Batter Up (To No Good)

If what ESPN's reporting Tuesday evening is true, then the sport of baseball's about to take another Steroid Era fastball to the junk with no cup, as a major provider of performance-enhancing drugs is ratting out his all-star clients.

Major League Baseball will seek to suspend about 20 players connected to the Miami-area clinic at the heart of an ongoing performance-enhancing drug scandal, including Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun, possibly within the next few weeks, "Outside the Lines" has learned. If the suspensions are upheld, the performance-enhancing drug scandal would be the largest in American sports history.


Tony Bosch, founder of the now-shuttered Biogenesis of America, reached an agreement this week to cooperate with MLB's investigation, two sources told "Outside the Lines," giving MLB the ammunition officials believe they need to suspend the players.

One source familiar with the case said the commissioner's office might seek 100-game suspensions for Rodriguez, Braun and other players, the penalty for a second doping offense. The argument, the source said, is that the players' connection to Bosch constitutes one offense, and previous statements to MLB officials denying any such connection or the use of PEDs constitute another. Bosch and his attorneys did not return several calls. MLB officials refused to comment when reached Tuesday.

Bosch is expected to begin meeting with officials -- and naming names -- within a week. The announcement of suspensions could follow within two weeks.

Gonna be a weird All-Star game with no actual all-stars playing, considering about a score of them are about to get dump trucks dropped on them from Bud Selig's office.  And A-Rod getting 100 games out?  That's pretty much lights out for his career.

Not that I'm all broken up about any Yankees getting the hook for a century or anything.

Going For The Throat

President Obama, having gotten Judge Sri Srinavasan appointed to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals without any fuss whatsoever, now unveils the full majesty of his move:  appointing three more judges at the same time to fill the remaining three seats on the court's bench.

The president’s simultaneously nomination of the three judges for the D.C. Circuit, first reported by CQ Roll Call on May 10, sends a strong message that he intends to push for the nominees in a way that he has not lobbied for his other lower-court choices. Obama had never appeared alongside a judicial nominee other than for the Supreme Court, according to advocates.

The D.C. Circuit is widely considered the second-most-powerful court in the nation because of the important national security and administrative law cases it hears. It received its first new judge since 2006 last month when the Senate confirmed Sri Srinivasan, the former principal deputy solicitor general in the Justice Department, in a unanimous vote. Senate Republicans had twice filibustered Obama’s previous choice to the court, Caitlin J. Halligan, whose nomination was withdrawn earlier this year.

Obama nominated Patricia Ann Millett, an appellate attorney in Washington; Cornelia T.L. “Nina” Pillard, a law professor at Georgetown University; and Judge Robert L. Wilkins of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The Senate confirmed Wilkins to his current post by a voice vote in December 2010.

Republicans are now stuck having to pass all three nominees and giving the President exactly what he wants, or filibustering the nominations and facing a bully pulpit call for the nuclear option to end judicial filibusters.

Either way, the President wins.  I love it.

StupidiNews!

• Flooding along the Mississippi River has forced evacuations north of St. Louis as a second levee breach in two days threatens thousands of residents.
• House Republicans are moving forward with legislation that would ban all abortions in America past 20 weeks.
• A federal bankruptcy judge has removed the last major obstacle to US Airways merging with American Airlines and becoming the world's largest air carrier.
• A new report finds fewer US families are dealing with medical bankruptcies, indicating health care costs are on the way down.
• A new ruling from the International Trade Commission in Samsung's favor could ban the sale of older Apple iPhone and iPad models in the US.

Last Call For Revenge

The Associated Press has decided it has the power to make things very uncomfortable for the Obama administration, and has decided to hit back.

Some of President Barack Obama’s political appointees, including the secretary for Health and Human Services, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press.

The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees’ email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses.

The AP asked for the addresses following last year’s disclosures that the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency had used separate email accounts at work. The practice is separate from officials who use personal, non-government email accounts for work, which generally is discouraged — but often happens anyway — due to laws requiring that most federal records be preserved.

The secret email accounts complicate an agency’s legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails in response to congressional or internal investigations, civil lawsuits or public records requests because employees assigned to compile such responses would necessarily need to know about the accounts to search them. Secret accounts also drive perceptions that government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions.

The Associated Press has decided that it felt the Obama administration was abusing its power and trust.  Apparently, the AP has countered by doing much the same thing by putting these email addresses out there, certainly ones they've used to communicate with administration officials.  At best, that's just being a bunch of douchebags.  At worst, it's rank hypocrisy.

The AP story gives the impression that this is unprecedented, making no mention of the use of the multiple addresses by previous administrations.

U.S. Senators and Representatives also typically have non-published e-mail addresses, though Congress exempted itself from Freedom of Information laws. It seems obvious that political figures of both parties would need an unlisted e-mail address that cannot be easily guessed for communications with advisers and colleagues — just as cabinet secretaries private cell phone numbers would not be publicly available, though their main office number would be.

Despite Alexander’s concern, the release of this information shows that both the public and private email addresses are public record and that any legitimate FOIA request or subpoena for records would include those sent to and from both addresses.

People forget that at their heart, news organizations are intelligence-gathering agencies, and that intelligence can be misused for personal reasons. Somebody might want to refresh the AP's collective memory on that, and tell them to knock off this message pitch crap.

They Still Can't Stop Lying About Obamacare

As I pointed out on Saturday, Forbes.com hack Avik Roy is paid to lie quite professionally about things like Obamacare raising premiums 146% in California, and did a great job of it right up until the point it took Ezra Klein one paragraph to bury him.

Roy got his 146 percent by heading to eHealthInsurance.com, running a search for insurance plans in California and comparing the cost of the cheapest plans to the cost of the plans being offered in the exchanges. That’s not just comparing apples to oranges. It’s comparing apples to oranges that the fruit guy may not even let you buy.

Roy, caught red-handed, has decided to respond by simply move the goalposts and declaring victory.

To Ezra, it’s galling that three-fourths of his compatriots can pay $109 for health insurance, because 12 percent were not eligible for the plan, and another 14 percent had to pay somewhat more. This is why Obamacare is a great achievement, he says, because Health Net will have to serve all comers, regardless of prior health status.

And I appreciate Ezra’s perspective. I, too, am a supporter of universal coverage, so I understand Ezra’s passion for providing health insurance to the sick. But what we didn’t know last week—and we do now—is how much more the healthy will have to pay for that insurance, under Obamacare. In Orange County, where Irvine is located, the three-fourths of the 25-year-old population that is in good health will have their premiums jacked by 95 percent.

Same false argument, dressed up in different misleading numbers.  Now Roy has found a narrow, specific category where premiums will rise for people, but that's a far cry from his "everyone will see premiums go up 64%-146%" claim earlier, plus 25-year olds will be eligible for being on their parents plans, and if you're under 30, you can get catastrophic coverage still, which exactly addresses the point Roy was attacking (that Obamacare forces young people to buy expensive insurance). But he can't leave without declaring victory on all those intellectually bankrupt liberals...

But in the end, I’m glad that we’re finally having the intellectually honest argument about Obamacare that we should have been having all along. No, Obamacare won’t decrease the cost of your insurance by $2,500 a year. Indeed, it could raise it by that much. No, under Obamacare, you can’t keep your plan, if you like your plan. Instead, you’ll be forced to buy a costlier plan with add-ons that you neither need nor want.

If you’re a leftie, you likely think that’s a good thing. But you should have said so all along. The fact is that Obamacare was sold to the public under false pretenses, and the chickens are now coming home to roost.

So now Roy has completely knocked all the pieces off the board and has claimed victory because you lied first, liberals so I win!

Jonathan Cohn sinks this argument handily:

Roy is no dummy. He’s well aware of these facts. He could have acknowledged them, and went on to make the case that the benefits are not worth those costs—that it’s fundamentally unfair to ask young, healthy, affluent people to pay more, or that Obamacare’s whole scheme is just so inefficient as to make it worse than the alternative.¹ As Aaron Carroll wrote the other day, Obamacare involves real trade-offs: Higher-income people have to pay higher taxes, the health care industry has to endure lower payments from Medicare, and—yes—some young, healthy, affluent people have to pay more for private insurance. Those of us who support the law believe that's a worthwhile price to pay to help achieve universal coverage, given the lack of politically viable alternatives. Roy disagrees, I know, and he could have made that argument in a nuanced way last week.

But Roy didn’t do that. And while all of us are susceptible to hyperbole or selective interpretation from time to time, Roy's column was something else entirely. He plucked out two examples of people who would pay more in California, pretended they were emblematic of the system as a whole, then accused other writers of being irresponsible. His argument hasn't held up well to scrutiny, but it's part of the political conversation and, I'm sure, will remain so for a while.

.So the only logical explanation is that Avik Roy is lying professionally.  Like I said, paid to lie.

Hang Out In The Middle Of The Jersey Turnpike Long Enough...

...and the truck comes barreling right for you.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s death Monday morning sets up a complicated succession process that will have implications for two Garden State politicians widely believed to hold national ambitions: Gov. Chris Christie (R) and Newark Mayor Cory Booker (D).

With Lautenberg’s passing, it falls to Christie to appoint a temporary replacement and to decide when to schedule the election to replace Lautenberg, both while he faces his own re-election in November and tries to build his brand on the national stage. Booker, who all-but officially announced his decision to run for Lautenberg’s seat in December, may find himself simultaneously facing off against Christie’s chosen successor and confronting the consequences of the stormy relationship he had with Lautenberg prior to the senator’s death.

Chris Christie has tried to hang out in the middle of the New Jersey Turnpike for four years now, and this is now what he faces:



He's going to lose badly no matter what he does.  He can't choose a far-right Tea Party nutjob, because he's facing re-election in a blue state in less than six months.  He can't choose a moderate because the nutjobs running his party will bury him.  He can't punt and call a special election without nominating anyone because then he gets pegged as a wimp, and he can't wait until November to hold the election because it will bring out Democratic voters in a big way, and that could hurt his chances for re-election.  He can't resign, pass the buck to Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, and have her send him to the Senate because they'd both get killed in November by Democrats. Most of all, if he doesn't pick the New Jersey equivalent of Chuck Grassley, any ambitions beyond Jersey are over for him nationally.

Nate Silver actually does have some objective advice for Christie if his goal is increasing GOP power in the Garden State:

Mr. Christie might have decent choices from New Jersey’s list of current United States representatives. Six of the state’s 12 representatives are Republicans, and most of those Republicans are quite moderate.

In particular, Mr. Christie could appoint one of the two Republican representatives — Frank LoBiondo of the Second Congressional District and Jon Runyan of the Third — who won re-election last year in districts carried by President Obama. Mr. Runyan had the better fund-raising performance last year, bringing in $2.1 million for his campaign, compared with $1.6 million for Mr. LoBiondo.

Because of New Jersey’s strong Democratic lean, the appointee would still probably be the underdog against Mayor Cory Booker of Newark or whomever the Democrats nominated. But someone like Mr. Runyan would stand a fighting chance, whereas an underqualified nominee or a conservative Republican would most likely be added to the long list of Senate appointees who failed at the ballot box.

But there's no way he can do that without incurring the wrath of the teabaggers.  He's utterly screwed and he knows it. 

And it couldn't happen to a more deserving sack of crap.

StupidiNews!

• The US is sending Patriot missile batteries and F-16 fighter jets to Jordan to beef up defenses there as the US ally takes on an increasing number of refugees from neighboring war-torn Syria.
• One of Turkey's largest trade union groups is joining the growing protests against the Erdogan government and calling for a two-day national strike.
• President Obama's power to make recess appointments is expected to go before the Supreme Court later this year as Republicans want to sharply curtail the practice.
• NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's campaign against sugary sodas is now expanding to take on fruit drinks, teas, and energy drinks.
• Social media game maker Zynga is laying off 18 percent of its staff and concentrating on mobile platforms as the company's losses reached $200 million last year.

Last Call For The High Risk Pool Fools

House Republicans really do seem to be completely incapable of any sort of competent governance, because even when they try it, they fail miserably.  For example, House Republicans have gotten a lot of 100% deserved criticism that their plan to repeal Obamacare does nothing to help the tens of millions of Americans who would still be without affordable health insurance.  So what's Eric Cantor's answer?

Why, giving them crappy, unaffordable health insurance, or course!

The original bill, championed by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), transferred $3.6 billion from Obamacare’s $10 billion prevention and public health fund to the law’s temporary high-risk pool aimed at covering sick people for the remainder of this year.

The altered version wipes out Obamacare’s prevention fund entirely and uses the money to fund state-based high-risk pools which have nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.

“To address the concerns raised several weeks ago, an amended version of the bill has been drafted,” Cantor wrote Friday afternoon in a memo to House Republicans, which was provided to TPM. “The amendment does not utilize or fund the existing [Obamacare high-risk pool] program, which will expire at the end of the year. Instead, the amendment provides funding for state based high risk pools, the framework that represents the conservative policy answer to helping Americans with preexisting conditions.”

Now keep in mind that these high-risk state pools were temporary measures to provide some insurance to people who had none.  It didn't work out too well, but that's why it was a temporary measure.  The cogitators in the House GOP want to make this permanent and call it a solution.

State-based high risk pools, which already exist in many states, are a favorite GOP alternative to Obamacare. While they make some strides in covering people with pre-existing conditions, they are very expensive without younger and healthier people in the system as a counter-balance. (The temporary high-risk pool created under Obamacare quickly ran out of money, too.) States tend not to be able to afford — or want to spend the money — to adequately cover their residents under high risk pools.

So once again these clowns choose pretty much the worst way to govern.  Surprise!

Ride Of The Young Guns

The College Republican National Committee (yeah, who knew, right?) is blasting the GOP leadership over the increasing loss of America's young voters in a new report examining what went wrong with 2012 and voters under 35.

In the report, the young Republican activists acknowledge their party has suffered significant damage in recent years. A sampling of the critique on:

Gay marriage: “On the ‘open-minded’ issue … [w]e will face serious difficulty so long as the issue of gay marriage remains on the table.”

Hispanics: “Latino voters … tend to think the GOP couldn’t care less about them.”

Perception of the party’s economic stance: “We’ve become the party that will pat you on your back when you make it, but won’t offer you a hand to help you get there.”

Big reason for the image problem: The “outrageous statements made by errant Republican voices.”

Words that up-for-grabs voters associate with the GOP: “The responses were brutal: closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.”

“[The] Republican Party has won the youth vote before and can absolutely win it again,” the report says, pointing to presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush who were competitive with that demographic. “But this will not occur without significant work to repair the damage done to the Republican brand among this age group over the last decade.”

So in order to win over young voters, the GOP has to be...more like the Democrats.  Considering the Democrats have already staked out this territory, good luck with that, kids.  Republicans are a dead-end party that will not go gentle in that teabag night until the Tea Party cancer is ripped out and disposed of.  That's going to take getting rid of them at both the national and the state level, and the latter part of that isn't going to happen for another decade or so at the minimum.

Meanwhile, the country will try to survive the storm, I guess.  But if the future of the GOP has basically given up on the party as a going concern, and their big idea to save the party is "We need to pretend to be more like the Democrats on social stuff and still stick it to poor people" then I'm betting that when the rubble clears, the Democrats will have a long run ahead of them.

The issue of course is how much of the country gets reduced to that rubble in the meantime.

Thy Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds

At least women always know where they stand with the GOP.  After repeated refusals to pass legislation to guarantee fair pay, a woman finally steps forward and explains that women don't want fair pay.  Republican congresswoman Marsha Blackburn says that women being recognized in the workplace is "more important" than equal pay for the same duties and responsibilities.

Thanks for clearing that up, doll.

During a roundtable discussion on NBC's Meet The Press, former White House advisor David Axelrod asked if she would support a law promoting workplace gender equality. Blackburn responded:

"I think that more important than that is making certain that women are recognized by those companies. You know, I’ve always said that I didn’t want to be given a job because I was a female, I wanted it because I was the most well-qualified person for the job. And making certain that companies are going to move forward in that vein, that is what women want. They don’t want the decisions made in Washington. They want to be able to have the power and the control and the ability to make those decisions for themselves."

Not only did she dodge the issue with some truly Palin-esque babble there, she manages to act a fool and contradict herself while insulting just about every woman everywhere.  She calls recognition more important, seemingly without understanding that most people work for money and that raises and bonuses are perfectly acceptable forms of recognition.  Apparently, if you don't accept a "good job" in lieu of being paid as much as the man sitting next to you, it's time to suck it up and be a team player.

Because there is no logical argument against promising to pay men and women fairly, she then clarifies that she is all about equality because she wants to earn her job by being the most qualified, not because she is a woman.  Dandy, but how about the most qualified also being paid the most competitive wage, even if the worker is a woman?  That makes sense to everyone but Republicans.  To speak on behalf of women and say that we don't want the decisions made in Washington is atrocious.  Women fought hard for fair pay and workplace equality, and were shot down by a unanimous GOP vote.  Then she pops a useless but empowering phrase about how women can make those decisions for themselves.  Just what decisions are we talking about?  Because unfair pay practices are legal, what choices do women have exactly?  I suppose we can choose whether we are underpaid by this guy or that guy.

It's hypocritical to believe that government shouldn't intervene to enforce fair treatment of women, and then turn around and use government to further take away their rights and freedoms.  It's way more hypocritical to sell out your gender to jockey for position in an organization determined to oppress them.  It's the height of hypocrisy to support unfairness while claiming to be giving women what they really want.  Funny, I haven't heard a single woman ever say she wanted a smaller paycheck, higher insurance costs, less access to screenings and lifesaving medical treatments and insurmountable odds.  I guess we're just lucky enough to find it everywhere we go.

StupidiNews!

• Last weekend's death toll from Midwest tornadoes is now 16, including the deaths of professional storm chaser and engineer Tim Samaras, his son Paul, and colleague Carl Young.
• Al-Qaeda in Yemen is hyping Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, claiming he got the recipe for the bombs from the group's online magazine.
• A devastating disease has ripped through the coffee plantations of Central America this spring, putting thousands out of work and threatening dramatic coffee price spikes.
• Tens of thousands continue to pour into Istanbul's streets to protest President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as political unrest grips Turkey's capital.
• Apple has reportedly reached a deal with Warner Music and Universal Music ahead of this week's big developer's conference, where rumors of an Apple streaming radio service abound.

Last Call For Government

The brilliant minds of conservative punditry are convinced this weekend that the IRS scandal is so fundamentally huge that America is on the verge of rising up by the tens of millions and demanding an end to Obama, the Democrats, and liberalism itself, leading to a new permanent era of Republican rule and FREEDOM and LIBERTY and stuff.  As such, they are trying to endless top each other about their calls for revolution against the government.

Peggy Noonan calls for an independent counsel because the poor people at the IRS were clearly forced by the terribly evil Obama administration to do...well, terrible evil.

There will be more hearings next week, and fair enough. But down the road an independent counsel is going to be needed because the House does not have all the prosecutorial powers an independent counsel would—the powers to empanel a grand jury, grant immunity to potential witnesses, find evidence of criminal wrongdoing, indict.

Another reason to want an independent counsel: There are obviously many good, fair-minded workers in the IRS, people of sterling character. They deserve to be asked about what they were forced to put up with, what they felt they had to bite their tongues about. 

There may even be a few stories about people who stood up and said: "You know you're targeting Americans because they hold political views you don't like, right? You know that's wrong, right? And I'm not going to do it."

It would be worth an investigation that breaks open the IRS to find that person, and that moment. You have no idea how much better it would make us feel, how inspiring and comforting, too. 

Because witch hunts are feel-good exercises. Mark Steyn at the National Review sees Noonan and raises with his call for the abolition of the IRS, civil resistance to its actions and apparently taxation itself.

So let’s take Obama at his word that he had no idea all this was going on. In that case, he might like to take the lead in calling for the abolition of a corrupt agency and its grotesque tax code, and their replacement by a bureaucracy with more limited powers commensurate with a free society and a simplified tax regime with lower rates and thus fewer bewildering, mercurial “exemptions” that make the citizenry dependent on the caprices of Ms. Lerner and her colleagues. That’s a prize worth fighting for. In the meantime, the next time the IRS call you up with demands for this and demands for that, simply tell them, “I am filing the Lois Lerner defense,” and then say as she did to Congress “I have not done anything wrong. And I will not answer any questions.” Every man his own Lois Lerner!

So much for those poor IRS employees.  They, and the agency, have to go.   But Rich Lowry gets himself on WIN THE MORNING with his call to bring down the entire federal government.

Needless to say, this is not how American government is supposed to work. It reflects the mindset of the Progressives rather than the Founders. “The Constitution was designed,” DeMuth writes, “to make lawmaking cumbersome, representative, and consensual; the regulatory agency was a workaround, designed to make lawmaking efficient, specialized, and purposeful. It was a way to accommodate growing demands for government intervention in the face of the constitutional bias for limited government.”

And it has worked: “It has enabled the federal government of a vast, populous, diverse democracy to partake directly in the everyday affairs of scores of millions of citizens and businesses.” Some of them, like the conservative organizations that applied for 501(c)(4) status and got harassed by the IRS for their temerity, we hear about; most we don’t.

The administrative state is an open invitation to high-handedness. My colleague Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a piece for Bloomberg View on Obama’s lawlessness. Most of the examples have to do with the administration ignoring or distorting the laws via the bureaucracy. Obamacare says that states have to set up exchanges before the subsidies and penalties in the law apply? No matter. The IRS says it will pay out subsidies and impose penalties regardless of whether states set up exchanges.

All that of course has to go, along with the current executive branch's occupants.  We'll have to start over.  And of course that means "with Republicans in charge of everything forever."

This is where the leading lights of conservativsm have brought us:  scorched earth government, where if they can't be in charge, then it has to burn down and be rebuilt until they are.

The CEO Of America, Inc.

Time Magazine got their hands on Mitt Romney's executive branch transition report, detailing what would have happened to America's federal agencies if Romney had won.  The phrase "America should be run like a business" will never scare you more after reading what was in store for us:

In the months before the 2012 election, a group of high-powered consultants and political operatives prepared a secret report for candidate Mitt Romney, explaining how he should take over and restructure the federal government should he win the presidency.

“The White House staff is similar to a holding company” read one PowerPoint slide, which would have been presented to President-elect Romney as part of an expansive briefing on the morning after Election Day. It went on to list three main divisions of the metaphorical firm: “Care & Feeding Offices,” like speechwriting, “Policy Offices,” like the National Security Council, and “Packaging & Selling Offices,” like the office of the press secretary. This was the view of the Presidency Romney would have brought with him to Washington, a glimpse of the White House that never was — and plan that never saw the light of day.

But now the secret is out. On May 29, the Romney Readiness Project, the Republican candidate’s transition organization known as R2P, published a 138-page report detailing how it prepared for a potential Romney victory. It is the product of a team of nearly 500, who labored in Washington and around the country to be ready to help Romney assume the reins of power on January 20th, 2013, in accordance with the Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act of 2010.

Romney was dead serious about turning the federal government into a corporation, and turning executive branch agencies into divisions that produced "deliverables" and reach "metrics".

Even before the election, hundreds of staffers held table-top practice drills to game out how they would parachute into federal agencies to learn the ropes and explore policies and procedures for the new administration to change. Another team would work in “the bunker,” a secure room in the federal office building housing the transition where potential Cabinet and senior staff nominees and appointees were vetted. By Election Day, nearly 20 researchers and lawyers had prepared Romney to select his entire Cabinet and more than 25 senior White House staffers, as well as deputies for key departments and agency heads.

They were ready to go with the goal of making Romney the "CEO in Chief" of America, Inc. at the expense of the rest of us.  Absolute madness, this stuff. 

His plans for the first 200 days in office: repeal Obamacare, give the student loan business back to Wall Street, turn schools into distance learning centers, get rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and give the mortgage industry to Wall Street, 5% across the board federal budget cuts by firing 10% of all federal workers, implement the Ryan budget cutting spending to 20% of GDP by 2016 (meaning most likely another 20-30% cuts across the board), turn Medicaid into a block grant program...and then take all of those savings and massively expand the military, add 100,000 active troops, come up with a plan to start wars in Iran and Syria and scrap nuclear missile treaties with Russia.
We would have been screwed beyond reason by a Romney Presidency...and remember, any 2016 plan for the GOP candidate will be far worse than this.

How To Train, You're Draggin'

Mediaite's Tommy Christopher has put together a thoughtful piece on fixing MSNBC's ratings woes over the last couple of months, and I'm inclined to agree with a good portion of it.

The good news is that much of this is fixable. The news cycle is cyclical (hence the name), and so without changing anything, some of this damage will repair itself. MSNBC has been heavily promoting its full coverage of the George Zimmerman trial for the killing of Trayvon Martin, which could easily make the Jodi Arias trial look like an episode of Judge Judy. MSNBC can also help itself by exercising editorial judgment that plays to its strengths, and serves the public.

But there are things that are more within Phil Griffin‘s control which can be changed. Ratings woes or not, All In is better suited to 10 pm, while O’Donnell is a known quantity who can plug the leak at 8.

I agree with Joe Concha that two hours of Hardball is too much, but I’d keep the 5 pm edition, and give 7 o’clock to a new, younger-skewing talent like Joy Reid, who has been getting a lot of guest-hosting under her belt. Joy has impressive new media chops, but with more reporting experience than a lot of bloggers, and a point of view that meshes well with the network’s fastest-growing demographic. She’d also be the perfect digestif to the more outspoken, and less journalism-focused, Rev. Al Sharpton.

I like Chris Hayes, but he can't handle the 8 PM slot.  Period.  He's a good weekend host, but the 8 PM slot is just too much for the guy.  Hayes is a pundit, not a host.  I mean he's better than Ezra Klein hosting, but he doesn't have the presence.  And yes, I understand what I'm saying when I spend a pretty good portion of my time around here bemoaning shallow, information-free news production on cable.  I also understand that if nobody's watching, there's no point.

And right now, nobody's watching Chris Hayes.  It's sad.  It's also true.  Hayes "bends over backwards" as Christopher puts it to get conservatives on his show.  The problem is Hayes is far too nice to call bullshit on his guests.  He's non-confrontational to a fault and lets quite a bit of GOP gobbledegook slide by without challenging it.  There are plenty of network news shows that already provide that service, which is why I don't watch them.  Lawrence at least fights back.

However, I'm all for Joy Ann Reid over a second hour of Hardball.  Let's make that happen ASAP.

Last Call For The Unemployed In Wisconsin

Wisconsin Republicans are doing everything they can to brutally punish anyone who dares get unemployment benefits, because, well, just because.  We're doing this to protect workers, you see.

Among the changes included in the Republican-backed legislation would slightly increase the maximum allowable benefit by $7 to $370 per week, it would render anyone cut off from receiving benefits for not taking a job ineligible to ever receive benefits again until they find a job that pays at least six times his or her benefit rate at the time of termination of benefits. The current requirement is four times their benefit rate.

So if you get laid off (remember, you're ineligible for unemployment benefits in Wisconsin at all if you've been fired for "good cause" by the employer or quit yourself, it's up to the employee to prove they had a "good cause" to quit) and you get a measly $370 a week, you'll need to literally have a job earning more than $100,000 a year before you're eligible to get benefits again.  And you only get 13 weeks of benefits, max.  Good luck with that.

Oh, there's more:

It would force job applicants to apply for twice as many jobs to remain eligible for benefits. Currently employment seekers must apply for two jobs per week to keep unemployment benefits flowing. The new law raises that number to four.

Currently, people receiving educational or vocational training in order to qualify for a job can continue to receive unemployment benefits past their original expiration date. The new law would stop those payments.

Here's the best part:

The bill mandates that banks and financial institutions must hand over the private account information of any people suspected by the government of receiving overpayments.

In the event of overpayments, even those caused by government error or computer malfunctions, the government would be able to freeze and collect from the accounts of people receiving unemployment.

And remember, these are supposedly "small government Republicans" demanding these powers.

To recap, Republicans have zero problem with using the power of government to violate the freedoms of Americans if those Americans are those awful, parasitic unemployed.  They don't count as Americans anyway, the moochers.