politics

Posted in response to the comments on a comments on a Baltimore Sun editorial about the recent "samurai sword killing" in Baltimore. (Links have been added to this version.)

Wow. The bloodlust displayed by many comments on this incident makes me sad.

We don't have all the details, but it seems Mr. Pontolillo was probably acting in justified self-defense. I'm a martial arts instructor and a gun owner, and I stand solidly behind his right to do so.

But one of the few teachings that has stuck with me from my abandoned Catholic upbringing is that every single human being has the potential for redemption, regardless of their past mistakes. Mr. Rice has lost his chance at redemption, and that should sadden us.

If the very best thing that we, as a society, could do with Mr. Rice's human potential was let it bleed out onto the ground, then we are in sorry shape indeed.

Thanks to right-wing "tough on crime" policies, along with the economics of the prison-industrial complex, prisons have abandoned any attempt at reforming inmates. And so we see the sort of "revolving door" system that did nothing for Mr. Rice. A recent NPR story about Folsom prison notes that four decades ago, when it was a model institution where almost every prisoner got education and job training, most never returned to prison. Now, only 10% get job training -- and the recidivism rate is 75%.

So here's the end result of the "tough on crime" attitude spouted by those cheering Mr. Rice's death: more crime, more violence, lives wasted, and ordinary citizens with blood on their hands.

Well, I certainly don't think that Glenn Beck raped and murder a young girl in 1990. But, as this parody site asks -- applying the same logic that Glenn himself often uses:

Why won't Glenn Beck deny these allegations? We're not accusing Glenn Beck of raping and murdering a young girl in 1990 - in fact, we think he didn't! But we can't help but wonder, since he has failed to deny these horrible allegations. Why won't he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?

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There's a whole section of links to evidence on your left there, in the navigation section titled "Evidence". We await evidence that he *didn't* rape and murder a young girl in 1990!

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Why is the MSM not reporting that Glenn Beck might have raped and murdered a girl in 1990? Why are they not investigating these allegations?

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So, there's this thing going around the internets...some people say that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990. I'm not saying that it's not possible, I'm simply saying there are questions to be answered. After all, why else would so many people say that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990?

Ars Technica discusses the story:

The controversy started a week ago in the Fark forums, where someone picked up on an old Gilbert Gottfried roast of the "comedian" (scare quotes fully intended) Bob Saget. During the roast, Gottfried repeatedly said (watch the video) that Saget had "not raped and killed a girl in 1990." The Fark forums took the joke about the power of insinuation and applied it to right-wing talk show host Glenn "Obama is a racist" Beck.

One of the Fark readers then took the forum meme to the next level, registering a domain name and launching a web site in order to make a point about talking head TV demagoguery. "Why won't Glenn Beck deny these allegations?" asks the site. "We're not accusing Glenn Beck of raping and murdering a young girl in 1990—in fact, we think he didn't! But we can't help but wonder, since he has failed to deny these horrible allegations. Why won't he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?" At the very bottom of the page was a small text disclaimer saying that the site was satirical.

I spoke to the anonymous owner of the site, who tells Ars that launching it "just felt right"—it flipped the "birther" non-falsifiable conspiracy theories about Obama's birth and citizenship around and applied the same tactics to one of the biggest talking heads (no pun intended?) on cable news. It's just "using Beck's tactics against him" and is a small way of "directing all this frustration" with Beck and others into action.

We've already discussed how the astroturfers behind the teabagger protest on Friday couldn't count the number of people there, and then lied about ABC being a source for their grossly inflated estimate.

But wait -- there's more.

To show their numbers, they've been circulating a photo of a packed National Mall. The problem is, it's not from this weekend.

This is clear from what's missing -- the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened five years ago, isn't in the picture. The photo in question is apparently from a 1997 "Promise Keepers" rally.

In every photo and video I've seen of this "event", it looks like there are a lot of people -- crowded in front of the camera. If you look in between you can see that the crowd is as shallow as an insurance industry lobbyist's ethics.

A recent New England Journal of Medicine poll found that 62.9 percent of physicians favor a public option as part of health care reform. An additional 9.6 percent favored a completely government-run single payer option.

The alternative to the public option being put forth by industry shills is some sort of co-op. Now normally, I'm all in favor of co-ops and other non-profits: they're a great illustration of how a non-capitalist organization can function in a free market. But the idea of for-profit competing with non-profit organizations doesn't work for insurance, because of the nature of pooled risk.

Let's say you've got a bunch of people, half of whom -- call them group A -- are going to get significantly sick this year, and half -- group B -- that aren't. Pulling numbers out of the air for illustrative purposes, let's say that a group A person consumes $1,500 worth of health care over some period of time (including the necessary administrative costs), and a B consumes $500.

In an efficient non-profit insurance system, one that does the best job of spreading the risk, we set everyone's cost at the average, at $1,000.

But now, let's introduce a for-profit provider into the model. If you can tell ahead of time who's an A and who's a B -- based on things like medical history and age -- you can offer Bs a plan priced at $900. That's cheaper than the $1000 they're paying now, and since Bs only consume $500, you make $400 on the deal. Wow! What's not to love?

The problem is that this cherry picking takes Bs out of the risk pool. Say that, with that $100 incentive, half of the Bs leave the non-profit and buy into the for-profit plan. Then the non-profit's risk pool now has twice as many As as Bs. The average cost to provide care to the non-profit group jumps from $1,000 to $1,167, so that's the new cost of the non-profit plan. (Either that, or the non-profit plan has to start kicking As off its rolls.)

And so more Bs leave the non-profit pool to join the for-profit plan. And -- here's the fun part -- with that increased demand, and the costs of the general pool rising, the for-profit plan can raise its price! At, say, $1,050, it might be more expensive than what a B was paying before the for-profit plan came along, but it's cheaper than the non-profit's new prices.

So this weekend, a bunch of teabaggers showed up in D.C., protesting health care reform and "voicing opposition to big government". Now, I have to wonder why these "no big government!" types only come out when there's some threat to the aristocracy -- where were these guys when the Patriot Act was signed, or when Bush the Second deployed a whole lot of big government power in its rawest form to Iraq? I guess there just wasn't anybody to astroturf these folks into shape the way "FreedomWorks" -- founded by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp and former White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray -- is doing now.

But, hey, free speech and all, and it's not like 60,000 to 70,000 protestors is a big deal by D.C. standards. But then FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe went and claimed there were 1 million to 1.5 million people there -- and falsely claimed ABC News as a source for their grossly inflated estimate.

Not only have they had to apologize for the false attribution, they've had to admit that the millions-men number was B.S., and have cut their estimate roughly in half, to between 600,000 and 800,000 -- though that's still an order of magnitude more than any disinterested party's estimate.

Alan Turing was one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the Twentieth Century -- indeed, one of most brilliant mathematicians ever. During World War II he was instrumental in breaking the Nazi's "Enigma" code. In the process, he developed much of the theoretical framework for the field of computer science. The mathematical model of computers that every comp sci major learns about, the "Turning machine", was his invention. Every time you use a computer -- such as reading this -- you are benefiting from his genius.

But let's get back to the fact that he helped defeat the Nazis and thus helped save the UK, and all of Western civilization.

Usually, people who help save a nation are treated with gratitude. But Turing was gay.

In the homophobic society in which he lived, that was a crime. His security clearance was revoked, he was prosecuted, and sentenced to "chemical castration" via hormone injections. In 1954, he committed suicide.

Over 55 years later, the UK has finally apologized for its wretched treatment of this heroic genius.

Betsy McCaughey is widely regarded as the person responsible for starting the "death panel" rumors. In this press release, she disputes a recent profile piece the New York Times did about her.

Here's what's interesting: her objection to doctors being rated on whether they help patients articulate their own wishes, and whether those wishes are adhered to:

Doctors' quality ratings will be determined in part by the percentage of the doctor's patients who create a living will and the percentage who adhere to it. (And quality ratings affect a doctor's Medicare reimbursement)

The "adhere to" part is especially dangerous. Some people say "they'd rather die than be on a ventilator, but when the time comes, they choose to live. Doctors will incur penalties when families do not adhere to end of life written plans. - a horrible conflict of interest. As a patient advocate, I see these difficult situations and know that government should not be
involved.

Let's be clear: if you can decide for yourself whether to die or to remain on a ventilator, your living will is not in effect.

But putting that nonsensical part aside, if you're in a condition where you can't decide, and you've left a living will or advance directive, presumably you want that to be followed! (Else, why did you make it?) Whether it says "pull the plug" or "hook me up to every machine you've got," you want your doctor to follow your directions.

It's not your family's choice, it's your choice. If a doctor disregards a patient's wishes, of course they ought to be down-rated!

It seems what McCaughey and her ilk object to is you being able to make your own decisions about end-of-life care. That's what this is about: these folks want to give you the same treatment they gave Terri Schiavo.

Tom Tomorrow, author of political cartoon This Modern World, on Rep. Joe Wilson's "You lie!" outburst during Obama's speech:

You’d think that an elected representative heckling the President of the United States during a speech to Congress would be considered inappropriate, but as the summer’s town hall disruptions made clear, the right wing is operating under an entirely different set of assumptions than most, you know, sane people. Honestly, I think Wilson could have walked up to the front of the room, pulled down his pants, and taken a dump right on the podium, and he’d still be applauded by the wingnut media. Wilson may have just put himself on the short list of Republican presidential contenders for 2012.

(If you haven't seen it yet, this week's TMW, "Then and now with Goofus and Gallant", says it all about how the left and the right are treated in the supposedly "liberal" MSM.)

If Bob Cesca is right about what's in Max Baucus's version of the health care reform bill, that it contains a mandate to give your money to private insurers, then that version must not pass. Indeed, no reform at all would be preferable to this give-away to the insurance parasites that got us into this mess -- a bill authored by the industry it's supposed to reform:

The short answer is that Baucus receives around $1500 a day from the health care lobby and PACs and he needs to keep his financiers wallowing in their own filth. But a more specific answer can be defined by who wrote the Baucus Plan.

Funny story. Baucus and his staff forgot to delete the name of the author of the plan from the Acrobat version of the document. Whoops!

In the Properties dialogue box of the PDF, in the "author" slot, the name Liz Fowler appears. Fowler is a Baucus staffer who was with the senator in the early part of this decade but left to take a breather in the private sector and only returned to Capitol Hill last year. During her time in the private sector, can you guess where Fowler worked?

She was the VP for Public Policy and External Affairs at WellPoint, the health insurance parent company of Blue Cross.

Really, it wouldn't matter if Baucus had written the legislation himself, since he's wholly owned by big pharma and the insurance giants. Between 2003 and 2008, they paid him over a $1,000,000. This is the guy who, in discussing his real employer's position on health care reform, said ""Merck is not ready for single pay. I mean, America."

So here's another loopy conspiracy theory: the right-wing National Legal and Policy Center found (cleverly hidden right out in plain sight at www.fbo.gov) a Request For Proposal "to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites." The blogosphere is abuzz with how this is an attempt by Obama's secret team of socialist fascist secret Muslims to create an "enemies list"

Or, as Hot Air exposes...not.

The Presidential Records Act (PRA) essentially requires each administration to keep every pixel and keystroke ever published for later review by Congress or investigators, in case illegal activity takes place. We have seen this invoked ex post facto to the Clinton and Bush administrations, in the latter over e-mails sent and received outside the White House mail system. At that time, legal experts and investigators insisted that everything produced by an administration for anything remotely concerning official business had to be archived within the EOP. [Executive Office of the President]

A more careful reading of this RFP shows that to be the project. The contract directs the contractor to archive the “information posted on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence“, including social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter, and so on. It doesn’t call for everything on those networks to be archived, but only “information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence[,] both comments posted on pages created by EOP and messages sent to EOP accounts on those web sites.” In other words, the archiving will include interaction on EOP websites and pages, but not anything else.

In other words, this massive spying effort is nothing more than applying the retention requirements for Presidential e-mail to Facebook and Twitter messages.

Somehow I'm sure that if the Obama administration didn't do this, these same folks would be complaining how he was using social networking sites as an attempt to get around the PRA. (Like, say, how Bush administration crooks used an e-mail server run by the Republican National Committee to circumvent the PRA.)