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Those jumped-up pseudo-populists would never stand a chance.
And yes, I'm a union member, of the dreaded SEIU. I only wish the whole country could enjoy the benefits of being union workers, too.
"A nation of sheep soon begets a government of wolves."
--Edward R. Murrow
"Apparently, the administration has issued rules requiring parity for mental health treatment with other illnesses. They'll take effect July 1st. If you want to know why health insurance costs keep marching upward seemingly uncontrolled, this is why: mandating new benefits is always popular, and the government doesn't have to pay for them."That's right. It's tough out there for an insurance company, what with all those record profits and sky-high CEO salaries. No, the government doesn't pay for those new mandates, Megan; those who pay the premiums do. But lest you think she's a heartless Randian sociopath, she assures you she has feelings:
"I am very sympathetic to the plight of the mentally ill. Unfortunately, most of the people who will tap the benefits are not severely ill people who need intensive care; they're people who are unhappy. Unhappiness is not a condition for which psychotherapy, or antidepressants, have been shown to be very effective. "Granted, it was a very small, brief, and token assurance, though she did try. It's just that her Predict-O-Vision eyeballed all those undeserving benefit-tappers, and her Objectivism got the best of her. So here she is trying to refine her empathy:
"Update: Let me point out something which I thought was obvious--the private insurance market is not where you necessarily get insurance if you are severely mentally ill. Really severe mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, interferes with "normal life activities" like working or dating, and onset is typically in young adulthood. The more likely you are to have the social or financial resources with which to obtain private insurance, the less likely you are to have the kind of severe mental illness we're worrying about."Let me just parse out this blockheaded, misinformed logic: what she is really saying is that mental illness can only be considered genuine if it is totally disabling, and if that's the case, why, you'd be one of those "lucky duckies" entitled to some other free lunch---say, SSI, or Social Security Disability, or, Medicaid, and you wouldn't really need private insurance, because the rich and employed don't get schizophrenia.
"About 140 million Americans in more than 450,000 employer plans will benefit from improved coverage, according to the administration.Yep, that's scary all right, but not nearly as scary as what passes for humanity in the pages of The Atlantic these days.
Included among the rules that will take effect July 1 are:
□ Health plans for employers with more than 50 workers cannot charge a higher co-pay or deductible for treatment for mental health or substance abuse than for a visit to the doctor or medical specialist. There also is no separate deductible.
□ The plans cannot set restrictions on the number of visits or hospital days for mental-health and substance-abuse problems that are different than those for medical problems.
□ The plans must offer out-of-network benefits for mental-health and substance-abuse treatments as they do medical and surgical treatments.
However, the act does not require that a group health plan provide benefits for mental health and substance abuse. It also does not apply to issuers who sell health-insurance policies to employers with 50 or fewer employees or who sell health-insurance policies to individuals."
" Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as "A People's History of the United States," inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.During a lifetime of tiny men and moral midgets, Howard was a magnificent soul from youth. But even if he had not accomplished one thing but this, he would have still been a greater asset to our country than any of our elected politicians of the last 45 years.
His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack."
"The Touch Book uses an innovative ARM processor from Texas Instruments that delivers the power of a traditional desktop computer but uses a fraction of the energy.It runs for around 10 hours without charge, uses open sourcing and is modifiable, and the tablet can be removed from the keyboard as a stand-alone. It's $299 to buy the tablet alone, and $399 for the whole system. There is ongoing refinement that customers can tap into and download as upgrades are made. Personally, I think it's elegant and revolutionary, and would much rather put my money into real, customer-engaged entrepreneurship than into Apple's now massive (and expensive) industrial structure.
Like a cellphone, it is always-on, so there is no need to reboot each time. And without noisy fans and disk drives, it's completely silent, so it won't intrude on your inner space."
"GREENVILLE - Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has compared giving people government assistance to "feeding stray animals."Not only was his grandmother uneducated, it's clear she insured he stayed that way, too. This is his understanding of "welfare":
Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, made his remarks during a town hall meeting in Fountain Inn that included state lawmakers and about 115 residents.
"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better," Bauer said."
"He said government hasn't made requirements to make those receiving aid be more responsible.You see, this man lives in the Reaganesque world of welfare queens and lazy chicken-eating Negroes, so he missed 1996, when Clinton's welfare reform created the Temporary Aid to Needy Families program, which places limits on lifetime receipts of benefits, and requires parents to work or go to school in exchange for what benefits they receive. And since that program is highly individualistic by state, he must be unaware of his own state's requirements, which requires work and/or school, and which limit the receipt of aid to 60 months in an entire lifetime. Extensions of aid beyond the stated limit are only granted to heads of households who are disabled or caring for a disabled person, who are under 18 and still in high school,who are not themselves recipients of TANF or are caring for abandoned children, or who have no reasonable access to transportation or child care. Failing to comply with extension criteria means immediate termination of the case. Yet this lying sack goes boldly on with his lies, taking swipes as children who,through no fault of their own, must seek school lunch aid to ensure some nutritional adequacy in their diets:
"They can continue to have more and more kids, and the reward is there's more and more money in it for them."
Instead, he said, the government should place incentives in its welfare programs, such as providing child care so parents can work or receive education so they can break the welfare cycle.
Government continues to reward bad behavior by giving money to people who "don't have to do a thing," he said."
"Later in his speech, Bauer said, "I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina," adding, "You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I'll show you the worst test scores, folks. It's there, period."
"Bauer said he shouldn't have used the "stray animals" reference. However, he said he knows his comments are politically incorrect, and he does not feel that he needs to apologize."Fine work, Republicans. More of him and the Crackerbaggers will be ready to start up the lynch mobs again.
"Four years later, in 1886, this Court in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 , 6 S.Ct. 1132, decided for the first time that the word 'person' in the amendment did in some instances include corporations. A secret purpose on the part of the members of the committee, even if such be the fact, however, would not be sufficient to justify any such construction. The history of the amendment proves that the people were told that its purpose was to protect weak and helpless human beings and were not told that it was intended to remove corporations in any fashion from the control of state governments. The Fourteenth Amendment followed the freedom of a race from slavery. Jusice Swayne said in the Slaughter Houses Cases, supra, that: 'By 'any person' was meant all persons within the jurisdiction of the State. No distinction is intimated on account of race or color.' Corporations have neither race nor color. He knew the amendment was intended to protect the life, liberty, and property of human beings."Now Glenn Greenwald is fielding comments that confuse what is Constitutional with what is ideologically acceptable, and in the course of it, has pointed out that the "liberal" dissenting justices do not quarrel with the concept of corporate personhood, and their dissent is not based on any rejection of it. He warns his commenters:
"Those same name-calling accusations were made frequently by commenters last night about those who think the First Amendment actually means what it says and can't be violated in the name of good results ("your absolutism and legalistic purity ignores the real-world problem of corporate influence"). The "rule of law," however, means that if the Constitution or other laws bar X, then X is not allowed regardless of how many good outcomes can be achieved by X. That was true for the "crisis" of Terrorism, and it's just as true for the crisis of corporate influence over our political process. Whatever solutions are to be found for either problem, they cannot be ones that the Constitution explicitly prohibits. That's what "the rule of law" means."
Today, The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports:This definition of "persons" has certainly seen plenty of plasticity in the last couple days. Perhaps since the Supreme Court has stretched forth its hand to shelter corporations under its wing by virtue of their "personhood", it may also choose to re-vist the definition as it applies to living beings. If the Obama Justice Department can get a ruling excluding actual humans from the definition, the destruction of the Constitution will be complete, and these troubling complaints will be put to rest along with their authors.
The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday....Once that rationale is accepted, it necessarily applies not only to past detainees but future ones as well: the administration is claiming the power to imprison whomever it wants without charges whenever it believes that -- even in the face of the horrendously broad "material support for terrorism" laws the Congress has enacted -- it cannot prove in any tribunal that the individual has actually done anything wrong. They are simply decreed by presidential fiat to be "too dangerous to release." Perhaps worst of all, it converts what was once a leading prong in the radical Bush/Cheney assault on the Constitution -- the Presidential power to indefinitely imprison people without charges -- into complete bipartisan consensus, permanently removed from the realm of establishment controversy.
There are roughly 200 prisoners left at the camp, which means roughly 25% will be held without any charges at all. Using the administration's perverse multi-tiered justice system, the rest will either be tried in a real court, sent to a military commission or released...The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Military Commissions Act unconstitutionally denied the right of habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees -- a principle the Obama administration has vigorously resisted when it comes to Bagram detainees -- but mere habeas corpus review does not come close to a real trial, which the Bill of Rights guarantees to all "persons" (not only "Americans") before the State can keep them locked in a cage.
Erin Miller:Zachary Roth writes at TPM that the concept of personhood for corporations is at the heart of the ruling. Basically, this means that because Constitutional rights are granted to those who are legal persons, and because corporations are considered to have legal personhood, their right to buy off the electorate via a saturation campaign funded by bottomless coffers fed mostly by contributers who have no control over where their money is going has been deemed by these 5 lackies as a right to free speech. This, coming out of a political philosophy that has striven for years to ensure actual human beings are allowed no Constitutional rights, and a court where 4 of the 5 justices actually dissented from giving those rights to untried men. Can I tell you how deeply I have loathed this legal precedent, which has withstood the test of time and, since it was first conceived, has caused untold misery to untold numbers of real live persons? Well, the floodgates are open now, and let the games begin! The risible part of all this is how the unions get tagged along with corporations, as though the AFL-CIO could match blows with Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, or ING.
Justice Kennedy writes for the Court...Reversed in part, affirmed in part, and remanded...Austin v. Mich is overruled...And so is the part of McConnell v. FEC that upheld the restrictions on independent corporate expenditures...In dissent, or partial dissent is Stevens, joined by Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer...Thomas also filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part...The Court does uphold the disclosure requirements for organizations like Citizens United...Justice Stevens' partial dissent is 90 pages...The majority opinion by Justice Kennedy is 57 pages
Tom Goldstein:
Much will depend on the wording, but today's decision is a small revolution in campaign finance law...The Court's decision overturns the previously settled distinction between corporate and individual expenditures in American elections...We will link to the opinions as soon as they are available...The decision presumably applies equally to state and local elections, given that the Court recognizes a First Amendment right...And the ruling almost certainly applies to both corporate and union treasury funds.
"As Darcy Burner put it yesterday: "Perhaps if the Democratic base doesn't show up to elect Coakley, party leadership should consider *trying to appeal* to the base." There's a reason it's called "the base" -- it's because it's the foundation of the party -- and, as the Republicans never forget, there is a serious cost to ignoring or spurning them.There's one other thing to weigh, as well: the Left's timidity. Only today, when a friend suggested she was ready to create a third party, I responded that the Dems could be turned around:
As I note in my NYT contribution today, the reasons for the Democrats' failings generally -- and the Scott Brown victory specifically -- are complex, and shouldn't be simplified in order to declare vindication for pre-existing beliefs (Obama loyalists: it was all about Coakley!; right-wing Democrats: it's all the Left's fault!; Republicans: it's a rejection of liberalism!). But whatever else is true, the Left, as usual, has very little power, both within the Party and in general. Blaming them for the Democrats' failings is about as rational as the 2006 attempt to blame them for the collapsing Iraq War. The Left is many things; "dominant within the Democratic Party and our political discourse" is not one of them."
"Third parties diffuse our energy and reduce the chances of a win. What the teabaggers are doing is working to take over local Republican machines. This is what progressives should be doing with the Democratic party. We could call ourselves the "Black Cat" Democrats, after the anarchist symbol "No War but Class War"."This was met with a resigned defeatism, implying that any attempt to re-make the Dems would be a futile effort. This is what we're up against. But why shouldn't we fight windmills? Why should we circle the wagons and just keep on keeping company with only others who think like us? When did a third party EVER result in a viable candidate (and I say that as someone who spent the first 2 decades of my voting life voting for 3rd parties). If we tried to establish a 3rd party, wouldn't we run up against the very same forces that would be arrayed against us inside the party, except that we would have about zero chance of gaining allies wlling to abandon it? Staying in the party and seeking to gently persuade the incumbents in hopes of gaining their cooperation would only waste our time. Staying in the party and making our voices heard, getting confrontational, and demanding a cost for our support, would get their attention and allow potential allies to remain "loyal" in a comfortably familiar milieu.
"...new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.Yet a Google search of the story reveals almost no establishment press reports on this important piece. The NY Times buried it in "US News" so deeply you can't even find it once you leave the page it's on. The silence is so astounding that even the conservative-leaning Sully remarked on it. In the best American Gothic tradition, we continue to lock up our dirty secrets in the attic, and Aunt Edith at the Times and Brother Billy at the Post make sure the neighbors don't find out.
Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently...
None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.
As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”
Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet...
The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable."
"The voters are aware it's a national referendum on the health care bill and Obama big government liberal programs."Too bad they forgot that it was a Republican who gave MA its current insurance company welfare program, the same Republican many in his party are already expecting to be the presidential frontrunner in 2012. I wonder how he will explain his big government liberal program to the clown car?
"I always wanted to do this or that when I came to Haiti, but I had learned that completely different things might ensue; it was necessary to accept those transformations, for a too stubborn insistence on one's own program-tet bef, as Haitian Kreyol succinctly has it, "bull head"-can be almost suicidal here. Better to yield up my own will and let the spirits lead. That was the main thing Haiti had taught me, and it was also a point that most of American officialdom seemed to miss."I'm not sure what the spirits had in mind for Haiti on January 12, 2010, but what has to be done now is pretty clear, especially since it appears another quake occurred last night measuring 4.6 on the Richter scale, just 37 miles from Port-au-Prince. Many quarters have been supplying the names of relief agencies that need funds, including my own employer, and when I got home from work last evening I found a heart-wrenching flyer in my mailbox from a neighbor up the street whose family in Haiti has not been found or heard from since the quake. These are the agencies that Bell recommends:
The Lambi Fund of HaitiNear and dear to my own heart is Doctors Without Borders. Their own website states:
Fonkoze
Partners in Health
"We are not providing water right now, but when we do, we will need to establish some water sources that are accessible and not contaminated. As a second step we will need to think about other strategies, perhaps drilling boreholes or water treatment - maybe treating salt water since it is by the ocean."Anyone with those particular skills and resources could be of untold value to the rescue effort right now. International Action is there.
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