Enjoy.
The point here is not that the extremism benefits the GOP. It may well have contributed to the party’s losing streak in recent years. But it does help opponents of change, as the shrieking chaos discredits the legislative process. When you’re rebutting death panels or socialism rather than talking about health-care reform, health-care reform is losing. And the fact that conservative extremists, with the help of establishment sympathizers, are so effective at enveloping the political process in crazy makes it much harder for Democratic presidents to actually do anything substantial. If you think back to Medicare Part D, or No Child Left Behind, there just wasn’t a similar dynamic.
Here. More or less what I realized a week ago. It’s the Luddite approach to politics – when you don’t like the direction of progress you take off your wooden shoe and submit it to the grinding gears. I can’t blame them for trying to halt progress – that’s more or less the aim of all political protest; strikes, boycotts, sit-ins and marches. They force people to slow down and consider whatever you’re protesting. However the difference between your traditional sit-down strike and what’s currently going on is that traditionally you’d protest a reform that’s actually happening. Not protesting the cockamamie dreamland threat of non-existent “death panels” conceived only by the mind of a half-cocked former Alaskan governor.
What we have is a conservative political class full of cowards who, afraid to face the political weight of a public riled up in favor of healthcare reform and other progressive issues, sent them to chase false bogeymen in the political wilderness. All I can say of anyone standing on the same side of the aisle and willingness stands aside allowing fear and deception to be used for your cause is that you suffer from an entirely different ethical dilemma. A temporary or permanent dislocation of a sense of honor from your person.
Here’s hoping you can find it again.
Be careful of what you get for free...health center at my undergrad used to pass these out...always check the expiration date!!!
First of all, I am going to say that I absolutely love Google and their Apps. They’re useful, free and I use them to work on school projects with a team. I love it. I really do, but I think this “going Google” movement isn’t such a great idea for anyone concerned with corporate security.
Google has just unveiled a new marketing campaign aimed at increasing the popularity of Google Apps. Now Google Apps are great, if you don’t give a shit who accesses them.
The first ad can be seen here:
Now here is what Google isn’t telling you – the use of Google Apps by Twitter (which uses the Apps for Email, spreadsheets, etc) is primarily how Hacker Croll leaked a ton of confidential company information to Tech Crunch.
I’ve linked to the whole article (well worth a read), but the gist of it is that Hacker Croll Googled Twitter employees, found their Google Email addresses, “forgot” one’s password and had a new one sent to a deactivated email address he then reactivated, entered that employee’s Gmail account where he then had access to all the Google Documents and spreadsheets of that employee, including the names and passwords of other Twitter employees.
Essentially one weak link unravelled all of Twitter’s corporate security…and the guy didn’t even have to use any fancy hacking algorithms or write any viruses. He took advantage of a basic human weakness – we can’t remember our own damn passwords.
So you don’t have to pay out the ass for Microsoft software upgrades, but you’re more susceptible to corporate sabotage. It’s like using expired Premium discount condoms while you’re out banging hookers.
–Kate
I left a comment over at Rutherford’s blog, which I figured was worth reposting here. It’s in reference to the Research 2000 poll claiming more than 50% of Southerners are convinced the President was born in the United States. Here’s an adapted version of that comment.
What you have is a people, already resentful of the federal governmen basically acting like a bunch of sore losers. I don’t believe for a second that over half of southerners actually believe Obama wasn’t born in the US, what I do believe is that they will take any excuse they can for not recognizing him as president. It’s not really ignorance so much as it’s twisted wishful thinking. It’s like the guy who loses the race and convinces himself he only lost because the other guy is on steroids. It’s a regionwide bout of the “rationalizations,” and while a number of people will try to read more into it, I’m afraid there isn’t a lot more to read.
I’ve entered that realm, being paid to blog. Or more accurately, the people who were already paying me to do other things have decided that I should be blogging with my time as well. Which is all well and fine; I’ve been blogging anyways, so you know, they might as well as have me do it for them.
From here on out, an appreciable portion of my environmental blogging will be done for my employers at Alabama Land Trust, Inc & Georgia Land Trust, Inc. If you really want to know about the finer points of conservation gruntwork, come visit. If you’re not interested, well, I don’t blame you. I’ll still be doing some environmental blogging here. I fear my employers aren’t all that interested in me expressing a number of opinions in their name.
For example, I have an unmuted fascination for the Mongolian Death Worm.
It’s reportedly 5 feet long, can spit stomach acid and emits an electric charge. On top of all that it looks hellaciously like a Graboid. It’s also never been officially documented so it could be a Mongolian boogaboo on the same level as the Chupacabra or a Yeti. It may, however, also be an extremely rare form of wildlife which is rarely found because of its Gobi Desert home and subterranean existence. Here’s hoping.
Try as I might to explain to my boss the urgency of highlighting the wildlife conservation issues surrounding the protection of the might-be-endangered Mongolian Death Worm, they just won’t bite. Apparently it doesn’t have anything to do with conservation in the Southeast, or the nation in general. Sad day.
Oh no, could the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act be working? EPI seems to think so:
The Commerce Department reported today that gross domestic product (GDP) contracted at a 1% annual rate in the second quarter of 2009, following a 6.4% decline in the previous quarter. GDP is the total market value of goods and services produced in the U.S. economy; it is generally considered the most comprehensive measure of economic activity.
The marked improvement in this quarter relative to last is largely due to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Despite the needed boost from the ARRA (up to 3 full percentage points of annualized growth in the quarter), the U.S. economy has still contracted over the past year by 3.9%, the largest annual contraction since 1947…
…Furthermore, real (inflation-adjusted) disposable personal income rose by 3.2% in the quarter, after rising by only 1% in the previous quarter. A large contribution to this increase was made by the Making Work Pay tax credit passed in conjunction with the ARRA, as this was the first full quarter that the credit was in effect. Inflation-adjusted transfer payments (including a one-time payment to Social Security recipients) rose at an annual rate of over 6% in the quarter as well.
This increase in disposable personal incomes did not translate into a sharp boost in consumption spending because the personal savings rate jumped again — rising to 5.2% in the second quarter, up from 4% in the previous quarter. This slippage between personal incomes and consumption spending caused by a rising savings rate makes plain that, instead of focusing on even more tax cuts, it was wise to make sure that much of the ARRA was devoted to direct public investment spending. The public investment spending in the ARRA, while not having a significant impact in the second quarter, will provide an even stronger boost to the economy in quarters to come.
The consensus of macroeconomic forecasters is that ARRA contributed roughly 3% to annualized growth rates in the second quarter. This means that absent its effects, economic performance would have resembled that of the previous three quarters, when the economy contracted at an average annual rate of 4.9%. In short, the recovery act turned this quarter’s economic performance from disastrous to merely bad. This is no small achievement, but with even more public relief and investments, the U.S. economy could do much better.
The smackdown is here. Money quote:
This is the stupidest thing Jonah Goldberg has ever written, by far, which makes it the stupidest thing anyone has ever written in the history of human beings writing things, and beyond that, it is the stupidest thing ever in the history of human beings farting and masturbating and eating poop on purpose.
His column is about how global climate change is stupidey-fakey because Earth might get suddenly hit by a meteor….
…When we all die it is going to be because we got hit by a great big fucking stupid meteor of stupid.
He’s a cultural remnant. A leftover from the time when all villagers had professional mourners that’d be hired by the family of the dead to wail and scream in an incoherent frenzy in in the deceased’s honor. Except time has rolled on and there’s no one left to cry for. Left so unguided, and molded into a television persona, such a mourner just cries about everything, including his undying hatred for otters and sea turtles (Why? We don’t know, and we’re not entirely sure it matters to Glenn Beck) on the behalf of whoever will pay the bills. For the right price I’m sure he’d strip naked and lay down in front of a washed-up Orka whale to cry his eyes out. He’s payed to do one thing, make a ruckus, and that’s all he knows. Natch:
Just to find Matt Taibbi already set it for you:
The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done. It doesn’t matter that it’s an urgent national calamity, that it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse and needs to be fixed very soon, and that, moreover, the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes.
It won’t get done, because that’s not the way our government works. Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing. Personally, I think they’re doing a lousy job even of that. I lauded Roddick for playing out the string with heart, and giving a good show. But these Democrats aren’t even pretending to give a shit, not really. I mean, they’re not even willing to give up their vacations.
This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a political majority in congress and a popular president armed with oodles of political capital and backed by the overwhelming sentiment of perhaps 150 million Americans, and this government could not bring itself to offend ten thousand insurance men in order to pass a bill that addresses an urgent emergency. What’s left? Third-party politics?
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think it’d be a net positive if committee chairman had more to fear in terms of losing their chairmanship, but I don’t think this could be any worse of an idea:
In an apparent warning to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), some liberal Democrats have suggested a secret-ballot vote every two years on whether or not to strip committee chairmen of their gavels.
Baucus, who is more conservative than most of the Democratic Conference, has frustrated many of his liberal colleagues by negotiating for weeks with Republicans over healthcare reform without producing a bill or even much detail about the policies he is considering.
“Every two years the caucus could have a secret ballot on whether a chairman should continue, yes or no,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. “If the ‘no’s win, [the chairman’s] out.”
The respective parties already have a number of healthy mechanisms to leverage individual Senators, as well as mechanisms for removing chairmen. When you have a chairman acting legislatively, like a boob, they should be held to a greater standard of accountability. However, they should be more accountible to the people they represent, not greater accountability to partisan politics. Though Baucus’s inclusivity as far as drafting the single most important healthcare bill in congressional history is, well, how can I say it, undemocratic, it’s important not to design party-wide political mechanisms on the basis of one incident alone.
The problem with this particular mechanism is that it assumes the party mainstream is the sane part of the party. This may be true most of the time, but what would happen, for example, if the Democrats went through a Republican-like “lost in the wilderness” period. It’d just be a mechanism to let the chickens more easily rule the roost.
-Marc-
