So, this happened.
Archives for February 2013
Do I look like a motherfucking role model?
I haven’t read watched the interview yet…what’s the over/under on the number of times he said “man”?
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) tells TMZ that his favorite songs of all-time are NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, Eminem’s Lose Yourself, and Tupac’s Killuminati.
Do I look like a motherfucking role model?Post + Comments (77)
Sequestered in Memphis
Greg Sargent on the Centrist Death Cult and how it enables Republicans:
The GOP’s explicit position is that no compromise solution of any kind is acceptable — this must be resolved only with 100% of the concessions being made by Democrats — which means any compromise Dems put forth is by definition a nonstarter at the outset.
Analysts reluctant to embrace this conclusion — an affliction I’ve called the “centrist dodge” — have adopted several techniques. One is to pretend Dems haven’t offered any compromise solution, when in fact they have. A second is to argue that, okay, Dems have offered a compromise while Republicans haven’t, but Dems haven’t gone far enough towards the middle ground, so both sides are still to blame for the impasse. (The problem with this dodge is that it fails to acknowledge that Republicans themselves have openly stated that there is no distance to which Dems could go to win GOP cooperation, short of giving them everything they want.)
We’re now seeing a third technique appear: Acknowledge that Republicans are the uncompromising party, but assert that it’s ultimately on the President to figure out a way to either force Republicans to drop their intransigence or to otherwise “lead” them out if it.
I’ve never understood why anyone thinks presidents have the magical ability to get Congress to pass stuff that Congress doesn’t want to pass. It’s not just Obama who isn’t magical; Bush couldn’t get immigration reform or Social Security privatization through.
I remember when it was the firebaggers who wanted Obama to be more magically powerful about health care reform. Jim Newell summed it up well:
I’m sure if Obama just had the bill on his desk and gave it to Congress and told them to pass the damned thing, Congress wouldn’t have objected or tried to change anything, and the Senate would’ve passed it all 100-0 through reconciliation—even if they didn’t need reconciliation. This is what the spineful George W. Bush would have done.
Now, it’s the Villagers who want it, and comparison is of course, Reagan and Tip.
But it doesn’t matter how much Ron Fournier and David Brooks blame the sequester on Obama. If the levee breaks, and the cuts comes, local media will give the cuts plenty of coverage, and Republicans will take a political hit.
I sincerely hope sequestration can be avoided. I think it would be terrible for the economy. Like Tim F, I have friends whose scientific careers would be adversely affected.
But if it comes, Bobo and Fournier and Woodward won’t be able to save Republicans’ sorry asses.
If it wasn’t for all those voters, we’d have won
One of Mitt Romney’s over-paid hacks weighs in on the politics of health care for women:
I don’t think it’s very controversial to suggest that a candidate who favors gay marriage and free contraception might have more appeal to a younger demographic. Does anyone want to argue that free contraception is seen as a more pressing issue to your average 21-year-old than to a 55-year-old voter…
Conservatives and media have successfully framed the preventive care provisions in the health care law as wholly about “free contraception” which is both inaccurate and insulting to the people who supported the health care law. I get that birth control makes these these super-savvy professionals snicker, but let’s review the facts, what actually happened.
Birth control is one of a long list of preventive care provisions that are covered without additional out-of-pocket costs in the health care law. That was a policy decision. It’s bigger than birth control. It comes from an idea about health care, an approach to health care. Here’s just part of that long list. I chose these randomly:
Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm one-time screening for men of specified ages who have ever smoked
Alcohol Misuse screening and counseling
Colorectal Cancer screening for adults over 50
Depression screening for adults
Type 2 Diabetes screening for adults with high blood pressure
Tobacco Use screening for all adults and cessation interventions for tobacco users
Anemia screening on a routine basis for pregnant women
BRCA counseling about genetic testing for women at higher risk
Breast Cancer Mammography screenings every 1 to 2 years for women over 40
Breast Cancer Chemoprevention counseling for women at higher risk
Breastfeeding comprehensive support and counseling from trained providers, as well as access to breastfeeding supplies, for pregnant and nursing women*
Contraception: Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling, not including abortifacient drugs*
Osteoporosis screening for women over age 60 depending on risk factors
Tobacco Use screening and interventions for all women, and expanded counseling for pregnant tobacco users
Hearing screening for all newborns
Height, Weight and Body Mass Index measurements for childrenImmunization vaccines for children from birth to age 18
Oral Health risk assessment for young children
Why did the administration include birth control?
Previously, preventive services for women had been recommended one-by-one or as part of guidelines targeted at men as well. As such, the HHS directed the independent Institute of Medicine to, for the first time ever, conduct a scientific review and provide recommendations on specific preventive measures that meet women’s unique health needs and help keep women healthy. HHS’ Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) used the IOM report issued July 19, when developing the guidelines that are being issued today. The IOM’s report relied on independent physicians, nurses, scientists, and other experts to make these determinations based on scientific evidence.
It was only after this policy decision that media and conservatives went batshit crazy and started babbling senselessly about sluts and aspirin. You’ll also recall that the conventional wisdom was that the policy decision on birth control would harm Obama politically. They took what was a sensible, physician-recommended policy decision and turned it into a political disaster… for Republicans. Obama didn’t do that, and the people who support the health care law didn’t do that. Media and conservatives did that. We all sat here and watched, first in horror and then with a kind of wonder.
Incredibly, they’re still doing it, with this wholly gratuitous smirking about young women voting for “free contraception.” Look at that long list of covered services. If young women were voting on “free” birth control, were older women voting on “free” osteoporosis screening and mammograms or were some other women voting on a “free” breast milk pump? There’s really no reason to treat this issue, or these voters, with so much disdain. I said this over and again in response to the conservative attempts to stop (some) people from voting, but it still continues to amaze me that there is a US political Party who firmly believe hectoring voters is a viable path to success.
If it wasn’t for all those voters, we’d have wonPost + Comments (42)
Random Stuff + Why People Hate the Government
A short clip of this Stones song was featured in “Argo.” The lyrics are obviously the result of a prolonged heroin binge, but the song rocks nonetheless:
In a comment on an Oscars thread yesterday, Robin G praised “Moonrise Kingdom.” I’d been meaning to see it and finally did last night. Awesome movie — highly recommended — and thanks for reminding me of it, Robin G: It was exactly the thing I needed to see.
Why People Hate the Government
My teenage daughter will soon go on a class trip that involves a domestic flight. Among the many neuroses her father and I share is an aversion to flying, but we try not to allow our eccentricities to completely dominate our child’s life, which is some of the hardest work in parenting. However, our ignorance of the demands of modern air travel nearly put the kibosh on a trip for which we’d already paid $1,400 (non-refundable!).
We foolishly assumed minors accompanied by fellow students, teachers and chaperones on a school-sponsored class trip would be allowed to board a winged bus to a destination within the United States with only common forms of identification like a student ID card and birth certificate. Not so; now, even a child must have an official state ID card from the DMV to board a plane. (Because of 9/11? If so, that’s reason enough to take a scuba trip to the North Arabian Sea, find Osama bin Laden’s skull and fashion it into a poop-scoop.)
Anyhoo, we learned that to obtain an official state ID card, a kid must have a Social Security card or a specific printout from the Social Security Administration verifying her application for a Social Security card. The form containing the same information that is issued to new parents to enable them to deduct children from their taxes doesn’t count, or so I was told by the DMV.
To obtain the magical correct form, one must have many additional forms of ID, which may or may not be acceptable to the person at SSA who ultimately reviews it. County school district vaccination records are considered a kind of gold standard, though. I learned this after finally reaching a human being following multiple excursions into the SSA’s hellish, circular automated call menu, which is designed to automatically dump callers if too many other luckless supplicants are in queue, a situation that is apparently the case 90% of the time.
Thus it came to pass that the kid and I took a day off of school and work last week and visited the Three Circles of Bureaucratic Hell in a nearby city. First we sat in the overflow holding area at the county health department to secure the vaccination records, occupying a zone teeming with screaming toddlers, anxious children and nervous families applying for citizenship or refugee status.
Then we languished in the waiting room at the local branch of the Social Security Administration with many crabby elderly folks, some of whom seemed to be practicing outraged speeches to unleash on the indifferent heads of bureaucrats seated behind numbered, Plexiglass-barred window openings in a vast, echoing hall that would make a great set for a MiniTruth scene from “1984.”
After emerging from that ordeal limp and exhausted by ennui, we made our way to the DMV for another crushing round of paper-shuffling and waiting. All told, it took around seven hours (not counting transportation), which was actually less than I thought it would. But it occurred to me that perhaps the experience of being gnashed in the gears of bureaucratic machinery is a more potent driver of people’s reflexive hatred of government than I’d realized.
I’m a confirmed fan of Big Government. I don’t enjoy paying taxes any more than I look forward to dental work, but I understand the necessity of both. The only thing that pisses me off about my tax rate is that Mitt Romney pays a lower percentage, and I’d gladly exchange a larger chunk of my income for a Scandinavian-style social safety net.
But I flatter myself and the Balloon Juice / Rumproast communities by believing that we’ve thought this through more than Honey Boo Boo’s core audience has. To them, the silly hoop-jumping requirements, appalling run-arounds and astoundingly inefficient service on display at the customer-facing outlets of local, state and federal agencies are The Government. Which makes it easier to understand why assholes like Rand Paul get elected.
Maybe better customer service would help consign Reaganism to the political dung heap it so richly deserves? It’s a thought.
Please feel free to discuss movies, music, parenting, soulless bureaucracy or anything else. In other words, open thread.
[X-posted at Rumproast]Random Stuff + Why People Hate the GovernmentPost + Comments (113)
“How to Report from Guantanamo Bay”
Kudos to NYMag for spotlighting a reporter who actually does the hard stuff:
The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg has reported from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay since the first detainee arrived in 2002. Last month, President Obama scuttled the office responsible for closing the center, which means Gitmo’s “media tent city” will be a permanent press encampment for the foreseeable future. Petra Bartosiewicz spoke with the veteran correspondent by phone from Gitmo’s Camp Justice, where Rosenberg has been covering pretrial hearings this month of the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
When he took office, President Obama promised to close Guantanamo within a year. Now the office dedicated to closing the detention center has itself been closed. What’s going on?
There are 166 detainees here right now. Congress has incrementally imposed harder and harder restrictions on their resettlement. Last year, two detainees went to El Salvador and two left dead. Nobody wants to be the person who sent someone back who will be behind the next terror attack. So it’s Guantanamo forever.How many times have you been to Guantanamo?
I’d say I’ve averaged about a week a month over the past eleven years. My longest stay was 41 nights. To get here you have to fly to D.C. You show up at a golf course near Andrews Air Force Base at about five in the morning and then get on a plane to Guantanamo with the judge, the defense attorneys, the prosecutors, and the media. It’s the war court on a plane, everyone but the defendants…Are reporters being monitored less now?
Well, there are two soldiers in the room with me right now, and there’s a red sticker on my phone that says, ‘This telephone is subject to monitoring at all times, use of this phone constitutes consent to monitoring.’ I think being on this island basically constitutes consent to being monitored…How long do you think you’ll continue covering Guantanamo?
There are people who call the War on Terror the “forever war”; if this is the forever war, then this is the forever prison. I want to stay here for the 9/11 trial, which I think is years away. I feel like I have an institutional knowledge. Everyone else rotates in and out of here. The soldiers come and go, the lawyers come and go, most of the reporters come and go. I feel a responsibility to stay. I want to see how it ends. I’m a little concerned it’s never going to.
Tuesday Morning Open Thread
(Alaa Wardi)
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As a technological idiot, do I need to worry when Slate warns about the “Bandwidth-Throttling Copyright Enforcement System Launche[d] Across [the] U.S.”, Six Strikes?
Also possibly worrying (I’m still thinking this guy runs as a ‘moderate centrist Democrat‘ in 2016), the Washington Post says Chris Christie is being snubbed by CPAC:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who has fallen out of favor with some conservatives in recent months, is not being invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference, according to someone close to CPAC who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The big conservative confab in the Washington area is a routine stopover for potential future potential GOP presidential candidates and has already nabbed most top 2016 contenders….
Christie’s apparent snub comes as most other big-name potential 2016 GOP presidential candidates have been invited and accepted the invitations, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R), Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (R), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.)…