treated by the medical community. But he’s just wrong about lung cancer:

When Sherry Stoll was diagnosed with breast cancer in late 2011, her community rallied around her. Friends, family and even strangers sent fruit baskets, handmade blankets, get-well cards and restaurant gift cards so she wouldn’t have to worry about cooking meals while going through chemo and radiation.

It was an interesting experience for the 53-year-old from Pittsburgh, especially since it wasn’t her first bout with cancer. A year and a half earlier, she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

The response from her community then? Crickets.

“There was definitely a lack of support and sympathy,” said Stoll, a stay-at-home mom who now runs the nonprofit lung cancer advocacy group, We Wish. “My family was there for me, but most people when they heard about it, were like, ‘Wow, that’s really a shame. Did you smoke?’”

Most people know that lung cancer is an aggressive killer, caused by a number of factors including smoking, genetic mutations and environmental exposures to carcinogens like radon and asbestos. But more and more patients, doctors and researchers are pointing to another harmful influence contributing to the suffering, delayed diagnosis and possibly even early deaths of those hit with the disease: stigma.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. Most patients are diagnosed late (symptoms usually don’t present until the cancer is advanced) and screening methods that can detect the disease at earlier, more curable stages have only very recently become available.

This year alone, about 221,000 people will be handed a lung cancer diagnosis and half will die within a year. All told, lung cancer kills more people every year than breast, colon, prostate and pancreatic cancers combined. Its five-year survival rate is a meager 17.8 percent. Five-year survival rates for breast and prostate cancers are 90 and 99 percent, respectively.

Sadly, funding for lung cancer research is as low as the death rate is high. According to a 2013 post on the website for the American Society of Clinical Oncology, or ASCO, “many individuals will spend more annually on round-trip airfares than either the U.S. or the United Kingdom spends on research per lung cancer death.”

Why the paucity of funding for lung cancer research?

Many point to its association with smoking, even though lung cancer is not exclusively a smokers’ disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 18 percent of people diagnosed with the disease here in the U.S. have never smoked.

Still, a pervasive stigma exists, a phenomenon aptly described by a team of Oxford researchers in one of the first studies on the subject.

“Whether they smoked or not, [patients] felt particularly stigmatized because the disease is so strongly associated with smoking,” they wrote in a 2004 paper in BMJ. “Interaction with family, friends and doctors was often affected as a result and many patients, particularly those who had stopped smoking years ago or had never smoked, felt unjustly blamed for their illness … Some patients concealed their illness, which sometimes had adverse financial consequences or made it hard for them to gain support from other people … A few patients worried that diagnosis, access to care, and research into lung cancer might be adversely affected by the stigma attached to the disease and those who smoke.”

Ten years later, not much has changed.

Two recent studies found an association between lung cancer stigma and delayed diagnosis and treatment. Another pointed out the profound effect stigma has had on research funding and quality of care, both with regard to physicians’ attitudes toward patients and patients’ attitudes toward themselves. A fourth compared lung cancer stigma with that of four other cancer types.

Not surprisingly, lung cancer beat all comers.

Compared to other types of cancer, research into lung cancer has been dramatically underfunded.
Not that Chris Christie would do anything about that since he wants to starve the research community of federal funds as all Republicans do and leave it to the profit seeking private sector. But it’s important to note that in our puritanical society, diseases which we judge as being the patient’s “own fault” are not treated with the same vigor and compassion that diseases we are told cannot be avoided are treated — and lung cancer is at the top of the list.

Christie’s right that we shouldn’t make moral judgments about diseases. But then he goes into a “pro-life” rant about fetuses which reminds me that he would deny life-saving research because of his inane insistence that blastocysts, zygotes and unviable fetuses are full human beings. So I don’t really think he brings as much value to this discussion as people seem to believe he does.

Still, baby steps. He’s a Republican who isn’t demonizing drugs so that’s a good first step. It would be helpful if he wasn’t also full of it about everything else.

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Ben Carson and the submarine

by digby

What’s happening to Ben Carson is kind of sad.  He has been considered almost a saint for decades for his life-saving surgical skills and his amazing personal story.  People have been inspired to enter medicine because of him and he has been a role model for millions of kids. He should have left it alone. Being under the political spotlight is showing that he is all too human. As it turns out, he’s not much of a saint. In fact, he seems to be a liar:

Ben Carson dismissed a recent National Review piece calling him out on “bald-faced lies” about his relationship with supplement company Mannatech, chalking it up to a “submarine” sent by another Republican campaign on the debate stage.

“Well they’re concerned about me. That obviously comes from somebody else on that debate stage. That’s a submarine that’s sent by them,” Carson said in an interview Tuesday with Stephen Bannon on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily.” “They’re very concerned about me and they’re using the National Review as their political tool. That’s pretty obvious.”

That does not exactly narrow it down, but the retired neurosurgeon declined to elaborate on which campaign might be responsible.

In the column written by Jim Geraghty, the author recounts speaking in the past with Carson’s business manager Armstrong Williams who he said “had no idea” about any of the controversies surrounding the company, including charges from then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott alleging unlawful and misleading sales practices.

“So you believe the National Review was used — that information was leaked or somehow was put in by another campaign and given to National Review to be weaponized?” Bannon asked Carson, who replied, “Oh yeah. Absolutely.”

During last week’s debate, Carson flatly denied “an involvement” with Mannatech, calling claims to the contrary “total propaganda.”

“I did a couple of speeches for them, I do speeches for other people. They were paid speeches. It is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of a relationship with them. Do I take the product? Yes. I think it’s a good product,” he said.

Geraghty called similar arguments from Carson and Williams “sophistry,” adding that “the Speaker’s Bureau just transfers the money from the group to the speaker; Carson spoke to the group four times and talked about the company’s ‘glyconutrient’ products in a PBS special as recently as last year.”

As Breitbart noted earlier this week, that program was not sponsored by Mannatech, but rather by the Platinum Group, which distributes the company’s products.

Carson has endorsed this product. It is quite obvious. And the fact that he’s lying about it is pretty bad. But what’s worse is that he’s been selling his reputation as a world renowned neurosurgeon to convince people to take a supplement to cure diseases it cannot possibly cure.

Now whether Carson knows that it cannot cure these diseases is unknown. I might have assumed in the past that it was ridiculous to assume he didn’t know that but after watching him for a while it’s fairly clear that he is an extremely gullible person. He may actually believe this junk cures cancer and Alzheimer’s. He has said he believes it cured his prostate cancer and the the only reason he got the surgery was because he doesn’t think most people would be as religious as he is about taking the supplements.

He might just be a mendacious con man. He does employ one, after all (Armstrong Williams.) But you can’t fake being a pediatric neurosurgeon so it’s not as if his whole persona is lie. I really think he’s just pathologically gullible and believes everything he reads and sees. And he’s taking on more and more right wing paranoia the more he gets involved in politics. It’s really creepy.

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List of demands
by Tom Sullivan

How far down the rabbit hole have we gone that Republican candidates for president think they are entitled to a list of demands from networks hosting debates (and I use that term reservedly) that would make rock bands blush? (Remember, no brown M&Ms.) The Washington Post obtained the list. Here are just a few:

• Will there be questions from the audience or social media? How many? How will they be presented to the candidates? Will you acknowledge that you, as the sponsor, take responsibilities for all questions asked, even if not asked  by your personnel?
• Will there be a gong/buzzer/bell when time is up? How will the moderator enforce the time limits?
• Will you commit that you will not:
  • Ask the candidate to raise their hands to answer a question
  • Ask yes/no questions without time to provide a substantive answer
  • Allow candidate-to-candidate questioning
  • Allow props or pledges by the candidates
  • Have reaction shots of members of the audience or moderators during debates
  • Show an empty podium after a break (describe how far away the bathrooms are)
  • Use behind shots of the candidates showing their notes
  • Leave microphones on during the breaks
  • Allow members of the audience to wear political messages (shirts, buttons, signs, etc.). Who enforces?
• What is the size of the audience? Who is receiving tickets in addition to the candidates? Who’s in charge of distributing those tickets and filling the seats?
• What instructions will you provide the audience about cheering during the debate?
• What are your plans for the lead-in to the debate (Pre-shot video? Announcer to moderator? Director to Moderator?) and how long is it?
• What type of microphones (lavs or podium)?
• Can you pledge that the temperature in the hall be kept below 67 degrees?

Dude, can I get on the “guest list” and a backstage pass to hang out with the band?

The sitting president has already commented on the ridiculousness of would-be leaders of the world’s most-powerful military not being able to take the heat from CNBC debate moderators.

But the heart of the matter is that the Republican Party dug the rabbit hole down which it has disappeared. Marty Longerman at Ten Miles Square:

The basic problem is that everyone on the right wants to benefit from having an electorate that is convinced that al-Qaeda is planting terror-babies at the southern border or that the government has robbed them of their Social Security and Medicare or that someone is coming any day to confiscate their guns. No one wants to give this up. Not really.

And the few people who see that this has gone too far and poisoned the minds of their base?

They can’t kick the habit and they’re petrified that even sticking their neck out to suggest some restraint will get their head chopped off.

Looking at you, Speaker Paul Ryan. If the span of policy debate on the right is between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, Longman writes, then “then there’s no room for anyone who isn’t stupid, evil, or afraid.”

In contrast to candidates whose concerns are for themselves, Matt Taibbi reflects on Bernie Sanders who, unlike so many before him, has not used his position to enrich himself:

Sanders is a clear outlier in a generation that has forgotten what it means to be a public servant. The Times remarks upon his “grumpy demeanor.” But Bernie is grumpy because he’s thinking about vets who need surgeries, guest workers who’ve had their wages ripped off, kids without access to dentists or some other godforsaken problem that most of us normal people can care about for maybe a few minutes on a good day, but Bernie worries about more or less all the time.

I first met Bernie Sanders ten years ago, and I don’t believe there’s anything else he really thinks about. There’s no other endgame for him. He’s not looking for a book deal or a membership in a Martha’s Vineyard golf club or a cameo in a Guy Ritchie movie. This election isn’t a game to him; it’s not the awesomely repulsive dark joke it is to me and many others.

And the only reason this attention-averse, sometimes socially uncomfortable person is subjecting himself to this asinine process is because he genuinely believes the system is not beyond repair.

The death rate is growing among the very people the GOP used to count on as its base voters. It is driven by “an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.” Sanders told Chris Hayes, “What it tells you is that there are millions of people in this country, working-class people whose standard of living is going down, they are experiencing very high levels of unemployment. They are in despair.” While the GOP’s candidates are busy looking after their own comforts, their base has begun to figure out they’ve been had.

I gotcher list of demands right here:

I got a list of demands written on the palm of my hands
I ball my fist and you gon’ know where I stand
We living hand to mouth, you wanna be somebody?
See somebody? Try and free somebody?

Got a list of demands written on the palm of my hands
I ball my fist and you gon’ know where I stand
We living hand to mouth
Hand to mouth

He’s loose and he’s right

by digby

President Obama …

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QOTD: Ben Carson

by digby

According to Chris Jansing on MSNBC, Carson is getting rock star level ecstatic crowds for his book tour with tons and tons of his former patients and doctors and nurses who have been inspired by him showing up and saying they want to work for his campaign. She says she’s been covering presidential campaigns since 1980 and she’s never seen anything like this.

When asked about the fact that he is completely without political or government experience he says:

“The ark was built by amateurs.”

This met with wild cheers and applause.

I don’t know what to do with that.

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Joe and Mika show how it’s done

by digby

Trump gave a “press conference” today in which he basically reiterated his Trump speech and insulted everyone. Yawn. But  he repeatedly claimed that the Democrats were thrown softball questions in their debate while the Republicans were tormented by rude gotchas. (He also complained that the Republicans were asked about “fantasy football” so there’s really no pleasing him …)

Anyway, if anyone wants to see what real softball questions are all they have to do is look at the smarmy love fest between Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and the Koch brothers this morning. This really is equivalent to “which of you are more handsome and why”

BRZEZINSKI: Let’s talk about the book and start with the title. How do you define Good Profit?

KOCH: Well, Good Profit, I define just that way, is profit — a good profit is profit that becomes [sic] from contributing to society, from helping other people improve their lives. And for a business, this means producing products and services that your customers value more than the alternatives while more efficiently using resources and being among the safest and environmentally protective producer. And so when you do those, you create good profit. And so this was my philosophy I developed early on.

In reality, as Media Matters has documented, the Kochs have a terrible environmental track record. Koch Industries paid “the largest civil fine ever imposed” for environmental violations after the company caused hundreds of oil spills, and a government agency determined that Koch Industries failures were likely responsible for the deaths of two teenagers. Koch Industries is also among the companies most responsible for both air and water pollution in the U.S. Finally, neither Scarborough nor Brzezinski challenged Koch on his professed devotion to the “scientific method,” even though Koch has personally denied the firmly-established scientific consensus that human activities cause global warming. [Media Matters, 11/3/15; Media Matters, 8/27/14]


SCARBOROUGH: I want to ask you something personally. Because Mika and I talked about this when we had spent a little time with Liz and you before, about how surprised you seemed a few years back at the level of vitriol leveled against you and your family, even Harry Reid calling you un-American. Something that we talked about on our show time and time again … What kind of personal impact did that have on you and your family, and were you shocked by the level of vitriol?

Koch responded in part by comparing himself to church reformer Martin Luther, who was put on trial for his religious beliefs and work. [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/3/15]

SCARBOROUGH: How did you feel the night all the election results came in after Harry Reid and the Democrats had run against you and your brother all year and it ended up that you guys won most of the races that you got involved in? [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/3/15]

SCARBOROUGH: How did you go from being that guy, to being one of the most influential people in the world? What happened? What was the — when did the, sort of the light come on for you? [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/3/15]

BRZEZINSKI: Sitting here in your childhood home we have the Koch brothers. Which one was the good brother? [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/3/15]

Brzezinski To Charles Koch: “You Were The Big Brother?” Scarborough further inquired if Charles Koch bossed David Koch around:

BRZEZINSKI: You were the big brother?

CHARLES KOCH: Yeah, four and a half years older. I was five years ahead of him in school.

SCARBOROUGH: Did he boss you around?

DAVID KOCH: Well, he helped me in a lot of different ways. Let’s put it that way. [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/3/15]

SCARBOROUGH: When we’ve heard about the Koch brothers, the Koch brothers, everybody talks about the Koch brothers like you’re conjoined twins. But you all are actually very different. Talk about the misperception, first of all, and then talk about how you guys are just different people. [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/3/15]

SCARBOROUGH: It’s hard to find people in New York, liberals, we were talking about this before, liberals or conservatives alike, who haven’t been touched by your graciousness, whether it’s towards the arts or cancer research. Do you think you got that instinct from your mom? [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/3/15]

SCARBOROUGH: Isn’t it interesting, though, that as time goes by and government’s gotten larger and larger, what we’ve certainly found when we go out and speak on college campuses is a real instinct to move towards a more libertarian position, whether it’s on economic issues where people want you out of their — want the government out of their lives or social issues, where it seems like they want the government out of their bedroom. Even though you’ve talked before about your disgust with what’s happening in Washington, D.C., it does seem like Americans are actually a lot hungrier for this message than they were when you ran. [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/3/15]

That’s how proper fluffing of wingnuts is done,  news moderators. Take note.

Update: MSNBC featured this interview all day long highlighting the fact that the Kochs aren’t your average Republican being for all that neato freedom and taking on crony capitalism and all.

They are the cronies, guys. The biggest cronies of all. And their idea of freedom is to let people be free to starve and die.

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A measured reaction

by digby

Here’s how one right winger responded to the news from the new Pew Poll that more people are becoming religiously non-affiliated:

All of which goes to show that religious institutions in America have failed in response to what Dennis Prager calls the most dynamic religion of the last century: secular leftism. Softness on social acceptance of homosexuality isn’t a result of declining religiosity, it’s also a cause of it: secular leftism has challenged traditional religious morality on its own turf, ethics, and seems to be winning. That’s because religious institutions have for too long assumed that they would be able to rely on the overall religiosity of their fellow Americans as a bulwark against secularism – but once a hole appeared in the dam, the waters began to pour through with increasing force.

All of which suggests that religious Americans must not retreat into mere Bible study. They must instead make a muscular, forceful argument for their morality above the secular morality of the left, rather than buying its principles while simultaneously claiming the superiority of its own standards. Religious institutions, fearful of losing membership, have attempted to dilute their ethical preaching in order to keep people coming to church. It isn’t working. People want standards, eternal standards, and they won’t come to church to hear what they could get for less effort on NPR.

Is it any wonder, with religious observance declining overall, that the left has utilized government to finally put its boot on the throat of its longtime adversary? If you don’t get your morality from religion, you get it from yourself; you are your own god. And many who make themselves into a deity wish to reign over others by using the power of the government gun, tolerating no other gods before them, including God.

This battle is only beginning. If religious Americans refuse to take up the mantle of their morality – if they insist on ignoring the leftism eating away at the ethics of their followers – they are destined to lose that battle. And that battle won’t end with empty churches, but with religious people under the government’s thumb.

Keep in mind that these are the same people who also worship individual liberty and fly the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag without and hint of intellectual or emotional dissonance.

It’s quite impressive actually. If F. Scott Fitzgerald was right, these are most intelligent people on the planet.

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The ruling class

by digby

Via Mother Jones

If you turned out to vote in today’s off-year general election, the chances are you voted for a bunch of white dudes. Not because you’re racist. (Although you probably are.) But because the ballots are overflowing with white dudes.

The racial disparities exposed in the study might have been less stark if it had included elections in large cities, which tend to be more racially diverse than rural areas. But that still doesn’t explain the wide gender gap.

But hey, there’s no hurry to change it, amirite? Things will work out in the long run. Of course you know what they say about the long run …

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