Deuce Loosely

Spencer Ackerman: To make a point no one should have to make: earlier this year, a deranged Army...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:59:00 -0500

To make a point no one should have to make: earlier this year, a deranged Army sergeant named John Russell opened fire near a combat stress clinic — sound familiar? — at Baghdad’s Camp Liberty and killed five of his fellow soldiers. No one speculated about any religious motivations. No one suggested he was part of an enemy “infiltration,” or suggested that U.S. troops have been “brainwashed.” Everyone understood that Russell was a deranged lunatic, not an advance scout for a conspiracy to subvert the military internally. It’s funny how double standards work.

Actually, no. It’s disgusting.

"Texas justice is essentially sorcery, and there will be people who say that we can perfect it, that..."

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:10:55 -0400

“Texas justice is essentially sorcery, and there will be people who say that we can perfect it, that we can close the loop-holes. They’re wrong. The problem isn’t with loopholes—it’s with us. We are fallible. Conservatives, more than anyone, should know that—it under-girds their entire philosophy. They don’t think government can perfect much of anything. What makes them think we can perfect murder?”

- Ta-Nahesi Coates

"If Obama agrees to use reconciliation [to pass healthcare reform], he will permanently affix himself..."

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:33:50 -0400

“If Obama agrees to use reconciliation [to pass healthcare reform], he will permanently affix himself to the liberal wing of his party and permanently alienate independents.”

- David Brooks

Brooks is wrong here. Reconciliation is a procedural manuever thta would allow the bill to pass with a bare majority rather than the 60 votes necessary to stop a filibuster. (Without Ted Kennedy, 50 votes is now a majority.) It’s absurd to insist that a majority of the Senate is the “liberal wing” of the Democratic party.

(via squashed)

More than that, i don’t remember Brooks pitching a fit when the Republicans used reconciliation to push through Bush’s tax cuts. Then again, it’s hard to find someone who believes in the “It’s OK if you’re a Republican” philosophy more than David fucking Brooks.

"Big domestic programs (other than tax cuts) are nearly impossible [to pass]. The Bush people went..."

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:35:38 -0400

“

Big domestic programs (other than tax cuts) are nearly impossible [to pass]. The Bush people went 0-for-2 on big domestic proposals. It’s difficult to turn immigration reform or Social Security privatization into a war against the worst enemy ever.

For all the talk about how Congress did whatever Bush wanted—and they did—he didn’t pass much of import domestically, aside from the big tax cuts (something else that’s always easy to pass) and (EDIT) Medicare Part D, a big corporate give-away (these are also relatively easy to pass). The last president to have success with ambitious domestic policy initiatives was probably LBJ.

Castigating Obama for not being another LBJ seems a little unfair to me.

”

- DougJ - Balloon Juice

SEC to retreat on tweet ban

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:56:10 -0400

SEC to retreat on tweet ban:

bg5000:

You’re at a South Carolina football game, sitting in the sun at Williams-Brice Stadium. South Carolina scores, and as the fans go wild, you tweet to your buddies, “Touchdown, Gamecocks!”

Oops, there’s a flag on that play. All social networking at games is against SEC rules. Gamecocks can’t tweet.

Or can they? The Southeastern Conference told The Observer on Monday that the conference is revising what might be college sports’ most restrictive policy on social media. Why? Because of the negative reaction in the media and on social media.

Ok, i understand why they might have a problem with videos from the game, but tweets? That just seems absurd. How would you even crack down on such a thing? How do they know if someone sent it from the stadium or the bar down the street? Does the SEC really have the man power to track this kind of thing down? So many questions.

"The insight that people need food has not led us to simply deregulate the agricultural sector..."

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:32:35 -0400

“

The insight that people need food has not led us to simply deregulate the agricultural sector (though that might be a good idea for other reasons) or change the tax treatment of food purchases or make it easier for rich people to donate to food banks, which is what Mackey recommends for health care. It’s led us to solve, or try and solve, the problem directly by giving people money to buy food. And that works. These programs, as every Whole Foods shopper knows, haven’t grown to encompass the whole population or set prices in grocery stores. If you have more money, you shop for food on your own. And if you have a lot of money, you shop at Mackey’s stores. That’s pretty much the model we’re looking at in health care.

Mackey, playing to type, has offered a Whole Foods solution for health care: It makes the system even better for the rich and the young and the educated — the sort of people who shop at Whole Foods, in other words — and doesn’t do a lot for those who really need help. Mackey has learned a lot over the past few decades about how to serve them. But Whole Foods is a grocery story for people who have money, not people who need food. And the correct analogy for health care is not people who can shop at Whole Foods. It’s people who need food.

”

- Ezra Klein, responding to Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s WSJ op-ed.

On Rationing

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:26:00 -0400

Matthew Yglasias:

As John Holbo suggests, one of the odder elements of the health care debate is that conservative appear to have concocted a special one-off meaning of the term “rationing” to apply to government guarantees of basic health insurance coverage. They observe that insofar as the government guarantees basic health insurance coverage to everyone, the government probably can’t actually deliver an unlimited quantity of health care services without breaking the bank. Therefore, at some point someone will probably not get some service he or she might want. This is rationing and it’s evil and the solution, for unclear reasons, is for the government to deliver no guaranteed services whatsoever since … well . . it’s not clear how that’s better since either way you could still pay out of pocket.

Conservatives don’t talk about anything else in this way. The United States Postal Service provides certain kinds of guaranteed mail delivery services. It will not, however, just do anything mail-related that you might want. This doesn’t lead to “rationing” of parcel delivery services, it leads to the existence of private sector shipping companies that you can pay to do other stuff for you.

Similarly, your kid is entitled to go to a public school. They’ll teach him reading and writing and some science and history and probably Spanish or French or some such. But in the vast majority of places, you can’t have your kid taught Japanese at taxpayer expense. Again, though, we don’t live in a dystopian universe of “language rationing” in which it’s impossible to learn Japanese, you’d just have to pay someone else to do it. We of course could ban the market in private foreign language instruction, but it’s not clear why we would do that, and the existence of public sector provision of Spanish language instruction doesn’t in any sense imply a ban on the teaching of other foreign languages. What’s more, even if you’re incredibly troubled by the fact that today’s poor children don’t have the chance to learn Japanese in public school it’s still the case that eliminating public schools and lowering taxes isn’t going to leave those kids any better off. They still won’t know Japanese and now they also won’t be able to read.

"Men feel slighted when a woman offers up only her friendship and not her body because — and this is..."

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:27:36 -0400

“Men feel slighted when a woman offers up only her friendship and not her body because — and this is what most “nice guys” cannot bear to admit — they don’t really want to be friends with her. They want to fuck her and friendship is simply the “investment” they have to make to reach the desired result. And it is really, truly shocking how hostile and venomous some self-described nice guys become when their efforts are thwarted.”

- Nerdshares: Unfulfilled Promises — on the PA gym shooter.

Health care for profit: sometimes scary

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:13:58 -0400

southpol:

Balloon Juice:

And today the Times has a piece on an even more disturbing practice, utilized by drug companies:

Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known.

The articles, published in medical journals between 1998 and 2005, emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia. That supposed medical consensus benefited Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company that paid a medical communications firm to draft the papers, as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001.

But the seeming consensus fell apart in 2002 when a huge federal study on hormone therapy was stopped after researchers found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke. A later study found that hormones increased the risk of dementia in older patients.

I don’t know whether or not paying ghostwriters counts as R&D spending.

Last October i asked Jeff Miller what the Libertarian plan for health care reform would be and one of his suggestions was to get rid of the FDA. I wonder how he feels about such an idea these days.

Laura Ling’s emotional homecoming press conference.

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:10:08 -0400

Laura Ling’s emotional homecoming press conference.

"To paraphrase Douglass, a Party is worked on by what they choose to work on. Work on stupid, expect..."

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:56:11 -0400

“To paraphrase Douglass, a Party is worked on by what they choose to work on. Work on stupid, expect to get stuck there. Expect to have to take meetings with a Russian-born dentist/lawyer about who’s American, and who’s not.”

- Ta-Nehisi Coates. Zing.

"Set aside the particular facts of this case and the various unknowns still swirling around it. A..."

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:28:09 -0400

“Set aside the particular facts of this case and the various unknowns still swirling around it. A police officer needs to be able to respond to a call about a possible burglary, knowing he or she is going into a situation where they might find an actual burglar, who could be armed and might act in an unpredictable and lethal way. But they also need to be able to turn on a dime once it’s clear it’s not a burglar but the owner of the house, tired and coming home from a long trip. And on top of that, even though the cop was responding to help the owner of the home, the cop needs to be prepared for the fact the owner may be embarrassed or angry for being treated like a criminal in his own home. If that happens, the cop needs to be able to understand the reasonableness of the reaction and deescalate the situation — not get into a macho pissing match which ends up getting decided in the favor of the cop because he has the handcuffs and the gun. (It’s my strong sense that this is what happened in the Gates case.)”

- John Marshall

Where we differ

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:42:39 -0400

squashed:

jeffmiller:

You and Squashed think you are being compassionate toward the guy who wants to sell his kidney, but it’s not compassion—it’s cruelty. He has a potential path out of poverty, and you want to block it. If you think it’s an awful path, give him a better one, so that the kidney sale looks less attractive.

Jeff, I assure you, I am trying very hard to give that guy a path out of poverty that doesn’t require him to sell chunks of his body. I have all sorts of ideas for programs that would have a much, much better chance of succeeding than a one-shot cash injection followed by a probable lifetime of health consequences.

The bold part is the point i’ve been wanting to make but Squashed beat me to. This whole “selling your organs” thing just sounds like a fancier pay day loan scheme, except instead of a crippling spiral of never-ending debt, you just have to go through the rest of your life down a kidney or with half a liver and all of the problems that come of that. What was the problem with changing the donor rules to being opt-out instead of opt-in, again? That just seems like a much simpler solution to the problem of organ donation, one that doesn’t involve more complicated regulation and oversight or the specter of organ harvesting.

"I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American or communist, but I meant no harm by it."

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:16:22 -0400

“I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American or communist, but I meant no harm by it.”

- Jeff Sessions in 1986. (via methodicechidna)

bg5000: Not soon enough. (posted with tweetshots.com) I would...

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:52:00 -0400

bg5000:

Not soon enough. (posted with tweetshots.com)

I would settle for Keyboard Cat playing him off.

Abstinence-Only Driver’s Ed

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:51:41 -0400

Abstinence-Only Driver’s Ed:

“What about seat belts?” you might be saying to yourself. “Don’t seat belts GUARANTEE that I CAN’T POSSIBLY die in a car?” Bzzzt! Wrongo. Every single day in this country, seat belts FAIL. In fact, I know of a study that proves—CONCLUSIVELY proves, people—that seat belts will fail 75 percent of the time.

Who did the study? Government workers.

"The final insult to oppressed people, is always to make them responsible for the venal stupidity of..."

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:26:43 -0400

“The final insult to oppressed people, is always to make them responsible for the venal stupidity of their oppressors. The bigots core refrain is never “I hate you,” but “Why are you making me hate you?” Left unsaid in all this is why, precisely, some guy in San Fran wearing a thong is so offensive. Instead it asks gay people everywhere to adjust. It’s not enough to be hated by the homophobe, now you must wash his laundry too.”

- Ta-Nehisi Coates

"It all got started during a discussion of George Bush, who McCain acknowledged was a less than..."

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:13:08 -0400

“It all got started during a discussion of George Bush, who McCain acknowledged was a less than perfect president. But McCain also pointed a finger at the Obama administration in Bush’s defense, saying she felt that the Obama administration “has to stop completely blaming everything on its predecessor.” When Maher asked McCain if she really thought this is what Obama is doing, McCain said “I do to a degree.” A clearly annoyed Begala immediately shook his head and said “not to enough of a degree, I’m sorry not nearly enough.” He then began to explain how President Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter for years, to which McCain responded blithely “you know I wasn’t born yet so I wouldn’t know.” Going in for the kill, Begala fired back “I wasn’t born during the French Revolution but I know about it.”

- Paul Begala Schools Meghan McCain (VIDEO) (via apsies:robot-heart-politics)

"It was only — let’s see — I think seven hours ago or eight hours ago when I..."

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:08:27 -0400

“

It was only — let’s see — I think seven hours ago or eight hours ago when I — I have said before that I have deep concerns about the election. And I think that the world has deep concerns about the election. You’ve seen in Iran some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.

Now, it’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling — the U.S. President meddling in Iranian elections. What I will repeat and what I said yesterday is that when I see violence directed at peaceful protestors, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me and it’s of concern to the American people. That is not how governments should interact with their people.

And my hope is, is that the Iranian people will make the right steps in order for them to be able to express their voices, to express their aspirations. I do believe that something has happened in Iran where there is a questioning of the kinds of antagonistic postures towards the international community that have taken place in the past, and that there are people who want to see greater openness and greater debate and want to see greater democracy. How that plays out over the next several days and several weeks is something ultimately for the Iranian people to decide. But I stand strongly with the universal principle that people’s voices should be heard and not suppressed.

”

- Barack Obama, today. What more do people want him to say?

"No matter how you package it, the free market fairies aren’t a solution to the health care..."

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:50:59 -0400

“No matter how you package it, the free market fairies aren’t a solution to the health care problem. People shouldn’t need to shop for better insurance, their insurance companies should pay for the care they need. The moment you find out your insurance company sucks is the moment you kind of need it to not suck.”

- Atrios