Max Keiser takes offense to Goldman, Sachs story by Matt Taibbi

Then, we have a Jon Stewart induced demolition of the those assholes who think Obama is not an American citizen because he’s not a Republican birthers:

I think the birthers simply boil down to people who are so ashamed of being openly racist and blackophobic that they have repressed their feelings of inadequacy so far down inside of them that they resort to supposedly reasonable conspiracy theories to make sense of the bizarre world around them in which, gasp, a black man is president of the United States. Holy FUCK!

And here’s the man in question doing his duty, supporting health care reform. I’m gonna flip out on health reform later today or tomorrow, as well as flipping out on Goldman, Sachs further.

Pay of Top Earners Erodes Social Security (You can get the full version if you search through Google News)
Ellen E. Schultz, The Wall Street Journal

Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security Administration data — without counting billions of dollars more in pay that remains off federal radar screens that measure wages and salaries.

Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total U.S. pay in 2007, the latest figures available. The compensation numbers don’t include incentive stock options, unexercised stock options, unvested restricted stock units and certain benefits.

Just try to stomach the outrage over the huo-hum fact that executives receive more than 33% of total pay in the US and read down to this:

The growing portion of pay that exceeds the maximum amount subject to payroll taxes has contributed to the weakening of the Social Security trust fund. In May, the government said the Social Security fund would be exhausted in 2037, four years earlier than was predicted in 2008.

The data suggest that the payroll tax ceiling hasn’t kept up with the growth in executive pay. As executive pay has increased, the percentage of wages subject to payroll taxes has shrunk, to 83% from 90% in 1982. Compensation that isn’t subject to the portion of payroll tax that funds old-age benefits now represents foregone revenue of $115 billion a year.

So because these behemoth assholes are getting paid so outlandishly, Social Security is drying up. What kind of ridiculously regressive tax policy is this, anyway????!?!?!?

The Can’t Do Blue Dogs
Harold Meyerson, Washington Post

Watching the centrist Democrats in Congress create more and more reasons why health care can’t be fixed, I’ve been struck by a disquieting thought: Suppose our collective lack of response to Hurricane Katrina wasn’t exceptional but, rather, the new normal in America. Suppose we can no longer address the major challenges confronting the nation. Suppose America is now the world’s leading can’t-do country.

Every other nation with an advanced economy long ago secured universal health care for its citizens — an achievement that the United States alone finds beyond the capacities of mortal man. It wasn’t ever thus. Time was when Democratic Congresses enacted Social Security and Medicare over the opposition of powerful interests and Republican ideologues. In fact, our government used to actually pave roads, build bridges and allow for secure retirements by levying taxes on those who could afford to pay them.

To today’s centrist Democrats, this has become a distant memory, a history lesson they cannot grasp. The notion that actual individuals might have to pay to secure the national interest appalls them. In the House, the Blue Dogs doggedly oppose proposals to fund universal coverage by taxing the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation’s households. Their deference to wealth — whether the consequence of our system of funding elections or a byproduct of the Internet generation’s experience of free access to information and entertainment — is not to be trifled with.

Also, you def need to see this on the Republican / ignorant White person outrage surrounding the Sotomayor nomination.

In fact, if you’re not angry by the time you’re done either a) reading Taibbi’s article, or b) reading and agreeing with my opinions published here, you should probably check yourself into Skynet headquarters, because you’re a mindless robot lacking basic human emotion (you’re probably also lacking the killing machine part, though, that comes with Skynet-conceived robots). At some point, I’m going to go on a rant about how EFCA was watered down…blah blah blah… but I’m a little behind in my constructive postings, so let’s get started.

The Great Bubble Machine

Taibbi presents awfully compelling evidence that Goldman has participated in creating bubbles in order to unfairly profit from them, while the rest of us suffer the consequences of their thirst for riches. He begins with the Great Depression, believe it or not.

Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investmenttrust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hogwild.

[...]

The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn’t hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.

Yes, they really were involved in Great Irresponsibility that created the Great Depression. It surprised me, too. Believe it.

Then we have the great Tech Stock bubble. This one is particularly interesting, if only because it wasn’t so long ago. While many firms participated in inflating the bubble, Goldman decided it would be cool to take it off the charts. We must remember that the Government is completely beholden to the interests of Goldman, not the least reason being that pretty much the entire market policy of the USA has been developed and administered by Goldman people (Rubin, Paulson, Summers, etc).

The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren’t much more than potfueled ideas scrawled on napkins by uptoolate bongsmokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for mega-millions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

[...]

“Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public,” says one prominent hedge-fund manager. “The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash.” Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: “Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share.”

The problem was, nobody told investors that the rules had changed. “Everyone on the inside knew,” the manager says. “Bob Rubin sure as hell knew what the underwriting standards were. They’d been intact since the 1930s.”

The main thing to take away is that Goldman, being a firm that takes companies public, was manipulating the IPO share price by having inside knowledge about what investors are likely to buy. This is technically called “laddering.”

But the real problem wasn’t the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers, who received hefty bonuses for tampering with the market. Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital and publicly owned financial companies, bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate, and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater.

Let’s skip ahead (skipping the housing craze which many of us are now familiar with)  to something even more outrageous, but definitely true–the unexplainable spike in oil prices in the Summer of 2008. After the housing bubble burst, Goldman moved on to the physical-commodities market.

Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008.

That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply.

[...]

But it was all a lie…Not only was the shortterm supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling — which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.

[...]

Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

And to do all this legally, a depression-era law had to be changed to allow there to be more speculators than “actual consumers and producers.” Nice. So while we all get screwed with high gas prices, declining access to social services including health care, increasing costs of education, increased pollution, etc, Goldman walks away with massive bonuses, and ready for this, pays only $24 million in annual taxes, an effective 1% rate. So I pay nearly 30 percent of my check to taxes, and I make less than minimum wage.

Too bad I don’t have a government that bends over backwards to subsidize my profits. I might have a nicer website. And more time to rant.

What you should be listening to

Kirsty Hawkshaw Meets Elucidate – Face to Face (Ken Loi Rework)

Until then, take some lingering analyses of Palin:

The Emperor Has No Clothes
The Anonymous Liberal

One of the more fascinating sociological phenomenon is the tendency people have, in certain situations, to ignore what their own senses are telling them and instead buy into an elaborate fiction just because other people appear to be doing the same thing. The classic illustration of this phenomenon is Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes — where a couple of con men convince the Emperor that they’ve made him a new suit out of the finest cloth there is, but that only smart people can see it. Not wanting to look dumb, the Emperor and his ministers rave about how beautiful the suit is and organize a procession through town. The villagers, not wanting to admit they don’t understand what’s going on, also rave about the Emperor’s beautiful new suit as he marches naked through the town. It’s not until a child points out the obvious — that the Emperor has no clothes — that the entire fiction crumbles.

Sarah Palin’s manic, rambling, completely incoherent resignation speech the other day was just the latest of her many naked processions through town. Yet for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, a large number of people, in both Republican circles and the mainstream media, continue to insist that she’s wearing a beautiful new suit. For instance, Mark Halperin of TIME insists– despite all evidence and common sense to the contrary — that by quitting her only significant governmental job before serving out her first term, and doing so in a complete train wreck of a speech, Palin actually strengthened her 2012 prospects. And though many on the right are belatedly acknowledging that the Emperor has no clothes, many others continue to insist that Palin is a viable presidential candidate and that her decision to step down may have been a “shrewd” one.

As Josh Marshall so perfectly put it earlier today:

“[A]ny pundit who thinks this is some risky but potentially brilliant strategic move is absolutely smoking crack. Hitting the crack pipe, or, just as likely, being witlessly contrarian to set themselves apart from the common herd of sane people.”

Palin leads the right into a reality TV vortex
Andrew Sullivan

The reality of Sarah Palin is that politics is a means to her higher goal: celebrity. Every action she takes is designed to make sense . . . if you believe that government is really a version of a reality show. The remote, David Lynch-style location, the family often in trouble with the law, the pregnant teenage daughter and her impossibly handsome redneck boyfriend, the boyfriend’s angry sister, an ornery Alaskan trooper, a few moose and mysterious pregnancies . . . and, well, the mini-series never ends. The best guess I’ve heard of the real reason for her abrupt departure is: “I’m a celebrity . . . get me out of here!”

A Farewell to Harms
Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal

She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. “I’m not wired that way,” “I’m not a quitter,” “I’m standing up for our values.” I’m, I’m, I’m.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

That piece was pretty harsh. You should read the whole thing if you love bashing Palin. Now, onto the Health Care reform party, which is shaping up rather poorly right now, and as usual, I blame the MSM propaganda machine for forcing everyone to freak out about change. There will probably be a rant about this at some point this week, too.

The cost of no public option
Devilstower, Daily Kos

Let’s move to the other end of the spectrum. As of 2009, life expectancy in the United States is 78.11 years. Which sounds pretty good, until you realize it puts us one slot above Albania. For the United Kingdom, this number is 79.01 years. For France it’s 80.98. For Canada, 81.23. for the United States, that means about 270,000,000 years lost compared just to the slightly better numbers of the UK. 936,000,000 years lost compared to Canada. Want to stick a monetary value on it? Say that just a fourth of these Americans in their golden years are pulling down 20 hours a week and getting minimum wage to wave you into the local big box or bag your groceries. That’s $442 billion worth of time lost compared to the UK. About $1.5 trillion lost if those workers had lived as long as Canadians.

There are good things to be said about the American system. When you’re in an American hospital, a very good level of immediate care makes you more likely to survive the immediate aftermath of a health crisis. Just had a heart attack? Hug that cardiac care unit close and you’re 20% more likely to hang around than your neighbor to the north. However, a low quality of long term and follow up care erodes that difference over the course of a year. Sorry.

Have a good day. I’m off to freak out a bit. Goodbye.

During the Bush years, the Senate needed 50 votes (plus Cheney) to pass legislation. Once Democrats took the Senate, that obviously changed. 60 votes became the new threshold. And no one has been a more avid promoter of that new standard than the Senate Democratic leader himself, Harry Reid.

Now that he has 60 votes, his handy excuse is bunk. So what does Reid do? Make more excuses.

Harry Reid sucks as a majority leader. Period.

New Dem health plan costs less, covers more — and has a public option
Jed Lewison, Daily Kos

The key thing to remember is that last time around, we were looking at a $1 trillion price tag over 10 years — and millions without coverage.

This time we’re looking at $600 billion over 10 years and 97% coverage.

What changed?

Two things. First, now the plan includes a public option, which is a far more cost effective way of expanding coverage than only subsidizing private insurance. Second, it contains a funding mechanism requiring employers who do not provide health insurance to pay an annual fee for each uncovered employee. Small businesses would be exempt from this fee.

Thank God we have this bill to offer, but it’s still not certain we are going to pass real reform. More discussion below.

Advocacy Groups? Shut Up. Lobbyists? Have A Seat
BarbinMD, Daily Kos

So, do you want to get involved in politics and help advance meaningful health care legislation? Maybe raise a little money to run ads that target specific lawmakers, organize petitions, or send out emails to like-minded people, urging them to contact their representative? Well, sit down and shut up:

“President Obama, strategizing yesterday with congressional leaders about health-care reform, complained that liberal advocacy groups ought to drop their attacks on Democratic lawmakers and devote their energy to promoting passage of comprehensive legislation.”

But if you have more than a million dollars a day to spend, have a vested interest in stopping real health care reform, and better yet, if you have a past, personal relationship with key lawmakers, pull up a chair

And they say we are lockstep Obama supporters that will follow him into Nazi America. Right. The next piece is less depressing, but same theme.

HELP Is on the Way
Paul Krugman, New York Times

So fundamental health reform — reform that would eliminate the insecurity about health coverage that looms so large for many Americans — is now within reach. The “centrist” senators, most of them Democrats, who have been holding up reform can no longer claim either that universal coverage is unaffordable or that it won’t work.

The only question now is whether a combination of persuasion from President Obama, pressure from health reform activists and, one hopes, senators’ own consciences will get the centrists on board — or at least get them to vote for cloture, so that diehard opponents of reform can’t block it with a filibuster.

This is a historic opportunity — arguably the best opportunity since 1947, when the A.M.A. killed Harry Truman’s health-care dreams. We’re right on the cusp. All it takes is a few more senators, and HELP will be on the way.

If Krugman thinks it’s a good bill, so do I. I’ll follow lockstep with him. For a perspective on the Sarah Palin debacle:

Sarah’s Straight Talk
Gail Collins, New York Times

“And a problem in our country today is apathy,” she said on Friday as she announced that she would resign as governor of Alaska at the end of the month. “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’ No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time … to BUILD UP.”

Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter. Or a deceased salmon.

RFK Jr – President Obama should go to Appalachia
Devilstower, Daily Kos

Yes, there are many problems facing President Obama, and many issues confronting the Congress. But the issue of mountaintop removal may be unique in that it doesn’t require any extraordinary action. It won’t cost billions of dollars. It doesn’t need any kind of false “bipartisanship.” It only requires that President Obama instruct the EPA and other agencies to enforce the existing law. If he does not do this, there is no doubt where the fault for the resulting ruin will lie.

I agree with Devilstower, and RFK. It is a tragedy that can be stopped easily. I have one more holdover from July 2:

That ’30s Show
Paul Krugman, New York Times

And as an economist, I’d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.

It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)

Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.

So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.

We didn’t do enough stimulus the first time around. Krugman was right, and they still won’t listen to him, even though he was on the cover of Newsweek many month ago.

Okay, whew, I feel a lot better. But now I am going to read Taibbi’s controversial but true articles about Goldman, then report back to you tomorrow. G’night!

To its credit, the Washington Post, on the whole by a very slim plurality, does what it is supposed to do–speak truth to power and explain to the public what is happening inside the Beltway. Thank god for reporters like Walter Pincus who have upheld the ideals of journalism while the building burns down around him.

From my perspective, this whole episode began with Dana Milbank, a loserface who “writes the Washington Sketch column about political theater in the capitol,” flipping shit because, god forbid, a reporter for the Huffington Post, a blog-based political news and opinion website (holy fuck those amateurs!), was called on by the President because he knew the question would be one from an Iranian reporter. Milbank basically said this was no different than having a ‘plant’ in the press briefing to ask a softball question, which was commonplace during the Bush years. Well, I’m sorry, Dana, that you or your WaPo and MSM colleagues didn’t find the Iranian struggle important enough to dig up some questions that real, actual Iranians might have for the president. Please, excuse the Huffington Post from doing actual journalism, just this once, okay?

What is the traditional media’s problem with blogs anyway? They do have trained reporters that write up news articles, getting as many facts as they can, finding the truth per se. Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, they are likely shitting themselves over the fact that the blogs are filled with opinions, and therefore everything associated with them is poisoned with bias. I mean, opinion and news are like oil and water, right? Who the fuck would ever take a news source that published both news and opinion seriously?  I guess the pages and pages (not to mention dollars and dollars) spent on condescending pundit opinions and observations is okay when the newspaper does it, because they are endowed with the divine abilitiy to separate news from opinion, by virtue of simply being the Washington Post.

What’s underlying Dana Milbank’s somewhat isolated and outlier-ed asshole-ness is the Bourgeoisie concept of professional entitlement, the idea that “I deserve y because I have x.” Milbank and the mainstream media coduct their daily work counter to the kind of meritocracy any profession, especially journalism, should actually be founded upon. “I deserve to ask the POTUS questions because I’m from the fucking Washington Post, bitches!” I’m sorry if you feel like you’ve wasted your life climbing the ruthless ladder of professional journalism to get yourself into the White House Press Corps, but you don’t have to project your inadequacies on me, Hector Projector. Shit.

So we have Milbank desperately trying to hang onto his entitlement from being a Washington Post reporter (though his column doesn’t shine any truthful light on what goes on in DC, it’s basically filled with trash along the same lines as a tabloid covering Hollywood celebrities, only these are Washington DC celebrities who apparently run our lives) on week, then the next week, we have a pay-for-press scheme (via Politico):

“Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate,” says the one-page flier. “Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. … Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders.”

Awesome. And it only costs $25,000 to attend. Can you possibly have less integrity? Basically, the WaPo thinks that it can hide behind it’s reputation that its a ‘reputable’ newspaper with ‘reputable’ reporters who have ‘reputable’ sources. Yeah. Right. This is the unraveling of the main stream media; of newspapers specifically, but notions about what constitutes professional journalism generally.

When you add it all up, there’s no way you come out of this story and believe the Post when it says the newsroom maintains its independence from the marketing department. It’s bullshit. Every one of the children of privilege working for the Post is compromised. How can you take any report the Post does about Health Care seriously, now? Were they paid to write the story? Even if they never take a dime to write a story, I don’t think I can take any story at face value, ever again, and neither should anyone else.

Juxtaposed to Milbank’s whining, what we have here is a shit-ton of hypocrisy. The left hand of the Post thinks that reporting should be left to serious professionals because the work of the media is serious business, while the right hand is wining and dining the power players, essentially selling its reputation as a serious institution to the highest bidder. Fuck That. This is how democracy dies.

The butt of all this is that now the WaPo is now the butt of all journalism jokes. Even Robert Gibbs joked about it for a while.  Any report or story that seems fishy ad infinitum from the Washington Post, there’s gonna be a joke, like this one at the end of the abbreviated pundit roundup on Daily Kos:

A document filed in federal court this week by the Justice Department offers new evidence that former vice president Richard B. Cheney helped steer the Bush administration’s public response to the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment by the CIA and that he was at the center of many related administration deliberations.

For a small fee, you can come over for dinner and we can discuss whether to post more stories like this. Nota Bene: the dinner has been canceled because of an overzealous publicist.

The paper’s credibility has been waning since the infamous lead up to the Iraq War; now it’s non-existant. We must now treat the Washington Post with the same skepticism reserved previously to obviously biased and compromised news sources like partisan blogs and Fox News.

Washington Post? Get back in line. You need to earn your spot again, if you ever deserved it.

Look for a post about Pride 2009 in Baltimore later this week. It will have photos, once I buy a pro membership to Flickr. That’s how they make their money, obviously. Smart. Also, Kim is again stateside, so my mood is likely to improve. Yea.

Also, make sure you’re keeping up with “What I’m Followin’” tab over there on the right column. There is lots of good stuff to read that may or may not appear in the Required Readings.

What you should be reading

This one isn’t “news” but analysis. It’s great though. I love how Taibbi can sit even the most talented and gifted writers down.

Fareed Zakaria’s Manifesto
Matt Taibbi

This is a beautiful piece of writing. Describing the misdeeds of Wall Street in the last decade by saying “few people acted… nobly” is sort of like saying that Stalin was “not always sociable” or O.J. Simpson was “not always committed to preserving life.” I mean, talk about a freaking understatement. Forgetting entirely the other insane lies in this passage (my favorite being the one about bureuacrats not taking cash for favors — I guess he means except for Bob Rubin taking $130 million or whatever from Citi after pushing through that merger), that “not so noble” bit is where Zakaria earns his money.

Because if you get into the actual gory details of what went on in those years, there’s just no way you come out of that story not wanting to see every banker on Wall Street strung up by his testicles.

This one is about the Supreme Court and it’s potentially landmark ruling about searches in schools.

SCOTUS: Teen Strip-Serach Unconstitutional, But …
Adam B, Daily Kos

This is depressing:

Another casualty of the recession: Recent college grads
Tony Pugh, McClatchy Newspapers

New monthly survey data from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston finds that during the first four months of 2009, less than half of the nation’s 4 million college graduates age 25 and under were working in jobs that required a college degree. That’s down from 54 percent for same period last year.

For some discussion surrounding the recent passage of the Waxman-Markey energy bill, pre passage.

Climate Change Protection, or Climate Change Assurance?
Devilstower, Daily Kos

So what kind of bill can put Greenpeace and the clean coal folks on the same side of the aisle? One that’s far weaker than we would hope for. It may not give the clean coal team everything they would wish for, but it certainly gives them a stocking full of goodies.

This won’t help anyone’s disaffection with the political system.

Another bangin’ Krugman column. He continues to be my hero:

Not Enough Audacity
Paul Krugman, New York Times

The point is that if you’re making big policy changes, the final form of the policy has to be good enough to do the job. You might think that half a loaf is always better than none — but it isn’t if the failure of half-measures ends up discrediting your whole policy approach.

Which brings us back to health care. It would be a crushing blow to progressive hopes if Mr. Obama doesn’t succeed in getting some form of universal care through Congress. But even so, reform isn’t worth having if you can only get it on terms so compromised that it’s doomed to fail.

[...]

And that’s why the public plan is an important part of reform: it would help keep costs down through a combination of low overhead and bargaining power. That’s not an abstract hypothesis, it’s a conclusion based on solid experience. Currently, Medicare has much lower administrative costs than private insurance companies, while federal health care programs other than Medicare (which isn’t allowed to bargain over drug prices) pay much less for prescription drugs than non-federal buyers. There’s every reason to believe that a public option could achieve similar savings.

Indeed, the prospects for such savings are precisely what have the opponents of a public plan so terrified. Mr. Obama was right: if they really believed their own rhetoric about government waste and inefficiency, they wouldn’t be so worried that the public option would put private insurers out of business. Behind the boilerplate about big government, rationing and all that lies the real concern: fear that the public plan would succeed.

Tarnished Shields: Mark Sanford And The Morally Bankrupt GOP Leadership
Walter Brasch, The Public Record

Basically, the articlerehashes recent political history and is all about how hypocritical Republicans are when they claim to be the party of family values.

Another post, below, along the same lines:

Clinton impreachment manager: GOP should lose “stinking rot of self-righteousness”
kos, Daily Kos

Like the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalists, conservatives seek to impose their morality on the rest of us via governmental coercion (legislation and the bully pulpit). They are incapable of minding their own business, and seek to stick their noses into peoples’ bedrooms and doctor offices. Yet time and time again, their relentless moralizing is proven to be hypocritical grandstanding, as they are unable to meet even the lowest of bars they try to impose on others.

We don’t care if Republicans want to fuck around on their wives and husbands. Those are private affairs. Yet Republicans seek to criminalize such behavior in a bid for votes and social approbation.

So yeah, we’ll laugh and mock when Republicans are busted as hypocrites. If you want to make “family values” the centerpiece of your political persona, then don’t ditch your kids on Father’s Day to fuck your mistress!

The amazingness continues. Read it for a little fun!

One more post on health reform:

The Netroots and the House Progressives: Toward More Progressive Policy
mcjoan, Daily Kos

As part of the progressive movement, we’re in a sort of a feedback loop with the Caucus, working on both the policy formation and policy framing efforts–sort of the stick part of the process, as well as the “amplification” side–more the carrot part where we do our best to shore up their good efforts, provide them the public support, the financial support and, frankly, the ongoing pressure they need to have to become what will essentially be a progressive stop to the Senate.

Don’t ever underestimate the pressure part of this, on the House, on the Senate, on the White House.

Good stuff. And goodnight.

Iran is still a mess, and people are dying. Of course I’d like the regime to fall, as well as the entire political system. But I feel bad for the Iranians. So much political turmoil, all the time. I guess I should feel lucky I live in the USA, where even in a system plagued by cynicism and inaction, at least we don’t have this in disputes over elections.

Once again, I’ve got a lot on my mind regarding health reform, and boy are we in the thick of things. People are getting worried left and right now that it looks like the Dems will be able to pull the trigger sooner than expected, getting some kind of reform passed within the year. I’m praying that they don’t sacrifice comprehensiveness simply to get something done, because then the plan will fail, and then not only will our health system remain in peril, but the Democrats will definitely take a hit in the ongoing popularity contest.

What’s most important to know right now about the health reform debate, something you might be missing if you follow cable news or read the op-ed pages of your local newspaper, is that 72 percent of the country supports a government-administered insurance plan. That’s a big mandate. If you think it is a good idea, you’re definitely not alone. Don’t let your federal representatives tell you that they know better than you and sweet talk you out of thinking it’s a good idea. They are lying, probably so they can get some dolla dolla bills from the fat cats.

Now, of course, a public insurance plan doesn’t solve everyone’s health problems magically, but…that’s…another…story. Let’s just make sure no one goes bankrupt when they have a medical emergency. I’ll take that as a positive outcome of all this.

I haven’t updated you all with any required readings recently. Sorry about that. Also, in order to collect what I may or may not be writing about or pointing to for your reading pleasure, I’ll be posting links to articles under the “What I’m Watchin’” tab. Also, I’m going to try out posting a song that I may or may not have been listening to while crafting the post. I hope you enjoy this feature. I know I will enjoy posting it.

What also is pissing me off right now is that I can’t insert any photos using any mechanism in wordpress. Nice. Issue Resolved.

What you should be reading

Firstly, if you missed Krugman’s column, here’s the gist:

In short, Mr. Obama has a clear vision of what went wrong, but aside from regulating shadow banking — no small thing, to be sure — his plan basically punts on the question of how to keep it from happening all over again, pushing the hard decisions off to future regulators.

I’m aware of the political realities: getting financial reform through Congress won’t be easy. And even as it stands the Obama plan would be a lot better than nothing.

But to live up to its own analysis, the Obama administration needs to come down harder on the rating agencies and, even more important, get much more specific about reforming the way bankers are paid.

He’s right and we should probably listen to him, again.

In a related note,

The Greatest Non-Apology of All Time
Matt Taibbi

Anyone else out there find himself doubled over laughing after reading Goldman, Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein’s “apology” for his bank’s behavior leading up to the financial crisis? Has an act of contrition ever in history been more worthless and insincere? Even Gary Ridgway did a better job of sounding genuinely sorry at his sentencing hearing — and he was a guy who had sex with dead prostitutes because it was cheaper than paying live ones.

Looking at Blankfein’s one-sentence apology, I’m struck in particular by a couple of phrases:

While we regret that we participated in the market euphoria…

Really, Lloyd? You “participated” in the market euphoria? You didn’t, I don’t know, cause the market euphoria? By almost any measurement, Goldman was a central, leading player in the subprime housing bubble story.

I love Taibbi. He always knows what’s up. Wish he had more time to write.

This one’s fun. It’s the Daily Show from last week mocking House Republicans for comparing their struggles against the tyranny of the Democrats to the struggles of the reformists in Iran.

Okay, back to the dead serious.

That Pesky Little Thing Called An “Election”
georgia10, Daily Kos

Today, 76% of Americans support a public option for all on health care.

So, to all the Democrats who claim that they don’t have the “votes” to pass a public option or that they need Republican support to reform health care, this is just a friendly reminder that the American voters have already weighed the John McCain/GOP plan. They rejected it in 2008, and more than 3 out of 4 Americans reject it today.

In other words, to wobbly Democrats wringing their hands over sacrificing real change at the crumbling alter of “bipartisanship,” to those who worship politics over principle and to those who act as if their constituents are the Republican minority in Congress whining about “socialism” rather than the American majority from coast to coast wishing for a public option, election have consequences.

A righteous rant, though it’s not tagged as one.

GOP Rhetoric On A Downward Spiral: The Political Costs of Ugly
Steve Singiser

One of the most important ingredients of Obama’s political success has been the GOP’s tendency to completely lose their marbles dealing with the President.

That tendency seems to be escalating, not abating, as time has gone on.

What you should be listening to

John O’Callaghan Featuring Sarah Howells, Find Yourself, Cosmic Gate Remix
A State of Trance 2009 by Armin Van Buuren

It’s June 16. We are coming up on the summer solstice. And yet, I’m walking around outside in two longsleeve shirts, a longsleeve jacket, and corduroy pants. WTF is going on?!?!

I don’t know about you, but this is really starting to freak me out. I feel like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky (tried to find the clip, sorry, not available). Last summer, all we had was blazing day after blazing day, with drout conditions for its entirety. This year, we’ve had tons (I mean tons) of rain, and I think we’ve managed maybe one-half of one day in the blaze. It’s insane. One weather man up here has been quoted as saying that this might be the year we have no summer at all. Imagine that. No summer? I thought global warming was supposed to give us no winter.

I spent the entire winter suffering through ridiculously cold day after ridiculously cold day. Just relive my facebook status updates through December, January, February, and March. You’ll see. But I got through it. I got through it thinking about, ahh, the warm days of summer are just around the corner. It was like a mini pep talk everyday. And now, it’s the freaking summer, and I’ve got high temperatures of 66 degrees fahrenheit. Awesome.

I reached the breaking point today when I was walking down to the post office in Danville to purchase 99 stamps with a $44.00 check (they actually gave me 100, I couldn’t talk them into giving me 44 cents in change from a check transaction). I took a good long sniff of the air. It felt familiar, felt warm. It felt like–vacation. What vacation?, I thought. I know–the f*#!-ing beach! It feels like the beach because the sun is really hot, you can feel it burning the skin (especially since I’m so white), but there is a continuous cool breeze, cooling you down lest you should feel inclined to sloth around in oppressive heat and go running from air-conditioned building to air-conditioned vehicle.

You readers are probably thinking, ‘dude, Mike, chillout, man–you should be happy there isn’t oppressive weather conditions. Bask in the chill weather while you can.’ No. This isn’t natural. And I don’t like things that aren’t natural. Plus, given the weather, I’m inclined to sit outside on my less than optimal porch, cracking open cold-one after cold-one. It makes me want to drink outside. At least when it’s hot, you don’t want to be outside. And the only other place I can drink alone is in my basement, which is wholly depressing, and makes me look like an especially high-profile loser, especially when I tell you all about it via this post.

With all this in mind, let’s turn to what I’ve been reading / following today:

Climate change odds much worse than thought
David Chandler, MIT News Office

The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth’s climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago – and could be even worse than that.

[...]

While the outcomes in the “no policy” projections now look much worse than before, there is less change from previous work in the projected outcomes if strong policies are put in place now to drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions. Without action, “there is significantly more risk than we previously estimated,” Prinn says. “This increases the urgency for significant policy action.”

Looks like it’s about time we did something.

Will the Health Industry Derail Obama’s Reforms?
Various Authors, Washington Post

The GOP’s Empathy Problem
kos, Daily Kos

The GOP’s hostility toward empathy, inherent in just about everything they do — from starving government, to an aggressive and destructive foreign policy — is predicated on a proud and arrogant dismissal of the wants, needs, and customs of anyone unlike them. So Obama is a moron for trying to understand Islam, ACORN is dangerous because they engage in community organizing, taxes are bad because it redistributes wealth, and blah blah blah blah. Go down the list — every conservative position is predicated on selfishness and lack of give-a-shit for other people.

The problem for conservatives is that ultimately, the rest of the country disagrees, including its largest growing demographics. And it’s hard to win elections when you are so far outside the American mainstream on such a key value.

Public Option Action Alert: Make the HELP Committee Hold Firm
mcjoan, Daily Kos

Basically, we are on the brink of losing the public option, which negates any real health reform. We might as well jump off a cliff because we wasted all this time and effort, and you know I hate wasting time.

What Happens if Obama Loses the Left?
buhdydharma, Daily Kos

But the Issue-Left?

Oh, they are not happy at all!

And there are PLENTY of them.

There are the Financial Issue People, who…for some unknown reason….object to giving away hundreds of Billions of dollars to corporate interests and the bankers who crashed the economy.

While allowing those same bankers to keep kicking REGULAR people…. people who don’t have Lobby, regular people who don’t “Own The Senate” …. out of their homes. Billions for crooks, nothing for The People.

Obama is losing them. and is about to let watered down regulations go through that will lose more of them.

I agree. That’s me. But I’m still a team player. I’ve always been leary of Obama’s moderate stances on issues that he should be comfortable in taking a liberal stance on. Stupid Edwards…

High Definition Democracy
georgia10, Daily Kos

The concept of citizen-selected leadership itself is ancient, but we are witnessing today the latest chapter in how technology is strengthening that democracy, one byte at a time.

One need look no further than the 140-character updates streaming in from Iran on Twitter, the photostreams pouring in on Flickr, and the blossoming Facebook pages to understand and appreciate the revolutionary effect social media has had on how civilizations engage in and react to democracy.

[...]

But the internet provides something more. Where print, radio and TV have permitted political and community leaders to “get their messages” out to the masses, they are largely one-dimensional methods of communication. With the internet, however, we are seeing for the first time how multi-dimensional technology allows not just for the amplification of a “message” by those at the top, but it also allows for the creation of sub-messages, anti-messages, and other reactions by the masses.

In other words, we have moved from the era of citizen passivity – reading or watching or hearing about current events – to the era of citizen proactivity, where individuals are empowered to opine on, report on, dispute, support, or organize around those current events.

Iran’s Day of Anguish
Roger Cohen

Ahmadinejad won as the Interior Ministry was sealed, opposition Web sites were shut down, text messages were cut off, cell phones were interrupted, Internet access was impeded, dozens of opposition figures were arrested, universities were closed and a massive show of force was orchestrated to ram home the result to an incredulous public.

Overnight, a whole movement and mood were vaporized, to the point that they appeared a hallucination.

For more Iran analysis, see this: Khamenei: The Power Behind the President.

Social Networks Spread Iranian Influence Online
Brad Stone & Noam Cohen, New York Times

Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and, most visibly, coordinating their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. Their activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential elections on Friday and ensuing attempts by the government to restrict or censor their online communications.

On Twitter, reports and links to photos from a peaceful mass march through Tehran on Monday, along with accounts of street fighting and casualties around the country, have become the most popular topic on the service worldwide, according to Twitter’s published statistics.

This is why the internet is amazing. If you aren’t engaging online, you aren’t doing as much as you can to make this world a better place for regular people.

What the President had to say:

Obama and the Politics of Short Memories
E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post

As long as the global economy was crumbling, business held back and even welcomed the infusion of hundreds of billions of government dollars to prop up the system. Business leaders, like everyone else, were frightened to death. They welcomed Big Government’s exertions to keep the banks alive and gin up consumer purchasing power.

It is an odd tribute to the short-term success of Obama’s recovery effort that the business lobbies now feel free to return to the old-time religion of bashing government and singing the praises of the unfettered marketplace. You might expect the corporate guys to show a little gratitude to the government that bailed them out. But that’s never been their way. They’d rather pretend that the past nine months were a bad dream.

[...]

The Obama administration, which has largely had things its own way so far, would do well to take this declaration of war seriously. Until now, Obama has been able to occupy the broad middle ground of American politics. Many who were unhappy with how aggressive the government had to be to get the economy rolling nevertheless accepted the need for Washington to act boldly.

Stay the Course
Paul Krugman, New York Times

The debate over economic policy has taken a predictable yet ominous turn: the crisis seems to be easing, and a chorus of critics is already demanding that the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration abandon their rescue efforts. For those who know their history, it’s déjà vu all over again — literally.

[...]

To sum up: A few months ago the U.S. economy was in danger of falling into depression. Aggressive monetary policy and deficit spending have, for the time being, averted that danger. And suddenly critics are demanding that we call the whole thing off, and revert to business as usual.

Those demands should be ignored. It’s much too soon to give up on policies that have, at most, pulled us a few inches back from the edge of the abyss.

He just explains it so well.

And some health care videos for you to enjoy; the first is Obama speaking passionately to the dumb AMA, and the second is Howard Dean firing back against the stupid co-op compromise.