Assignment desk: Question for McCain

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In a Florida speech today, John McCain said it's time to put Americans "back in charge" of their own health care. The idea is that you and I are in the best position to shop for healthcare insurance. If by "are in the best position" he means "don't know crap about how to", then he may be right.

I respectfully suggest that a reporter ask McCain if he has ever shopped for his own healthcare insurance, and whether he had any difficulties selecting a plan. Then ask him if all of his "friends" can sign up for the same healthcare plan that he is covered by, for an affordable price. And whether he supports full, immediate enrollment in that same plan for all combat veterans from all wars as a paid-in-full benefit of the GI Bill.

PS: click through to the NPR transcript and get a load of the commentary by one Regina Hertzlinger, a Harvard Business School professor and "leader in the consumer-driven health care movement." Something about people wanting a Toyota when their employer would rather buy them a tricked-out Harvardmobile, and how that would be a shame, or something. I think Dr. Hertzlinger might be better described as a " leader in the right-wing idiotic simile movement."

Scribefire!

Pay no attention: I'm just trying a Firefox plug-in called Scribefire, which supposedly will let me post to this blog without actually logging in. The purpose of this technology? I have no idea. But it's sure awesome!

Immediate update: Scribefire messes with my precious ledding (that's line-spacing to you nonspecialists). Therefore, my interest in it has seriously declined over the past 90 seconds.

Fifty50 in-depth analysis: Pennsylvania Democratic Primary

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You've heard the liars and BS craftsmen spinning their primary analysis to the craven official media. Everybody wants to tell you what it all means. Well, allowing for the fact that I have my own biases, I think a few basic facts are hard to dispute. And the meaning is self-evident to us rubes in Champaign, Illinois, if not the bitter imbeciles of central Pennsylvania and the Beltway Cocktail Circuit.

First, look at these Pollster.com charts. I'm not good at this stuff, and these are probably not the best charts to use, but they look good enough to show that Obama has been steadily been closing the gap on Clinton's lead since the beginning of 2007 or the beginning of 2008 --- take your pick. As far as I can tell, that fact has not been widely reported, or reported as being significant. You may remember that a similar failure of communication led to stories about how Obama got trounced in the New Hampshire primary, even though he steadily gained on Clinton up until primary day. (Obama got "trounced" because he did not live up to the hype or inaccurate opinion polling after the Iowa caucuses.)

Second, there is some irritating and disingenuous "conventional wisdom" being dispensed about how the Democrats are doing themselves tremendous harm through self-destructive negative campaigning tactics. Well, no, that's not really true: Hillary Clinton and her peckerwood husband, and their surrogates, have been directly appealing to the bigot vote by invoking the names of Scary Negroes and their purported association with Obama. Then there's her disingenuous shot-and-beer pandering to morons who think Chablis and Merlot are not manly, and her ridiculous purported love affair with guns. And she has been aided in her tactics by the official media, especially Gibson and "George" on the ABC debate. As far as I can tell, Obama has retaliated by referring to Hillary as "Annie Oakley."

To summarize, both a casual and a careful reader of the news would be justified in concluding that after months of throwing the kitchen sink, all the rolling pins in the drawers, and a bushel of bigoted personal attacks at her opponent, Hillary Clinton was not able to stop the slow and steady gains made by Obama in Pennsylvania over the past year or two.

Update while I'm still writing the original post: now The New Republic is comparing Obama to McGovern, meaning that he is a Don Quixote figure with an increasingly isolated band of fanatics as his only support. Expect to hear a lot of this "meme" in the next two weeks and beyond. Obama will be portrayed as the Democrat who is tearing the party apart.

Bill Clinton: against fearmongering before he was for it

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Josh Marshall, my online journalistic hero with at least one editorial foot of clay, posted this video flashback of Bill Clinton yesterday. It's from 2004; click through after you read Josh's introduction.

It's difficult for me to understand why smart younger guys like Marshall, as well as Atrios and others, still lionize the Bill Clinton of the past and to this day cannot understand that they bought a Bill of goods back in the early 1990s. The words Clinton speaks in Josh's video clip are fine words, and true, even if they reflect irony on the campaign of his wife today, 4 years hence. But those fine and true words were uttered by a slippery peckerwood who has even stopped trying to sound sincere since he started earning $50K/hour flicking his silver tongue at corporate audiences following his "retirement."

Look, fellas: Bill Clinton was never a liberal, and was never even a "progressive." His program has always been basically the same as the Rockefeller Republicans, including their twisted heirs such as G.H.W. Bush. Not liberal. Not progressive. Not concerned in the slightest about you or me. This fact was obvious to liberal adults in 1988 and 1992 and 1996. So guys, stop waxing nostalgic about the "old" Bill Clinton. The "new" one is same as the "old" one.

Do you disagree, Puny Human? OK: send me one example of any truly liberal or progressive initiative that arose from either of the two Clinton administrations. And Al Gore accomplishments don't count. Neither do things that just look liberal in comparison with the Reagan/Bush administration. Neither do botched healthcare policy reforms....

A Brooks & Shields joint

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Driving south on Prospect last night I had the misfortune of punching the radio through a transcription of the PBS NewsHour, and some insane punditry by Mark Shields and David Brooks. You just have to listen to it to appreciate the, what --- I don't know: stupidity, mendacity, mental illness? Depends on who was talking at a given moment. Examples:

1. Listen to how Shields immediately goes off the deep end in renouncing debate moderator questions about flag lapel pins while at the same time implying that people who agree with his opinion may be internet-based left-wing conspiracy nuts.

2. Marvel at how smarmy Brooks sounds right out of the gate, lecturing Shields (but really lecturing all of us rubes in the audience) about how important it is for moderators to ask presidential candidates questions to discover whether they are really like "us," possibly not aware of the fact that most of "us" wear lapel pins of any kind, and even fewer wear lapels.

3. Wrap your puny human mind around this bit of analysis by Shields: Pennsylvania have lost 237,00 manufacturing jobs since the beginning of the Bush administration; change has not been good for Pennsylvanians, and change is not a welcome message for these people because change has hurt them. Therefore, Pennsylvania is a "good fit" for Hillary Clinton. [I solemnly swear that my paraphrase of his clanging is accurate.]

4. Mystify yourself wondering why Brooks thinks it's appropriate to slip in an endorsement of retired Senator and unretired DLC A-hole Sam Nunn for VP. What?! That's some nice "being in touch," there, fella.

The insight of the evening, which both of these soiled specimens seemed to think they were uttering for the first time in American history: these (Democratic) people will just say whatever it takes to get elected without any regard for what they would actually have to do once in the Oval Office! Next week: Soylent Green is PEOPLE!

Epiphany

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Small-town crackers are so stupid that they need elitist pundits to convince them that Barack Obama condescended to them.

Should-Never-Have-Left Department

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Jeez, I take a sabbatical and the political discourse becomes so unimaginably stupid that I'm literally frightened to say anything about it.

I believe that thinking people, and especially people of good intentions, are natural suckers in what passes for political discourse today. We behave all politely and try to address the disingenuous points made by professional right-wing liars and troublemakers. We try to play by civil rules of discourse, and observe the principles of logic. And they don't. I wonder when a political leader or presidential candidate will just say to Russert or Matthews or Stephanopolous, live on TV, that no, he or she will not answer the moderator's carefully engineered double-bind question because it was deliberately contrived to elicit an answer that can be interpreted by the elite media to offend a significant portion of the population. Or that it is just too stupid to answer, and that an answer would offend the intelligence of the viewing audience. What would someone like Obama have to lose with a statement like that? Really.

It terrifies and sickens me that the elite media present right-wing talking points as if they're the touchstone of fact that we must all acknowledge before we are allowed to utter a sound. I can assure all you young people out there that there was a time when journalism and public discourse at least resembled a truth-seeking activity.

Yes, all that I'm presenting here are gross generalities, but it's time to jump back into the blog again, so this is where and when I choose to do it. Consider this a bit of throat-clearing. But, really, where can I intelligently begin when the hottest topic in the establishment media for the past week has been an off-the-cuff remark by Obama, taken entirely out of context, liberally spiced with dog-whistle racism and anti-gay subtext, courtesy of the sociopaths running Hillary Clinton's campaign (i.e., the Clintons) and the sociopaths who make their living talking on your TV, your radio, and probably, soon, in the fillings of your molars?

My fervent hope is that, finally, we are on the verge of a watershed event: someone (the Republican/DLC establishment) may finally go broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people. First chance I get, I'm sending $25 to Obama, if for no other reason than I'm awed by his ability to maintain his dignity so far.

Will return soon

Occasionally, regular, hideous life takes a front seat to blogging. This past week has been, collectively, one of those occasions. I promise to return soon in order to provide more of the mature commentary and creative fugues that you have come to expect.

Executive summary on Reaganomics

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Jane Smiley is a novelist who writes really clear-headed and lively commentary for HuffingtonPost. Her latest post is a brilliant and concise description of... well, just go read it. I have some younger readers, and I hereby command them to click through and get a short course in post-1970s American political economy. Don't worry, kids: it's actually quite entertaining.

In my opinion, Smiley's column covers everything a regular, everyday person needs to know about Reaganomics, other than the self-evident observation that it has been a miserable failure in all it ever has attempted, even by its own standards, except its efforts to dismantle U.S. democratic institutions, transfer public wealth to private corporations, and maintain a perpetual state of war. And fear. And pestilence.

I do disagree with one detail in Smiley's analysis, though. The ultimate problem really isn't the sociopathic economists, but the transformation of the free press into a house organ for the Reagan Revolution over the past 25 years. These free-market goons would have been humiliated and laughed off the stage by real, two-fisted reporters even before they had their right foot out of the green room two decades ago.

Funny

Hillary Clinton supporters are staging a writer's strike at DailyKos. They feel they are victims of meanness.

Doodooodoot duhdootdoot! I interrupt this blog to bring you a special bulletin: No One Cares.

Hillary Clinton: monster

Actually, much worse than a monster: Republican.

Geri Ferraro: bigot

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Much comment on the racism of our first-ever female vice presidential nominee (1984), Geraldine Ferraro, can be found on the web tonight. Here's a representative one --- a Daily Kos link with commentary from Bob Cesca, illustrating that Ferraro has a long history of this kind of race-baiting.

Obama's campaign doesn't need to be demanding resignations from Hillary's campaign, but they do need to point out what the Clinton campaign has become: monstrous. And then they should hire back Samantha Power and give her a raise.

Erratum and update: Well, it appears that Geri Ferraro was not the first-ever female vice presidential nominee after all. StuporMundi apologizes for his error. However, Ms. Ferraro was, as far as StuporMundi knows, the first-ever female vice presidential candidate to end up being such a clueless, bigoted asshole.

Warrantless wiretapping thought experiment

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It's audience participation time! You are invited to help with my domestic wiretapping thought experiment! Let's get started!

Suppose you are the U.S. Attorney General, in charge of a Justice Department that believes it has the power to conduct warrantless wiretaps of any telephone conversation that takes place in the United States. Suppose further that your department has in the past investigated and prosecuted domestic political enemies for the sole purpose of removing them from elected office. Also suppose that you had spent the previous 20 years as an ultraconservative judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and may or may not harbor feelings of animosity about a flashy, arrogant liberal prosecutor (now the Governor of your state) who in the recent past caused considerable trouble for some of the nice men who toil on Wall Street.

Given those assumptions (here comes the audience participation part), could you think of any reason not to allow the G-men to prosecute Eliot Spitzer on the basis of evidence that may have originated with an illegal wiretap? As a corollary experiment, can you think of any reason why Pat Fitzgerald's investigation of Karl Rove may have gone suddenly, inexplicably limp a coupla years ago?

All this is just the basis for a "hypothetical," of course, not a "conspiracy theory."

Update: Well, dagnab it, Jane Hamsher beat me to the punch with this nice post at FireDogLake that includes other, more wonky, Spitzer-type hypothetical questions for you to ponder. I hope our heroes at TPM Muckraker dig into it.

A little Obama history

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The link below goes to Bob Cesca's blog. It reprints an October 2002 antiwar speech by Barack Obama. Read the text. At the time Obama gave the speech, while he was still serving in the Illinois legislature, Senate Democrats were falling all over themselves to stand up and be counted by President Bush. (Yes, that's right: falling all over themselves to stand up.)

Then, if you like, you can follow another link provided by Cesca, this one directing you to the text of a speech Hillary Clinton gave on the floor of the Senate about a week later. It includes this line:

If we get the resolution and Saddam does not comply, then we can attack him with far more support and legitimacy than we would have otherwise [emphasis added].

She made that foreign policy speech less than 2 years after her first election to any public office. Some may attribute the poor judgment shown in that speech to her lack of experience.

Today's doke

Update: Hat-tip to Big Otis for pointing out some "slipshop" editing in the text of Today's doke. I have corrected the error. Thanks, asswipe.

Looking back on Huckabee

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He said he majored in miracles. But he didn't say whether he stayed awake during class.

A difference between Clinton and Obama

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Putting aside ideas and policy, an area where political competition is obscured by pointless nuance and deliberate ambiguity, I see one revealing difference between Clinton and Obama. It is evident in the basic strategy and tactics used by each campaign.

Obama seeks support through his personal charisma and giving inspirational speeches. He puts together strong local campaign organizations, including effective get-out-the-vote operations. His goal seems straightforward: to attract the most voters and make sure they get to the polling place on primary day. His campaign treasury is rich largely because hundreds of thousands of everyday people are contributing small amounts in direct response to the message they hear.

Clinton relies heavily on party establishment types and their established political organizations, which can be assumed at least in part to depend for their power on patronage at the city, county, and state levels. She entered two rogue Democratic primaries, in Michigan and Florida, in defiance of the national party and all other competing candidates, and is now lobbying to change the rules pertaining to whether her delegates from those states may be counted. Behind the scenes, her campaign has been trying to lean on party "superdelegates" to snatch the nomination if Obama gets to Denver with more regular delegates than she has.

In other words, Obama is working hard and playing by the rules to win the nomination; Clinton is working the establishment, gaming the system, and operating through back-channels to get what she wants.

"I heard it on NPR"

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Back-to-back stories on All Things Considered this afternoon:

First, a strangely objective update on an under-reported story about a "loner," found comatose in a Las Vegas motel room, in possession of (1) firearms, (2) undisclosed amounts of the neurotoxin Ricin, (3) castor beans, from which Ricin is synthesized, and (4) an "anarchist-type textbook." Although the man's ethnicity was not reported, we can be fairly certain that he does not come from any brown-skinned, funny-accented region of the world. Why? Because, according to ATC co-host Melissa Block, Vegas police have stated that "it doesn't make you a terrorist to have an anarchist-type textbook." No word from John Law on whether it makes you a criminal to possess a deadly illegal poison previously used in terrorist attacks.

The frame for this first NPR story was something to the effect that, 'well this is certainly an interesting mystery, isn't it?' The report does represent an admirable presumption of innocence by an often-hysterical press in This Time Of War. They give us this tale of a simple country pizza delivery guy, living in his cousin's basement, taking his anarchist's cookbook and his castor beans and his guns along with undisclosed amounts of illegal neurotoxin on a road trip to Vegas, just minding his own business and living there with no visible means of support, when he mysteriously goes into a coma. Maybe he was "just trying to do harm to himself," one reporter mused. There are probably easier ways to do that, but who knows?

Second, a strangely sanctimonious story about a New York cabbie, briefly hailed as a hero for having rescued an infant abandoned in his taxi, until it was discovered that he was indirectly acquainted with the baby's father. NPR calls the story "Taxi Driver Arrested for Helping Girlfriend Ditch Kid." Nice. ATC co-host Robert Siegel clumsily walks the listener through the convoluted facts by asking the New York Daily News police reporter he's interviewing questions such as, "Is he from Ecuador, is that what I read?" Ah-HA! (How the hell should the police reporter know what Siegel read?)

As near as I can tell, here's the story. The father of an "angelic" 5-month-old baby girl tells his sister he can't care for the baby himself because he works construction and the underage mother has left him. This guy's sister tells her boyfriend, the Ecuadoran taxi driver, that they must bring the baby to a city fire station, which is reasonably in sync with the intent of the city's safe harbor law if not the letter of it. The immigrant does this, but he fabricates a story about how the baby was abandoned in his taxi, presumably to protect the brother of his girlfriend. Bad call, of course. But before the cabbie confesses to his fib, the heartwarming story hits the press: Ecuadoran Samaritan Toast O' Town --- Read All About It! But then the fairy tale is spoiled by an inconvenient detail, and everybody feels chumped. So the cabbie loses his livery license and faces prosecution for filing a false police report. Forget about the fact that this guy actually did take charge of an abandoned baby and did the right thing --- he made an error doing it. Let's pile on and strip him of his livelihood, then send him back where he belongs. Unless he has an apartment full of guns, castor beans, and an anarchist-type textbook.

International Journal of Nana Studies 1(4)

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Proposed: A Fifth Law of Thermodynamics

Background

Nana has developed and proposed a new Law of Thermodynamics, the acronym for which is DENOLT (Double E's Negative- Oneth Law of Thermodynamics. This new law of physics, in its draft form, may be described as follows: The entropy of an isolated thermodynamic system decreases in direct proportion to the amount of time heat transfer occurs within the system.

Discussion

Initial development of DENOLT took place at a traditional American pancake house located in Champaign, Illinois, on 10 February 2008. The thermodynamic system described in the original embodiment of the theory consisted of natural gas from a conventional municipal gas main, a small source of heat to ignite the gas into a sustained flame, a steel restaurant cooking grill, a film of vegetable-based cooking oil, and diced Idaho russet potatoes.

Nana [poking at hard potato cubes within a "Farmer's Scramble"]: This is why we waited so long.
SM: What do you mean?
Nana [continuing to poke at the hard potato cubes]: They started with raw potatoes.
SM: They always start with raw potatoes.
Nana: No they don't.
SM: Are you saying that they grow potatoes already cooked?
Nana: No. But they had to cut them up.
SM: Do you mean that they can't cut up well cooked potatoes?
Nana: Oh, you know what I mean!

Analysis and Conclusion

Because cooked-in-the-dirt russet potatoes harvested from Idaho are demonstrated to become more heterogeneous the longer they are grilled at high temperature, the entropy of the system of which they are a part has been demonstrated to decrease in proportion to the amount of heat transferred. The proposed new thermodynamic law, DENOLT, assumes that said precooked-by-nature potatoes are cut up at some time between when they are harvested and when they are introduced to a hot grill.

Although DENOLT may currently be regarded only as a hypothesis, it is considered probable that research scientists and engineers will be able to test and replicate the initial results through controlled experiments at any traditional pancake house. Theoreticians may be expected to employ these data to codify and refine DENOLT as a scientific theory. Upon subsequent rigorous testing and observation by the scientific community worldwide, confirmation of DENOLT as the fifth confirmed Law of Thermodynamics should be expected within the century.

Afterword

"Double E" is an alias by which Nana is sometimes identified for purposes of confidentiality and protection of intellectual property.

Afterword II: Erratum

A commenter who should be able to grasp esoteric thermodynamic theory was confused by this account of the draft DENOLT. Part of the confusion may be attributed to the author's incomplete description of the cubed potato (CP) properties. The CPs were not cold, and their hardness was attributable to a state of rawness not explainable by the established Laws of Thermodynamics (Nana 2008a).

Beyond "Good to Great"

From The Salt Lake Tribune, via TPM and reader DB (where I saw the relevant Trib excerpt), comes an account of a next-gen employee motivation program.

In the long term, employee motivation through management-initiated waterboarding is probably a welcome development for several reasons. First, it will weed all the sissies out of the sales team and put them on the streets where they really belong to begin with. Second, it will finally rid us of impermanent, namby-pamby management fad thinking epitomized by Harlequin-style boardroom romances such as Good to Great. Third, it will help to rip the grinning, baboon-like happy-mask off the Reagan Revolution and reveal just what it's always been about: applying wealth and brute force to deceive the innocent, intimidate the weak, and redefine human beings as an expendable capital resource for use by a handful of degenerate plutocrats and their enforcers.