Last Call For Six Feet Under Six Flags

Texas's apparent need to disregard any possible reason for government oversight of exploding fertilizer plants also extends to oversight of roller coasters that kill people.

“With No Safety Oversight, Six Flags Will Investigate Roller Coaster Death Itself,” says a U.S. News headline that we totally could have written. Does it surprise you to learn that this death trap of an unregulated roller coaster is in Texas? No, of course it doesn’t. Does it surprise you that there are absolutely zero elected or appointed officials charged with coordinating the legislative, bureaucratic, or legal ramifications of such a death? No, it is Texas, so this too is unsurprising.

So guess who is investigating Six Flags in Arlington?  Why, Six Flags!  Why?  There's NOBODY ELSE TO LOOK.

Six Flags initially said in a statement that it was “working with authorities” to figure out what happened. But it later had to admit that it was running the investigation itself because there are no authorities to work with.

There's no oversight investigating Texas amusement parks, because there's literally no oversight governing Texas amusement parks.


America, because freedom.

Last Call For The Confederate Luchador

Rand Paul's racist buddy Jack "Check out my Confederate flag wrestling mask" Hunter is finally out of a job.

Jack Hunter, the aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) who has in the past expressed pro-Confederate views, has resigned.

Hunter said in an e-mail to the Daily Caller that he will resume his career as a pundit and that he didn’t want to be a distraction for the senator, who is considered a top potential 2016 presidential candidate.

“I’ve long been a conservative, and years ago, a much more politically incorrect (and campy) one,” Hunter wrote. “But there’s a significant difference between being politically incorrect and racist. I’ve also become far more libertarian over the years, a philosophy that encourages a more tolerant worldview, through the lens of which I now look back on some of my older comments with embarrassment.”

Paul stood by Hunter two weeks ago, saying his past comments were “absolutely stupid,” but that he didn’t think Hunter held any racist views.

“If I thought he was a white supremacist, he would be fired immediately,” Paul said.

Instant termination if you're 100% sure, but apparently if you're only relatively sure your social media campaign guy is a white supremacist, firing him takes two weeks or so.  Meanwhile, Hunter is going back to his "pundit" roots where he can be a racist shock jock and actually get paid for it.

Nice work if you can get it, I guess.

Meanwhile, this will fix Rand Paul's little racism problem, right?

Bluegrass State Priorities

What's more important here in Kentucky to our state politicians, good governance or UK basketball? Here's a hint: if it took you more than half a second to arrive at the obvious answer, you don't live here.  here's Think Progress sportswriter Travis Waldron on the state's two religions: coal and basketball.

Now, with one of those industries in sharp decline and the other enjoying its return, as head coach John Calipari says, to its “rightful position atop the mountain of college basketball,” their paths are crossing in a way that will leave many of Kentucky basketball’s biggest fans holding the short end of the stick. Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) and Lexington Mayor Jim Gray (D)announced plans this week to renovate Rupp Arena, the home of UK basketball since 1976. How the state plans to pay for the estimated $300 million cost, which includes renovations to the attached convention center, is unclear. But to cover the multimillion-dollar cost of the planning and design phase, which will begin soon, Kentucky is diverting $2.5 million in revenues raised from the 4.5 percent tax levied on the sale price of all coal produced in Kentucky.

The so-called coal severance tax generates more than $200 million a year in revenues for Kentucky. Half of that revenue goes immediately into the state’s general fund. The other half is split between two separate accounts for reinvestment into coal-producing counties, with those investments aimed at funding economic development projects that aren’t related to coal, and to foster economic development partnerships between eastern Kentucky counties. In the past, it has funded the creation of industrial parks, road, water, and other infrastructure projects, and scholarship programs for students from coal country. It is meant to address a reality that is staring Kentucky in the face: coal won’t be there forever, and the counties whose mountains have produced it for more than a century need something to turn to when the coal either runs out or is no longer worth mining.

What it isn’t meant to do is build arenas in Lexington. “That’s not what this money is for,” Carrie Ray, a research associate at the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, an organziation based in Berea, Kentucky, told me. “It’s not intended to build a basketball arena that’s nowhere close to the coalfields.”

The state doesn't mind sticking Kentuckians with a $2-$5 toll each way on replacing the Brent Spence bridge to Cincy, but replacing Rupp Arena, well the state will bend over backwards to get that done ASAP.  And these are the Democrats here doing this.  Good ol' Dinosaur Steve and friends are happy to get Rupp Arena renovated.  The Brent Spence?  Not so much.

And people wonder why Kentucky is full of red state Dems.

You Mean It's About Jobs?

With useless Republicans busy trying to repeal Obamacare for the 40th plus time and yelling BENGHAZI and IRS at any reporters they can find, President Obama will be on the road this week talking to Americans about jobs and the economy.

Drawing renewed attention to the economy, President Barack Obama will return this week to an Illinois college where he once spelled out a vision for an expanded and strengthened middle class as a freshman U.S. senator, long before the Great Recession would test his presidency.

The address Wednesday at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., will be the first in a new series of economic speeches that White House aides say Obama intends to deliver over the next several weeks ahead of key budget deadlines in the fall. A new fiscal year begins in October, and the government will soon hit its borrowing limit.

The speech comes just a week before Congress is scheduled to leave for its monthlong August recess and is designed to build public pressure on lawmakers in hopes of averting the showdowns over taxes and spending that have characterized past budget debates.

In his economic pitch, Obama will talk about efforts to expand manufacturing, sign up the uninsured for health care coverage, revitalize the housing industry and broaden educational opportunities for preschoolers and college students. He will also promote the economic benefits of an immigration overhaul.

But with Congress effectively out of town after next week until Labor Day, we'll only have three weeks after that until the October 1 deadline.  Things are going to get ugly and this may actually be the year that the GOP shuts down the government.  We'll see, but at this point the GOP has made shutdown threats over defunding/repealing Obamacare, raising the debt ceiling, turning Medicare into a voucher program, turning Medicaid into block grants, and it wouldn't surprise me to see them threaten shutdown over the ridiculous national abortion anti-choice law, too.

Keep that in mind as we head forward.

StupidiNews!

• Britain's Prince William and wife Kate Middleton are in London's St. Mary's Hospital awaiting the birth of their child, who would be third in line to the throne.
• The US Marshal Service has "misplaced" nearly 2,000 encrypted two-way radios since 2011, according to a new report.
• Legendary White House press corps maven Helen Thomas passed away Saturday at the age of 92, having covered ten presidents in her nearly seven-decade career.
• The newest concern for America's aging Boomers: the legal and social ramifications of sex and consent when dementia comes into play.
• An accidental administrator password exposure put all of the Official Ubuntu Forums user information at risk over the weekend.

Last Call For Repeal-O-Rama

To Orange Julius, it's always the summer of 2010.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) vowed Sunday to hold more House votes to thwart ObamaCare, a major priority for the GOP as the law is implemented.

"You're going to see a lot more," Boehner told CBS's "Face the Nation." "You're going to see bipartisan votes coming out of the House to derail this thing.

Boehner is absolutely sure that enough House Democrats are eventually going to jump on the repeal bandwagon to give him a veto-proof margin in the House, and that will lead to 67+ votes in the Senate, and that will force President Romney to repeal Romneycare.

I really don't have the heart to tell him it's not going to happen, but apparently not only does he think Democrats in Congress are morons, he thinks voters are morons too.

But he's going to stick with his plan, dammit.  Right until it blows up in his face.

They Still Can't Stop Lying About Obamacare, Yet Again

Republicans and conservative pundits will never stop lying to you about Obamacare, America.  And for once, it's not the usual suspect (Forbes hack Avik Roy) but the Indiana GOP doing the lying.  That's right, we've gone from pundits making up statistics to state insurance officials doing it, and Washington Post health care writer Sarah Kliff catches them red-handed:

The average health insurance plan in Indiana will increase by 72 to percent next year and hit $570 under the 2010 health-care law, the state announced Friday. What does that tell us?

It certainly doesn’t tell us insurance coverage in Indiana will be cheap; that much is obvious. But it doesn’t really tell us that Indiana’s premiums are outrageous – in fact, when you dig into the documents insurers’ filed, it turns out Indiana’s rates look a lot like the rest of the country.

The $570 figure that Indiana put out Friday doesn’t, in fact, tell us much at all. It’s pretty much just a great number to make the cost of health insurance sound expensive in Indiana and a horrible one to use in thinking about how much Hoosiers will pay for coverage come January.

Cherry-picked numbers to put the worst-possible spin on Obamacare?  Surely you're joking!  Why, Republicans would never do that!  You know, except for doing it constantly for the last three years.

Indiana’s $570 figure comes from squishing together all the filings –- every plan that is bronze, platinum or anywhere in between –- and coming up with one composite. We don’t know whether a bronze plan in Indiana will be incredibly expensive, which is certainly a possibility, or if some high-priced platinum offerings are pushing up the average.

In other words, let's say Indiana wouldn't tell you what community college tuition cost in the state for 2014.  What if instead, they gave you the average cost for every college, community, two-year, four-year, public, and private, then said OMG community college costs went up A ZILLION PERCENT?

That's exactly what Indiana did with health care premiums.  Just like Avik Roy, they refuse to compare apples to apples, but instead compare apples to the average price of all fruit!  The entire point of the number is to make it look bad, and to make Indianans want to repeal Obamacare.  And it all because the GOP has nothing better to do but lie to their constituents.  This isn't some hack pundit doing this, these are state officials.

By the way, checking to see what premiums actual insurance companies are charging for silver level plans, they come out to $300-$400 a month for individual plans.  That's a far cry from $570, yes?

But you'd never know if you ask state Republicans.  They're too busy lying to you because they think Hoosiers are stupid.

Keep Calm And Pay Nate Silver Fat Stacks Of Disney Cash

FiveThirtyEight.com prognosticator extraordinaire Nate Silver is headed for the intersection of sports analysis and political analysis:  he's leaving the NY Times and taking a long-term contract with Disney to work as ESPN and ABC.  Marc Tracy at TNR explains:

In maybe the juiciest free agent signing since LeBron James bolted for Miami three years ago, it looks like Nate Silver, the political forecaster behind the FiveThirtyEight blog, is departing the New York Times after serving out his initial, three-year contract, and going to ESPN. According to (who else?) the Times, Silver will, presumably among other things, appear frequently on Keith Olbermann’s forthcoming, New York-based late-night show on ESPN2, and also do some politics work for ESPN’s corporate sibling ABC News. He had reportedly been in negotiations with the Times to sign a new contract.

Silver, who a decade ago was working at Baseball Prospectus analyzing the sport with advanced statistics, started blogging about politics at Daily Kos and then his own blog during the 2008 primaries and election. He became popular for forecasting elections, most prominently the presidential election as it plays out in the electoral college (hence “FiveThirtyEight,” for the 538 electoral votes), by averaging polls and weighting them to adjust for the ways in which they had been inaccurate in the past—a method not dissimilar from the one he used to devise a well-regarded algorithm for forecasting the future performances of baseball players. He moved his franchise to the Times in the summer of 2010. Particularly last November, he became a lightning rod for this more empirical way of following elections, as contrasted with the “narrative”-heavy approach of many pundits. He did not reply to a request for comment Saturday.

Now all of this makes a huge amount of sense:  At ESPN, Nate can rattle off sports figures and stay focused between election cycles.  It's basically the perfect job for him and his team, and frankly I don't know why ESPN didn't pay him more to begin with.

Which leads me to conclude the X factor here that made Nate take the plunge is Olbermann, also back at ESPN.  The two of them together again (Nate got his political TV punditry start as a regular guest on 2007-2008 Countdown with Olbermann) are a formidable combo.

Olbermann's reportedly not allowed to talk politics on his show.  But...with Nate Silver as a regular guest, I would have to think that he might bring up politics for Keith.  Either way, it's a compelling reason to at least tape Olbermann's show once in a while.

The Turtle Gets Shelled

Looks like Sen. Mitch McConnell is going to draw a primary challenger from the right after all.

Louisville businessman, Matt Bevin, plans to enter the Kentucky U.S. Senate race against Mitch McConnell, WHAS11 has learned.

Sources say, Bevin plans to air television commercials next week. An announcement is also planed as early as next week.

Bevin is a partner at Waycross Partners, a Louisville hedge fund.  He is the founder and former CEO of Integrity Asset Management in Louisville (the investment management firm was sold to a Michigan firm in 2010). A  former U.S. Army officer, Bevin also owns Bevin Brothers Mfg. Co. in East Hampton, Connecticut.  The bell making company was founded by Bevin's great-great-great-grandfather in 1832.

So Bevin has some pretty deep pockets. And the interesting thing is the actual Tea Party here in Kentucky is furious with the guy.

"Would this business owner taking taxpayer money to rebuild his business after a fire be considered to support limited government, free-markets, fiscal responsibility? What happen to his business insurance coverage?" asked John T. Kemper of the United Kentucky Tea Party.

Kemper has pledged to secure a well-funded tea party candidate to challenge McConnell in the 2014 race.

“I’ve never heard of this new guy but what would I know about the Kentucky Tea Party, right?" wrote Christopher Hightower a one-time statehouse candidate and volunteer for Rand Paul's 2010 U.S. Senate campaign.  "Of course the media will anoint anyone as a Tea Party candidate, as long as they take on Sen. McConnell.”

The Louisville Tea Party President, meanwhile, said Tuesday she was angry with The Hill reporter Alexandra Jaffe who interviewed her concerning the Bevin story.

"I just wanted to set the record straight that the reporter from The Hill twisted my words around like no other reporter I've ever talked to," said Sarah Durand, Louisville Tea Party President.  " Everything I said was taken out of context to present a story that is extremely inaccurate."

Durand said the story gave the impression that Bevin was courting tea party support.  In reality, she asserted, some Republicans have courted Bevin.

Bevin is talking to a variety of people about the senate race, including McConnell supporters, Durand said.   She added that she would never encourage anyone to run for political office.

Now things get interesting.  Post Rand Paul,  the Tea Party here has basically been shut out and shut up.  Nobody wants to hear from them anyway.  And it looks like they're being brushed aside again to make way from another clown from the country club business wing of the party, who saw how McConnell made tens of millions of dollars as a US Senator and wants in on the action.

Imagine that.

Stupidinews, Morning Edition!

• A Michigan judge has rejected Detroit's bid for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, citing the plan violates the state's constitution by cutting promised payments to city retirees and pensioners.
• San Diego County Clerk Ernest Dronenberg has filed an emergency petition with state AG Kamala Harris to suspend same-sex marriage licenses in the state.
• House Republicans have passed a version of No Child Left Behind renewal legislation that freezes federal school funding and eliminates the 2002 bill's federal oversight of school districts.
• Honda could get approval for its HondaJet project from US aviation officials as soon as 2014 as the automaker plans to take to the skies to challenge Cessna and Bombardier.
• Boeing's 787 Dreamliner jets are again under federal safety scrutiny as the FAA has ordered checks into the plane's emergency locator beacon systems, suspected in this week's Heathrow airport fire.

Last Call For One Hell Of A Presidential Briefing

This afternoon, President Obama made an unannounced appearance at the daily White House press briefing to make some heartfelt and thoughtful remarks on the George Zimmerman verdict and race in America.

But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling. You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African- American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African- American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.

The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.

Now, this isn’t to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context.

Context. It's a hell of a thing, and the piece of the national conversation on race we've been missing.  As President, Barack Obama today stepped up and delivered a speech with the necessary context that we've been sorely needing on having a real discussion about what the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman means to people.

Do read the entire transcript, or watch the briefing above.  It's the most honest starting point on this issue I've seen or heard all week. The NY Times editorial board summed it up thusly:

Mr. Obama said Americans needed to give African-American boys “the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them.” 

He said he was not talking about “some grand, new federal program” or even a national “conversation on race,” which he said often ends up being “stilted and politicized” and reaffirm pre-existing positions. 

In a way, Mr. Obama began that conversation today, while he spoke directly to African Americans who have longed to hear him identify with their frustrations and their anger. 

It is a great thing for this country to have a president who could do what Mr. Obama did today. It is sad that we still need him to do it.

PS, not bad for a guy with no teleprompter, huh.

I Think I've ID'ed The Problem, NC GOP

And because North Carolina Republicans aren't already crashing in popularity, they're now making the state's voter ID law even tougher with the intent of discouraging those damn hipster college students from voting at all.

The new measure would require voters to show one of seven types of photo identification issued by the government, such as driver’s licenses, passports, non-driver IDs and military or veteran cards.

It eliminates about half the types of photo identification allowed under the House version, including cards from UNC system colleges, state community colleges, local governments, private employers and law enforcement agencies. The bill would take full effect in the 2016 elections.

“We want a state-issued ID or a federal-issued ID,” said Sen. Tom Apodaca, the bill’s chief supporter, expressing concern that college IDs “could be manipulated” and allow out-of-state students to vote in two states.

“We want it succinct, and we are willing to pay for it,” he added, noting that the bill would provide free photo IDs to people without them.

To pay for the ID's, sure.  To keep the DMV offices open long enough to issue them all, well, that's another problem, given the steep budget cuts to state employee services in the last 3 years.  The state is only now experimenting with some Saturday DMV hours at a few offices...all without any extra funding or staffing, meaning how workers get paid to do it, well, umm...FREEDOM.

Good luck with that, guys.  PS, if you're planning on being a North Carolina college student in 2016 and voting for Hillary or whomever, you might want to reconsider going to school in a state that actually gives a damn about wanting you to vote.

By the way, the Charlotte Observer is so sick of the state GOP and NC House Speaker Thom Tillis (who is ironically not as responsible for this awful legislation as he should be because he keeps skipping out on votes to go fundraise for his bid against Sen. Kay Hagan in 2014) that they're calling for Tillis to step down as Speaker.

When Tillis announced his Senate bid, he said he would “raise money at the appropriate time.” “I don’t intend to campaign heavily and actively until after we get out of session,” he said.

It’s fine that Tillis is interested in higher office, and we don’t fault him for recognizing the need to raise millions. But the fiscal year started three weeks ago and the legislature still has not agreed on a budget. Tillis is missing sessions. His actions are raising questions of conflict of interest.

He has shown he can’t give his undivided attention to the N.C. House and the U.S. Senate at the same time. He should give up his Speaker’s gavel, resign from his House seat and give his full energy to his Senate bid, unencumbered by such distractions as running the state.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/07/18/4173663/tillis-tries-but-cant-serve-two.html#comments#storylink=cpy

Less-intrusive, small government for the win!

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/07/18/4173935/senate-republicans-unveil-stricter.html#storylink=cpy

Glad To Know Racism Is Over

Especially in Florida.

Walter Henry Butler, 59, was arrested by Gulf County Sheriffs deputies after shooting Everett Gant, who is black. Gant was shot in the face after he confronted Butler about using racial slurs to address children living in the apartment complex where the two men reside.

Deputies said Butler admitted to shooting the victim, and even called 911 himself to report it, after which he reportedly went back to cooking his dinner. According to reports, officers on the scene said Butler seemed annoyed by the arrest and told officers, “I only shot a ni—r.

Butler was charged with attempted murder and a hate crime. He is being held at the Gulf County Jail. Gant is said to be in stable condition and is expected to survive.

Not even a human.  Not even an animal, because old white guys love animals.  Nope, he shoots a person in the face because somebody came up to him and said "Hey, stop being a racist jerk to these kids" in which case BLAM because he's just one of those, you know.

Tell me again how there's no racism, and how the real problem is that Gant shouldn't have said anything about Butler's racial slurs to kids, and that Gant was treading on Butler's right to be a racist jackass, so that I can ignore you for the rest of my life.

StupidiNews!

• Detroit's Emergency Manager, Kevyn Orr, forced the city into Chapter 9 bankruptcy Thursday, citing "unacceptable" pension and maintenance costs, earning a vowed fight from city unions.
• Not content to ban abortions after 20 weeks, Texas Republicans are using the rest of the state's special legislative session to ban abortions after as little as six weeks.
• German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Freidrich is now walking back claims that NSA surveillance helped stop five terror attacks in Germany since 9/11.
• Finance ministers from the G-20 countries are meeting in Moscow this weekend to discuss plans to crack down on international corporate tax cheats.
• A big legal fight is brewing among a number of Jewish organizations over the future of the .kosher internet domain.

Last Call For The Insurance Hack

And of course with the news that Obamacare is significantly dropping individual insurance rates in New York, one-man hack army Avik Roy takes to his usual perch at Forbes to make up more ridiculous statistical games to "prove" Obamacare is really a failure for America.

Yesterday, fans of Obamacare were cheering. A front-page story in the New York Times announced that individuals shopping for health insurance in New York would see their premiums halved, based on figures released by the Cuomo administration. It was an “extraordinary decline” that “demonstrates the profound promise” of Obamacare, said one supporter of the law. But the cheerleaders are wrong. New York’s premiums will remain among the costliest in the nation, after Obamacare becomes fully operational. And the unique history of how the Empire State destroyed its individual health-insurance market—using policies quite similar to Obamacare’s—will translate, at best, to only a handful of other states.

And Roy knows this how?  Through the power of lies, damn lies, and Avik Roy Obamacare statistics.

In the vast majority of states, Obamacare has the net effect of raising premiums by a lot, which has given rise to the term “rate shock.” In California, for example, a healthy 40-year-old today can pay $94 per month in the individual market; that rises to $234 a month under Obamacare: an increase of 149 percent.

Obamacare even drives up costs in heavily regulated states. In 1993, Washington instituted progressive reforms similar to those of New York, though Washington’s were somewhat less punitive. This led me to expect that Washington, along with New York and a handful of other states, could see individual-market rate decreases under Obamacare. Much to my surprise, it turns out that even in Washington state, Obamacare will drive premiums upward by 34 to 80 percent. The average of the five lowest premiums for a 40-year-old in Washington today is $162; Obamacare will drive that up to $243.

How many times do we have to go through this?  Roy is comparing cheap catastrophic coverage that has a super-high deductible and doesn't meet minimum coverage standards with Obamacare bronze plans, which are completely different in what they offer, AND on top of that there are subsidies for people in order to help them pay for it.   It's like comparing the car payment on a cardboard box with wheels to an actual car.   He admits he's doing it:

To conduct the above analysis, I and my Manhattan Institute colleagues, Yevgeniy Feyman and Paul Chung, compiled data from the five least-expensive plans on the traditional individual insurance market in the most populous ZIP code of each New York county, via healthcare.gov, the federal government’s health insurance web site. By taking the average of those five plans, while adjusting for the impact of the individual-market component of the Healthy New York exchange, we established a “current rate” baseline for each New York county. We then compared those rates to the average rate of the five least-costly Bronze plans in each ACA rating region. No adjustment was needed for denials, surcharges, or age, because New York prohibits charging different rates based on health status, gender, and age.

Congrats Avik, you're comparing plastic apples to orchards laden with fruit and complaining that the apples aren't as cheap and as tasty as the plastic stuff.

Douchebag.