Paul Krugman has a great column in the New york times today, regarding health care.
This part especially goes a long way towards explaining why the “centrist” members of the senate are far from the center:
Honestly, I don’t know what these Democrats are trying to achieve. Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex — but who in politics doesn’t? If I had to guess, I’d say that what’s really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America.
Hopefully Democrats will do what they were elected to do which is help the American people not protect the interests of a few insurance companies, if they don’t Democrats may be looking at another 1994 scenario where republicans are swept into office largely because no one sees any difference between the parties.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 2:04 PM CDT
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Got this from Washingtonmonthly.com:
One executive said rescission is about “stopping fraud and material misrepresentations that contribute to spiraling healthcare costs.” So, for example, when a woman in Texas was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, her insurer dropped her coverage because the company found an instance in which she visited a dermatologist for acne, and didn’t tell the insurance company about it. This, the insurer said, was an example of “fraud and material misrepresentation.”
This executive seems to have confused the companies self-interest with what they are contracted to do as an insurance company like pay for thetreatment of people who get sick. This is sort of like the auto executives flying their private jets to Washington so that they could beg for money.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:59 AM CDT
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Can someone explain how does Megan Mcardle keep her job
Posted by John Rove as Words at 2:28 PM CDT
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I am not a big Beatles fan, and Yoko’s duet with John Lennon makes me cringe, but this seems like a good idea
Posted by John Rove as Words at 4:12 AM CDT
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You would think that conservatives would love General Motors, the company has been a consistent denier of climate change and they gave us the Hummer, the SUV for men who need to compensate, but no:
“In the effort to reverse this lurch beyond the farthest left fringe of previous Democratic statist urges, individual Americans have a role to play. They have to say no to GM products and services until such time as the denationalization occurs,” says Hugh Hewitt. He acknowledges that this is a serious step that could hurt people currently working for GM: “But there isn’t any alternative, every dollar spent with GM is a dollar spent against free enterprise. Every car or truck purchased from Government Motors is one not purchased from a private car company that competes fairly against all other car companies.”
I am not a big fan of GM but trying to make them go out of business seems a bit mean spirited.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 4:00 PM CDT
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Maybe we should start calling Dick Cheney former President Cheney as he is leaving no doubt who was in charge during the “bush” administration.
Update: It also seems that Mr Cheney is trying to make-up for his role in the September 11 attacks, my only question is does he know he screwed-up and is intentionally trying to hide it, or does he really beieve he knew what he was doing. My guess is that he really thinks he did a good job as president, even though the country suffered three thousand casualties n his watch and lost thousands more service-men all thanks to Dick’s negligence. That would be hard for most of us to deal with.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:34 PM CDT
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Probably not the end but looks like they may go to a five day schedule from the current six days of delivery, given that the US mail is mostly a delivery system for bad advertising that goes straight into a landfill, it might be better to go to delivery four days a week or perhaps even three.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:35 AM CDT
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One of the more interesting debates over the past few months has been whether Texas should secceed, and while I recognize that it would create a third world country on our southern border, it might be for the best. Rick Perry the governor of Texas does not seem interested in being president of the worlds newest third world cesspool, and is now claiming he never talked about secceeding.
A few years ago the future president of Aftexistan would have been able to get away with denying he ever wanted to secceed, now however he is all over you-tube and their are imbedded videos of him talking up seccession.
I guess we just need to negotiate some sort of guest worker program with Texas where we know that after coming up to the 49 states to help pick fruit and vegetables we have some guarantee that their citizens will return home; then Texas can enter its rightful place as the leader of conservative nations such as Somalia and Darfur.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:33 AM CDT
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Yglesias trys to explain Reagan worship:
Scratch a liberal, and he’ll find some good things to say about FDR. Some good things to say about JFK. These days there’s more and more appreciation of the fact that Lyndon Johnson did some very great things along with some very bad ones. Jimmy Carter’s not so popular, but there’s still stuff to like in his legacy. Bill Clinton’s administration was in many ways a disappointment but also in many ways an exemplar of successful governance. And so it goes. History is a mixed bag, and major historical figures in the progressive tradition all have their praiseworthy aspects along with their shortcomings.
In the conservative official view, by contrast, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George HW Bush, and George W. Bush were all big government sellouts who strayed from the True Path as defined exclusively by Ronald Reagan. And yet at the very same time we’re supposed to believe that America is an intrinsically conservative country that years for hard-right policies. There’s an obvious contradiction. And the portrait of Reagan as a down-the-line man of the right isn’t even accurate. The whole thing is bizarre, and there’s genuinely nothing like it on the left.
Anyone who posts on the internet or even talks to conservatives runs into Reagan worship, conservatives seem to believe that Reagan was perfect, even though he left the country in a financial mess and at least partially created the situation we have today in Afganistan. Not to mention the whole Iran-Contra mess.
Reagan was a master of saying one thing and doing another and somehow conservatives are stuck with the the myth that Reagan did waht he said, while they try to do what he did. In some ways Reagan is a senile Albotross hanging around the neck of te Republican party until they get over their Reagan myths they will be innefective at governance and unable to create new policies or ideas.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:48 AM CDT
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David Schuster succinctly explains the Miss USA pageant and the people in it:
David Shuster expressed a negative view of the Miss USA pageant after Donald Trump announced at a press conference that Carrie Prejean would remain as Miss California, despite apparently breaking her contract and posing for topless photos.
“Can I vomit right now, literally, can I vomit?” Shuster said just after Trump thanked the press for attending. “Doesn’t this represent everything that is wrong with the superficial nature of these pageants?”
Shuster then proceeded to tee off on Prejean: “I mean she talked about how women could make a difference in this world. She lied. She avoided taking personal responsibility. She blamed others, whether it’s Perez Hilton or the photographer.”
And doesn’t it seem like Trump is pimping out the contestants?
Posted by John Rove as Words at 6:44 PM CDT
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Effective treatments are not the most profitable, therefore we shouldn’t use them. The market has spoken.
You’d think that doing research to figure out which treatments are most effective would be an obviously good thing. But no: it is, apparently, the first step on the road to socialized medicine. A lot of the attacks rely on this “first step” argument. For instance, the Heritage Foundation wrote that “The type of information collected by CER could eventually be used inappropriately if a “Federal Health Board” was created to decide which types of treatment would be available to whom and when.”
It could be used to do bad things! At least, if a board that doesn’t exist were created and told to use this information! Pass me my smelling salts. I await with eager anticipation the Heritage Foundation’s realization that this very same logic could be used to ban guns: after all, they too can be used to do very bad things, and (unlike comparative effectiveness research) actually are so used. Do you think consistency will oblige Heritage to come out in favor of a ban on all guns? Me neither.
But the Heritage Foundation is a marvel of sanity and good sense compared to John Griffing in the American Thinker, who describes the language providing for CER as “a line that would sentence millions of people to death”, and adds, by way of explanation: “If you are picturing Germany circa 1930, you’re right on. With the passing of this bill, government, not doctors, will decide who receives care and who doesn’t, in essence, who lives and who dies.” Deacon for Life, for his part, calls it “Mengele-esque”. The idea that Hitler and Mengele’s great sin was conducting research into the comparative effectiveness of various medical treatments is, shall we say, peculiar.
More seriously, there is something about the arguments against CER that I have never understood. The opponents of CER claim that it will inevitably be used to make decisions about care. Insurers will not want to pay for care that is not effective, and so people will be deprived of the care they need. But notice what “deprived of care” means here. No one is seriously proposing to make it illegal to purchase whatever medical care you want on your own.
This means that even if your insurance company decides that it will not pay for some treatment that has been shown to be ineffective, you will, under any proposal being seriously considered, still be able to get that care; you just won’t be able to get someone else to pay for it. If not having someone else pay for your medical care counts as being “deprived of care”, then 46 million people are being deprived of care even as we speak — and that’s just the uninsured; it doesn’t include people who have insurance that doesn’t cover the treatments they need. And yet, strange to say, the opponents of CER generally do not see this as a problem.
Moreover, once you notice that what the opponents of CER describe as “being deprived of care” just consists in someone’s deciding not to pay for some treatment, the idea that decisions about who gets what treatment are currently made by your physician is true only if you pay for your care out of your own pocket. If, like most of us, you rely on medical insurance, then someone other than your doctor is already making decisions about your care. All CER would do is allow this person to do so on the basis of actual knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.
It seems like a lot of bad policies rely on the idea that it would be a stppeing stone to something else, i.e. Marijuana policy.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 9:37 AM CDT
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More from Grayson<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/PXlxBeAvsB8&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/PXlxBeAvsB8&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
Posted by Al Swearengen as Economics, Video at 11:23 PM CDT
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I got this from a militia recruitment web site:
It is the opinion of the Militia that there is a world wide effort on the part of Islam to populate Western nations and, when numbers are sufficient enough, declare Sh’ria law. Islam is not a religion that accomodates other faiths or shares western values concerning freedom of religion. For that reason, we must reciprocate by declining your membership.
The best way to fight this imaginary threat is to try to outbreed the Muslims, who really loses in this war. The rest of us, these people overwelm the welfare system and create huge amounts of pollution with their clans and overwelm public school systems, especially when you consider these are the same people insist on teaching creation myths as science, basicaly dumbing down the rest of the country.
I don’t know how you stop these people from dragging the country down with them but I am starting to see the need for stricter gun laws and perhaps and end to welfare policies that reward people for having big families.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 9:56 AM CDT
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We’d love more of this! <video>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKP05AyfRsI</video>
Posted by Al Swearengen as Economics, History, Justice, Video, politics at 11:04 PM CDT
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People forget that Reagan was also a pretty crappy president
My sense is that for the vast majority of Republicans, their current and alleged beef with President Bush is that he espoused some sort of ‘big government conservatism’. He was profligate with the nation’s finances and left the country settled with huge structural deficits.
How is this different from Reagan’s time in office exactly? They’re actually surprisingly similar.
Both presidents pushed through big tax cuts, squeezed domestic discretionary spending, though never as much as opponents feared or supporters professed to hope for, and spent lavishly on defense. Having two big wars gave President Bush more to spend on. But the broad pattern is very similar. And both ended up leaving the country with really big deficits, though Reagan did a bit in the latter years of his administration to even the balance. Again, very, very similar. So either Bush is well within the conservative tradition or Reagan is another phony.
Perhaps, had conservatives been a little more honest about the eighties maybe Bush would not have repeated all the mistakes Reagan made.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:57 AM CDT
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Looks like Chrysler the parent comapany of Jeep is about to go bankrupt. Which would really suck, Jeeps were cool at one time. Now they are just big SUV’s, like any other big SUV. What happened? It seems that Jeep rather than sticking with their niche of making really good off-road vehicles that were kind of cool to drive around town, ableit somewhat uncomfortably and unreliably, switched to making cars that would appeal to soccer moms. This of course meant that they were competing with Ford and Land Rover and Mercedes etc. etc.
Now the ultimate soccer mom car is of course, the Prius, leaving Jeep with a bunch of unsold vehicles that no body wants. Had they stuck with their original market they would still have a group of hardcore enthusiasts with high brand loyalty. Hopefully Jeep will survive as a company and build a cool small off-road vehicle and leave the mass marketing to another bankrupt cr company.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:30 AM CDT
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You Douche!
Douche!
We could have drank at the bar we’ve always gone to and spent half the fucking money, but NO…
Posted by Al Swearengen as Economics, Video, politics at 7:02 PM CDT
2 Comments »
That poor 2 year old…
…oh boy, how about some sanity….look, obviously our system of government is a failure, and we need to try something else. Let’s make Obama “king for life” and hang every elected Senator and Representative we can get our hands on! The last straw was CLEARLY just a few months ago when something happened…I’ll let others decide what that “something” was, but I think someone should be detaining Octo-mom, Perez Hilton and Terri Shiavo (if she’s not alive then grab Eric the Midget instead) until we get everything sorted out.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Comedy, Video, politics at 6:45 PM CDT
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I love this one:
STEPHANOPOULOS: [O]n the issue of taxes, I think it’s 43 percent of people who file taxes pay no income tax at all. For the middle fifth of taxpayers, they’re paying just about 3 percent in federal income tax this year.
BOEHNER: Well, you want to go out and explain that to the hundreds of thousands of people around America that showed up for these rallies.
Since the eighties conservatives have exploited the low information voter, it now seems pretty apparent at this point that they don’t know what to do with them either.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:47 AM CDT
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the governor of Texas has been making quite a bit of noise lateley about secceeding.This seems like a no brainer for the rest of the country, we would need some humanitarian safeguards, specifcaly anyone from Aftexistan should be allowed to migrate north and we would have to make sure that they didn’t have nuclear weapons, but other than that it seems like a the best solution to the countries Texas problem.
The country of Aftexistan would also probably absorb a lot of the unproductive citizens from other states, and it would be a good opportunity to see if christian socialism can succeed. Texas, go ahead make my day.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:23 AM CDT
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More Tea Party video
Posted by Al Swearengen as Comedy, Video, politics at 9:41 PM CDT
6 Comments »
Chalk up one for Al…I called this
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen at 12:21 AM CDT
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This is so fun to watch! One of those ‘tea parties’
Posted by Al Swearengen as Comedy, Economics, Video, politics at 9:34 PM CDT
1 Comment »
At pandagon Amanda Marcotte challenges the notion that children are a bundle of joy and that we need to overpopulate to keep our economy going.
At Donkeylicious Niel Sinababu suggests immigration as a solution for those who worry about social security.
The only thing I would add is that some people view children as a material good and as such they feel a need to acquire as many of them as they can, government policies that discourage kid hoarding and perhaps and end to charites that encourage people to have lots of kids might also be a good idea.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:52 PM CDT
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This is really good news, hopefully the trend will continue.
There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.
The positive nature of this is somewhat tempered by the fact that the remaining christians are becoming more radicalized.
A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that “these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more ‘evangelical’ outlook among Christians.” With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe.
If that trend continues we will probably wind up with a vast underclass of people who insist on believing in creation myths and having large families, all because they know the “rapture” is just around the corner. These people will be left behind, but not in the way they think, chances are they will get bitter over generations of not seeing any of their mythology come true, while the heathens continue to live better and better lives by abandoning the mythology of the past. Leading to a small hard-core group of extremists, who sit around in caves and plot attacks on non-believers. This seems like a familiar story, I just can’t remember from where.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:48 AM CDT
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Some people are suggesting our standard of living might be higher with less people:
So the Malthusian logic that says that higher levels of population is a disaster no longer applies. But I’m still not at all convinced that the reverse logic that says that lower levels of population is a disaster does apply. True, lower population will lead to lower measured GDP, but the relevant issue is GDP per capita. We’ve moved away from a strictly resource-based economy, but resources are still pretty darn important. If Canada had only 30,000 inhabitants instead of 30,000,000 citizens, then it seems to me that those 30,000 Canadians could be fabulously wealthy. Conversely, if Alaska had as many inhabitants as California, then Alaskan oil revenues wouldn’t be nearly the boon that they currently are. And if the United States had 200 million citizens instead of 300 million, surely our commute times would be much shorter and patterns of residency would be more driven by where there’s demand for workers and less by where there’s affordable housing.
Also, if their were less people we probably would not have issues with climate change, and if you believe that the wars we are fighting are at least partially about resources(I happen to think they are all about resources) we would probably not be embroiled in so many conflicts.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 5:23 PM CDT
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Nurse says Octamom doesn’t care about her kids, and that is a shock to who?
Octamom lost one of her children about a year ago
Octamom would like her own TV show, this seems like a bad idea inthat it will give social services even more evidence that she is crazy.
Octamom is dissapointed that formula and diaper companies don’t want to sponsor her craziness. I wish fertility doctors were as ethical.
Their is a lot more stuff out there, I guess she is sort of a stimulus package for writers.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:32 AM CDT
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I got this via Pandagon as a response to the argument that we need high birth rates to maintain social security:
But without denying that the effect is real, this strikes even a lover of Social Security such as myself as a pretty unpersuasive reason to explicitly target higher birthrates as a policy objective. If it’s true—as I’m inclined to think it is—that slower population growth rates are likely to increase average living standards then people could still be made better off even with smaller transfer payments. Alternatively, a developed country that did find itself in desperate need of additional workers can always let more immigrants in.
Also, if you only have one kid chances are inheritence will be larger, after all you wont be splitting it amongst multiple siblings and by only having one kid you may actually save more money. Who knows people might even be able to afford college for their one child rather than having five of them start their adult life deeply in debt.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:51 AM CDT
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Looks like other people are starting to notice that low birth rates may be a good thing:
Matt recently had an interesting post reminding everyone that a lower population has the strong benefit of decreasing the number of people who need to share resources. Predictably, Ross Douthat, knowing that low birthrates are often an indicator of dangerous levels of female equality, threw a minor fit over it. Congrats to Matt for not caving to the disingenuous panic about pension programs, and pointing out a relevant point indicating that there is some level of hypocrisy/bullshitting going on
This seems a bit strange to me, however, since the people urging us to panic about low birthrates are almost always conservatives who oppose the existence of such programs. Certainly, the two commenters I was citing seemed to feel this way.
But he also brings up two things that are simply ignored by people making the argument that we need forced child-bearing to make sure that our dependent elderly are cared for:
What’s more, it’s not entirely clear to me how true this really is. After all, children are a significant—and legitimate—claim on the public purse. And high birthrates seem likely to lead to low workforce participation on the part of women, which makes sustaining your retirement benefits more difficult. Conceivably you could get around that by making public spending on child care and preschool and after school programs even more generous, but that just gets you back around to where we started.
Considering that the people making these arguments would see most women turned into housewives, they’re actually suggesting that we dump what’s probably upwards of 40% of current workers from the workforce, because we’re that desperate for labor. Another thing that seems like it would be great for the economy is cutting that amount of income to so many households, who are already not spending because they don’t have enough money. And the key to making sure that there’s enough money for a dependent elderly population is to dramatically increase the number of dependents overall. Perhaps, if women put our minds to it, we can turn 75-80% of the country into dependents.
I’m only mildly kidding. Obviously, the demographic panickers don’t expect poor women and women of color to quit their jobs and become housewives, and they probably don’t intend for them to be the ones having a dozen children. Ideally, they’d quit fucking altogether so they have more time to work. Because, from what I can tell, Matt’s right and the entire low birthrate panic goes straight back to people who are looking for any excuse to claim that women’s rights have to be revoked for the good of the world. But in order to believe that more children automatically means more wealth because it’s more labor, you have to both ignore the fact that it means less labor (because you take so many women out of the labor pool), but you also have to assume that the only thing that creates wealth is labor, and resources have nothing to do with it. Which is easy to believe if you’re already wealthy enough to shield yourself from the pains of growing prices on all sorts of items, from real estate to gas to food, caused by heightened demand, but for the rest of us, not so much.
Kids are also part of the American dream just like a big car and house in the suburbs, the problem being that all those things are enviromentally damaging and less fulfilling than people think they are. Also, they are expensive in the form of roads and fire protection for the burbs and more schools for the little bundles of joy. The government should do whatever it can to discourage people from having kids, this means making all forms of birth control readily available, mandating real sex education(not abstinence only) in any school that recieves federal money and ending tax advantages for people that have large families, and yes, an end to fertility research and treatment.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 1:14 AM CDT
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Legalizing pot should be a no-brainer
Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:05 PM CDT
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