lambert's blog

And we were also told that the suspects threw IEDs. Did they? We were also told the suspects were wearing what appeared to be suicide vests. Were they? Alternet:

Now, almost a week after the Tsarnaev brothers fought a rolling street battle with dozens of heavily armed police officers, we learned Wednesday night that they had only a single handgun, according to sources who spoke with  ABC News and the  AP, something that directly contradicts what officials had previously said.

Cops, donuts. Cops, out-of-control gunfire, who knew? A case of High Speed Pursuit Syndrome, perhaps? Read below the fold...

The New Yorker:

Set off in a public space a couple of crude, homemade bombs that you appear to have made using a recipe on the Web, and the state will make you Public Enemy Number One. To ensure you are caught and punished, there are virtually no lengths to which the authorities won’t go. They’ll assemble a multi-agency task force overnight, calling on some of the enormous investments in hardware, intelligence, and manpower that have been made since 9/11. They’ll haul in anybody who might be remotely connected to the crime scene, and, if necessary, shut down an entire city. Once you’re caught, they’ll interview you in your hospital bed without reading you your legal rights and then charge you with using W.M.D.s. If you weren’t born in this country, there will even be talk about changing the immigration laws.

If you systematically shoot a classroom full of defenseless six-year-olds and blow off your own head, things proceed rather differently. To be sure, you, or your memory, will be hated and vilified. But the political system, in hock to the N.R.A., will classify you as a nut whose deadly actions have few or no policy implications. (With the demise of the gun-control legislation, that’s what it did with Adam Lanza.) Life and politics will go on as normal. The President will probably visit the scene of your outrage and say consoling things to the families of your victims. He’ll mean what he says, but he won’t be able to do much about it, and nobody will ask why the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. didn’t realize you were such a menace to society and lock you up preëmptively. Crazed shooters, after all, are something we’ve grown used to.

Probably because there's money to be made selling fear, and there's no money to be made regulating guns. Read below the fold...

The Times buries the lead:

Ms. Tsarnaeva expressed some of her greatest anger when one questioner said Dzhokhar had told officials that the brothers were motivated by an extreme interpretation of Islam. She said Dzhokhar’s lawyers had assured her that he could not yet speak or write.*

“Where does this information come from?” she shouted.

Read below the fold...

MedPage Today:

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has put a hold on the nomination of Marilyn Tavenner to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), vowing to block her appointment because of the Obama administration's planned use of specific funds related to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). ...

"The prevention fund works. Thanks to this funding, more children are being immunized, more people are quitting smoking, more communities are fighting chronic disease, more people are being screened for hepatitis C," Harkin told Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at a budget hearing Wednesday morning. "Robbing prevention when we know these efforts can improve people's health and lower healthcare costs goes against the very mission of health care reform."

Doesn't Harkin know the midterms are coming up? And that if ObamaCare moves from Manageable Clusterfuck to Outright Clusterfuck the Democrats might do as well as they did in 2010? Read below the fold...

The Hill:

A stronger U.S. economy will [might] contribute to a rise in the growth of healthcare costs over the next six years, ending the current record-breaking slowdown, according to a new study.

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) predicted that by 2019, annual healthcare cost growth will be closer to historic averages — over 7 percent compared to 3.9 percent between 2009 and 2011.

"As [If] the economy recovers, health spending is likely to trend upwards, though growth rates are unlikely to return to the double-digit levels we have seen in the past," the authors wrote.

The analysis attributed most of the current lag (77 percent) to economic factors, but predicted that ObamaCare could play a role in bending the healthcare cost curve in future years.

ObamaCare's apologists are already conceding it won't. Read below the fold...

Politico:

Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources [note plural] in both parties [it's bipartisan!] said.

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said.

Ezra Klein dutifully tries to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Pravda: Read below the fold...

This post is about a study commissioned by Families USA, who helped destroy single payer not once but twice; see this massive takedown from Hipparchia. So when Jeffrey Young (HuffPo) treats these jokers as credible, that shows he and HuffPo have a problem. So one assumes they're working an angle, though gawd knows what, but also that if they say something's wrong with ObamaCare, which they helped to pass, then matters are even worse than they say. On the question of who gets theirs this time:

Families USA, a liberal [BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!!] health care reform advocacy organization, attempts to answer that vital question in a report released Thursday. In short, young people, working families and whites will get the bulk of the subsidies from [ObamaCare].

So, on the question of who gets thrown under the bus:

And while African-Americans and Hispanics are much more likely to be uninsured than Caucasians, whites will make up the majority of tax credit beneficiaries.

Because they have no place to go. And nobody could have predicted that the Republicans would opt out of expanding a Federal program:

Another important consideration is that the health care reform law intended to provide Medicaid coverage to anyone earning up to 133 percent of poverty, which is $15,282 for a single person this year. The Supreme Court threw that plan into disarray when it ruled last year that states may opt out of the Medicaid expansion. So far, Republican governors in 20 states won't broaden Medicaid, which will send some poor people into the exchanges and leave others uninsured.

Because poor people in Red States also have no place to go. (Recall also that ObamaCare will not even be marketed to the "vulnerable and the disengaged," who I would bet are primarily black and poor.) Read below the fold...

The Hill:

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) reprimanded the Obama administration Wednesday for using billions of dollars from ObamaCare's preventive health fund for other purposes.

There's a good deal of pearl-clutching on the right about this, but Harkin is a Democrat, and by no means the worst of 'em. I would also note that even under the best interpretation, everybody admits that Obama is taking money from programs meant for direct delivery of health care, and using it for other purposes. That is a very bad sign for how the administration will handle future spending when ObamaCare is fully implemented. Under the worst interpretation, Obama's decided that compensating for the artificially created complexity and confusion of ObamaCare (Sibelius calls this "education") by throwing pork to web site developers, trainers, pollsters, public relations firms, and marketing specialists -- in other words, to members of one of his key constituencies, the technocracy or "creative class" -- is more important than programs that have the proven ability to save lives.

It keeps getting better! Read below the fold...

NPR:

[Many] fraudsters seem to be preying on the public's confusion over the massive changes taking place in the nation's health care system.

Seniors are often targets — they're more likely to be home to answer the phone, and they tend to have retirement savings that scammers hope to tap. But they aren't the only victims: The federal government received nearly 83,000 complaints of these types of scams last year — up 12 percent from the year before.

Read below the fold...

If Obama and the Democrats had passed single payer Medicare for All in 2009, every American would have had guaranteed coverage for two years by now; it took LBJ only a year to get all 65+ citizens covered in 1965, and that was in the days before computers. Back then, the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate, and could passed the bill.

But wait, you cry. The filibuster! Read below the fold...

Via Joe Weisenthal, here's the long term unemployment hearing room:

Read below the fold...

Boston bombing suspect cites U.S. wars as motivation, officials say Read below the fold...

Actually, not a sinking ship, but a "train wreck." I mean, ObamaCare was a legislative triumph for Senator Max Baucus, so you'd think he'd wish to stick around to bask in the applause after ObamaCare's triumphant roll-out.* Here, in its entirety, is The Obama's statement on Baucus's resignation:

I want to thank Max Baucus for his nearly 35 years of service to the people of Montana. Max has made small businesses a top priority, often taking “Work Days” to visit local businesses across Montana and spend a day working alongside his constituents to gain perspective and help bolster the local economy. As Finance Committee Chairman and a senior member of both the Agriculture and the Environment and Public Works Committees, Max has been a leader on a broad range of issues that touch the lives of Americans across the country. Michelle and I commend Senator Baucus on his career, and wish him and his family well in the future.

Notice anything missing? Read below the fold...

FT:

Boeing in the dark over 787 battery fires
Boeing on Monday admitted it may never be established why batteries failed [that is, caught fire]* on two of its high-tech Dreamliner aircraft, as work began to fix the safety problem that grounded the company’s wide-body passenger jet. ...

Read below the fold...

Maria Maisto of New Faculty Majority:

Doug Wright was a highly respected and dearly loved adjunct professor who taught humanities courses for many years at several colleges in Utah. As a so-called part-time faculty member who had the same responsibilities to students as any full-time faculty member, he was given only temporary assignments, sub-professional pay, and was not eligible for health insurance. When he was diagnosed with cancer in May 2009, he spent his life savings on treatment.

A close friend, Paul Babin, made a film about his struggle. The film, The Place Beneath, was an appeal to the country to make health care accessible to all people who need it. 

In an epilogue to the film, Babin describes a party that Doug and his friends held in early November 2009. The film had found a home on the internet, and as he celebrated six months of a hard-fought fight, Doug was to learn that Vice President Joe Biden [always a bad sign] had seen the film and had been moved to write to him expressing his thanks.

Meanwhile, how have top university administrators been doing?

Chief executives of colleges and university systems saw healthy increases in base pay. Leaders of systems earned $370,470, on average, an increase of 15.5 percent. Presidents of single institutions received median base salaries of $274,300, an increase of 7.2 percent.

Under The Sachs Conjecture, that's happening because these chief executives are part of a "morally pathological" elite. Read on for a telling example: Read below the fold...