Wetsuit optional.
Looks like maybe I spoke too soon about CPAC not being as much of a freak show as it has been in the past:
Is there any way I can publicly renounce my whiteness and become an honorary black person? Something like a reverse racial draft?
(via)
Religious liberty is expanding very quickly. I don’t even know if I can keep up.
We’ve gone from religious-affiliated entities (yesterday) to all businesses (today):
That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”
“If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate,” Picarello said.
Now we’re just stripping out contraceptives completely, co-pay or no co-pay:
A new bill introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a rising conservative star and leading contender for the Republican vice-presidential nomination in 2012, could cut off birth control coverage for millions of women who receive it through their health plans.
Rubio has sold his proposal—introduced Jan. 31 as the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” or S. 2043—as a way to counter President Barack Obama’s controversial rule requiring even religiously affiliated schools and universities to offer copay-free birth control to their employees. But health care experts say that its implications could be far broader.
If passed, the bill would allow any institution or corporation to cut off birth control coverage simply by citing religious grounds. It has 26 cosponsors in the Senate; a similar proposal sponsored by Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) has 148 cosponsors in the House. On Wednesday, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) vowed to repeal Obama’s rule, and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)pointed to Rubio’s bill as a potential model for doing so.
In English, this means that no entity has to cover birth control in a health plan if it can point to a religious reason for not doing so. And the entity itself is not required to have any religious affiliation. It could just be a plain old corporation. That means that if the middle-aged white guy who runs your company is religiously opposed to birth control, he can have it stripped out of your insurance plan—even if his Viagra is still covered. You could wake up the next morning and find you’re paying full price for drugs that you once got for free or at much-reduced prices.
“This could be huge,” says Judy Waxman, the vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women’s Law Center. “It’s clearly more than a million women who’d be affected if it were just hospitals and universities [that were affected], but under the Rubio bill it could be any employer. It could be millions.”
I don’t even know what to say. Obama is busy standardizing health insurance coverage for all, and conservatives are busy taking coverage from the women who have health insurance, or might ever have health insurance, sometime, in the distant future:
Obama’s health care bill included a massive expansion of Medicaid, but Rubio’s bill could allow governors who are opposed to birth control to deny it to Medicaid patients who were added to the program under Obama’s bill. All state Medicaid plans currently cover family planning, although the state is allowed to decide what that means. The Rubio bill would override that.
For years, liberals have been claiming that conservatives were ultimately targeting birth control, and conservatives always denied it. Marco Rubio has now all but announced that they are, in fact, targeting birth control.
Some enterprising journalist really, really needs to look into how this “firestorm” started, and what it’s really about, because it’s spreading very quickly.
Well, here’s an interesting weapon!The Susan G. Komen Foundation, which collects and distributes money for Breast Cancer research and prevention is in the news for withdrawing its (relatively small) grant from Planned Parenthood.
So the Komen Foundation doesn’t want to be associated with the nation’s largest abortion-provider. But they don’t mind partnering up with a handgun maker.
Komen took off the mask, and people don’t like what they see. Right wing lunatics.
Just “WOW” is all I can really muster.
I’m ashamed to say that until Charlie Pierce in his own, powerful essay on MLK day pointed me to it, I had never actually read Lyndon B. Johnson’s speech to Congress urging—almost ordering—the legislators before him to pass the Voting Rghts Act.
Here’s a sample:
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil I know how agonizing racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society.
But a century has passed, more than a hundred years, since the Negro was freed. And he is not fully free tonight.
It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great President of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact.
A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since equality was promised. And yet the Negro is not equal.
A century has passed since the day of promise. And the promise is unkept.
The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American.
For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated, how many white families have lived in stark poverty, how many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we have wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror?
So I say to all of you here, and to all in the Nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future.
This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall overcome.
Mine too.
One last thought: One strand I draw from Johnson’s speech is that it is possible to have a politics that transcends the mere purchase and sale of interest; one in which words have both power and integrity.
I want that politics back.
Update: Boss Bitch points us to newly recovered audio of an MLK speech to an Ohio High School in 1967.
Image: Lyndon Baines Johnson with Martin Luther King on August 6, 1965, at the signing of the Voting Rights Act.
...because there is no way I want to miss the Balloon Juice snarkasaurus masticating this:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Colbert Super PAC Ad – Attack In B Minor For Strings | ||||
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Have at it folks—and don’t worry, there’s plenty for everyone.
It was one of the few — if not the only — coordinated efforts to attempt in-person voter fraud, and it was pulled off by affiliates of conservative activist James O’Keefe at polling places in New Hampshire Tuesday night. All of it part of an attempt to prove the need for voter ID laws that voting rights experts say have a unfair impact on minority voters.Now election law experts tell TPM that O’Keefe’s allies could face criminal charges on both the federal and state level for procuring ballots under false names, and that his undercover sting doesn’t demonstrate a need for voter ID laws at all.
Federal law bans not only the casting of, but the “procurement” of ballots “that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.”
Hamline University law professor David Schultz told TPM that there’s “no doubt” that O’Keefe’s accomplices violated the law.
These guys are so god damned stupid we’re getting to the point they will be featured on one of those cable shows featuring America’s dumbest criminals. “Hey guys, let’s go break multiple laws, film it, and then show everyone. I see no flaws with this plan!”
I have to disagree with Cole’s post in response to my post linking Milt Shook’s post. (This is the inception of BJ flame wars.)
Calling the PPACA “Obamacare,” or calling a Kleenex a “Kroger brand tissue” essentially assigns labels to concepts that are by and large identical. A Kleenex is a tissue; Obamacare is the PPACA. The latter is a politically charged alias, but it does not substantially alter the artifact to which it applies.
“Indefinite detention bill,” on the other hand, is a name chosen to incite the emotions of people expected to be rightfully horrified by the mere existence of a “detention bill,” as if it were the primary law being enacted. It is not. What is actually being enacted is a massive spending and authorization bill to fund and operate the entire United States military worldwide for another year.
In conclusion and with much love to my boo in WV, I have to call his example a preposterous false equivalence.
Today is World AIDS Day. Globally, more than 33 million people have HIV, and this day serves as an opportunity for people worldwide to unit in the fight against HIV. In doing so, VA medical centers across the country offer Veterans free confidential HIV tests. The Department of Veterans Affairs leads the country in HIV/AIDS screening, testing, treatment, research and prevention. An extensive list of documents can be found on this site intended for patient and provider alike.
The VA healthcare system is something that all Americans can be proud of. A government agency that consistently performs its mission on or under budget, that mission being to provide quality health care to a huge patient population in a geographical area that covers all fifty states and various possessions. The VA not only provides health care to our nation’s Veterans, but also serves as one of, if not the largest repository of medical research databanks in the world. The VA has partnered with medical schools across the country since the mid-1940s to provide research support and training to medical and nursing students all over the United States. If you’ve ever seen a doctor, that doctor probably got some of his or her training in a VA hospital. Some of the best care around is available, and nobody is turned away because they can’t pay for it. If a Veteran can pay something, he or she will. Our patient base is approximately 25 million strong, and we add ten thousand new beneficiaries a month. We are the ultimate expression of socialized medicine. The government provides healthcare to American citizens who have performed a public service.
We keep costs down by negotiating with pharmaceutical companies, something Medicare was unable to do under the part E prescription drug benefit package created by the republicans a few years back, and also by being the most advanced healthcare system in the world. A Veteran who has gotten his care at the VA medical center in Falls Church, VA can go to the Community Based Outpatient Clinic in Ada, OK and the doctor there will have access to all of that Veteran’s medical records, transmitted over a secure network, and available right there in the treatment room to include current medications and dosage rates. We will soon be able to do that with the medical records of military Service members who have departed their services and entered the VA system.
Part of the reason that I’m telling you all this is to toot our horn. I openly admit it. I work here, and I love working here, and I don’t want to see my job liquidated because the republicans want to keep tax cuts for the richest Americans more than they want to care for Veterans. But I’m also telling you this because I am a beneficiary of the Veterans Health Administration. I don’t want my benefits, especially the high quality healthcare I get from you, the American taxpayer, cut. I pay for part of my care because I can afford to, but every day I see patients in our Alzheimer’s clinic, our methadone program, our physical therapy center, the art therapy program, the counseling and readjustment program, the CICU, SICU, and MICU, outpatient psych, inpatient psych, and all over this facility who are a hell of a lot sicker and a hell of a lot poorer than I am and would be lost without the VA.
Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Paul Ryan, and other prominent republicans have called for replacing the Veterans Health Administration with vouchers:
Republicans have made it their goal to eliminate all government programs and replace them with privately owned and operated corporate entities. The V.H.A. is an integrated health care system that, as Krugman points out, “is the most efficient health care system” followed by single-payer systems like Medicare, and both outperform any private system in controlling costs while providing high-quality health care. Social Security, Medicare, and the V.H.A. belie Republican claims that private sector systems are superior to any government programs and instead of strengthening those systems, they intend on destroying them like a criminal destroys incriminating evidence showing their guilt. However, there are millions of Americans who know Social Security, Medicare, and the V.H.A. perform well or else there would not be opposition to privatizing those government programs.
The VHA is but one facet of the Federal Government that needs your support. If you get a chance, I hope that you’ll ask political candidates their positions on the VHA, the National Parks Service, and other programs of the government, and get a straight answer out of them. People should be dogging Mitt Romney at every stop, and asking him why he wants to destroy the VHA, and would he feel differently about it if he or any of his sons had ever served. We should be asking Newt Gingrich if the patriotic fervor that led him to fuck a lobbyist on his desk while married to someone else and managing the Clinton impeachment would impel him to protect the VHA and other critical government operations.
The VHA is just one government agency that has a positive impact far outsized to it’s size and budget and that performs its mission very efficiently. I know that the Postal Service is as well, and I have a very soft spot in my heart for the National Parks Service. What federal agency has had a positive impact on your life, and how is it threatened by the current crop of robber-baron-messenger-wannabes?
Elvis Costello has a new boxed set out and he doesn’t want you to buy it:
Unfortunately, we at www.elviscostello.com find ourselves unable to recommend this lovely item to you as the price appears to be either a misprint or a satire.All our attempts to have this number revised have been fruitless but rather than detain you with tedious arguments about morality, panache and book-keeping – when there are really bigger fish to filet these days – we are taking the following unusual step.
If you should really want to buy something special for your loved one at this time of seasonal giving, we can whole-heartedly recommend, “Ambassador Of Jazz” – a cute little imitation suitcase, covered in travel stickers and embossed with the name “Satchmo” but more importantly containing TEN re-mastered albums by one of the most beautiful and loving revolutionaries who ever lived – Louis Armstrong.
The box should be available for under one hundred and fifty American dollars and includes a number of other tricks and treats. Frankly, the music is vastly superior.
Amazon has it priced at $202.66 so I assume it must be at least $225 retail for one CD, one DVD, a 10” vinyl record and a 40 page hardcover book.
Rand Paul is all torn up about this Herman Cain business.
Not because sexual harassment in the workplace is a scourge that should be eradicated so that women and men at work can concentrate on putting those red covers on their TPS reports, rather than warding off unwanted games of grab-ass. Oh no! But because woman are just so goddamn sensitive:
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has an interesting take on Herman Cain’s growing scandal: honestly, he says, these days it seems like women can’t take a joke.“There are people now who hesitate to tell a joke to a woman in the workplace, any kind of joke, because it could be interpreted incorrectly,” he told the National Review. “I don’t. I’m very cautious.”
‘In my election, I had an anonymous girl from college — who I still don’t know — make accusations against me,” he told NR. “I don’t think you should print stuff like that. To libel someone’s character and not put your name on it, I think is inappropriate and shouldn’t be printed.”
[via Talking Points Memo]
Looks like Time Warner has a bit of a PR debacle on its hands.
A Time Warner customer service representative, Julia Nelson, died at her desk at a Time Warner customer call center in Garfield Heights, Ohio last month. It turns out that a Time Warner employee (who refused to be interviewed on camera) began to administer CPR to the dying woman, but was ordered by a supervisor to stop, and to get back to work. The employee also said that another boss told her that she could be held liable in the event that something went wrong as a result of the potentially life-saving treatment that see was performing on Nelson.
Not only did Time Warner let one of its long-time employees die, Time Warner prevented any of its other employees from doing anything to help.
It’s unconscionable.
From Crooks and Liars:
More »
This is bananas. From Stephen Foster at Addicting Info:Two protesters involved with Occupy Santa Cruz in California walked into Bank of America earlier this week to close their own accounts as part of the national protest against the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street, which has only seen it’s profits soar since it nearly collapsed the economy back in 2008… Rather than allow their customers to close their accounts, they told them that “you can not be a protester and a customer at the same time.” The bank manager threatened to lock the doors and call the police to have their own customers arrested for the simple act of requesting the closure of their own accounts. The two women left the bank and called the police. The officer went into the bank and after talking to the manager, relayed a message to them. According to the bank manager, “If they came in with the signs and they were part of the protest earlier, then they are protesters and cannot be customers at the same time.”
Just as Citibank’s statement regarding its arrest of protestors at a branch in New York was an epic PR failure, so was Bank of America’s response to the arrests in Santa Cruz:
More »... In psychiatry, there is a fun logical problem in which students are asked to generate an instrument that will accurately classify people with and without schizophrenia in a sample of the population. Students draw up elaborate series of questions and diagnostic procedures and sometimes do as well as being right 95% of the time. But those approaches are all inferior to a different diagnostic system, which classifies all people as non-schizophrenic without bothering to ask them anything. Because only 1% of people have schizophrenia, such a system is correct an impressive 99% of the time. When you are trying to predict something with a very low base rate, most of the time you make a positive prediction (e.g., this person has schizophrenia) you will be wrong, and most of the observations you make about the group for which you make a negative prediction (e.g., this person doesn’t have schizophrenia) will be true but have trivial predictive power because they are true of almost everyone…
Fast-forward to President Obama, whom you may have heard cannot win in 2012 because no President has been re-elected with high unemployment. After it was pointed out that FDR and Ronald Reagan were both re-elected with high unemployment, the shocking historico-statistical proof of Obama’s political demise was re-framed to “No President since World War II other than Ronald Reagan has been re-elected with high unemployment”. But so what? Only 5 people have been twice elected President since World War II, and an infinite number of things is true of all the people who haven’t.
No one who wasn’t from California, Texas or Arkansas has been re-elected President since World War II (Doom for Obama!). No one whose last name starts with an O has been re-elected President since World War II (Double doom!). No one who was African-American has been re-elected (Triple Doom! Hey wait a minute, how did he get elected the first time…he was African-American then wasn’t he?). At least President Obama can take comfort in the fact that every single left-handed President who ran for re-election since World War II has won, as long as you don’t count George H.W. Bush.
