Consistently wrong since 2002
This will be awesome:
Hillary would have gotten the public option. Just sayin’.
Although these guys are setting themselves up for disaster. If my memory is correct, the Clintons are pretty good at avoiding being drafted.
From our faithful correspondent TaMara:
It’s been in the 90’s all week, but nights are cool enough for me to start thinking of fall menus. I’ve promised to fulfill some squash soups requests, which I’ll post over the next few weeks, but to get you started, there are a couple of Sweet Potato Soups here. If you have other fall menu requests, let me know. I’m happy to look for something new to try. One O/T note: Homer is now officially a member of the JeffW household. Yeah, I know, we’re all surprised by that now, aren’t we? Tonight’s menu is a diverse group of flavors with no discernible theme that I can see. Lots of light fall fruit notes, though, so it has that going for it.
On the board tonight:
1) Roasted Salmon in Orange-Ginger Soy Sauce
2) Fresh Spinach Salad
3) Herbed Potatoes
4) Blueberry Crisp
As ever, recipes and shopping list at the link.
(In her email, Tamara added: “BJ people are so predictable – Homer has gotten a couple thousand hits since he became our mascot.” Lots more where that came from, over at her blog.)
It took three oatmeal stouts and an order of gutbomb wings, but I think I am no longer stressed out.
An interesting story from yesterday’s comments:
The First World War will officially end on Sunday, 92 years after the guns fell silent, when Germany pays off the last chunk of reparations imposed on it by the Allies.
The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.
Germany was forced to pay the reparations at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead.
The initial sum agreed upon for war damages in 1919 was 226 billion Reichsmarks, a sum later reduced to 132 billion, £22 billion at the time.
This goes to show how dangerous debt is, and justifies a lot of the Villager fear about the size of our debt.
Consider this an open thread.
I haven’t pissed people off by making fun of the Snooze Hour in a while (via Wonkette):
I have no idea what is in the air, but my dogs are driving me damned nuts. Rosie in particular. They’ve been walked multiple times, they’ve been fed, groomed, petted, loved, and it still is not enough. Rosie is walking in between my legs pacing as I sit here trying to work, every now and then letting out a sigh to let me know just how bored she is and just how awful I am. Then she sits down on my feet to let me know she is here, and if I move, she growls and grumps. Then, every now and then she will itch herself out of boredom, making as much noise as she possibly can with her collar, looking at me with those damned JRT eyes just so I know she is bored and WANTS TO DO SOMETHING.
I’m trying to get something done with a software package I have never used before, and she’s doing everything she can to make me mental. I have got to get my yard fenced in.
I don’t know why this story isn’t getting more press, given how much attention other planned terrorist attacks have gotten:
Intelligence officials and people familiar with an unfolding terrorist plot to target Europe tell NPR that Osama bin Laden is involved.
Several months ago, source say, bin Laden used couriers to send a message to al-Qaida’s affiliates and partners: He told them that he would like to see a Mumbai-style attack on at least three strategic targets — the United Kingdom, Germany and France.
You read this blog, presumably, so you already know that I’m a misanthropic agoraphobe. I don’t like calling strangers to tell them to vote and I certainly don’t like knocking on strangers’ doors and telling them who to vote for.
But I did some phone-banking last night for a nearby Democratic Congressman, Dan Maffei, who is facing a challenge from a teahadist (I think Maffei will crush her, but who knows in this environment). You can do this, too, as unpleasant as it is.
The people in the Peter Daou/FDL wing of the blogosphere are often very good about doing all this shit, to their credit. There’s no reason you can’t be too.
If you’re in or near a competitive district or state, then get up, get into it, get involved, like the man says.
So the big Wall Street Journal article today is about fast-food giant, McDonald’s, threatening that new provisions in the Affordable Care Act will mean that they may need to dump healthcare coverage for thousands of employees. Here’s a handy table of exactly what sort of insurance McDonald’s provides:
Here’s the WSJ:
While many restaurants don’t offer health coverage, McDonald’s provides mini-med plans for workers at 10,500 U.S. locations, most of them franchised. A single worker can pay $14 a week for a plan that caps annual benefits at $2,000, or about $32 a week to get coverage up to $10,000 a year.
Last week, a senior McDonald’s official informed the Department of Health and Human Services that the restaurant chain’s insurer won’t meet a 2011 requirement to spend at least 80% to 85% of its premium revenue on medical care.
[…]
McDonald’s, in a memo to federal officials, said “it would be economically prohibitive for our carrier to continue offering” the mini-med plan unless it got an exemption from the requirement to spend 80% to 85% of premiums on benefits. Officials said McDonald’s would probably have to hit the 85% figure, which applies to larger group plans. Its insurer, BCS Insurance Group of Oak Brook Terrace, Ill., declined to comment.
I went over to the Kaiser Family Foundation to take a look at what I might qualify for under the healthcare law if I were a single McDonald’s worker (using 2014 dollars). Generously assuming I’d make $10/hour (I believe shift managers make about $9.81/hour) I calculate my yearly salary at $20,800 – or about 181% of poverty.
Turns out I’ll be on the hook for a premium of about $1127 a year, or about $21 per week. That’s $11 less a week than I’d pay for McDonald’s mini-med benefits. But instead of yearly maximum benefit of $10,000 I’d have no maximum benefit at all since maximum benefits are no longer legal. And I’d only have a maximum out-of-pocket expense of $2,083. This plan – a ‘silver’ plan under the new law – is going to be quite a lot better than McDonald’s, actually:
The maximum out-of-pocket costs the person/family will be responsible for in 2014 (not including the premium) is $2,083. Whether a person or family reaches this maximum level will depend on the amount of health care services they use. Currently, about one in four people use no health care services in any given year. The guaranteed plan for the person/family will have an actuarial value of 87%. This means that for all enrollees in a typical population, the plan will pay for 87% of expenses in total for covered benefits, with enrollees responsible for the rest. Specific provisions like deductibles and copayments may vary from plan to plan, and out-of-pocket costs for any given individual or family will depend on their health care expenses. Preventive services will be covered with no cost sharing required.
McDonald’s could also take advantage of the free choice vouchers built into the law (another fingerprint of the excellent Ron Wyden) which allow people to opt into the exchanges even if their employer provides coverage.
Either way, I’ll take my silver plan any day over the mini-med McDonald’s plans. A $10,000 maximum benefit provides no real health insurance at all, though it’s better than nothing. We really should have fought for universal catastrophic insurance starting immediately, which would have taken the teeth out of reports like this one. And if I were a McDonald’s employee, I’d be hoping against hope that I could lose the crappy mini-med plans and get onto an exchange as quickly as possible. Though hopefully not before 2014….
(P.S. As a cashier making $7.51 an hour I would be on the hook for a yearly premium of $494 or about $9.5 a week. I’d get far, far superior health coverage for about $4.50 less a week than the cheapest McDonald’s plan, which caps benefits at $2,000 – $83 less than my out of pocket maximum on the silver plan which has an actuarial value, at this income, of 94%.)
More trouble overseas:
In a sweeping action meant to regain the confidence of jittery investors, the Irish government said Thursday that it expected to inject billions more euros into two of its largest banks, underscoring the extent to which they continued to jeopardize the country’s fiscal condition.Brian Lenihan, the Irish finance minister, said that Allied Irish Bank — once the biggest in the country — would come under government control as a result of a state-guaranteed share offering worth €5 billion, or about $6.8 billion. The bank had been trying to raise capital by selling assets, but Mr. Lenihan said the current market conditions would not allow for a private transaction.
The government also confirmed market expectations that under a worst case scenario, its financial commitment to a smaller bank that it already owns, Anglo Irish, could reach €35 billion. This figure equals an earlier forecast by Standard & Poor’s, one that at the time was questioned by government officials. Some Irish analysts said that the ultimate bill for Anglo could be even higher than that.
I can’t be the only one who remembers wingers talking about the “Celtic Tiger” and how we needed to model our economy and tax policies (translation- deep cuts in the corporate tax rate) after them in order to remain competitive with Ireland. Hell, I remember a 60 Minutes special.
Good times.
Not to step on Anne’s post on the same thing, but you really need to read the unabomber manifesto that Don Juan Dildo and the Love Boat Crew were following to realize how crazy our wingnuts are these days. They honestly thought this planned sexual assault was going to expose the “racism against white people at CNN.”
And stop calling this a prank. WHat they wanted to do to this woman was much darker than a prank. If someone took one of my sisters onto a boat under false pretenses, filmed them without their knowledge, and deliberately sexually harassed them with the intent to intimidate or have sex with them or both, I’d probably be in jail right now.
... or a job. Well, to be fair, “[Isabel] Santa’s attorney, Christopher Markham, said even though Santa’s duties were taken away from her, she is still on the Project Veritas payroll.” As is James O’Keefe! And you thought the watercooler chats around your workplace were strained!
Maureen O’Conner at Gawker phrased it nicely:
Basically, “the right’s Bob Woodward” is the journalistic equivalent of a guy who shows his penis to you on the subway, then stands there chuckling under his breath.
Sure, the jokes practically write themselves, and yet here’s the scary part: O’Keefe’s closest female associate is reported to have told her attorney that she “... didn’t want what could have happened to occur. She thought it may have been a threat to the organization, and didn’t want it to happen to [Boudreau].” Us ladies, always so paranoid about guys when all they want is just to have a little fun, probably!... or so we all sincerely hope. We’re trained from an early age to be skittish about men who stand a little too close, stare a little too long, embarrass themselves trying for ‘romantic’ and landing on ‘stalker’. Spare a tear for all the genuinely Nice Guys who never get the chance to prove themselves (and say a prayer for the women who didn’t trust their own instincts).
Because—and since most of you are probably bicoastal elitists who went to the kind of High Progressive educational institutions where ‘women’s studies’ are not automatically a punchline, you’ve already been exposed to this theory—quite often, rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power. It’s a “weapon” that a person, usually male, resorts to when he believes he has been disrespected, humiliated, made less. And the disrespect is quite often not personal but institutional. The cultural stereotype is the guy who gets yelled at by his boss who goes home and beats his wife, but in this cruel modern world even men with dependent spouses are constrained by changes in law-enforcement policy around the concept of ‘domestic violence’. So some guys who feel they’ve been pushed beyond their limits go postal, while others… spend a lot of time documenting their proposed acquisition of “Viagra and stamina pills” and “fuzzy handcuffs”.
As the first Gawker commentor wondered: “Does he get to expense the sex toys to Fox News or did Andrew Breitbart already have them stocked in their top secret bunker?”
The humor, it is irresistable! And yet, slightly terrifying! Maybe it’s just, as Steven Thrasher reports in the Village Voice, “White America Has Lost Its Mind“. But how, in less than thirty years, have we moved from a young, overprivileged white guy attempting to use a presidential assassination as a tool to seduce the movie star he was stalking, to another young, overprivileged white guy attempting to use a “prank seduction” as a tool of… political assassination?
Here’s the best video I could find of Carl Paladino threatening the New York Post’s State Editor, Fred Dicker, saying he’ll “take out” Dicker if Dicker sends his “goons” again to take photos of Paldino’s ten-year-old daughter, who was fathered by Paladino when he had an extramarital affair. Dicker was asking Paladino to provide some proof of his allegation that Andrew Cuomo also had an extramarital affair. Here’s the Post story on the confrontation.
It’s not very smart to piss off the top reporter for the biggest conservative paper in the state, but Horse Cock Carl isn’t very smart.
Unable to get support for even a watered-down version of net neutrality, Henry Waxman throws in the towel entirely. This is probably good news, since it allows the FCC to attempt some rulemaking on net neutrality, which many analysts believe they have the right to do. I’d rather see the FCC take another crack at net neutrality, since whatever Congress passed would probably be the last word for decades.
Yesterday, I was pretty critical of the Democrats in Congress based on a report saying that Waxman’s bill was essentially the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal translated into legislation. Today, it appears that his proposal (which was never made public in detail) was a little better than Googlezon’s, since some public interest groups supported it. Even so, the reason the bill died was a combination of Republican intransigence combined with Waxman’s inability to get enough Democrats to sign on to his proposal.
The Post’s take on Waxman’s decision contained this headscratcher:
He said legislation could still be introduced in this Congress. But analysts say that after the mid-term elections, it will be harder to pass a law to regulate Internet service providers in a Republican-dominated Congress.
The bald assumption that Republicans will control Congress is either a nod to their control of the Senate agenda via the filibuster, or a reflection of a “Dewey Defeats Truman” mentality in the DC press corpse.
From commentor Comrade Scott’s Agenda of Rage:
I could write a story on Bozo himself. He was dumped along the river here (weekend homes inhabited mostly by assholes) and wandered into town. He had all 4 legs back then. The old guy uphill from us took him in. Said old guy and dog lived in squalor for years. Bozo was allowed to roam around town and had an annoying habit of snoozing in the street.
One day, the UPS truck makes a delivery and backs over poor ole Boze. The leg wasn’t broken so the hope was that perhaps the nerves would grow back. After 8 months of lugging a dead limb around town, it was clear they wouldn’t. So, the old guy, who didn’t have a pot to piss in, went ahead and had the leg amputated and eventually paid off the vet. That was, oh, maybe 7 years ago.
We eventually started taking care of the old guy, Bozo and his two cats. Boze had mange, a hemotoma in one ear, and chronic skin allergies from years of living on ice cream, hot dogs and hamburgers; the old guy loved the dog damn near to death. The missing leg is the least of his problems. He’s also blind in that eye on the same side, again, probably nerve damage stemming from UPS—-What Can Brown Do To You!
About 4 1/2 years ago, the old guy was finally cajoled into moving out of his house, he was about 79-80 at the time. We promised to find homes for his cats and agreed to take in the dog, our first dog after being married almost 25 years. The old guy went into an assisted living home and we’d take Bozo to visit him pretty regularly. After 2 years, his health declined and he went into a nursing home for about a year. Again, we’d take Boze out to visit him. He passed away earlier this year and is buried in the non-denominational cemetery (the other one is for Catholics only) nearby. When Bozo’s time comes, we plan on cremating him and burying his ashes up there.
A stubborn, loveable dog who’s probably around 12 now and acts like he won’t live to see 13. He loves kittens. We routinely let our foster broods out and he’ll nuzzle them, lick their bellies, etc…after they get over their initial fear of a big dog. Attached is one of the more friendly fosters attacking the old guy. He sucked it up.
(Part I of Comrade Scott’s story here.)
