Later On

Karl Vick in the Washington Post:

The untimely disappearance of Sally Marrari’s medical coverage goes a long way toward explaining why insurance companies are cast as the villain in the health-care reform drama.

"They said I never mentioned I had a back problem," said Marrari, 52, whose coverage with Blue Cross was abruptly canceled in 2006 after a thyroid disorder, fluid in the heart and lupus were diagnosed. That left the Los Angeles woman with $25,000 in medical bills and the stigma of the company’s claim that she had committed fraud by not listing on a health questionnaire "preexisting conditions" Marrari said she did not know she had.

By the time she filed a lawsuit in 2008, she also got a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and her debts had swelled beyond $200,000. She was able to see a specialist by trading office visits for work on the doctor’s 1969 Porsche at the garage she owns with her husband.

"I’ve had about 10 visits," Marrari said of the barter arrangement that has proved more reliable than her insurance. "The car needs a lot of work."

Rescission — the technical term for canceling coverage on grounds that the company was misled — is often considered among the most offensive practices in an insurance industry that already suffers from a distinct lack of popularity among the American public. Tales of cancellations have fueled outrage among regulators, analysts, doctors and, not least, plaintiffs’ lawyers, who describe insurers as too eager to shed patients to widen profits.

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Ten anime movies that put Disney in the shade.

This story from the Associated Press is shocking:

The U.S. military faced more criticism Monday in Afghanistan as a charity accused American soldiers of storming through a provincial hospital, breaking down doors and tying up staff and visitors in a hunt for insurgents.

Critics say such heavy-handed tactics, if true, violate international principles and undermine support for the war against the Taliban.

The American military said it was investigating the allegation, which came on the heels of a furor over reports that dozens of civilians were killed in a NATO airstrike in the country’s north last week.

Civilian deaths and intrusive searches have bred resentment among the Afghan population nearly eight years after the United States-led coalition invaded to oust the Taliban’s hard-line Islamist regime, which was sheltering Al Qaeda leaders.

On Monday, the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan said soldiers with the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division looking for insurgents forced their way into the charity’s hospital in Wardak province, about 40 miles southwest of Kabul.

"This is a clear violation of internationally recognized rules and principles," said Anders Fange, the charity’s country director. No one was harmed in the raid, but Fange said it violated an agreement between NATO forces and aid groups working in the area.

U.S. military spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker confirmed that the hospital was searched last week but had no other details.

Fange said U.S. troops kicked in doors, tied up four hospital guards and two people visiting relatives, and forced patients out of beds during their search late Wednesday…

Continue reading. Is the American military trying to give the Taliban more support from the people of Afghanistan?

Very good assessment by Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic:

The August recess began with critics attacking health care reform because of its high price tag. It ended with critics attacking health care reform because of how reformers proposed to reduce that high price tag. The intervening weeks were nightmarish: Instead of using August to showcase what reform could do for the average American, the White House spent most of its time knocking down rumors of death panels for the sick and elderly. And as the right became energized, the left grew disillusioned, as much by the administration’s backroom deals as by its ineffectual messaging. Eventually, the shift showed up in the polls. First people grew more wary of reform. Then they grew more wary of the president. It was if everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Somehow, though, health reform is not dead. Despite all of the setbacks and all of the missed opportunities—despite this train wreck of a month—the situation remains remarkably similar to what it was before the recess. Significant health care legislation is likely to pass, particularly if Obama manages to give a good speech on Wednesday night. And while the possibilities for what that legislation might accomplish have certainly diminished, mostly for worse, it’s not clear how much they have diminished–and to what extent progressives may yet have the power to change that fact.

Here is where the debate stands, based on interviews with about a dozen key players spanning the administration, Congress, and broader reform community: …

Continue reading.

Businesses not only are devoted to screwing over their employees (got to keep labor costs down, you know), but also to screwing over consumers. Latest example, in a Wall Street Journal story by Brody Mullins:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is launching an advertising campaign of at least $2 million aimed at defeating a central plank of the Obama administration’s financial-regulation overhaul.

But there won’t be any mention of banks or Wall Street or insurance companies.

The first ads running in Washington-area newspapers feature a picture of a butcher with the line: "Virtually every business that extends credit to American consumers would be affected — even the local butcher and the credit he extends to his customers."

The ads are aimed at the administration’s proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would tightly regulate consumer products including mortgages and credit cards. It would have the power to ban certain practices and require financial firms to offer loans with simple terms and clear disclosure.

The Chamber’s goal is twofold: move the spotlight off the unpopular commercial banks and mortgage lenders that are the target of the legislation and muster a roster of more sympathetic opponents.

"We want to go beyond the usual suspects to show how overreaching this is," said Amanda Engstrom, a senior vice president at the Chamber who created the lobbying and advertising campaign.

The lobbying push comes as Congress returns to work after a monthlong recess. While most attention on Capitol Hill will be on health care, lawmakers on the financial-services panels will continue to forge ahead on legislation in response to the financial collapse. Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, plans to begin holding votes on his panel’s parts of the legislation, including the consumer agency, later this month.

Asked about the butcher ad, Steve Adamske, a spokesman for Mr. Frank, called the campaign "scare tactics from the likes of big business."

Continue reading. You can understand why banks and credit card companies would fight a "Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would tightly regulate consumer products including mortgages and credit cards," especially since "it would have the power to ban certain practices and require financial firms to offer loans with simple terms and clear disclosure." Can’t have that happening, can we?

I generally forget to soak my boar brushes before the shave, but this morning I remembered, and the Semogue 2000 softened nicely from the soaking. I worked up a very good lather from Geo. F. Trumper Coconut Oil shaving soap, and the first pass was great. But the second pass was practically no lather at all. I grabbed the tin of Dovo shaving soap and worked up a new lather—and this time enough for both the second and third passes. I’m not sure whether Dovo is that much better or I did a better job. In any event, it’s clear that the Semogue 2000 requires more breaking in.

The Futur with its previously used Bolzano blade did a great job, smooth and trouble-free. And the Ogallala Bay Rum was a very nice finish.

Just the update from Greenwald’s column today:

One of TV’s assigned "liberals" for attacking the Left — Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter — earlier today unleashed a very strange, multi-step outburst on his Twitter feed regarding the foolish Left, the public option, and a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago documenting and criticizing his 180-degree/White-House-mimicking reversal on health care reform (effectuated while he’s writing an Obama book dependent upon White House access).  Jane Hamsher dissects this behavior as only she can (as but one example:  Alter complains that my criticism of his White-House-pleasing reversal was "[my] typical ad hominem tripe" and then two minutes later — literally — writes:  "Greenwald is smart but a total snake–ready to screw anyone for a post," without any apparent recognition of the contradiction).

I just want to add to one point Hamsher made.  Alter’s Newsweek column this week argues that Dick Cheney is worse than many of the most notorious torture-reliant tyrants because, unlike them, "Cheney creates a moral argument for torture."  That’s a fair enough point — I agree with it — but Alter neglects to mention that Cheney had company in "creating a moral argument for torture" — namely, "liberal" Jon Alter, who wrote a column in Newsweek entitled "Time to Think About Torture," in which Alter argued we must do exactly that in order to defeat Al Qaeda.  Notably, in this week’s column, Alter argues that we must not prosecute anyone for torture, including Cheney.  As I noted the other day, behind virtually every Broderian establishment pundit opposing torture prosecutions is a shameful record of supporting or otherwise enabling Bush radicalism and lawlessness, including torture.

But that’s our mainstream spectrum:  "liberals" such as Alter are allowed on TV as long as they spend much of their time mocking the foolish, unhinged Left; opposing torture prosecutions; supporting warrantless eavesdropping and telecom immunity (while mocking the Left for "pulling their hair out over this"); and endorsing things like the torture regime itself.  I don’t blame Alter for being upset when such things are pointed out, but they’re not "ad hominem" observations — just facts.

A book that makes an interesting point:

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

by Incite! Women Of Color Against Violence (ed.)

A review by Niels Strandskov

It is hard to imagine the United States without its non-profit sector. Many of the essential functions of society, from pre-natal care to cemetery maintenance, fall within the purview of non-profit organizations. Americans expect non-profits to heal the sick, feed the poor, create art, foster learning, rehabilitate the lapsed, and applaud the heroic. Even those who are not dependent on non-profits for our livelihood can hardly go a day without interacting with this class of organizations.

For all the social good that non-profits promote, there remains an ideological paradox surrounding their existence: How do organizations which seek to change society for the better reconcile their aims with the very social forces which create the problems they are trying to alleviate? A recent collection of essays, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, argues forcefully that this paradox is only solvable by abandoning the non-profit model, at least as far as social justice organizations are concerned.

Edited by the activist group INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, the collection was inspired by that organization’s demoralizing experience as the sometime recipient of grants from large foundations. Specifically, INCITE! lost a major grant because it refused to toe the mainstream liberal line on the issue of solidarity with Palestinian resistance. When INCITE!’s members started organizing and educating themselves about their place in the non-profit world, they found the results disquieting. A 2004 conference on the question of taking money from large funders was the result, and that in turn led to the publication of this book.

Always unabashedly polemical, the essays here are mostly the result of similar disillusionments suffered by the members of other activist groups. A Seattle anti-rape group found itself marginalized for advancing a critique of sexual violence that encompassed class and race, finding fault with the organs of the state in addition to individual offenders. A group of Native women in the early 1970s became increasingly skeptical of the wave of professionalization and state accommodation that followed the flowering of radical action around peace and civil rights. And several academics chart the machinations by some of the largest foundations to steer African-American civil rights organizations away from protest and into non-threatening programs like job creation.

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded has already made quite a splash in radical circles. Although its critique is firmly rooted in a certain segment of the activist milieu, its broader message bears considering by all activists, and many non-activists as well. Can we really expect to see positive change when the salaries of most organizers depend on the approval of grant-making bodies that are governed by corporate executives and others close to the centers of power? These essays make a persuasive case that the answer is "No," and that the sooner activists separate themselves from grant-makers, the better it will be for everyone who wants to see a new world open up before us.

Torture, quite apart from the immorality and illegality of its use, fails also as a source of information: torture unfortunately is much less effective than other methods of interrogation. Ali Soufan explains in a NY Times op-ed:

Public bravado aside, the defenders of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are fast running out of classified documents to hide behind. The three that were released recently by the C.I.A. — the 2004 report by the inspector general and two memos from 2004 and 2005 on intelligence gained from detainees — fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism.

The inspector general’s report distinguishes between intelligence gained from regular interrogation and from the harsher methods, which culminate in waterboarding. While the former produces useful intelligence, according to the report, the latter “is a more subjective process and not without concern.” And the information in the two memos reinforces this differentiation.

They show that substantial intelligence was gained from pocket litter (materials found on detainees when they were captured), from playing detainees against one another and from detainees freely giving up information that they assumed their questioners already knew. A computer seized in March 2003 from a Qaeda operative for example, listed names of Qaeda members and money they were to receive.

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From time to time I’ve mentioned Tom Geoghegan’s book Which Side Are You On?: Trying to be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back, a highly entertaining look at the Labor movement from the perspective of a Labor lawyer. The book, first published in 1991, is now available in a revised edition. (Links are to attractively priced secondhand copies; I highly encourage the reading of the book, especially by those who are anti-Labor.)

The NY Times reached back into its archives to run this op-ed by Geoghegan, originally published in 1991, the same year the book was published:

In 1989, the greatest year in history while I’ve been alive, all I did was pile up newspapers in the back seat of my car. Every day there seemed to be another historic headline about Poland or Prague and I’d think, "Well, this paper I have to save . . ."

By June I felt like a bag lady with a shopping cart.

And now it’s happened in the Soviet Union, too. And I always thought that if something great or historic were to happen in my lifetime, somehow America, all of us, would have to be part of it. We wouldn’t just happen to watch it on TV.

But instead, in these great historic times, I haven’t done any living in history at all. I’ve been practicing labor law in Chicago. And in my own life, everything that looks like "History" seems to go in reverse.

It’s been strange, living in America in these lightning years: watching our own right to strike disappear, watching union membership drop and drop. Once unionized American labor had 34 percent of the private-sector work force. Now it’s down to 12.

It now seems at least possible that union labor will disappear (except, of course, in baseball, the last field of dreams). A few friends of mine have asked, "Well, what are you going to do? What line of work will you go into?"

Well, I could sneak across the border into Canada. They have a labor movement there. Or I could go to Paris. Now that would be the best revenge, wouldn’t it? Living in Paris, teaching labor law to deconstructionists.

I keep meeting people from Europe who want to hear about the Wagner Act, or Taft-Hartley. It seems to fascinate them. Things that in America I have to explain slowly, in baby-talk, they seem to instantly understand. Sometimes I want to fall in their arms. I want to weep. I think, "My God, somebody’s interested . . . somebody understands . . ."

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Labor has fallen on hard times with globalization and increasing automation, but labor is still the source of wealth for the world. Michael Lind has an interesting essay at Salon.com on this very topic:

Today is Labor Day, when we celebrate the wealth destroyers – at least if the libertarian right is to be believed.

According to many free-market conservatives, economic growth is almost exclusively the result of investment decisions by a small number of rich individuals – the “wealth creators.” The wealth creators, according to the conservative press, are constantly being threatened from above by government, which seeks to destroy wealth by taxation, and from below by workers, particularly those organized into unions, who threaten to destroy wealth by insisting that capitalists share a decent amount of their profits with employees. The entire basis of conservative “trickle-down” economics is the idea that the economy will grow faster if the supposed wealth creators keep more of the profits of private enterprise, with less going to taxes and worker compensation.

If you believe this theory, then Labor Day should be a cause for national mourning. We should all pause to mourn the loss of capital that might have gone to a fifth or a sixth mansion or a private jet, but instead was conscripted against its will to pay for a public school or higher wages in a factory.

We should weep for the capital that might have given its life for high-end caterers but instead was forced by government to be spent on public hospital nurses. And we should grieve for the dollars that were wasted on public police protection, when they might have gone instead to private security guards in a gated community.

But maybe instead of mourning we should celebrate. Maybe Labor Day should be replaced by a new holiday to celebrate the tiny number of brilliant investors who, more or less single-handedly, are responsible for long-term economic progress. We should abolish Labor Day and replace it with Capital Day – a festive time when we, the majority of parasitic wealth destroyers whose income comes from wages rather than investments, can give our collective thanks to the small number of people who have most of the money.

I’m not sure that the above would be recognized as satire in all quarters. Here, for example, is an article in Investor’s Business Daily from last fall, denouncing candidate Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the top 5 percent: “At this delicate time in our economic history, talk of tax hikes on wealth creators and capital is irresponsible – a recipe for the kind of market meltdowns we’ve seen repeatedly in recent weeks. Spread the wealth? More like, destroy it.”

You would expect that in Investor’s Business Daily [which lately is famous for writing that, had Stephen Hawking been born in the UK, he would never have lived to make his contributions to science because the National Health Service would have let him die - LG]. But here’s British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, addressing the British Chambers of Commerce back in 2003: …

Continue reading.

This is weird. A report in Salon by Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the author of Engaging the Muslim World:

Preliminary reports are saying that a NATO airstrike on an oil tanker earlier hijacked by guerrillas set off an enormous explosion as people had gathered around it. Some 80 are feared dead.

There has been a central and continuing debate about how the Taliban and other anti-government guerrilla groups in Afghanistan have been funded. Initially it was thought that they were involved in the drug trade, but it turns out that they probably don’t manage to capture very much money from it (they are after all competing with corrupt government officials and criminal cartels). Then it was suggested that money is coming in from millionaire Muslim fundamentalists in the Gulf, from the United Arab Emirates, etc.

Now it turns out that we have met the enemy and he may well be us. Taliban are getting a cut of US government aid contracts in Afghanistan. Jean McKenzie of Global Post broke the story that the Taliban are getting a cut of US government aid contracts in Afghanistan. That story in turn prompted a congressional investigation that is generating more media on the question. The establishment of a substantial American press corps in Kabul and Islamabad is beginning to yield dividends for the US public in the form of investigative reporting that was infrequent earlier in the 2000s, in part because it is dangerous and in part because AfPak were not big emphases for the Bush administration.

CBS reports on the congressional hearings to find out if Congress is authorizing money that goes to Taliban.

Continue reading. There’s also a video at the link, and how the State Department might be involved.

You’d think that Congress, paid purely to debate and pass legislation, would at least be good at that. Not so, as Mike Lillis points out in the Washington Independent:

Credit card holders hit with arbitrary interest rate hikes in recent months might be stuck with the extra burden, despite the high-profile congressional effort this year to protect consumers from such increases.

With most of Congress’ sweeping credit card reforms not taking effect until next year, some card companies have reportedly taken to raising rates — while the law still allows it — on even reliable borrowers. Rather than attacking those discretionary hikes head on, however, Congress sidestepped them, punting any protections for those card holders to the fancy of officials at the Federal Reserve, who are currently drafting rules for implementing the reforms. That punt could create a loophole for card companies to exploit — a possibility that’s raised concerns about the ultimate effectiveness of the law to protect the most responsible card holders from new rate increases, and left consumer groups anxiously awaiting the Fed’s interpretation of the statute.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Enacted in May, the new law is designed to protect consumers from the most abusive practices of the credit card industry — practices like hidden fees, short payment windows and interest rate hikes applied to existing balances. Beginning next August, it will also require card companies to review rate hikes periodically to determine whether changes in market conditions, customers’ credit risks, “or other factors” should result in reducing the rates previously increased. The provision is designed to remedy the near-universal trend of companies raising rates when customers are deemed to be risky bets, but almost never reducing them again if conditions change and the risks are eliminated.

Yet the provision’s “other factors” clause is so vague — purposefully so, some experts say — that consumer advocates have been left wondering how successfully it will protect card holders from arbitrary rate hikes.

“The statute as written is so ambiguous that you really don’t know what it means or how it’s to be applied,” said Pamela Banks, policy counsel at Consumers Union. The “other factors” language, Banks added, is “a catch-all” which regulators could interpret to be “any number of things.”

A lenient interpretation of the provision, if it allowed arbitrary hikes to remain, would be an expensive one for many card holders — not least of all because any rate hikes installed before February may apply not only to new purchases, but to existing balances as well.

Lauren Saunders, managing attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said …

Continue reading.

Useful information for those who dine out.

I’m gradually drifting out of the mainstream: I haven’t heard of a single one of these apps that Steve Walling discusses at the link. I’m sure that if I were still attending meetings—an experience for which I experience no longing at all—I would know at least one or two.

More here.

I just learned of Men’s Biz, an Australian vendor who sells a complete line of shaving products on-line. This is a site that my Australian readers probably already know about, but if not: check it out.

A perfect shave today, everything coming together very nicely. The Semogue 2015 brush from VintageScent.com produced a great lather from the Kell’s Original Energy shave stick—and I still love that fragrance. The Merkur Slant Bar with a previously used Astra Superior Platinum blade was smoothness itself as it slid through the stubble. After three quick passes, a splash of Alt Innsbruck brought the shave to a graceful close.

Adam Tschorn in the LA Times:

In June, an estimated 25,000 people attended the inaugural THC Expo hemp and art show in downtown Los Angeles, an event that pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the local economy — including a $22,400 payment directly to the city of Los Angeles for use of its convention center.

Barneys New York in Beverly Hills is celebrating the Woodstock spirit by selling $78 "Hashish" candles in Jonathan Adler pots with bas-relief marijuana leaves; Hickey offers $75 linen pocket squares or $120 custom polo shirts bearing the five-part leaf; and French designer Lucien Pellat-Finet is serving up white-gold and diamond custom pot-leaf-emblazoned wristwatches for $49,000 and belt buckles for $56,000.

Earlier this year, Season 5 of Showtime’s "Weeds" kicked off with promotional materials plastered on bus shelters, buses and billboards throughout the city. Last year, just across from the tourist-packed Farmers Market at 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue, a "Pineapple Express" billboard belched faux pot smoke into the air. Even the ’70s slacker-stoner comedy duo Cheech and Chong are back. After recently concluding an international tour, they say they are working on another movie, voicing an animated version of themselves and even batting around the idea of staging a Cheech and Chong Broadway musical.

After decades of bubbling up around the edges of so-called civilized society, marijuana seems to be marching mainstream at a fairly rapid pace. At least in urban areas such as Los Angeles, cannabis culture is coming out of the closet.

At fashion-insider parties, joints are passed nearly as freely as hors d’oeuvres. Traces of the acrid smoke waft from restaurant patios, car windows and passing pedestrians on the city streets — in broad daylight. Even the art of name-dropping in casual conversation — once limited to celebrity sightings and designer shoe purchases — now includes the occasional boast of recently discovered weed strains such as "Strawberry Cough" and "Purple Kush."

Public sentiment is more than anecdotal; earlier this year, a California Field Poll found that …

Continue reading.

From the NY Times:

The Hunt for a Good Teacher
By STANLEY FISH
Find the best teachers and take a writing class.

An Argument Worth Having
By GERALD GRAFF
Cut through the jargon, analyze and debate.

Get Lost. In Books.
By HAROLD BLOOM
Read the authors that are difficult and demand rereading.

Don’t Alienate Your Professor
By CAROL BERKIN
Once in class, participate.

Play Politics
By GARRY WILLS
Have passion for learning and for your beliefs.

Go the Wrong Way
By MARTHA NUSSBAUM
Think about life, not just a job.

Off-Campus Life
By JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS
Read a good newspaper; it will be your path to the world at large.

My Crush on DNA
By NANCY HOPKINS
Fall in love with your vision of the future.

Change Course
By STEVEN WEINBERG
College is never what one expects.