StupidiNews!

• A video threatening terror attacks at the Sochi Winter Games next month has surfaced on a known jihadi website, prompting concern from US lawmakers over Russia's security precautions.
• A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck New Zealand near the capital of Wellington Sunday, with property damage and aftershocks affecting both the North and South islands.
• The Seattle Seahawks will face the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII in two weeks as both teams won their conference championship games Sunday.
• Two explosions rocked Bangkok, Thailand on Sunday, injuring 28, as anti-government protesters and political opposition groups stepped up their campaign to oust Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.
• Paramount's Anchorman 2 marked the end of a film era as the last film to be released by the studio to theaters in 35mm format, as the company goes all digital.

The Long Road Ahead For Obama

David Remnick of the New Yorker checks in with the President, who makes a number of very interesting "I don't have to run for election anymore, so here's my opinion" statements that he could have never made, say, 18 months ago during a campaign.

On the NFL's serious problem with concussions and brain injuries:

“I would not let my son play pro football,” he conceded. “But, I mean, you wrote a lot about boxing, right? We’re sort of in the same realm.”

The Miami defense was taking on a Keystone Kops quality, and Obama, who had lost hope on a Bears contest, was starting to lose interest in the Dolphins. “At this point, there’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” he went on. “These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you know?”

On his second term:

“The conventional wisdom is that a President’s second term is a matter of minimizing the damage and playing defense rather than playing offense,” Obama said in one of our conversations on the trip and at the White House. “But, as I’ve reminded my team, the day after I was inaugurated for a second term, we’re in charge of the largest organization on earth, and our capacity to do some good, both domestically and around the world, is unsurpassed, even if nobody is paying attention.”

On pot legalization in Colorado and Washington state, he says that pot is less dangerous than alcohol but adds:

Less dangerous, he said, “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer. It’s not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.” What clearly does trouble him is the radically disproportionate arrests and incarcerations for marijuana among minorities. “Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do,” he said. “And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.” But, he said, “we should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.” Accordingly, he said of the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington that “it’s important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.” 

And finally, on race and politics:

“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President.” The latter group has been less in evidence of late. 

“There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues,” he went on. “You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government—that it’s distant, that it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable—and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There’s a pretty long history there. And so I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, so that they understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to states to expand Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am this power-hungry guy in Washington who wants to crush states’ rights but, rather, because we are one country and I think it is going to be important for the entire country to make sure that poor folks in Mississippi and not just Massachusetts are healthy.”

The entire article is worthwhile, and gives serious, reasonable insight to the President and what he's trying to accomplish these days.   Do take a look.

We've Reached Maximum Rubin Con

Jennifer Rubin has long been the most embarrassing columnist at the Washington Post, but her take on this weekend's Chris Christie developments from MSNBC just utterly shatters the Irony Meter.

The test for the mainstream media and for medic “critics” (often merely on the prowl for Fox News bias) is whether they find the actual scandal: The MSNBC hit-squad that does not investigate, does not make any pretense of balance or fairness and is nevertheless given legitimacy by other media elites. 

This is also a lesson for conservatives in dealing with liberal media bias. You don’t whine. You present the facts, fully and fast. You present compelling evidence of bias. If the conservatives want politicians who show some backbone when under attack by phony news operations, they’d be wise to follow the Christie model. 

In the meantime, Christie, in an odd way, may be lucky here. MSNBC has turned a legitimate news story (the bridge) into a vivid display of media bias. That in turn will give conservatives who might otherwise see fit to pile on pause. Do they want to be the couriers of MSNBC smears?

This is a person who spent a year giving Mitt Romney free campaign columns as a shoo-in for President in 2012, going so far as to attack anyone who doubted him from the left or right, ignoring the Afghanistan war Bush got us into, declared the media had no business asking Romney/Ryan about details of their budget plan, accused MSNBC of "saving President Obama" from his "debate disaster" in 2012, accused President Obama of Nixonian paranoia, and who still lacks even basic competency on macroeconomics.

This is a person whose credibility would require several years of hagiographical rehabilitation to reach the lofty height of zero.  For her to accuse anyone of partisan media bias should have cause the spacetime continuum to collapse in a screeching 52-vehicle pileup of hubris.  The last paragraph should have ended with "And my computer has suddenly burst into black flames as I finish writing this.  I blame Obama."

Joe Gandleman makes a very good point since we're worrying about MSNBC's journalistic integrity and all.

I’m sure some may say “well that’s MSNBC,” but in fact it’s irrelevant if this came from MSNBC, or Fox or CNN. This is the mayor of a major city coming forward, and not acting as a blind source but making the allegation with her name attached to it.

Which already puts Kornacki's story light-years ahead of anything Rubin craps out of her awful little soul.

How is she still employed?

Last Call For Fahgeddabout The Bridge, This Is Worse

The GOP Gov. Chris Christie Trouble-O-Meter just kicked up another notch as MSNBC's Steve Kornacki leveled some brutal new accusations against the New Jersey governor.

Two senior members of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration warned a New Jersey mayor earlier this year that her town would be starved of hurricane relief money unless she approved a lucrative redevelopment plan favored by the governor, according to the mayor and emails and personal notes she shared with MSNBC. 

The mayor, Dawn Zimmer, hasn’t approved the project, but she did request $127 million in hurricane relief for her city of Hoboken – 80% of which was underwater after Sandy hit in October 2012. What she got was $142,000 to defray the cost of a single back-up generator plus an additional $200,000 in recovery grants. 

In an exclusive interview, Zimmer broke her silence and named Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno and Richard Constable, Christie’s community affairs commissioner, as the two officials who delivered messages on behalf of a governor she had long supported. 

“The bottom line is, it’s not fair for the governor to hold Sandy funds hostage for the City of Hoboken because he wants me to give back to one private developer,” she said Saturday on UP w/ Steve Kornacki. “… I know it’s very complicated for the public to really understand all of this, but I have a legal obligation to follow the law, to bring balanced development to Hoboken.”

This is no longer just about the George Washington Bridge, but about a long pattern of Christie abusing the powers of his office for the last several years.  Now that Mayor Zimmer has broken her silence, who else will come forward?  Likewise, the bridge investigation is continuing as well, and there's news now that David Wildstein one of the Christie aides at the center of that mess, now wants to tell his story to New Jersey state lawmakers under oath if he's granted immunity.

An attorney for David Wildstein, one of the men at the center of the investigation into last September's lane closures on the George Washington Bridge, said his client has a "story to tell" if granted immunity from state and federal prosecution. Alan Zegas told the Wall Street Journal Friday that Wildstein wants to testify before one of the legislative committees investigating the closures.

"There is a story to tell," Zegas said. "He would be happy to talk about all he knows."

Christie is in a heap of real trouble now, and it's falling apart fast and gaining speed.

The Obvious Solution

Republicans in Missouri are concerned that lethal injection is a barbaric and sickening practice, akin to torturing a person to death, after Ohio's latest death penalty execution last week with a new combination of drugs led to the inmate gasping for air and dying slowly over 25 minutes. But instead of the logical progression of "perhaps we should re-examine the awful practice of the death penalty", Missouri Republicans' response is "hey, let's bring back firing squads!"

Missouri state Rep. Rick Brattin, a Republican representing Harrisonville, introduced legislation Friday that would add five-person firing squads as an alternative to the state's current method of capital punishment, lethal injection. 

Brattin cited the prolonged death Thursday of Dennis McGuire in Ohio as evidence that alternative methods were needed after manufacturers of pentobarbitol, the drug most commonly used in lethal injections, began withdrawing it from use in executions on ethical grounds. 

It took almost 25 minutes for McGuire, who was executed for raping and murdering a 22-year-old pregnant newlywed, to die gasping and choking Thursday from a new combination of drugs that had never before been used in a U.S. execution. McGuire's family said Friday it intends to sue Ohio prison officials for what they called McGuire's "torture." 

Missouri also allows execution by lethal gas, but its gas chamber hasn't been functional since 1965. With the state's next execution scheduled for Jan. 29, "we've been having all of these troubles getting the drugs to administer the lethal injection," Brattin told the statewide radio network Missourinet on Friday. 

"I was just looking at a second option, something we could do if we had to utilize the death penalty and we could not administer the lethal injection," Brattin said.

Besides being "quick and something we could do at a moment's notice," he said, an execution by firing squad would be more humane than McGuire's ordeal.

Sure.  Killing someone with a bunch of bullets is more humane than killing them with drugs.  Because ethics, and America!  It's what Jesus would have done, right?

Nerd Fights In The Land Of Epistemic Closure

Readers know I've had my problems with Ezra Klein from time to time on his analysis of everything from Dudebro Defector to Obamacare.  He's a good guy for the most part, but he thinks he's the second coming of Nate Silver or something, and it doesn't always work out that way for him and his Wonkblog crew at Washington Post.

Still, his skills are light-years beyond that of tired hacks like the WSJ's James Taranto or Daily Caller's Mickey Kaus, so when they decided to pick a fight with Ezra, hilarity ensued.  Taranto:

On Tuesday Klein himself proclaimed "The Death of ObamaCare's Death Spiral." He helpfully numbered his points, which go to 11 (lumbar puncture must be a mandated preventive procedure under ObamaCare). "The risk of a 'death spiral' is over," Klein proclaimed in point 4, citing the same Kaiser study. 

In his response, Kaus pointed out that in point 7 Klein had acknowledged Kaus's earlier point. Klein quotes a tweet from Kaiser's Larry Levitt: "The health mix of ACA enrollment is much more important than the age mix. Klein then elaborates: "So far, we're using age as a stand-in for health. But if all the young people signing up are sick, then the models break down." One might add that they don't all have to be sick. Nearly half of healthy young people are prone to a normal yet expensive medical condition, namely pregnancy.

That's Taranto's argument.  Obamacare will break down because all the ladies are gonna get knocked up and flood the system with expensive pre-natal and birthing procedures. Perhaps Obamacare should have something like, oh, I don't know, a contraception mandate to make birth control readily available to women so that doesn't happen.  Oh wait!  It does!  And conservatives are trying to do everything they can to destroy that mandate so that people covered under Obamacare plans don't have access to affordable birth control, thus causing the situation Taranto is concerned about!

There's an easy, built in solution to Taranto's concern, and he refuses to admit that the solution is already there.  But Ezra Klein is the hack?  Ho boy.

Although Wonkblog didn't respond to Kaus's argument, Levitt did, tweeting "that the 'shock absorbers' built into Obamacare--'risk corridors,' etc.--mean that the 'risk of a death spiral is overstated.' " Kaus conceded the point but noted that "those shock absorbers expire in three years," so that "insurers will start to raise rates in only two years if the risk pools are looking bad." To which Levitt replied that "I assume that enrollment will ramp up over the next 3 years." 

Which, Kaus answers, begs the question: "If you assume success then the risk of a death spiral is over!" We would add that it wouldn't surprise us if defenders try to keep ObamaCare on life support in the coming months and years by shifting the definitions of "success" and "death spiral." Never underestimate the power of equivocation.

Says the WSJ columnist.  This is comedy at its best here.  All indications are that more people will sign up, significantly more.  It's an assumption, yes...but a pretty safe one.  One, it's a government program, two, the mandates, three, increased Medicare eligibility, four, the "Woodwork effect".

Taranto goes on in the same vein for some time, but he ends with this:

But the advent of ObamaCare, with its corporatist means to a socialist end, has turned the Wonkbloggers into complete sellouts. Klein, Kliff and the whole klique are now acting like corporate shills too.

Well, you'd know, James.  You'd know.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Two students in Philadelphia are in critical condition after being shot in a high school gym by another student, one suspect is under arrest.
• A panel of federal judges investigating a jurist who sent racist emails about President Obama revealed the judge has a long histroy of racial comments.
• As many as 15 are presumed dead after a suicide bombing attack in Kabul outside a popular restaurant.
• Bond rating service Moody's has raised Ireland out of junk bond status as the country is exiting EU-imposed austerity.
• As sales of the Wii U are falling short of expectations, Nintendo is reportedly exploring getting into smartphone gaming.

Last Call For The Taste Of Freedom

Freedom Industries, the company that poisoned the water supply for 300,000 West Virginians with its coal chemical leak last week, has officially filed for bankruptcy protection.

Freedom Industries Inc., facing multiple lawsuits and state and federal investigations after the Jan. 9 spill, filed a Chapter 11 petition with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of West Virginia. 

Company president Gary Southern signed the paperwork, which lists the company's assets and liabilities as a range — both between $1 million and $10 million. It says the company has at least 200 creditors and owes its top 20 creditors $3.66 million. 

The water was tainted after a chemical used to clean coal leaked from a storage tank and then a containment area at a facility owned by Freedom Industries. The water ran into the Elk River, contaminating the state's largest water system. 

The bankruptcy document says the leaky storage tank appears to have been pierced through its base by some sort of object. It also says a current theory for the hole is that a local water line that broke near the Charleston plant could have made the ground beneath the storage tank freeze in the cold days before the spill.

No doubt the company will get a nice Chapter 11 deal at taxpayer expense, while taxpayers also pay for the cleanup, and the company will emerge from bankruptcy with immunity to all those lawsuits and will be able to get back in the business of awesome coal chemicals by say, this time next year.

Business as usual, because America, where corporations are protected at all costs.  People, on the other hand, well, not so much.

Wisconsin's Working For No Weekends

As I mentioned in StupidiNews on Wednesday, Wisconsin Republicans want to get rid of the 40 hour work week.

The measure's authors, Sen. Glenn Grothman of West Bend and Mark Born of Beaver Dam, say the bill brings Wisconsin in line with federal law, gives workers a way to make extra money and employers a way to boost production. But Democrats and labor leaders insisted bosses would use the bill to force their employees to work longer and effectively erase the weekend. 

"Even God said rest on the seventh day," said David Reardon, secretary-treasurer for Teamsters Local 662, a union that represents about 10,000 workers across various industries in west-central and east-central Wisconsin, including manufacturing, truck driving, public workers and food service workers. "I would hate to see that Republican bill pass. Some employers would really take advantage of that." 

Current Wisconsin law requires employers who own or operate factories or retail stores to give their workers at least 24 consecutive hours off every seven days. Under Grothman and Born's proposal, workers could volunteer to work seven straight days without a rest day. 

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state's largest business organization, brought the idea to them, the two Republicans said. The organization was doing a study on discrepancies between federal and state law and discovered federal law imposes no such limits on consecutive work days as long as minimum wage and overtime payment requirements are met, Born said.

"Volunteer".  Sure.

Rep. Cory Mason, D-Racine, called the legislation a "slap in the face to ordinary working folks in Wisconsin." 

"Workers fought long and hard for a 40-hour work week and the weekend," Mason said. "People deserve at least a day off a week. It's a legal protection for a reason." 

Grothman dismissed their concerns, saying he's never heard of any business where pressuring employees to work extra hours has been a problem. He, too, insisted the bill would help workers make extra cash. 

"It's ridiculous when people want to work extra hours why Democrats would stand in the way of that," he said. "I don't know why some people want some people to remain poor."

 Ahh, but how quickly we forget that Republicans passed legislation to eliminate overtime pay last May.

The bill would amend long-standing labor law by allowing private-sector employers to offer compensatory time off in lieu of time-and-a-half pay for overtime. Employers and workers are supposed to agree on the arrangement, but there is nothing to stop an employer from discriminating against those who prefer payment by cutting back on their overtime hours. Nor would employers face any real deterrent against forcing unpaid overtime on workers who fear losing their jobs if they object. The recourse for coerced workers would be to sue, a far-fetched and unaffordable option for most people. 

For employers, then, the bill is a way to impose extra work at no additional cost, effectively shifting what would otherwise be worker pay into corporate profits.

So imagine if both laws were in effect in Wisconsin:  Your boss could say "I need you to work this weekend. You won't get any overtime pay.  In fact, you won't get any pay at all for it.  You'll get comp time, which I don't have to let you actually take off and that you'll lose after a year.  So you'll end up working 60 hours this week and get paid for 40, or I'll fire you."

All your boss has to do is say "It was my understanding that they volunteered for extra hours and they didn't show up for work. Of course I fired them."  Oh well.

And yet that's exactly what Republicans want to make legal.

Because Republicans care about jobs and working class Americans.

Carolina Out Of My Mind

Just a gentle reminder that my home state of North Carolina is now under complete GOP control, and that they continue punishing those who traditionally vote for Democrats and will do so until they leave the state and become somebody else's problem.  Today's target:  those making under $50,000 a year.

The 900,000 poorest working families in North Carolina just got another tax hike from the conservatives who swept state legislature elections in 2010. 

The change took effect at the beginning of 2014, meaning that the taxes those families file this spring will be the last to feature the state’s tax break for the working poor. The provision, known as the Earned Income Tax Credit or EITC, will also be 10 percent less generous in its final year. State-level EITCs work by tacking on an additional benefit to the federal EITC, and the law repealing North Carolina’s EITC for 2014 also cut the credit from 5 percent to 4.5 percent of the federal benefit. 

In order to qualify for the federal or state-level tax credit, tax filers must earn less than about $50,000. The goal of the credit is to buoy the incomes of working people whose employers pay them too little to provide the economic stability that having a job is supposed to ensure. Many conservatives who oppose other policies to boost poor peoples’ income, such as minimum wage hikes, support the EITC as an alternative way of keeping working people out of poverty without interfering with how private businesses operate. 

But that argument didn’t carry the day among North Carolina Republicans, and lawmakers slashed and then eliminated the state’s EITC during last year’s legislative session. That change was overshadowed by the GOP’s broader changes to the basic shape of the income tax codein the state to favor the rich and harm the rest.

So yes, Republicans have no problem raising taxes on those who can afford it the least to give tax breaks to the wealthiest.  North Carolina is now under a flat income tax of 5.8%, saving those making six figures or more thousands and those making seven figures tens of thousands in taxes.

In turn, that tax burden, along with the elimination of the state's Earned Income Tax Credit, just jacked up income taxes on the poor, big time.

Now combine this with the state's new draconian cuts to unemployment insurance in order to get the unemployed to leave the state and become someone else's problem.

"We had the ninth most generous unemployment compensation in the country and we were having a lot of people move here, frankly, especially in urban areas to get unemployment and then work other sectors and survive. So,people were moving here because of our very generous benefits, and then of course, we had more debt. So I think, personally, more people got off unemployment and either got jobs or moved back to where they were going or came from and quit the migration as much because of unemployment. We’ve seen this in other states where the benefits are very high, it could draw people from outside the state."

What happened of course is that since North Carolina now has the worst unemployment insurance in the country as of last summer, in turn they now have one of the highest rates of workers leaving the job market completely.  What Republicans have managed to do is drive people out of the job market and into government programs.  That's happening across the country, but it's happening faster in NC.

The GOP goal is to make being poor so awful that the poor just vanish, move away, or who knows?  Die, maybe?

Either way, they're not the NC GOP's problem anymore.

Last Call For Volunteering Out Of Obamacare

Tennessee is sure gonna fix that Obama boy's wagon, I'll tell ya.  Republicans are gonna make Obamacare illegal in the state, then what are you gonna do about THAT, Obama?  Actually, nobody seems to know what the next step is, because apparently the law would actually make it illegal for state-run hospitals or UT system hospitals to accept or even treat Obamacare patients.

Health insurance exchanges established under President Barack Obama's signature law would be illegal under legislation proposed Wednesday by Republicans aiming to prevent state agencies from carrying out the mandates of the health overhaul. 

Sen. Mae Beavers of Mt. Juliet and Rep. Mark Pody of Lebanon held a news conference to announce the measure that seeks to prohibit any cooperation by the state or its agencies in implementing or administering the federal law. 

"The federal government does not have constitutional authority to commandeer state and local governments to enforce or implement these federal health care mandates," Beavers said. "This legislation takes a very strong stand to resist this federal overreach of power." 

Except for the part where both the legislative branch and judicial branch gave the executive branch this power.

The legislation would ban new health insurance exchanges established under the law. So far, more than 36,000 Tennesseans have signed up for coverage under the exchanges. More than 2 million people had enrolled through the end of the year, according to the most recent nationwide statistics.

Sponsors say they haven't talked to the governor's administration about the proposal or officials with TennCare, the state's Medicaid program that provides health care for 1.2 million Tennesseans. 

"I'm sure they'll come to see us," Beavers said.

And what of the thousands of people who have insurance from the exchange?  Well, that's somebody else's problem, apparently.  Sure hope they don't get sick.  It'll be illegal to use their insurance because, you know, black President.

Obamacare Isn't Going Anywhere

Josh Marshall makes the case that the battle over Obamacare is done, and the GOP lost.

It's simply too late to undo what happened in March 2010.

To be clear, the program is still trying to make up ground lost in the first blundering two months of the roll out. And the near-term politics for Democrats may still be bad. But all the efforts at sabotage - trying to convince young people not to sign up, trying to scare people that they'd have their identities stolen, trying to prevent so-called 'navigators' from helping people enroll, refusing to set up state-based exchanges, opting out of Medicaid expansion and generally trying to scare the crap out of people with death panels and everything else so they wouldn't sign up. All had one aim: undermine enrollment to force what health care economists call a risk pool death spiral. 

That's when you've got too high a percentage of the old and sick to spread the cost of payouts. Without more young and healthy people, there's no way to effectively spread the risk. Then you have to raise premiums. So the logic of holding coverage is undermined for all but the really,really sick. And pretty soon the whole thing just blows up. 

That was the aim. But it didn't work. Relatively little noticed this week, we got the first look at the demographic breakdown of the first round of sign ups (those through Dec. 28th, 2013). They weren't great. 24% of enrollees were 18 to 34. The administration was and is aiming to have 40% of enrollees in that category. 

But that's not the end of the story. A key Kaiser Foundation study recently found that the key threshold for Obamacare success was 25% of enrollees in that age group. At that number you could have 1% to 2% premium rises. Not great, but not enough to fundamentally break the program and not enough to cause the dreaded 'death spiral.'

Republicans are confident that 2014 will bring a GOP Congress, and 2016 will bring a GOP President, assuring an Obamacare repeal.  I hate to break it to them that by 2016, it's going to be far, far too late.

But let them run on obstruction.

Meanwhile, In West Virginia...

Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink in Charleston.

Area emergency rooms are seeing an influx of patients reporting symptoms related to exposure to chemical-tainted water, despite the fact that West Virginia American Water has deemed water in many areas safe to use. 

Rahul Gupta, health officer for the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department, said 101 patients visited area emergency rooms in the 36-hour span ending at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning, reporting symptoms related to exposure to tainted water. He said 46 of those allegedly water-related emergency room visits occurred between 7 p.m. Tuesday night and 7 a.m. Wednesday morning. 

"What we are seeing when we talk to our partners in hospital systems are people with skin and eye irritation, rashes, nausea, upset stomach and diarrhea," Gupta said. 

All of those symptoms have been connected with exposure to crude MCHM, the chemical that leaked from a Freedom Industries storage tank Thursday into the Elk River, and then into West Virginia American Water's Charleston treatment plant a mile and a half downstream. 

Gupta said many of those patients reported using water that was deemed safe to use by West Virginia American Water. As of Wednesday afternoon, the "do not use" order has been lifted for 51,600 of the 100,000 customers affected by the chemical spill.

So a week later, the water's not safe, it's still making people sick, and who knows when it will actually be safe again.  Try thinking about going a week without water.  Would you be able to buy, purify, or get enough fresh water for a week for a family?  Would you even be able to purify it with this awful chemical in it?

But let's loosen regulations, right?  That's surely the answer.

StupidiNews!

• Ohio will become the first state to use a new two-drug solution for a lethal injection execution of a convicted death row inmate on Thursday.
• The US Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday over a Massachusetts law designed to create "free speech buffer zones" for protesters at abortion clinics.
• Charter Communications and NBC parent company Comcast are looking to jointly make a deal to buy Time Warner Cable, creating the largest cable company in the US.
• Police in Delhi, India have arrested two men in connection with a gang rape of a Danish tourist, promising additional arrests will be forthcoming.
• A new Johns Hopkins/Cal-Irvine study finds caffeine may help long-term memory functions such as retention.

Last Call For Running Against Obama

I'm not a huge Hillary Clinton fan and voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 primary in a state where he lost by 20+ points. I like 2016 speculation in January 2014 even less.  But if Brian Schweitzer of Montana thinks he has a chance in hell running in 2016 as the anti-Obama, he can go straight to hell and take his hopes with him.

Brian Schweitzer, the former two-term Democratic governor of Montana, is rarely speechless. Once he gets going on a topic, he’s almost impossible to stop. As he builds up steam, he’ll slap his knee to emphasize his points. He’ll slap your knee to emphasize his points. Good luck getting a word in edgewise for that follow-up question. 

But at the moment, Schweitzer is rubbing his chin, looking up at the ceiling, searching – unsuccessfully – for just the right words. The question was simple enough: Is there a single thing President Obama has done that you consider a positive achievement? 

Finally, he spoke. 

“My mother, God rest her soul, told me ‘Brian, if you can’t think of something nice to say about something change the subject,’” he said.
But he couldn’t help himself, slamming Obama’s record on civil liberties (the NSA revelations were “un-effing-believable”), his competency (“They just haven’t been very good at running things”), and above all, Obamacare (“It will collapse on its own weight”). 

Eventually, he paused to acknowledge Obama’s historic role as the first black president. But by that standard, Obama’s usefulness ended the day he took the oath of office.

So your plan to win in 2016 is to alienate the Democrats who voted for Barack Obama.  Twice.

Please take your Big Sky country boy act back to Helena, bro.  We're not interested.  If you can't be half-assed to come up with one thing this President did that you liked, I've got a name for you.

Republican.

Steve M makes a similar point about who Schweitzer is playing to:

But what makes this whole package hard to sell is the fact that Schweitzer is making the attack so personal and ad hominem. Do you know what Barack Obama's job approval rating is among Democrats right now? It's 75% according to a December poll from CNN, 78%according to a December CBS poll. It sure seems as if there's disillusionment among Democratic voters, but a lot of Democrats are clearly still loyal, while others are no worse than ambivalent -- they're frustrated and disappointed, maybe, but they're still essentially on Obama's side, even if a lot of what he does (or fails to do) is maddening.

Jamelle Bouie has more:

If Schweitzer is an unlikely choice for the Democratic nomination, it has less to do with his low national profile, and everything to do with his pronounced Obama-skepticism. Black voters have their concerns with the Obama administration, but the president is held in high esteem. Which is to say that, if you’re going to distance yourself from the administration, you have to do so without without attacking Obama as a figure. Otherwise, you’ve alienated African Americans and crippled your bid for the nomination.

Good luck winning the primaries running as a red state white guy who can't think of one nice thing to say about President Obama.  The good news?  Watch carefully who backs Schweitzer from the "left".  It's a dead giveaway they're no friends of Democrats, liberals, or you.  Allahpundit over at Hot Air is hoping Schweitzer can cause as much damage to Democrats as possible, for example.

After all, Ralph Nader has his day in the sun too, and look where that got us.