Milwaukee Business Journal

U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Janesville) is introducing a proposal Wednesday that he says would establish universal health care, shore up Social Security and Medicare, and provide a simpler alternative to the current tax code.

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Medicaid program on skids, Jindal says
But wrangling persists as remedies planned
Saturday, November 15, 2008
By Jan Moller

BATON ROUGE -- Arguing that "doing nothing is not an option," Gov. Bobby Jindal on Friday proposed restructuring Louisiana's health-care program for the poor into a private insurance model that relies on managed-care principles to control costs and improve health outcomes.

[...]

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This is likely the wrong blog to ask this kweshun, but I'm still curious. For the sake of argument, let's say Obama wins, very clearly and obviously in your own mind. And let's say that somehow, insert your own 2000 redux here, "they" (try to) take it away from him, via Brooks Brothers riots and SCOTUS foolishness and other sundry undemocratic methods. What is your response, if any? And why? How would it be different than if HRC had had it stolen from her? Or the candidate of Your Choice?

I don't think McSpain has the ground game to steal it this time; I also don't think Wall St/Telco Ave money wants Obama to lose. So honestly I'm not so worried about it. I think we'll get a "democratic" prezint next Jan. But let's say the paranoid, insane racist members of the Franchise refuse to give up power, and pull out all the tricks, and declare at 3am Nov 5 that "McCain Wins!" What do you do?

Marching? Molotovs? Sit ins? Strikes? LTEs? Turning the channel? Knitting? Nothing? Just wondering...

Seeing as how Lambert seems intent on stealing all my post ideas today, I'll post this in case like me, you don't often go to HuffPo. It's worth noting that Larissa used to live in Russia, and knows from Coup. Beyond all the bullshit, she speaks plain truth.

As I see it now, we have but two options and I have long alluded to hoping against hope that one of these options would not be the only one left to a peaceful people. The first and frankly most preferable option is for Congress to immediately begin impeachment proceedings against the members of this latest Business Plot.

No time needs to be wasted on hearings as we already now have in writing, formally as presented to Congress, the intentions of this administration to nullify Congressional powers permanently, to alter Judicial powers permanently, and to openly steal public funds using as blackmail the total collapse of the US economy if these powers are not handed over. You do see how this is blackmail, do you not? You do see how this is a manufactured crisis precisely designed to be used as blackmail, do you not?

The other option, the one I have long prayed we would never need to even consider, is a total revolution. But, If Congress won't act in its own self-defense, in the defense of democracy, in defense of us - the people who have elected them to protect us from this very danger - then what is left for us to do? I don't want to see it come down to this, but I fear that it will. Put your party politics aside right now. We are in a crisis so dangerous that should these people succeed in their coup, your party affiliation will no longer matter, your American flag will be a nice collectible item of something that once was, and your version of God will be worshiped in secrecy because your freedoms will be owned by the few.

You are no longer Republicans, Democrats, or any shade of voter. You do not live in a swing state or a solid colored state. You are simply this: an American. That is the only side that matters. So call your members of Congress and demand, no, declare that unless they do their duty to the Constitution and to us, we will move to the streets - not because we want to, but because our founding fathers demanded this duty of each and every citizen in the face of such a domestic enemy. Demand - as is your right - that this bill be voted against and demand - as is your right - that the people plotting this treachery be held to account. We are either a nation of laws or we are no longer a democracy. Pick a side, because there won't be another time, another moment, another chance to be a patriot.

What's interesting is that she got more than one threat from wingnuts to turn her in to DHS or some shit just for writing a blog post. Expect more of that in future.

This post is largely an attempted response in the form of a summation to the long comment thread Lambert"s "Roubini" post of yesterday continues to produce. I have used so many tags because this crisis is the sum total of all the Bush/Republican/Rightwing shit we've lived through for the past eight years, and the similar shit stretching back to Nixon and Reagan.

Across the liberal blogisphere a consensus has been building that what Paulson is asking for is unacceptable. How to frame why it is unacceptable has been the on-going question, and how to best bring some kind of pressure on the congressional Democrats, but also on Obama to show leadership, presidential leadership, right now, when it'sneeded, to keep both the tax payers and liberal progressive ideas from becoming implicated in yet another disaster not of their making.

"Peter" seemed to feel, in that comment thread, that Lambert and others were failing to understand that there is a real problem in the economy.

No one doubts that. In fact, all kinds of progressives have been insisting that no one was paying attention to the fundamental instability which the housing bubble was creating, appeals to sanity which were ignored. In fact, even after the initial bailouts, this administration and Paulson had done nothing to stave off the freezing up of liquidity which happened last week. I believe it took them by surprise. But I also agree with Lambert that their instinctive reaction is precisely the one that Naomi Klein has been pointing out - to use the crisis to continue to advance the same policies that created the crisis.

Medicare's Poison Pill

The Real John McCain

I'm all for ambition and entrepreneurship. After all, they are supposedly what "Makes America Great". But occasionally maybe we should step back for a reality check.

For example, do we really want our government buying ammunition from freshly-minted con artists?

"MIAMI - A Miami Beach man says he is not guilty of defrauding the Pentagon under a contract he had to supply ammunition to forces in Afghanistan.
Twenty-two-year-old Efraim Diveroli entered the plea Monday in Miami federal court. Diveroli remains free on bail.
Prosecutors say Diveroli's company, AEY Inc., provided banned Chinese-made ammunition to forces in Afghanistan and claimed it came from Albania.

Kevin Drum

This would be the same Medicare Advantage that supposedly harnesses the power of the free market to operate more efficiently, yet still requires sizeable subsidies because it costs considerably more per person than good 'ol big government Medicare. What's at issue here is cutting those subsidies so that private Medicare costs only a little bit more than standard Medicare instead of the whole lot more that it costs now.

But that's not in the cards. Forcing private insurers to operate as efficiently as the federal government is apparently asking too much of the GOP's free market acolytes. Better to cut doctors' fees instead.

Krugman has good perspective on Bear, Stearns ("If you can keep your head when all about you / are losing theirs and blaming it on you...")

When push comes to shove, financial officials — rightly — aren’t willing to run the risk that losses on bad loans will cripple the financial system and take the real economy down with it.

Which is actually re-assuring to me; I don't live in the financial economy at all; I live in the real economy.

Consider what happened last Friday, when the Federal Reserve rushed to the aid of Bear Stearns.

Nobody expects an investment bank to be a charitable institution, but Bear has a particularly nasty reputation. As Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times reminds us, Bear “has often operated in the gray areas of Wall Street and with an aggressive, brass-knuckles approach.”

Bear was a major promoter of the most questionable subprime lenders. It lured customers into two of its own hedge funds that were among the first to go bust in the current crisis. And it’s a bad financial citizen: the last time the Fed tried to contain a financial crisis, after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, Bear refused to participate in the rescue operation.

Bear, in other words, deserved to be allowed to fail — both on the merits and to teach Wall Street not to expect someone else to clean up its messes.

So, Bear got culled and devoured by JP Morgan (much as Spitzer may gotten culled). Interesting.

But the Fed rode to Bear’s rescue anyway, fearing that the collapse of a major investment bank would cause panic in the markets and wreak havoc with the wider economy. Fed officials knew that they were doing a bad thing, but believed that the alternative would be even worse.

As Bear goes, so will go the rest of the financial system. And if history is any guide, the coming taxpayer-financed bailout will end up costing a lot of money.

Part of me says fine! I don't have any! Then again, I'm not (yet) able to grow all my food on my eighth of any acre, so not having "any" means only having a small amount...

[T]he big bailout is coming. The only question is how well it will be managed.

As I said, the important thing is to bail out the system, not the people who got us into this mess. That means cleaning out the shareholders in failed institutions, making bondholders take a haircut, and canceling the stock options of executives who got rich playing heads I win, tails you lose.

According to late reports on Sunday, JPMorgan Chase will buy Bear for a pittance. That’s an O.K. resolution for this case — but not a model for the much bigger bailout to come. Looking ahead, we probably need something similar to the Resolution Trust Corporation, which took over bankrupt savings and loan institutions and sold off their assets to reimburse taxpayers. And we need it quickly: things are falling apart as you read this.

But who, exactly, do we trust to put things back together?

It's a busy weekend for me, but I hope folks get a chance to check out what sounds like a Most Excellent book about religion in America today. Posner looks to have done some great research, and the Alternet excerpt is especially useful, on this day when 'religious voters' in the Black community are on the verge of handing Obama a needed victory. "And what does it profit a man to gain the whole world..." heh.

nside the Trinity Christian Church in Irving, Texas, a crowd starts gathering in the afternoon for a Victory Healing and Miracle Service that is to begin at 7 p.m. that evening. People have traveled from as far away as Ohio and Arkansas and Georgia to participate. Most are waiting in the perimeter lobby of the church, camping out with pillows and Bibles, ordering pizza, and waiting for an event that has been hyped on Christian television for months. I approach one woman, an African American member of televangelist Rod Parsley's World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio. Judging from her clothes, the woman could scarcely afford the plane ticket she bought to see a performance of the preaching phenomenon whose services she can attend three times a week at home in Columbus. She's almost in a trance, barely able to focus on me or what I am asking her, and she brushes me aside as I inquire about her journey.

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Typed in from the Guardian, week of 11/16/2007:

A governmental audit of the Ronald Reagan presidential library and museum has failed to account for 80,000 to 100,000 items of White House memorabilia. Auditors the disapperances from the complex in Simi Valley, near Los Angeles, indicated the "near universal" breakdown of security.

Hey, freedom's untidy!

Get a load of this:

The head of the federal agency investigating Karl Rove's White House political operation is facing allegations that he improperly deleted computer files during another probe, using a private computer-help company, Geeks on Call.

Scott Bloch runs the Office of Special Counsel, an agency charged with protecting government whistleblowers and enforcing a ban on federal employees engaging in partisan political activity. Mr. Bloch's agency is looking into whether Mr. Rove and other White House officials used government agencies to help re-elect Republicans in 2006.

At the same time, Mr. Bloch has himself been under investigation since 2005. At the direction of the White House, the federal Office of Personnel Management's inspector general is looking into claims that Mr. Bloch improperly retaliated against employees and dismissed whistleblower cases without adequate examination.

Recently, investigators learned that Mr. Bloch erased all the files on his office personal computer late last year. They are now trying to determine whether the deletions were improper or part of a cover-up, lawyers close to the case said.

So, to recap: Karl Rove is accused of retaliating against employees and then illegally deleting the evidence. The man in charge of investigating him is accused of retaliating against employees and then deleting evidence.

Fuck. This. Shit.

Wait, though, it gets better!

The response, the world leaders portrayed in Austin Powers gasped in disbelief. Hell, when I watched it I thought to myself, “now that’s a lot of money.”

But that is nothing in this age of Bush Administration spending. Now, in the Global War On Terror, a request for supplemental appropriations in the amount of $190 Billion is par.   Read more…

Once, His Lordship the Grey One put up a post comparing stats for his Mighty Blue Implement of Power and that of some Potter fanzine site. The difference was truly Awesome, and the Potterites showed what "dedication" and "popularity" really look like in online communities/causes. In that spirit, I offer the following. Do read the whole thing:

The results suggest a startling conclusion: On average, companies generated roughly $28 in earmark revenue for every dollar they spent lobbying. And those at the very top did far better than the average: More than 20 companies pulled in $100 or more for every dollar spent.

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A multimedia explosion of GOP Family Values. And this is just for two thirds of 2007.

I'm sure you've probably seen this disgusting story about next year's destination for The Internation Male Leather Circuit party embassy in Iraq, but one part caught my eye. I'm going to be angry like the Grey One today I think, and frame anything like this in the following: "...and Harry and Nancy think you should pay for this!" Isn't war grand?

The residence of the U.S. ambassador to Iraq will be 16,000 square feet. The deputy chief of mission in Iraq will have a “cozy cottage” measuring 9,500 square feet.

I have said it before: your Masters don't live like you do. Theirs is another world, a quite secure bubble filled with Byzantine imaginations and debauched practices, opulent, decadent, utterly corrupt- and they didn't really pay for any of it.

You did. I'm glad the Democratic Leadership is getting ready to give them some more of our our grandchildren's money.

Excerpts from Robert Draper’s new Bush biography, “Dead Certain” - to be released today - show just where the President’s mind probably has been all along:

Worth an estimated $21 million (£10.5 million) - made mostly before he took office in 2000 - he said that to begin with, "I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers. I don't know what my dad gets - it's more than 50-75 thousand dollars per speech." He also noted: "Clinton's making a lot of money."

Posted whole because it's so good:

I took a jog around presidential candidate websites to see how they were responding publicly to the public's dismay/astonishment over what happened 2 years ago and what hasn't happened (in terms of Gulf Coast relief and recovery) since. (the photo of Bush and McCain holding cake above was taken not long after the levees breached in New Orleans and people were drowning).

The re-building of New Orleans and the Gulf region could have been a boon to the U.S. economy with one of the biggest public works projects in American history. New homes could have been built and bought at a time when the real estate industry needs help. New Orleans could have been a shining example of American industy, ingenuity and science as a sparkling clean, safe and energy-efficient metropolis rose from Katrina's ashes.

That hasn't happened. Yet. Instead, President Bush proposes $200 billion for Iraq spending while local police are running low on ammunition to protect folks here at home.

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No, really. No one.

hrough April 2006, DOD has reported about $273 billion in incremental costs for GWOT-related operations overseas--costs that would not otherwise have been incurred. DOD's reported GWOT costs and appropriated amounts differ generally because DOD's cost reporting does not capture some items such as intelligence and Army modular force transformation. Also, DOD has not yet used funding made available for multiple years, such as procurement and military construction. GAO's prior work found numerous problems with DOD's processes for recording and reporting GWOT costs, including long-standing deficiencies in DOD's financial management systems and business processes, the use of estimates instead of actual cost data, and the lack of adequate supporting documentation. As a result, neither DOD nor the Congress reliably know how much the war is costing and how appropriated funds are being used or have historical data useful in considering future funding needs.

Read this AP report at the commie-pinko forbes.com site and tell me again why the Republicans are considered the law-and-order, fiscally responsible, small-government party.

Every attempt at whistleblowing on Iraq War fraud is thwarted, including literally torturing the whistleblowers.

(via)

In economics studies you learn the terms 'cash cow' and corporate takeover, and that is what I see happening in the treatment of this country by the cabal in the White House. We are seeing America's assets stripped away to support the criminal group that has taken over.

Of course, there is no appearance, and no occurrence, of public interest there.

This crew of GoPerverts has made one thing perfectly clear, to paraphrase their idol, Richard Nixon.