Last Call

The Kroog reminds us that between 2001 and 2010, before HCR was ever on the books, 1 in six Americans lost their employer-based health insurance during the Bush years and the 2008 recession that followed.

Reed Abelson at Economix points us to a startling study on the effects of the Great Recession on health insurance. You can see similar trends in the Census data, but for whatever reason this survey — carried out by a highly reputable group — is even stronger. Here’s the key picture:

What this says is that the system that has provided workable insurance coverage to many (but not enough) Americans is coming apart at the seams. And this in turn means that if health reform goes down, we’re going to be looking at a wave of misery spreading across the land.

Republicans want to replace HCR with "You're at the mercy of the insurance companies.  Good luck."  And yes, this includes Mitt Romney, who has vowed time and time again to "repeal Obamacare".  Like it or not, it's the only way forward now.  If it's repealed...and if the GOP wins, it will be...then it's over.

Better choose a side.

Mitt's Deal With The Devil

So what's Mitt Romney going to do to win? Make a deal with the Devil, of course.

While Romney’s public activities are geared almost entirely toward winning the nomination, his campaign is on a private mission aimed beyond spring. Senior aides and surrogates — hoping to seize a moment when even some unfriendly Republicans are beginning to see Romney as inevitable — have spent the past several weeks making calls and visits to conservative leaders and activists who have resisted Romney’s candidacy.

Campaign manager Matt Rhoades has been wooing tea party organizers in general-election swing states and, in some cases, offering private meetings with Romney. Advisers with roots in the conservative movement, such as Bay Buchanan and Mark DeMoss, have been reaching out to evangelical leaders who are backing other candidates. Elected officials, led by Sen. Roy Blunt (Mo.), have been courting lawmakers and Beltway power-players who are not on board.

In Boston, longtime confidants Beth Myers and Ron Kaufman are developing a plan for the GOP convention in Tampa, to prevent the party from being divided during the nominee’s turn in the spotlight. Still other Romney emissaries are in touch with mega-donors — including billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who has been supporting former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), and Foster Friess, who backs former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) — to persuade them to jump ship.

The coordinated approach, detailed this week in interviews with Romney advisers and supporters, is designed to assure all factions within the party that, as one adviser said, “when the dust settles, we want everybody on board.”

This is the part where Romney makes his promises to the Tea Party and the Corporate wings of the GOP that their extremist nonsense will be his first political acts in office.  He wants Santorum and Gingrich out, and to do that, he has to convince the money people that Romney is for sale.

Of course he's for sale.  He stands for the highest bidder.  And he's making deals to get the Tea Party lunatics and the billionaires who fund them the America they want at the expense of all of the rest of us.

Do we finally understand that Mitt Romney is in no way, shape or form a "moderate" ?

Morocco Promises Changes In Rape-Marriage Law

RABAT, March 15 (Reuters) - Morocco on Thursday said it would amend a law allowing rapists to marry their underage female victims after the suicide of a teenage girl raised doubts about the effectiveness of reforms to women's rights in the country.

Sixteen-year-old Amina El-Filali killed herself last week near the northern city of Larache by swallowing rat poison after a six-month forced marriage to the man who raped her.

Local human rights activists say the law violates women's rights and was created to avoid damage to the reputation of the victim's family.

Rape victims in Morocco carry a stigma of shame and dishonour. They are often suspected by police and judges of consent, and little social assistance is given to help them rebuild their lives.

Convicted rapists face five to 10 years in prison, and up to 20 years when the victim is underage.

At the westernmost boundary of the Muslim world, and only a stone throw's away from Europe, Moroccan women find themselves enjoying more freedoms. A family law reformed in 2004 won the North African country praise from the West for giving Moroccan women more rights than many Arab states.

But that reform, which led to the creation of matrimonial courts, has been dogged by Morocco's conservative and predominantly male judges, and by a failure to adopt laws to ensure better protection to women from physical abuse.

If there was consent, it wouldn't be rape. There is no shame for the family, or the victim, or there shouldn't be. Being selected for rape can come down to opportunity, or something out of the victim's control, such as eye color or height. It cam come from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or as the result of a poor decision. But it never, ever comes from consent, or the very definition of rape is contradicted.

That a female minor could be raped and then forced to marry her attacker is insane. How does that save her or her family any pain? Compounding the mistake at the victim's expense is deplorable. Forced marriage is sickening enough as it is, but marrying one's attacker would be a lifetime of servitude to the person who caused them pain and terror.

And this is after radical improvements.

A Special Place In Hell, Oklahoma Style

"It is - if not the most - probably one of the most heinous crimes we've had in our county," said Undersheriff LouAnn Brown with the Osage County Sheriff's Office.

Investigators say the Thomas' four adopted children, two boys and two girls, were abused for as long as nine years. The children are between 13 and 15 years old.

"Food was an issue, and punishment, was they were only allowed a certain amount of food, the kids have talked about that and if they overstepped that limit then there was punishment," Brown said.

Court documents detail the children were allegedly paddled regularly, forced to eat horse manure, forced to perform sex acts, fed bar soap and cayenne pepper and forced to vomit food and eat it off the floor.

"It's hard because we have families of our own and for people to be able to adopt children and then abuse them like these children have been abused, it's just wrong," Brown said.

According to court documents, the couple had two other foster children who were removed from the home in 2003 by the Department of Human Services after signs of abuse were discovered.

This made me sick to my stomach.  This can't be chalked up to anything but pure evil.  I hope these two lose their freedom forever, and those poor kids are given the best that Oklahoma has to offer them.  Somebody dropped the ball, and these kids paid for it for almost a decade.  Unforgivable.

Split Decision Equals Derision

Republicans in Wisconsin continue to fall apart at the seams as Gov. Scott Walker's self-immolation keeps claiming political victims around him.

Wisconsin state Sen. Pam Galloway (R) is resigning from the chamber today, citing a family health situation. Galloway was one of the targeted incumbents in upcoming recall elections.

This also means that as of now, the Republicans have officially lost their Senate majority, leaving the chamber split 16-16. The recall elections to come will determine who takes the majority. 

Wisconsin Dems are not sitting idly by, and if they regain the Governor's mansion and the State Senate now, Wisconsin's GOP is done for.  It shows that we can fight back, even in states like Kentucky.  We'll see.

Last Call

And Barack Obama, of the Moneygall, Ireland Obamas, nipped off to the pub this afternoon for a pint o' Guinness.

President Obama made a brief St Patrick's Day pilgrimage to a Washington D.C. Irish bar, The Dubliner, on Saturday, where he quaffed a pint of Guinness and enjoyed cheers from a rowdy crowd of green-clad partiers, some of whom had staked out their spots as early as 10 am. He was accompanied by Henry Healy, described by a White House staffer as the president's ancestral cousin from Moneygall, Ireland, as well as Ollie Hayes, the owner of the Publican bar that the president went to on Moneygall.

I love this guy.  I really do.

The president got more raucous cheers as he walked in (if he paid the $10 cover, it was out of your pooler's field of vision). At the bar in the Dubliner's front room, the president enjoyed a Guinness, taking a couple of respectable sips with what your pooler read as an expression of contentedness. The resulting Guinness mustache was, pooler and others agreed, "much more 'David Niven,' and much less (AP White House ace) Jim Kuhnhenn." On two occasions, the hundreds of partiers sent up cries of "Four more years!" and there was a raucous "U.S.A! U.S.A.!" call at one point.

Erin go Bragh, folks.  Hope you had a good St. Pat's, from one bi-racial kid with Irish ancestry to another.

Dancing Up A Storm On St. Paddy's Day

Now if this doesn't bring a tear to Zandarmom's Irish eyes, then nothing will.

For those feeling down about the United States and its place in the world, meet Drew Lovejoy, a 17-year-old from rural Ohio. His background could not be more American. His father is black and Baptist from Georgia and his mother is white and Jewish from Iowa. But his fame is international after winning the all-Ireland dancing championship in Dublin for a third straight year.

Drew is the first to admit that this is a lot to take in, so he sometimes hides part of his biography for the sake of convenience. As in 2010, when he became the first person of color to win the world championship for Irish dancing — the highest honor in that small and close-knit world — and a group of male dancers in their 70s, all of them Irish, offered their congratulations. 

“They said, ‘We never thought it would happen, but we’re thrilled that it did,’ ” said Drew’s mother, Andee Goldberg. She added, “They don’t even know he’s Jewish. That hasn’t been broached. I think it would be too overwhelming.” 

On a recent Wednesday, Drew, dressed in an orange polo shirt and jeans, was eating grapes and holding a tiny, shaking dog named Belle while his mother talked about his accomplishments. Ribbons and trophies adorned his sea green bedroom, the rewards of dozens of competitions since he started dancing at the age of 6. 

Neither mother nor son can remember a time Drew wasn’t dancing, or the reason that he started. Drew thought it might have had to do with his mother getting tired of Disney movies and playing Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly videos for him. She also took him to musicals and theater performances. 

But when he went to a friend’s Irish dance competition in Indianapolis, and saw the girls and boys leaping and skipping, dancing that was part tap, part ballet set to very happy music, he was hooked. 

“I was like, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” his mother said, shaking her head. “You’re biracial and you’re a Jew. We thought you had to be Irish and Catholic.” 

He said, “I was like, ‘I want a medal.’ ” 

Drew's something of a local legend around here in Southwest Ohio.  He performs with the world-class McGing Irish Dancers here in Cincy and his third All-Ireland championship is finally getting him noticed.  Good on him.  And yeah, I'm partial to stories about bi-racial kids kicking ass.  Go figure.

You'll be hearing his name more in the future, I'm betting.

Dear America:

"Who you calling stupid, Obama? I mean damn that Obama boy is stupid, stupid, stupid himself.  I mean you liberals thought Bush was stupid, but Obama is dumber than an empty septic tank.  He may be the dumbest President we've ever had.  Rutherford B. Hayes never said ''It's a great invention, but who would ever want to use one' about the telephone! This proves my central point of how stupid and dumb and stupid Obama is.  What do you say to that, libtards?"

--Mark Steyn, National Review

Bonus Verbatim Stupid:

So let's see. The president sneers at the ignorance of 15th century Spaniards when, in fact, he is the one entirely ignorant of them. A man who has enjoyed a million dollars of elite education yet has never created a dime of wealth in his life sneers at a crippled farm boy with an eighth-grade schooling who establishes a successful business and introduces electrical distribution across Michigan all the way up to Sault Ste Marie. A man sneers at one of the pioneering women in broadcasting, a lady who brought the voices of T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton and others into the farthest-flung classrooms and would surely have rejected Obama's own dismal speech as being too obviously reliant on "Half-A-Dozen Surefire Cheap Cracks For Lazy Public Speakers." A man whose own budget officials predict the collapse of the entire U.S. economy by 2027 sneers at a solvent predecessor for being insufficiently "forward-looking."

A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like George Peck, and purveyors of scholarly excellence like Mary Somerville. It's not clear why it needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle "Crowd-Pleasing For Dummies" as a keynote address.

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, they all laughed at Edison... How does that song continue? "They laughed at me..."

At Prince George's Community College they didn't. But history will, and they will laugh at us for ever taking him seriously.

Yes, history will surely destroy the mentally deficient Obama for that Hayes quote.  Meanwhile, wake me up when the President does does something worse than attributing a quote wrongly to Rutherford B. Hayes and instead says stupid garbage like this.



Then get back to me, Steyn, on whom history will judge more harshly.

A Special Kind Of Stupid

Check out this video, where a man jumped through the window of a Burger King, bumps the cashier aside and tries to make off with the register money.

Me, I particularly like the way they drag him down, slam the window shut and drag him out of camera view. You can hear the "Aaaaahhhhhhh" fade out as they drag him out of sight.

The original video was taken down, so here is the raw footage via YouTube:



Enjoy!

Very Well, AT&T

You have made me take time out of my busy day to tell you the obvious.  It seems, though you are a mighty corporation who has surely has brilliant people on staff, that you are incapable of understanding the most basic customer service principle ever:

Stop being bullying assholes.  It is not doing you any favors.

NEW YORK (AP) -- AT&T is offering to discuss a settlement to an iPhone user who won a small-claims case that alleged the company was slowing down his "unlimited" data service.

In a letter dated Friday, a law firm retained by AT&T Inc. is threatening to shut off Matthew Spaccarelli's phone service if he doesn't sit down to talk.

The phone company doesn't say if the settlement would involve money beyond the $850 award the Simi Valley, Calif., resident won from the company in small claims court on Feb. 24.

In its letter, AT&T asked Spaccarelli to be quiet about the settlement talks, including the fact that it offered to start them, another common stipulation. Spaccarelli said he was not interested in settling, and forwarded the letter to The Associated Press.

Whether AT&T is right or not, they have handled this about as ass backwards as possible.  A flaw has been exposed, and without apology or any demonstration of giving a damn, they made it worse.  Trying to shut the guy up and threaten to cancel his service based on whether he did what they wanted only makes them look nastier.

They have done what I now call "pulling a Komen" where they issue a bland, corporately scrubbed and non-incriminating apology and don't even try to learn the lesson.

The Kroog Versus Drill Baby Drill (Again)

Krugthulhu rises from the Keynesian depths to devour the soul of Drill Baby Drill.

The irony here is that these claims come just as events are confirming what everyone who did the math already knew, namely, that U.S. energy policy has very little effect either on oil prices or on overall U.S. employment. For the truth is that we’re already having a hydrocarbon boom, with U.S. oil and gas production rising and U.S. fuel imports dropping. If there were any truth to drill-here-drill-now, this boom should have yielded substantially lower gasoline prices and lots of new jobs. Predictably, however, it has done neither.

Why the hydrocarbon boom? It’s all about the fracking. The combination of horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing of shale and other low-permeability rocks has opened up large reserves of oil and natural gas to production. As a result, U.S. oil production has risen significantly over the past three years, reversing a decline over decades, while natural gas production has exploded.

Given this expansion, it’s hard to claim that excessive regulation has crippled energy production. Indeed, reporting in The Times makes it clear that U.S. policy has been seriously negligent — that the environmental costs of fracking have been underplayed and ignored. But, in a way, that’s the point. The reality is that far from being hobbled by eco-freaks, the energy industry has been given a largely free hand to expand domestic oil and gas production, never mind the environment.

Strange to say, however, while natural gas prices have dropped, rising oil production and a sharp fall in import dependence haven’t stopped gasoline prices from rising toward $4 a gallon. Nor has the oil and gas boom given a noticeable boost to an economic recovery that, despite better news lately, has been very disappointing on the jobs front.
As I said, this was totally predictable.

Imagine that.  We're producing more oil and gas under President Obama.  We're drilling, baby, drilling...and fracking for that matter.  But gasoline prices are nearing the $4 mark in friggin' March.  Once again the evidence is abundantly clear that gas prices don't seem to have anything to do with supply and demand, at least as far as supply is up and demand is down, prices are skyrocketing.

Sabre rattling with Iran, commodities speculation, refinery issues, and good ol' corporate greed on the other hand...

Wages Of Failure

Easiest way to stump a GOP candidate running for office?  Ask them what the federal minimum wage is.

Three Missouri Republicans running to take on Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in November were asked during a radio debate on KMOX what the federal minimum wage is and whether they would vote to increase it. None of the three knew what the minimum wage it, but all knew that they would vote against increasing it, regardless.

Host Charlie Brennan asked the three candidates — businessman John Brunner, former State Treasurer Sarah Steelman, and Rep. Todd Akin — “What is the federal minimum wage? Would you vote to increase it?” Here are their responses to the first question:

BRENNAN: Okay, do you know what the minimum wage is?
BRUNNER: No sir.
BRENNAN: How about you Sarah Steelman?
STEELMAN: Uh…$7.50 an hour.
BRENNAN: Do you know what the minimum wage is?


AKIN: My guess is its somewhere in the 6 or 7, but I don’t know the exact number right now.



But hey, all three of them are against raising it, whatever it is.  Clearly $15k a year is just too much money to compete with Chinese sweatshops.  Especially when all three GOP candidates are filthy rich.

Perhaps explaining their ignorance of the current minimum wage is the fact that none of the three candidates personally live anywhere near it. Akin owns two homes and receives an annual congressional salary of $174,000. Steelman has donated upwards of $400,000 to her own Senate campaign. Brunner tops them all, sporting a net worth of approximately $100 million.

Minimum wages?  Those only affect business owners, the only class in America worth giving a damn about if you're a Republican.  But remember, Claire McCaskill is the elitist.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• As he arrives back in the US from Kuwait in Pentagon custody, the solder behind the alleged Afghan massacre has been identified as Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.
• The NSA's Total Information Awareness project, scrapped after 9/11, has been resurrected in Utah in a new electronic surveillance and codebreaking center.
• China's halls of power are still trembling after the public removal of reformer Bo Xilai as Party Secretary of Chongqing city.
• Sears will close 62 more stores in the first half of this year in order to cut costs and compete with Wal-Mart.
• Radio's This American Life is retracting its show on Apple's worker conditions in China based off comedian Mike Daisey's one-man show over serious inaccuracies.

Last Call

My Senator, Rand Paul, is trying to do everything he can (along with fellow GOP members Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham) to sell seniors on taking a step back from Medicare and embracing "Obamacare".  It's a hell of a thing to do putting seniors at the tender mercies of the insurance companies with vouchers and subsidies, but they're selling it as "the same health care that members of Congress get".

Under the plan, seniors would be subsidized up to 75 percent of their monthly premiums, with wealthier seniors receiving smaller subsidies. The eligibility age would also climb, slowly. But FEHBP per-capita costs are rising faster than Medicare’s — so even if the plan were able to save money at the outset as Paul claims, the costs of the new program would likely surpass projected Medicare costs in the near future.

Unlike ObamaCare, Paul says there would be no mandate requiring seniors to buy insurance — “The system is voluntary in that sense,” he said. “But it will be the new Medicare.This will be Medicare. Medicare will be the federal employee health care plan.” But that would create an incentive for healthier seniors to opt out of the program, triggering what health policy experts term adverse selection — and a “death spiral” for insurance premiums.

In all other ways, the plan is structurally akin to Obama’s health care law. It even kicks in in 2014 for all seniors, just as Obama’s law does for the uninsured. DeMint explained, in admirably honest terms, why Republicans are OK with, essentially establishing Obamacare for seniors, but not for everyone else.

“Medicare is already set up as a government program,” DeMint said. “So we’re beginning to privatize with this idea. To go the other way in the private sector for people who have private employment, and to bring that under government control and to define benefits is completely the opposite direction. So what we’re trying to do with Medicare is move it back toward a plan that we would like.”

A plan that would leave most seniors paying the majority of their health care costs and healthier seniors opting out altogether, assuring that insurance rates for seniors would increase exponentially.  Yeah, that's a great plan: the end of Medicare in under 2 years.  Awesome.

Texas Goes All In On Voter Suppression Hold-'Em

Texas Republicans tell Eric Holder and President Barack Obama exactly where they can stick their opposition to the state's voter suppression laws as they go for broke and demand that the Supreme Court rule on the Voting Rights Act being constitutional.

Attorney General Greg Abbott on Wednesday made a direct constitutional challenge to a piece of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, which singles out Texas and several other states.

Abbott took aim at a section of the act that requires Texas and several other states, mostly in the South, that have histories of discrimination to "pre-clear" any changes to election laws. Abbott seems to be using the U.S Department of Justice's recent denial of pre-clearance of the Legislature's controversial voter ID law, which would require voters to present a valid form of photo identification before casting ballots, as a way to try to change the larger decades-old requirement.

"For the Department of Justice to now contend that Texas cannot implement its voter ID law denies Texas the ability to do what other states can rightfully exercise under the Constitution," Abbott, a Republican, said in a statement.

Yes, Texas is going there, trying to strike down not just pre-clearance, but the entire act and the voting protections it entails, citing that the Tenth Amendment outweighs the legislation.  The pre-clearance measure, Section 5 of the act, is the target but the real goal is to overturn the entire bill.

Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Anthony Kennedy would be all it would take in order to gut the VRA as much as possible.  If as part of their voter ID law case SCOTUS agrees to hear this too, it's entirely possible that the VRA could be gone before November.

If that happens, all bets are off.